Rejecting U.S. Claim to Greenland

 

It’s not often that Europe speaks with one voice – or responds with such urgency. But US President Donald Trump’s announcement Saturday of sanctions against several European countries that reject any US claim to Greenland, a Danish territory, was one of those moments.

EU ambassadors are holding an emergency meeting in Brussels on Sunday in response to Trump’s threat, which he made after an estimated quarter of the population of Greenland’s capital Nuuk joined protests against any potential annexation.

Across the continent, among allies that usually tread carefully in responding to utterances from the White House, the response was immediate and emphatic, and recognized an existential threat to the transatlantic alliance.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has tried to cultivate a good personal relationship with Trump, led the charge – describing the threat of tariffs as “unacceptable.”

“No intimidation or threat will influence us – neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations,” he said on X. “Europeans will respond in a united and coordinated manner should they be confirmed. We will ensure that European sovereignty is upheld.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer chimed in, saying in a statement that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong.” Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has typically had positive relations with the US President, described the move as an “error” in a handout video from a state visit to South Korea.

Revealing she had already had a phone conversation with Trump, Meloni said she “doesn’t agree” with the idea of imposing tariffs against countries that contribute to Greenland’s security. Eight European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and France, issued a joint statement Sunday saying that, “tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response.”

Trump, in a lengthy social media post Saturday, said the United States needed possession of Greenland to counter Chinese and Russian threats in the Arctic and develop what he has called the Golden Dome to protect North America from ballistic missiles.

Experts say that the US does not need to own Greenland for the Dome to be effective, thanks to a 1951 agreement that gives the US the right to build defense facilities on the island. The Pituffik Space Base, which US Vice President JD Vance visited last March, is focused on missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command and control missions.

European politicians said Trump’s unilateralism over Greenland, and his treatment of long-standing allies, was playing into Moscow and Beijing’s hands. “China and Russia must be having a field day. They are the ones who benefit from divisions among allies,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez took a similar line. In an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, he said any military action ‍by the U.S. against Denmark’s vast Arctic Island would damage NATO and delight Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would make Putin “the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said. “If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy,” Sanchez warned.

“The measures against NATO allies announced today will not help in ensuring security in the Arctic,” said the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola on X. “They risk the opposite, emboldening our joint enemies and those who wish to destroy our common values and way of life.”

One casualty of the tariff threat may be the US-EU trade deal agreed last year, which the European Parliament was set to debate this week. The leader of the largest group in the assembly, Manfred Weber, said on X that “given Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, approval is not possible at this stage.”

There have been plenty of occasions during both Trump administrations that European governments have reeled in shock at the rhetoric from the White House and then embarked on careful damage limitation. But many Europeans recognize in the second Trump administration a far more strident tone, beginning when Vance excoriated Europe as woke, soft on immigration and anti-democratic in a speech at the Munich Security Conference last February.

Trump’s National Security Strategy in November doubled down on the scorn. “It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies” two decades from now, it said. The document sneered at what it called the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe, claiming “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

And earlier this month, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

“For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States,” Miller added. Essentially, in this White House, a strong transatlantic relationship is no longer thought critical to US national security or its dominance of the Western hemisphere. But strong words from the capitals of Europe are just that: The challenge is to build greater self-reliance in defense and security, a process that takes decades rather than months.

In the meantime, some may recall then UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s exasperation over the planning for D-Day, the operation that would liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them,” Churchill said later.

Analysis by Tim Lister, CNN