NATO Europe stands behind Denmark in face of Trump’s tariff threats over Greenland

With US President Donald Trump now threatening economic coercion in the form of tariffs against several NATO European allies who refuse to acquiesce to his plans to subjugate the sovereign Danish territory of Greenland, Europe’s political leaders are running out of diplomatic road.

On 17 January 2026 Trump, who has argued the United States needs to control Greenland for security reasons, announced that he would impose 10% tariffs from 1 February on goods from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom if they did not comply with his plans to take control of Greenland. These tariffs, Trump said, would increase to 25% if an agreement is not reached by 1 June.

In the face of this threat, European leaders have stood their ground in defence of their NATO ally. The eight European ​nations targeted by the tariffs said in ⁠a joint statement on 18 January that they stood in ​solidarity with ‍the kingdom of Denmark and ​the people of Greenland. “As members of NATO, we ‍are committed to strengthening Arctic ​security as a shared transatlantic interest,” the nations stated. “Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward ‍spiral.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking in response to Trump’s tariff threats on 17 January, called them “unacceptable”, adding that “No intimidation or threats will influence us, whether in Ukraine, Greenland or anywhere else in the world, when we are faced with such situations.”

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson stated the same day, “We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed. Only Denmark and Greenland decide on issues concerning Denmark and Greenland. I will always stand up for my country, and for our allied neighbours.”

On 19 January UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer stated, “Threatening tariffs on allies is the wrong thing to do, completely wrong. … A tariff war isn’t in anybody’s interests.”

Starmer added that “any decision about the future status of Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark alone. That right is fundamental, and we support it.”

While Starmer played down the idea of retaliatory tariffs in the face of Trump’s threats, EU leaders – most notably Macron – are considering deployment of the bloc’s anti-coercion instrument (ACI), widely known as the ‘big bazooka’, if Trump persists with his tariff threats. This measure, which came into being in 2023 in response to Chinese trade coercion against Lithuania after it deepened ties with Taiwan, allows the EU to impose sweeping trade sanctions, such as excluding the aggressor nation’s companies from its internal market, imposing export controls or ending intellectual property protections.

As ESD and numerous media outlets have previously noted, Trump’s purported justifications for needing to acquire Greenland for security reasons make little sense. In 1951 the United States and Denmark signed a defence agreement in relation to the territory allowing the US government “to improve and generally to fit the area for military use” and to “construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment” there. While there are currently only around 150 US military personnel stationed in Greenland, at Pituffik Space Base, under the agreement with Denmark there is no effectively no limit to the number of US military personnel that can be deployed there.

That being the case, Trump’s claims that the United States needs to control Greenland for security reasons appear like little more than a thinly veiled excuse for plundering Greenland’s natural resources.

Trump’s seemingly wilful ignorance of historical facts only serves to exacerbate the situation. Smarting from not receiving this year’s Nobel Peace prize, Trump questioned in an 18 January message to the Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre – whose government is not responsible for awarding the peace prize – Denmark’s right of ownership of Greenland, claiming “There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago.”

Leaving aside the fact that the United States exists as a result of white settlers from Europe ‘landing in boats’ and subjugating indigenous tribes, Danish rule over Greenland began in 1721 – 55 years before the Declaration of American Independence – after the territory had previously been settled by Norse adventurers from the 980s onwards.

It is worth noting that the Trump’s avarice regarding Greenland is not widely held beyond his administration. According to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, 75% of Americans oppose the United States attempting to take control of Greenland, while numerous members of Congress from Trump’s own Republican Party also oppose it.

“This is appalling,” Republican Representative for Nebraska Don Bacon told CNN on 6 January. “Greenland is a NATO ally. Denmark is one of our best friends … so the way we’re treating them is really demeaning and it has no upside.” Bacon referred to the Trump Administration’s Greenland rhetoric as one of the “silliest things” to come out of the White House over the past year.

Republican Representative for Utah Blake Moore, who co-chairs the bipartisan Congressional Friends of Denmark Caucus alongside Democratic Representaive Steny H Hoyer of Maryland, issued a joint statement with Hoyer on 6 January that read, “Sabre-rattling about annexing Greenland is needlessly dangerous. The Kingdom of Denmark is a NATO ally and one of America’s closest partners. An attack on Greenland – a crucial part of that alliance – would tragically be an attack on NATO.”

The pair added, “If the message is that ‘We need Greenland’, the truth is that we already have access to everything we could need from Greenland. If we want to deploy more forces or build additional missile defense infrastructure in Greenland, Denmark has given us a green light to do so. Our ally has always accommodated us. Threatening to annex Greenland needlessly undermines that co-operation for no gain. … The last thing America needs is a civil war among NATO that endangers our security and our way of life.”

North Carolina senator Thom Tillis said in a speech on the Senate floor 14 January, “The thought of the United States taking the position that we would take Greenland, an independent territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, is absurd.”

In the short term, Denmark’s NATO allies have recently shown their solidarity by deploying military contingents to Danish exercises in Greenland, while Denmark itself has dedicated billions of euros of additional spending on High North security, including in Greenland, over the last year.

The Greenlanders themselves, meanwhile, who ultimately aspire to independence, have overwhelmingly expressed their objection to any notion of a US takeover. Opinions polls have indicated that 85% of Greenlanders oppose becoming a part of the United States. Thousands of protesters have demonstrated in both Greenland and Denmark against Trump in recent days.

As 2026 plays out NATO Europe’s leaders may well be hoping for a Democratic surge in November’s US mid-term elections as their salvation. If the US Republican Party, substantially still under Trump’s thumb but facing political headwinds from the US affordability crisis and ballooning healthcare costs, controversy over the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in US cities and blowback from US foreign interventions – all as a result of Trump’s policies – were to lose the House, Senate or both in November, then Trump’s emergence as a lame-duck president might finally make the Greenland issue recede. Until then, NATO faces the greatest threat to the alliance’s cohesion since it first came into being in 1949.