Italy's Meloni hopes to attend Trump inauguration as she downplays his Greenland and Panama comments

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni said Thursday she didn’t believe President-elect Donald Trump actually intends to use military force to seize control of Greenland or the Panama Canal, saying she read his comments more as a warning to China and other global players to keep their hands off such strategically important interests.

“I think we can exclude that the United States in the coming years will try to use force to annex territory that interests it,” said Meloni, who travelled last weekend to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate and intends to attend his inauguration.

Rather, she said, Trump’s comments were “a message to some other big global players more than any hostile claim over these countries.”

She identified increased “Chinese protagonism” in the commercially important Panama Canal and resource-rich Greenland as being behind Trump's warning and said she interpreted his words as part of a “long-distance debate between great powers.”

Meloni was speaking at an annual press conference during which she was peppered with questions about her relations with Trump and Elon Musk. She confirmed she hoped to attend Trump's inauguration Jan. 20, but was checking her agenda before confirming her presence.

Trump on Tuesday said he wouldn't rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland which he declared to be vital to American national security.

Analysts say such rhetoric could embolden America’s enemies by suggesting the U.S. is now OK with countries using force to redraw borders at a time when Russia is pressing forward with its invasion of Ukraine and China is threatening Taiwan, which it claims as its own territory.

Meloni's press conference came a day after her right-wing government scored a major political victory by welcoming home an Italian journalist who had been detained in Iran for three weeks.

The case of Cecilia Sala had become intertwined with that of an Iranian engineer detained in Italy on a U.S. warrant, who is wanted by the United States in connection with a 2024 drone attack in Jordan that killed three American soldiers.

Meloni, in describing what went into Sala’s liberation, identified a “triangulation” with Iran and the United States as being key to securing the release, confirming for the first time that Washington’s interests in the case entered into the negotiations.