Trump Administration Explores Costly Option For Greenland Takeover: Report

The Trump administration is exploring a can-you-top-this financial maneuver if it were to obtain Greenland, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

The newspaper wrote that one option in a White House cost analysis of a takeover is to essentially “offer a sweeter deal” to the semi-autonomous Danish territory’s government than Denmark does. The Danes allocate about $600 million a year to services for the island, WaPo estimated.

The U.S. offer under White House consideration “is a lot higher than that,” an official familiar with the plans told the Post. “The point is, ‘We’ll pay you more than Denmark does.’”

In a visit to Greenland last week, Vice President JD Vance accused Denmark of underinvesting in the territory. “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” he said to the European nation. The Danish foreign minister admonished Vance for using such a tone with an ally.

The newspaper cited the cost study as proof that President Donald Trump’s “musings” about annexing Greenland have morphed into concrete government action.

Trump and allies have talked up Greenland’s importance to the U.S. for national security and its natural resources.

He’s tried relative sweet talk in promises to invest billions of dollars to make Greenlanders “rich” but also said he’d take the territory “one way or the other.” In an NBC News interview over the weekend, he did not dismiss the possibility of force. “I don’t take anything off the table,” he said.

The administration’s much-criticized version of its “manifest destiny” is getting definite pushback.

“We are not for sale and can’t just be taken,” Múte Bourup Egede wrote on Facebook last month when he was still Greenland’s prime minister. “Our future is decided by us in Greenland.”

His successor, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, echoed the sentiment on Sunday: “Let me be clear: The United States will not get it. We do not belong to anyone else. We decide our own future.”