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Posted on 01/18/2026 12:15:52 AM PST by RandFan
Summary
EU ambassadors will hold an emergency meeting later after Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on allies who are against his proposed takeover of Greenland
Trump says he plans to raise import taxes on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland
A 10% tariff would apply from 1 February, and could later rise to 25%, the US president says
UK PM Keir Starmer says Trump's threat is "completely wrong", while French President Emmanuel Macron calls it "unacceptable"
Denmark's Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen says the threat has "come as a surprise" as Danish and US officials have just held "constructive" talks
Trump insists the US must own Greenland for US security and has not ruled out taking it by force
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
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Trump is playing the world beautifully. He has them scampering to and fro over every issue. They do not realize they are being manipulated to do what Trump called for years ago:
Have Europe bolster their defenses as part of NATO.
Have Europe invest in their own militaries and cooperate more fully with each other.
Take responsibility for their own borders, defense and preparedness.
Invest heavily in military R&D of heir own.
Wake up to the idea that Russia and China are direct threats.
This is amazing. By threatening Greenland all of NATO is now beefing up forces where Trump wanted them to and against Chinese and Russian incursions.
They think Trump actually wants to invade Greenland. These Europeans are real amateurs compared to Trump! He has forced them to act in their own and all of NATO’s defense!
Trump is a genius!!
Trump can read a room and knows that campaigns urging Americans to austerity lose elections, so he has elected to grow us out of a potentially existential sovereign debt crisis. Tariffs are the indispensable tool to achieve this. In addition, he aims to drill baby drill, cut taxes, cut regulations but, finally, to restore America's mercantilist power and that is to be done through tariffs. Tariffs not only encourage domestic manufacture, they have also demonstrably immensely increased foreign investment here.
If the Supreme Court takes these tariff powers away from Trump, his whole scheme will likely fail.
But now Trump has gone a bridge too far. These tariffs imposed on our allies inevitably appear to them and to the whole world to be done out of frustration over our European allies' refusal to submit to intimidation. These tariffs are in aid of naked aggression and for no good reason.
No reasonable observer can look at the treaty rights currently enjoyed by the United States in Greenland to expand our military presence at will can come to any conclusion other than Trump is seeking to expropriate Greenland's natural assets. Clearly, the defense of the United States to be conducted in Greenland can be done under the current treaty rights, so there is no need to offend 500 million Europeans as we have done.
They know and we know that this ploy is not to advance American national security, but in the furtherance of some other policy objective.
It is difficult to perceive any substantive difference between Trump's threats to invade Greenland and Putin's actual invasion of Ukraine. Both have advanced national defense as the rationalization for aggression. Both are prevaricating.
Trump's record of coveting other nations' minerals is not pretty. He once regretted the fact that in the wars of the Gulf we did not take over the oil. He strong-armed vulnerable Ukraine into a mineral sharing agreement in exchange for no substantial security advantage to Ukraine. He has bombed Venezuela and openly justified it as a means to obtain its oil and minerals. Now he extorts Greenland and, by extension, our allies in Europe for the minerals.
Tariff policy conducted for traditional economic reasons is one thing but conducting naked aggression against allies with tariffs as a weapon is a foreign policy that can only bring us sorrow.
Are you even serious right now? Scratch that - are you high?
UK and EU-NATO collaboration uses the NATO C3 architecture which is far, FAR more effective than other alliances around the world. Granted, they’re very slow and pedestrian, which has always been a frustration - but who actually holds back decisions? Hungary mostly. I fail to see how making the presence of the USA inside the alliance an even bigger problem than having Hungary in it, benefits the USA or EU-NATO.
Cooperation from the UK, Iceland, Norway and Canada (the four countries nearer to Nuuk than Greenland, unless the USA fancies bouncing everything through Alaska) the entire cost of developing Greenland will have to be met through US Federal funds. Bluntly, the USA cannot afford that. So why didn’t Trump just invite Canada, EU-NATO (including Greenland) and UK to a shindig somewhere, pitch the Golden Dome, and point out how existential it is for whole NATO security architecture? The best way to fund Iron Dome is to build a city in Greenland, funded by a new “Gold Rush” (built on AI, datacentres, and yes mineral exploitation). The signal this would’ve sent to China and Russia is, EU-NATO is enthusiastically working with the USA on a mutual benefit project.
We ALL agree Greenland needs to be protected from Russian Federation rape. But by the same logic, we can’t allow any other single country to rape it. So this megaproject cannot be a US-only endeavor. It HAS to be a whole-NATO endeavor with Greenland and Denmark (who both aren’t actually against the idea in principle) as stakeholders. That is the main basis of Europe’s objection - it’s not the idea of what needs to be done that’s the problem, it’s Trump’s “we’ll do all of it and you’ll all stand aside” approach to it that’s the problem.
Without the UK, Iceland, Norway and Canada (all of whom are geographically nearer to Greenland than the USA) all providing assistance, the Golden Dome project is going to take twenty years to deliver and it’d bankrupt the USA. On what planet, and What kind of wuckfit do you need to be, to think that the best way to solve those problems is to completely piss off every other partipant that the USA actually needs to be ON BOARD with it from the get-go?
By the way: Almost every country in NATO does meet the block contribution requirements. The imbalance on spending is due to size of country and size of forces/spending on its own self-defense, not the proportion of contribution to NATO. The USA is not even in first place in terms of proportionate spending - it’s in FOURTH place. While some graphs show the USA covering over half of all NATO spending, they neglect to mention that this is usually money that the USA, as the head country in NATO, spends inside its own MIC, mostly for its own purposes, while benefiting from having bases all over NATO at less than cost price and occasionally being able to flog its surplus to its allies.
NATO was already dealing with the “what if the Russian Federation attacks a NATO country” planning - Putin has been saying on and off since 2008, if EU-NATO keeps cock-blocking his hostile takeover of Ukraine and the Baltic, eventually he’ll start nuking European and British cities. Since the start of the SMO we have known that Medvedev and Kadyrov are not averse to the idea of a RF first strike. And of course Belarus is now enabling that first strike capability by hosting Oreshnik.
I hate to say it but Trump’s flip-flopping has gotten to the point where the best we in EU-NATO can say is, he is completely unstable and incoherent.
One minute he wants us investing in our own militaries and cooperating with each other (we’re already doing that.)
The next minute, it’s HIS administration that’s undermining (if not wilfully sabotaging) NATO cooperation.
Finally... some very senior voices inside the Trump administration keep parroting Kremlin bullshit to the Kremlin script - even to the point of the last “American” Ukraine peace proposals turning out to have been written almost entirely in Moscow instead of Washington. Frankly, we’re all pig sick of the contradiction between telling us all one minute to step up our own defences, then telling us in the next minute that ANY attempt we make to invest in our own defense amounts to a “warmongering” provocation.
The US Administration needs to make its F***ING mind up.
Whadda pant load.
Well said.
Trump is negotiating. That requires informing your negotiating opponent of your strength and your willingness to use it.
Biden and Obama have let the rest of the world walk all over us and Trump is telling them this abuse of the US is over and done.
Your appeasement approach is what started this abuse in the first place. I know Trump's approach looks scary but we need to buckle up and have confidence in his negotiating know-how.
This is another Trump feint. The goal is Copenhagen.
“Accordingly, Greenland seems like a small contribution considering the decades or proactive defense we’ve provided to those freeloaders.”
Once they were the first line of defense for us. The Royal Navy, the French Army, the Bundeswehr were powerful forces that contributed to the defense of all. Now, every NATO nation is a strategic liability for us.
OK...
“What has the EU ever done to contribute to the defense of the US since WW2?”
First of all, the EU didn’t exist before the Maastricht Agreement of 1991. (The EEC that preceded it was PURELY a trading bloc.)
Secondly: Germany was self-demilitarised primarily at the insistence of both the USSR and the USA (nobody fancied a THIRD period of a mighty German army!) The Warsaw Pact had Russian forces, western Europe had US forces. So, when MAGA and Freepers argue that NATO should’ve been disbanded after the Cold War ended, their own logic dictates that the USA should’ve bugged out of western Europe and let the EU develop its own defense architecture. Begging the question, why didn’t it?
Thirdly: within the EU, it was France, Germany and Benelux who were pushing the agenda to create a superstate with its own unified defense architecture (e.g. a single European army). The UK, Poland, the Scandinavian countries, and the Baltics didn’t want that. The USA wasn’t in favor either.
The consequence of all three is, the USA willingly threw its own resources at maintaining its presence in Europe long after the end of the Cold War. If Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2 and Obama had made any effort to withdraw from Europe, you and Trump would have a point, but the fact is they all got a shedload of “quid pro quo” out of maintaining US bases in those countries. For more than 3 decades, the USA has benefited from Europe buying American goods and services, and Europe buying American military kit.
Trump is opposed to the single European superstate and single European army (on the legitimate basis that this is guaranteed to be treated by Russia as an existential threat) but hasn’t offered a single constructive suggestion as to how Europe could possibly carry the weight of its own defense without relying on the USA if it DOESN’T have that architecture.
Lest we forget, the USA from under at least six consecutive presidential terms has benefited from EU-NATO forces and EU-NATO intelligence sharing... to conduct its own military missions.
The UK, Denmark, and Ukraine contributed to American missions in the Middle East post 9/11 despite there being no objective reason (beyond the mere fact of our being NATO members/partners) to get involved at all. Even in the UK there were million man marches in protest at Blair committing British resources in situations where we were completely convinced that these were neocon vanity projects.
The USA invoked Article 5. We were obliged under the NATO charter to assist with the DEFENSE missions that followed. It became abundantly clear that the regime-change mission in Iraq had sod all to do with NATO defense.
So, not only has the USA successively abused the NATO charter and missions to the extent that Russia and China have been able to successfully argue to BRICS that NATO is really just an extension of US foreign policy, the USA has confirmed that interpretation by repeatedly obstructing movements in Europe to build up its own defenses WITHOUT America pulling the strings.
So the answer to your question is, we don’t contribute to American “defense” but you sure as sh*t didn’t mind us all being coerced into contributing a lot to American OFFENSE. At our own expense.
“That requires informing your negotiating opponent of your strength and your willingness to use it.”
It’s long past time for the USA to acknowledge Europe is no longer a world power. And the decline of Europe continues and is larger self inflicted.
“Biden and Obama have let the rest of the world walk all over us and Trump is telling them this abuse of the US is over and done.”
On the contrary. George W Bush, Obama and Biden all abused the NATO relationship by dragging EU-NATO into unnecessary wars that had nothing to do with collective defense.
BRICS grew exponentially because the rest of the world could see that. Russia and China built a slam dunk argument on the need to bring the USA down a peg or two, entirely off the back of it.
All Trump is doing now is adding a new facet to that argument - “you thought the neocons were bad? Look at how abusively the USA now treats even its own allies, never mind its enemies.”
I’m not in the business of appeasement.
Tough love was definitely needed in Trump’s first term, when all of Europe was being complacent about Russian aggression and Trump was warning us about it. But now we have the peculiar contradiction of Trump
- insisting that Russia presents an existential threat to the USA (only via the Arctic?!), while
- flatly ignoring the existence of that very same threat across the Pacific (Remember Sarah Palin warning us about the proximity of Russia to Alaska over a decade ago?!), while
- obtusely ignoring Russia’s blatant agression towards eastern Europe (and basically telling Ukraine to surrender) while also watching every “deal” with Russia crash and burn because Russia won’t water down a single one of its maximalist demands
You need to look up “appeasement” in the dictionary.
Completely ignoring one ONGOING threat from Russia/China (eastern Europe) while ignoring the most likely second threat (Pacific/Bering), while making a massive song and dance about a hypothetical threat from Russia/China in a third direction as if it really is the only one that matters, while forcing Canada into a position where it had to lessen its tariffs on car imports from China to offset the damage that Trump’s unnecessary tariffs are doing, is what appeasement REALLY looks like.
Non-appeasement comes from realising that if Russia/China is creating threats from multiple directions, you need to counter the threat in multiple directions and that means YOU DO NOT PISS ALL OF YOUR ALLIES OFF.
As I’ve already said, there’s a far more sensible solution. Now that EU-NATO is completely on board with the idea that Russia more than China presents the most immediate threat,
1. Stop cock-blocking and criticising the combined European defense step-up now that it’s actually happening. Since we are all now agreed that aggressive Russian expansion (into the Arctic as well as into eastern Europe, BOTH for the purposes of grabbing land and resources) is the most immediate threat, building up a European defense against Russia that isn’t dependent on the USA is not “warmongering”; it is COMMMON SENSE.
2. Deal with the Arctic threat on a pan-NATO basis. Get a clue - you need to do it quick, you need the ability to do it securely. You WILL need Canada, Iceland, Denmark, UK, and Norway (at the very least) all on board.
You need resilience and redundancy in comms - unless you want to rely solely on Starlink to Alaska, you’re going to need backhaul to sites in Canada, Iceland, UK and Norway.
You can’t seriously expect to ship everything to Greenland via a single Atlantic sea route and/or a single route from northern Alaska. Single points of failure present a massive risk of interference. So, AGAIN, you will need Canada, Iceland, UK and Norway for redundancy of logistics across land, air and sea.
3. Your Golden Dome needs to be beefy across Alaska and British Columbia too. Otherwise, you’ll spunk $500n on putting detection and countermeasures into Greenland only for Russia to render the whole thing a pointless waste of effort by repositioning its launch capability. Logically, you want Canada contributing to the effort.
If it’s a question of urgency, all of this needs to be done ASAP. Of course the Trump administation can f** around with talks of secessions and independence votes and a roadmap to leaving NATO while slapping tariffs on the very partners it’ll need to rely on... All of which might give MAGA some right good feels without actually achieving dick.
But my point is, the administration could’ve gotten round a table with that subset of allies six months ago, laid all of this out, and those countries would almost certainly have been on board already.
How many troops are NATO members nations sending to Greenland...?
Denmark has already said as much.
It is heartbreaking to contemplate the wreckage this administration's solipsism is doing to the national security of nations on both sides of the Atlantic - And all so unnecessary.
Our republic has no allies among the governments of Western Europe.
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