United States President Donald Trump has threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on trading partners in the West, particularly NATO allies, if they resist his plans to acquire Greenland.
Tensions between the EU, especially within the NATO alliance, have reached a peak recently over recent US attacks in Venezuela and its hostile rhetoric towards Greenland.
At a White House event on Friday, Trump doubled down on his campaign to bring the vast, mineral-rich Arctic island under US control, saying he “may put tariffs on countries if they don’t go along with our plans for Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security”.
“So I may do that,” he said, while not ruling out the possibility of withdrawing from NATO if the bloc persists with opposition to US demands. “We’re going to see,” he said, and maintained that so far, “NATO has been dealing with us on Greenland”.
Trump for months has insisted that the US should control Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, and said earlier this week that anything less than the Arctic island being in US hands would be “unacceptable”. Last week, he reiterated his demand, saying “one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”
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He has sought to justify his calls for a US takeover by repeatedly claiming that China and Russia have their own designs on Greenland, which holds vast untapped reserves of critical minerals.
Earlier this week, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland met in Washington with US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Although a consensus couldn’t be reached, they agreed to set up a working group. But, Denmark and the White House then offered sharply diverging public views on the group’s purpose.
European leaders have insisted that is only for Denmark and Greenland to decide on matters concerning the territory, and Denmark said this week that it was increasing its military presence in Greenland in cooperation with allies.
In Copenhagen, a group of senators and members of the House of Representatives met Friday with Danish and Greenlandic lawmakers, and with leaders including Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
“We have heard so many lies, to be honest and so much exaggeration on the threats towards Greenland,” said Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic politician and member of the Danish parliament who took part in Friday’s meetings. “And mostly, I would say the threats that we're seeing right now is from the US side.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, have introduced bipartisan legislation that would prohibit the use of US Defence or State department funds to annex or take control of Greenland or the sovereign territory of any NATO member state without that ally's consent or authorisation from the North Atlantic Council.
While NATO allies like France, Germany, the UK, and Sweden promised to deploy troops in case of a confrontational situation with the US arising over the Arctic island, Denmark’s top military commander in Greenland, Major-General Soren Andersen, dismissed any conflict between NATO members.
“I don’t see a NATO ally attacking another NATO ally,” he said. “My task is to work up here for the defence of the kingdom together with NATO.”
However, the dispute is looming large in the lives of Greenlanders, with Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, saying on Tuesday that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU”.
The chair of the Nuuk, Greenland-based Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents around 180,000 Inuit from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia’s Chukotka region on international issues, said persistent statements from the White House that the US must own Greenland offer “a clear picture of how the US administration views the people of Greenland, how the US administration views Indigenous peoples, and peoples that are few in numbers”.
Sara Olsvig told the press in Nuuk that the issue is “how one of the biggest powers in the world views other peoples that are less powerful than them. And that really is concerning”.
Indigenous Inuit in Greenland do not want to be colonised again, she said.
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