What started as a punch line is turning into a trade war with our allies.
When President Trump began fantasizing about annexing Greenland back in 2019, the suggestion was hard to take seriously. Maybe he’d been playing Risk, where Greenland-to-Iceland is the sole invasion path between North America and Europe. Or he’d been fooled by the Mercator projection map of the world, which exaggerates land masses near the poles and makes Greenland appear to be about the size of South America.
However he got to this strange idea, it had to be a joke. Governments buying and selling inhabited lands was commonplace in the age of monarchies. But slavery ended, and the idea of selling people wholesale vanished soon after.
Unsurprisingly, Denmark refused to consider the offer.
Danish PM Mette Frederiksen described the suggestion as “absurd” and said she hoped Mr Trump was not being serious.
He was serious enough to cancel a planned trip to Denmark in response. But nothing happened right away, and the next year Trump lost the 2020 election and had to leave office.
Most of us forgot, so when he began talking about Greenland again last year, it seemed to come out of nowhere. But he hadn’t even taken office yet when Don Jr. went to Greenland to drum up support. One Danish broadcaster claimed Trump bribed poor people to express their desire to join America.
Several sources said a portion of the people who appeared in a video by Trump’s campaign team that was recorded at a restaurant in the capital city of Nuuk, and pictures on social media, are homeless and socially disadvantaged, according to DR.
By March, J.D. Vance and his wife were scoping out Greenlanders’ support for becoming part of the US. Greenland’s prime minister described the trip as “aggressive“.
Last week, Stephen Miller brushed off a question about whether the US might take Greenland by force, saying “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” But if Trump thought he could bluff his way into Greenland, European powers have called that bluff.
The White House has been describing talks between the US, Greenland, and Denmark as “technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland” — as if the sale were a done deal, pending a little haggling about price. But Denmark and Greenland think they have agreed to no such thing.
Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said the agreement at Wednesday’s meeting had in fact been “to launch a high-level working group to explore if a common way forward can be found to address the American security concerns in relation to Greenland.”
This week, countries began moving troops around.
Before the talks began Wednesday, Denmark announced it would increase its military presence in Greenland. Several European partners — including France, Germany, the U.K., Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — started sending symbolic numbers of troops or promised to do so in the following days.
Ostensibly, the European troops are there to address Trump’s stated concern about defending Greenland against Russia and China. But they also make another point: Maybe somebody will fight the US over the future of Greenland.
The idea isn’t that a dozen or two French or German soldiers can fend off a concerted US attack. But they draw a line in the snow: Trump isn’t going to take Greenland without killing some of America’s most loyal allies.
The US did something similar during the Cold War, when it stationed troops in West Berlin. Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet-occupied East Germany, so it could not be defended by the troops we had stationed there. But their presence meant that the Soviet Union could not take Berlin without starting a war with the United States.
Having been denied his fantasy of a bloodless Anschluss, Trump upped the ante, saying on Truth Social that the European countries “are playing this very dangerous game”, and “have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable”.
So he announced 10% tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland, rising to 25% on June 1, and “payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”.
Presumably that’s an additional tariff, because Americans already pay 15% tariffs on goods from the EU.
The tariff move seems to have goaded European leaders into action. For some while, they have been trying to humor Trump, flattering him rather than criticizing him, and making relatively small concessions in hopes that some other shiny object would draw his attention. The EU signed a trade deal with the US in August that allowed the US to impose 15% tariffs on most European imports while having no tariffs in the other direction. But having seen how long that arrangement has lasted, they are discussing retaliation rather than further appeasement.
It’s hard to see how they could do anything else. Trump’s trade demands last summer were about money, but this crosses over into principle.
A second EU diplomat said the situation was seen as very serious: “There was a clear and broad understanding that Europe and the EU cannot start reneging on key principles in the international order, such as territorial integrity.”
Making the conflict even more mysterious is that Trump’s stated rationales for wanting Greenland don’t add up. He claims that Russia and/or China want Greenland, and that only the US (not Denmark) is able to defend the island.
But of course, the US is already obligated to defend Greenland through the NATO treaty. We already have bases in Greenland. Greenland and Denmark have expressed willingness to allow a greater US military presence, as well as openness to deals for exploiting Greenland’s mineral resources. So what do we gain by making Greenland a US territory?
I hope the Supreme Court is watching. If anyone needs more evidence that Trump’s use of tariffs has nothing to do with the intention behind the law he is using — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — this is it. Paul Krugman writes:
A tariff to promote territorial expansion is clearly illegal, under any sane interpretation of U.S. trade law. This is on the Supreme Court, which is obviously dithering while the world burns
Remember the dancing frogs of Portland? Well, Greenland defenders have their own absurdists. Numerous music videos depict an inter-species Greenland defense force. Also check out this one and this one.
The Weekly Sift 