WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday raised the prospect of using tariffs as leverage against countries that oppose his push for the United States to acquire Greenland, injecting trade pressure into an already tense dispute with Denmark and Greenland over sovereignty, security, and the future of the world’s largest island. Speaking at a White House event focused on rural health care, Trump said he “may put a tariff on countries” if they “don’t go along with Greenland,” arguing that the U.S. “needs Greenland for national security.”
The comments came as U.S. and Danish officials attempt to keep the issue contained inside diplomacy rather than allowing it to spill into a broader transatlantic fight. Two days earlier, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met at the White House with Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and Greenland’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt. After the meeting, Rasmussen said the parties agreed to establish a working group to discuss Greenland-related concerns even as he acknowledged the two sides still fundamentally differ on Trump’s demand that the territory come under U.S. control.
Trump has framed the Greenland push as a defensive necessity in the Arctic, repeatedly arguing that Denmark cannot adequately protect the territory against Russian and Chinese influence. In a Truth Social post this week, he said the United States “needs Greenland” for national security and called it “vital” to a proposed missile-defense initiative he has dubbed the “Golden Dome,” adding that NATO would be “far more formidable and effective” if Greenland were in U.S. hands. The claim is maximalist—less about access than ownership—despite the fact that the U.S. already operates a major installation there, Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base), a key site for missile warning and space surveillance.
The White House has tried to preserve a measure of ambiguity about how far it would go. Earlier this month, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration prefers diplomacy but would not rule out other options, telling reporters that “all options are always on the table” as Trump considers what he believes is in the best interests of the United States. That posture—paired with Trump’s tariff threat—has sharpened European concerns that the U.S. is attempting to turn a sovereignty question into a negotiation conducted under economic and military pressure.
Denmark and Greenland have responded with unusually direct language. Greenland’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and the heads of all five parties represented in Greenland’s parliament, issued a joint statement rejecting attempts to dictate Greenland’s future. “We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes, we want to be Greenlanders,” they said, insisting that Greenland’s status must be decided by Greenlandic people alone.
In Copenhagen, the backlash has spread beyond official statements to parliamentary diplomacy. A bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers traveled to Denmark in mid-January to meet Danish and Greenlandic officials and to signal that Congress is not aligned with the idea of coercing a NATO ally. During that trip, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen acknowledged “real, deep concerns” in Denmark and Greenland and described those concerns as understandable “when trust is shaken,” adding that she believed “saner heads will prevail.”
Part of what makes the dispute so combustible is that Greenland’s governance is complex in ways that resist Trump’s property-deal framing. Denmark’s modern colonization of Greenland began in 1721, and Greenland’s political autonomy expanded significantly over the last half-century—beginning with home rule in 1979 and later with the 2009 Self-Government Act, which recognized Greenlanders’ right to self-determination while leaving defense and foreign affairs with Denmark. In other words, Greenland is not simply a Danish possession to be traded, and Danish officials argue that sovereignty cannot be bargained away under threat.
That is why Trump’s tariff language landed so sharply. Tariffs are an economic tool, but in this context they function as a diplomatic cudgel—an attempt to raise the cost of resistance for allies. The immediate question is whether such pressure can move Denmark or Greenland, both of which have continued to state publicly that Greenland is not for sale. The larger question is what this episode signals about how the U.S. intends to use trade tools against allies to achieve geopolitical aims—an approach that, if sustained, could strain NATO unity at the very moment Trump says the Greenland push is about strengthening Western security.
