# Trump refuses to rule out military force over Greenland and Panama Canal
Standfirst: President-elect Donald Trump has declined to rule out military action to control Greenland and the Panama Canal, intensifying an already combative foreign-policy transition.
President-elect Donald Trump has said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, declaring that U.S. control of both is vital to American national security.
The remarks, delivered at a Mar-a-Lago news conference less than two weeks before he was due to take office, were extraordinary even by the standards of Trump’s transition rhetoric. They broke with decades of U.S. policy that has emphasized self-determination rather than territorial expansion.
Trump’s comments were aimed at two very different places. Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory with a large U.S. military base and a strategic Arctic location. The Panama Canal is a critical waterway that has been under Panamanian control for more than 25 years. By invoking both, Trump tied his foreign-policy message to strategic geography as much as to nationalist politics.
The packet says Trump responded to a question about military force by saying he was not committing to rule it out, adding that “it might be that you’ll have to do something.” He also said that the Panama Canal was vital to the country and that Greenland was needed for national security purposes. Those lines are central because they show he was leaving the door open rather than speaking hypothetically.
The reaction from allies was immediate. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she did not believe the United States would use military or economic force to secure Greenland, while also stressing that any greater American interest in the Arctic would need to respect the Greenlandic people. Panamanian officials were equally firm, saying the canal’s sovereignty was not negotiable.
The broader political context matters too. Trump also floated the idea of Canada becoming the 51st state and said he would use economic force rather than military force there. That comparison shows the Greenland and Panama comments were part of a larger pattern of territorial provocation, not a one-off remark.
The packet also includes Trump’s social media post about a private plane landing in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, with his son Donald Trump Jr. and other representatives. Greenland’s government said that visit was private, not official, and that Greenlandic representatives would not meet the delegation. That detail suggests the administration-in-waiting was already using Greenland as a symbolic stage for the issue.
The reaction in Panama was no less emphatic. Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha said the government had no formal contact with Trump or his team and repeated that the canal would remain in Panamanian hands. That underscores how quickly Trump’s comments forced foreign governments to respond before he even entered office.
There is also a defense-policy angle. Trump used the same appearance to call for NATO countries to spend more on defense, and he complained about President Joe Biden’s move to restrict offshore drilling. But the Greenland and Panama remarks were the most striking because they raised the possibility of military coercion over territory.
The evidence packet leaves no doubt about the political impact of the statement. It is not just that Trump took a hard line. He reopened a vocabulary of force that U.S. presidents have largely avoided for generations.
For allies and rivals alike, that makes the transition harder to read. The message is that no option is off the table, even when the option in question involves overseas territory and long-standing diplomatic norms.
