President Donald Trump's interest in buying Greenland is "not a joke," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview Thursday.
"President Trump, what he has said publicly is he wants to buy it," Rubio told Sirius XM's "The Megyn Kelly Show."
"What he's saying is pretty accurate. People [have talked] about it for years. This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest, and it needs to be solved."
Rubio added that he was not involved in Trump's call to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, but he knows that the president "speaks bluntly and frankly with people," and he believes that diplomacy works better when the people involved are "straightforward, as opposed to using platitudes and language that translates to nothing."
Greenland is vital, Rubio told Kelly, because of the potential for the use of the Arctic for shipping lanes.
"How do you get some of this energy that's going to be produced under President Trump?" he asked. "These energies rely on shipping lanes. The Arctic has some of the most valuable shipping lanes in the world. As some of the ice is melting, there's become more and more navigable. We need to be able to defend that."
And as the Chinese do not yet have an Arctic presence, it's "realistic" to believe that they will try to do with Greenland "what they have done at the Panama Canal and other places," Rubio added.
That would be to install facilities giving China access to the Arctic with the cover of a Chinese country, said the secretary.
That would also allow China to send naval vessels to the Arctic and operate them from there, Rubio added, which would be "completely unacceptable to the national security of the world" and the United States."
"The question becomes: If the Chinese begin to threaten Greenland, do we really trust that that is not a place where those deals are going to be made? Do we really trust that that is not a place where they would not intervene maybe by force?"
Rubio added that Trump has made the point that Denmark would not be able to stop the Chinese without the help of the United States.
When asked if he thinks the United States will own Greenland by the end of Trump's presidency, Rubio said that it is Trump's priority.
"We're not in a position yet to discuss exactly how we'll proceed tactically," he said. "What I think you can rest assured of is that four years from now, our interest in the Arctic will be more secure. Our interest in the Panama Canal will be more secure. Our partnerships in the Western Hemisphere will be stronger."
He also predicted that Central American countries would welcome help from the United States so they could stop being a migration corridor for immigrants.
"They are countries that migrants come through and that and that these human trafficking rings run people through," he told Kelly. "It creates tremendous instability for these countries at a tremendous cost as well. They would welcome help in stopping that migration corridor from continuing because it's destabilizing their countries."
The overall goal, he concluded, is to have a more secure Western Hemisphere that will solidify the United States' national interests worldwide.
"That's the goal," he said. "We are going to be more secure from the Arctic to Central America to even Africa and certainly the Indo-Pacific."