By Robbie Gramer

President Trump has insisted that the U.S. needs to annex Greenland for U.S. national security interests, saying anything less than American control of the island would be "unacceptable."

Trump made his comments in a social-media post on Wednesday before senior Greenlandic and Danish officials were set to meet with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House.

"NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON'T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!" Trump said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.

Trump said acquiring Greenland is vital for his "Golden Dome" plan -- the $175 billion missile-defense shield he wants to develop to protect the U.S. before the end of his term.

Trump's repeated insistence that the U.S. acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, has infuriated Danish and Greenlandic leaders and sparked a diplomatic crisis between Washington and its European North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies.

"Greenland does not want to be controlled by the U.S. Greenland does not want to be owned by the U.S.," Greenland's prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said Tuesday in a press conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. "The situation is very, very serious."

"It has not been easy to stand up to a completely unacceptable pressure from one of our closest allies," Frederiksen said.

The Greenlandic and Danish foreign ministers traveled to Washington to meet with Vance and Rubio on Wednesday.

Trump's ambitions for Greenland have triggered pushback in Congress from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who say efforts to acquire Greenland needlessly undermine NATO unity and cast doubt over U.S. global leadership with its closest allies.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign-relations committee, and Republican Lisa Murkowski from Alaska on Tuesday proposed legislation that would block the U.S. military from occupying the territory of NATO allies.

"The mere notion that America would use our vast resources against our allies is deeply troubling and must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute," Murkowski said.

Murkowski and Shaheen will join other lawmakers, including Sens. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) and Chris Coons (D., Del.) on a visit to Denmark later this week.

Danish and other senior European officials have insisted that the U.S. can draw as many benefits as it wants from cooperating with Greenland without fully annexing it -- including re-establishing U.S. military bases and cooperating on mining for critical minerals and other resources on the large Arctic island. During the Cold War the U.S. operated 17 military bases on Greenland. It shut down all but one of them in the ensuing decades.

Write to Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 14, 2026 09:31 ET (14:31 GMT)

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