Trump threatens 10% tariffs on eight Europeans to press Greenland demand

President Donald Trump announced a new set of targeted tariffs on eight European countries as an explicit lever to press his demand that the United States acquire Greenland. Speaking from his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, he said a 10 percent import duty on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland will take effect Feb. 1, and warned it would rise to 25 percent on June 1 “if a Deal is not reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The unilateral move blends trade policy, national security rhetoric and territorial ambition in a single, unprecedented maneuver that diplomats and trade lawyers say could test transatlantic institutions. Trump framed the levies as retaliation for European opposition to U.S. efforts to acquire the semi-autonomous North Atlantic island and cited recent diplomatic visits as provocations, saying the duties respond to trips to Greenland by representatives from Britain, the Netherlands and Finland. He has repeatedly argued Greenland is essential to U.S. defense planning, invoking a strategic missile-defense role often referenced in coverage as the “Golden Dome” system, and wrote the measures were necessary “in order to protect Global Peace and Security.”

The announcement follows a week of visible, high-level contacts and displays of European support for Greenland. The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland met in Washington with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and several European countries sent troops to Greenland in what participating nations described as a show of backing for the island. Those deployments and the diplomatic meetings underscore that Greenland has become a flashpoint between U.S. strategic ambitions and European insistence on the island’s sovereignty and regional autonomy.

Public reaction was immediate. Demonstrations erupted in Nuuk in front of the U.S. consulate and in Copenhagen, where citizens and Greenlandic diasporas mobilized against what they described as an attempt to commodify territory. Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen spoke at a protest in Nuuk, according to photographic captions and reports, signaling that the island’s own leaders are publicly resisting the U.S. pressure campaign.

Legal and practical questions about the tariff plan were raised within minutes of the announcement. The United States maintains a trade framework with the European Union that caps certain tariffs at 15 percent and a separate post-Brexit agreement with the United Kingdom that caps some duties at 10 percent; how a unilateral U.S. escalation would interact with those frameworks, or with World Trade Organization rules, is unclear. The European Commission and the foreign ministries of the eight targeted countries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Allies and analysts warned the tactic risks fraying long-standing security arrangements. NATO cohesion, already strained by competing political priorities, could be further tested if trade and defense cooperation become bargaining chips for territorial acquisition. Legal scholars also flagged potential violations of principles of self-determination and international law if acquisition is pursued by pressure rather than negotiation.

Trump set Feb. 1 and June 1 as hard deadlines tied to his demand for a “formal deal,” injecting a new timeline into a fraught strategic contest in the Arctic. Unless de-escalation comes quickly, the tariffs and the purchase drive promise to reverberate across trade, diplomacy and security networks that bind the United States to Europe and to the peoples of Greenland.