President-elect Donald Trump has made no secret about the fact that he wants Greenland and the Panama Canal to be owned by the United States and he is serious.

So much so, in fact, that when he was asked about it on Tuesday during a press conference, he did not rule out the possibility of using the military to acquire the two.

“I wanted to touch on the ‘world on fire’ that you mentioned. But let’s start if we could with your references to Greenland and Panama Canal, and so forth. Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?” a reporter asked the president-elect.

“No,” Trump said simply.

“Can you tell us what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a treaty, are you asking the Canadians to hold a vote?” the reporter said.

“I can’t assure you — you are talking about Panama and Greenland. No I can’t assure you on either of those two. I can say this, we need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military,” the president-elect said.

“I’m not going to commit to that. It may be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country. It’s being operated by China. China! And we gave the Panama Canal to Panama, not to China. It was a gift. They abused that gift. It should have never been made. Giving the Panama Canal is why Jimmy Carter lost the election, in my opinion, maybe more so than the hostages, the hostages were a big deal,” he added.

“If you remember — and nobody wants to talk about the Panama canal because it’s inappropriate, I guess. Because it’s a bad part of the Carter legacy. But he was a good man. Look, he was a good man. I knew him a little bit. And he was a very fine person. But that was a big mistake. Giving the Panama Canal to Panama was a very big mistake. We lost 38,000 people. It cost us the equivalent of a trillion dollars — maybe more than that. Probably the most expensive — they say it was the most expensive structure, if we call it a structure, which I guess you can, ever built,” Trump said.

“And giving that away was a horrible thing, and I believe that’s why Jimmy Carter lost the election, even more so than the hostages,” he said.