U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday spoke for more than an hour at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While his meandering remarks touched on multiple familiar topics, including windmills—a longtime personal pet peeve—the state of the U.S. economy, and his long-running 2020 U.S. presidential election denialism, Trump spoke at length about his desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark. He also strongly criticized NATO and said other members of the Western military alliance have taken advantage of U.S. generosity over the years.

The following is an excerpt from his remarks focusing on Greenland, Denmark, NATO, and U.S. military power.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday spoke for more than an hour at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While his meandering remarks touched on multiple familiar topics, including windmills—a longtime personal pet peeve—the state of the U.S. economy, and his long-running 2020 U.S. presidential election denialism, Trump spoke at length about his desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark. He also strongly criticized NATO and said other members of the Western military alliance have taken advantage of U.S. generosity over the years.

The following is an excerpt from his remarks focusing on Greenland, Denmark, NATO, and U.S. military power.

Ultimately, these are matters of national security, and perhaps no current issue makes the situation more clear than what’s currently going on with Greenland. Would you like me to say a few words [on] Greenland?

I was going to leave it out of the speech, but I thought, I think I would have been reviewed very negatively.

I have tremendous respect for both the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark, tremendous respect. But every NATO ally has an obligation to be able to defend their own territory. And the fact is, no nation or a group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States. We’re a great power, much greater than people even understand. I think they found that out two weeks ago in Venezuela.

We saw this in World War II, when Denmark fell to Germany after just six hours of fighting and was totally unable to defend either itself or Greenland. So the United States was then compelled. We did it. We felt an obligation to do it, to send our own forces to hold the Greenland territory—and hold it we did, at great cost and expense. They didn’t have a chance of getting on it, and they tried. Denmark knows that. We literally set up bases on Greenland for Denmark. We fought for Denmark. We weren’t fighting for anyone else. We were fighting to save it for Denmark. Big, beautiful piece of ice. It’s hard to call it land. It’s a big piece of ice. But we saved Greenland and successfully prevented our enemies from gaining a foothold in our hemisphere. So we did it for ourselves also.

And then after the war, which we won, we won it big—without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and little Japanese, perhaps.

After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it, but we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now?

So now, our country and the world face much greater risks than they did ever before, because of missiles, because of nuclear, because of weapons of warfare that I can’t even talk about. Two weeks ago, they saw weapons that nobody ever heard of. They weren’t able to fire one shot at us. They said, “What happened?” Everything was discombobulated. They said, “We got them in our sights, press the trigger,” and nothing happened. No anti-aircraft missiles went up. There was one that went up about 30 feet and crashed down right next to the people that sent it. They said, “What the hell is going on?” Those defensive systems were made by Russia and by China. So they’re going to go back to the drawing boards, I guess.

Greenland is a vast, almost entirely uninhabited and undeveloped territory, sitting undefended in a key strategic location between the United States, Russia, and China. That’s exactly where it is, right smack in the middle.

Wasn’t important, nearly, when we gave it back, you know. When we gave it back, it wasn’t the same as it is now. It’s not important for any other reason, you know. Everyone talks about the minerals. There’s so many [places], there’s no rare earth, no such thing as rare earth. There’s rare processing, but there’s so much rare earth. And this, to get to this rare earth, you got to go through hundreds of feet of ice. That’s not the reason we need it.

We need it for strategic national security and international security. This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America, on the northern frontier of the Western Hemisphere. That’s our territory. It is therefore a core national security interest of the United States of America, and in fact, it’s been our policy for hundreds of years to prevent outside threats from entering our hemisphere, and we’ve done it very successfully. We’ve never been stronger than we are now. That’s why American presidents have sought to purchase Greenland for nearly two........

© Foreign Policy