Senator Betrays Trump’s Greenland Invasion Plan: ‘Bold’ Talk

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) appears on NBC's Meet the Press on January 12, 2025.
NBC

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford brushed off President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to take Greenland by military force in a Sunday Meet the Press interview.

“The United States is not going to invade another country,” Lankford said on the NBC show. “That’s not who we are.”

Trump has publicly coveted the mineral-rich territory of NATO-ally Denmark for years, dating back to his first term in office.

But, in recent weeks, he’s escalated that geopolitical fantasy in a series of brash social media posts, earning the objections of Greenlandic and Danish officials.

At a press conference last week, Trump offered none of the assurances Lankford did.

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Asked by a reporter if he would rule out using military or economic force to take over Greenland or the Panama Canal, Trump said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this, we need them for economic security.”

Lankford, who was asked by Meet the Press host Kristen Welker to respond to Trump’s remarks, attributed them to the president-elect’s history of blustering rhetoric.

“The President speaks very boldly on a lot of things,” he said. “We’ve seen this over how he’s done negotiations, whether it be for real estate or how he served as a great president just four years ago. He makes a bold statement. He gets everyone to the table. You sit down to be able to talk it out.”

In addition to Greenland, Trump refused to rule out using military force to take control of the Panama Canal, which belongs to Panama.

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He has also mused about taking over Canada—repeatedly belittling the country’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as “governor”—but said at the press conference that he would limit any efforts to eliminate the “artificially drawn line“ between Canada and the United States to “economic force.”

Trump’s claims that he might start meddling with international borders has set off alarm bells in foreign capitals.

Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s minister of foreign affairs, warned the president-elect to respect the European Union’s “sovereign borders.” Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said Trump had shown “a certain lack of understanding” of “the inviolability of borders,” which Scholz called a crucial Western value.

France and Germany are both EU members alongside Denmark.

Múte Edege, Greenland’s prime minister, said Friday that he is willing to meet with Trump, but said the president-elect should respect the island territory’s aspirations for independence.

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“Greenland is for the Greenlandic people,” he said at a news conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in Copenhagen. “We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American, we want to be Greenlandic.”

The GOP’s Lankford insisted that Trump has “been very clear. He is the president that kept American troops out of war. He is not looking to be able to go start a war.”

When asked whether he would agree with Trump’s proposal to place tariffs on Denmark as an act of economic force, Lankford replied: “He’s actually proposed tariffs on just about everybody.”