By Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, Zachary Cohen, Natasha Bertrand, CNN
(CNN) — Flying home this month from an extended Christmas vacation in Palm Beach, President Donald Trump was momentarily taken aback when a reporter asked him about the ice-covered island he’s openly trying to annex.
“How did we come up to Greenland?” he asked, incredulously, on January 4. “We’ll worry about Greenland in about two months. Let’s talk about Greenland in 20 days.”
As it turns out, it took far less than two months for everyone to be talking about Greenland. And the president himself is driving the conversation.
What began during his first term as a novel — if, at least in the minds of some advisers, not entirely serious — bid to control the massive Arctic landmass has turned into a fixation that is causing the worst crisis between the United States and Europe in generations.
The sudden escalation in the early weeks of this year of Trump’s efforts to seize control of Greenland has left European allies badly shaken and sent his own aides rushing to develop policies that would fulfill his widening threats, even as some are worried the president might be taking things too far in asserting the US will settle for nothing less than total control of the country.
While Trump’s team is largely aligned with him on the importance of having US control of Greenland for national security reasons, many of his top advisers are not on the same page about the best way to achieve it.
“We don’t want to make it a state,” one Trump adviser said. “But do we want an alliance with them? No question about it.”
Even as Trump ratchets up his aggressive rhetoric about wanting to annex the country, and refuses to rule out military means to do so, several officials are wary of such a drastic step. Instead, the preference among many of Trump’s allies going forward is that the president uses the tariff threat as a negotiating tool, creating an opening for more concessions from the Europeans and resolving it all in an “Art of the Deal”-style negotiation.
“They believe they can try to pressure Denmark into a deal, even if it doesn’t lead to ceding the entire territory,” another source familiar with the discussions said. “Having some sort of cooperative control of Greenland would accomplish the same goal.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement for this story that “The entire administration is prepared to execute any plan to acquire Greenland that the President chooses.”
“President Trump leads on all foreign policy, and he was not elected to preserve the status quo,” she said. “Many of this President’s predecessors recognized the strategic logic of acquiring Greenland, but only President Trump has had the courage to pursue this seriously.”
At least some European leaders still hold out hope such a deal is possible. After conversations with Trump this weekend, some officials said the president appeared receptive to their clarifications on why some European nations were sending troops to Greenland. According to a senior British official, Trump conceded in a phone call with Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he may have been given “bad information” on the European deployment of troops to Greenland.
One European official said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, a Trump confidant, seems convinced a deal is possible to give the president an off-ramp, and has been raising the possibility privately of a renegotiation of the 1951 agreement between the US, Denmark and Greenland, potentially with some strong guarantees that Chinese investments in Greenland would be prohibited.
Officials say Trump’s most recent, aggressive pursuit of Greenland began after the successful US