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Trump announces plan to hit UK, Denmark and other European countries with extra tariffs over Greenland
Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago. Now Trump has announced 10% tariffs on imported goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. As a sidenote, despite predictions of economic catastrophe, Trump's tariffs have been smaller and done less economic damage than estimated.
Still, no one knows what's the next step of Trump's master plan. Will it fizzle like the whole "Canada 51st state" thing? Polymarket estimates 27% chance that Trump will take "part of Greenland" in 2026.
It's still not clear to me what exactly the US wants to do with Greenland that they cannot already do. They already have a military base in Greenland and I can't imagine that (before this whole kerfuffle) Denmark would have made a big deal about a larger military presence of the USA in Greenland. Why bully and alienate countries in your sphere of influence to get something you already have?
It's not 'the US' per se, it's Trump. His worldview seems to be extremely zero-sum. Hence the mercantilism, the grasping at Ukraine's minerals, and the desire to annex Canada and Greenland. Combine that with a feeling that the western hemisphere should be the US' sphere of influence, and the threats/bribes towards Europe make sense.
He has such a strong hold over the Republican party that he's been able to drag them along with his zany schemes, although I'm not sure what Trumpism will look like once Vance takes over. Maybe less chaotic but more driven by whatever is happening on right-wing Twitter.
The odds that Vance gets shoved in a locker the moment Trump exits are quite high.
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huh? Trump's current actual (and terrible) foreign policy, not his rhetoric, is the preferred foreign policy of the establishment GOP
it's his own base and supporters who do not like it
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We don't trust Denmark, and we especially don't trust the people of Greenland. Simple as.
One example I've heard brought up was in 2018, Greenland was courting a Chinese company as a major investor in one of their airports - against the wishes of the Danes I might add! It didn't go through after much controversy, but the fact that Greenland can choose to partner with China, or Russia, or whomever, is a serious risk.
The idea that they're 'in our sphere of influence', and so we can just rely on them to be our buddies forever, is counter to the worldview of the administration. We've seen disasters like the Panama canal, which we gave back to our friends the Panamanians, and which is now de-facto controlled by Chinese companies, and taken the lesson that anything we don't directly control will eventually be co-opted by our enemies. It's not an unreasonable conclusion based on recent history, even if it chafes at our allies in Europe to hear it.
If Trump was proposing it, I'm about 70% likelihood they'd have made a big deal of it.
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Look at a globe and put the north pole at the center of your vision. You have Russia on one side, and America on the other. The arctic is already becoming a sea route, and greenland is positioned to be a major part of that. Canada controls a lot of the territory there, and doesn't have the economy or the will to be a powerful western force.
It's about countering Russia and China. They both want increased presence in our sphere, and Greenland is a good place to assert our control. The Europeans are also incapable of managing this.
This is what people are saying but fail to acknowledge that the US has virtual carte blanch militarily since the end of WWII. They have a standing agreement with Denmark that allows the US to use Greenland with almost no limitations for military purposes. The only limitation was/is no nuclear weapons. A limitation the US was caught breaking during the Cold War, but resulted in a defacto don't ask don't tell policy from Copenhagen.
The US has run down their military presence to one base with about 250 guys hanging around painting rocks and sweeping dirt.
There's two options. One, that this isn't about the stated reasons re: China and Russia. Or two, that somebody in the White House came up with this idea and didn’t know about the standing agreement before they went public.
It would be a matter or routine diplomacy to increase US presence in Greenland from a token force to a significant one. And routine diplomacy to renegotiate the agreement for even more military access and cement a "no chinese access to public or private infrastructures".
Whatever is going on, it doesn't make sense with the information available to the public. The formal integration of Greenland into the US is not in line with the stated goals of the government. It isn't strengthening the geopolitical position of the US, as it's fracturing US/EU relations, and making it more likely that Denmark eventually revokes US access to the territory.
In addition, instead of Slavic attention being pointed across the Baltic, which aligns with the stated anti-Russia goals of the White House, now half the EU is at least considering the deployment of serious assets to Greenland.
Having Denmark send 40 F35s to Greenland instead of hanging over the Baltic is not what the US wants if it's interested in countering Russia.
Either there's something weird going on, or the White House is as incompetent as they've been accused of being.
I'm not american or european. But if this is the best the US can do in favour of the geopolitical strategy to deter China and Russia, the government is totally retarded.
"Let's assert control over an important piece of territory that we already have control over. The Eurocucks won't do anything about it anyway and they won't fight Russia if we want them to. Let's risk blowing up NATO and driving the cringers in Brussels to reneg on all standing defence pacts lol"
This is so against the interests of US geopolitics that I'm surprised to see this view pushed outside of a tweet by a US state senator.
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This is a paper-thin pretext and you should be embarrassed to even give it the time of day, nevermind parrot it. First of all, Russia has ample opportunity to attack the US from thousands of miles of its arctic shoreline with the shortest path not passing over Greenland. The melting of ice will only magnify this as our submarines will be get far more space for maneuver. Second, normal NATO mechanisms allow the US to weaponize Greenland however, and the US is not even demanding more or better terms of military presence. Russia and China in general would have a very hard time securing Greenland, Russian expeditionary capacity is laughable and China would take decades to build theirs.
The simplest explanation is that Trump just wants Greenland, probably to strip mine it. Whether that makes economic sense, I am not sure.
The simplest explanation is that Trump just wants it, because it looks big on the map. 666D chess theory disproven again, Great Man theory proven again.
So, after everything that happened, you still see Russian war machine as "yours". Well, you can take man out of great power, but you cannot take great power out of man.
It doesn't just look big, it is big. Not as big as it looks on a Mercator projection, but big enough.
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"Your EU4 campaigns are about completing mission trees and getting achievements. My EU4 campaigns are about making my country's name bigger on the map. We are not the same."
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I realize that you've blocked me and won't read this, but I am sure that even trump realizes that Greenland is covered in (on average) 1500 meters of ice, with basically just the coasts actually ice free. Any kind of mining operation would be insanely expensive.
The ice-free part of Greenland is almost as large as California.
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It’s such a simple explanation that you can’t even…explain it? Strip mine it for what, exactly? Why would Trump care to strip mine Greenland? Does Greenland do a lot of mining (no)? Is there a mysterious resource that Greenland has that nobody else does?
I mean…yes there is: arctic coastline.
And I’m not “parroting” this. This is obvious to anybody who has even a passing interest in geopolitics and has been a topic or conversation for 20 years at least.
Greenland does in fact have some of the largest known reserves of valuable minerals in the world.
That said, it is indeed very uneconomical to develop.
But no matter! Trump got excited even for non-existent Ukrainian rare earths, so this is a no-brainer. And in the glorious AGI-powered future, labor-intensive development will be much more economical, as labor will be mechanized and mass-produced.
«Arctic coastline» is a pathetic excuse, the US in practice faces no limits sans its own fiscal prudence on militarizing Greenland.
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That doesn't answer the objection. The US is allied with Canada and Denmark. The US has a history of working through bases in allies' territory, and already has basing rights on Greenland in particular.
Why pointlessly antagonize regional allies with territorial demands instead of just working with them? (We know the answer)
I think we need to be able to make policy around the Greenland territorial waters. Exactly who is allowed to do what there under international law is immensely consequential.
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We know the answer? What is it?
Canada sounds like they’re currently trying to stoke an alliance with China, and the Europeans refuse to invest any money defense, they just keep trying to guilt us into paying for it. Not only that, but their immigration policies have massively destabilized their own countries.
We need strong partners. Denmark and Canada, at this point, aren’t. Canada just struck a deal to buy a bunch of shirty Saab fighter jets instead of massively superior F35s as a way of trying to spite us, the people paying for their defense.
Why would Canada be trying to spite the US? Did something happen?
Any problems you have with Canada right now are the result of a one sided failure of American diplomacy. MAGAS like to describe these countries as cucked, but honestly, how cucked would you have to be to buy fighter jets from a country that's threatening to annex you?
What you have to understand about Canada is that we are (the dumbest of) the liberal stereotypes, on average. We pride ourselves on not doing what the US does, even if it’s insanely destructive.
The US requires people to pay for healthcare? Well, we’ll forbid that (unlike European nations which usually offer both a public and private option, we only offer public - as such, we have serious brain drain to the US and wait times that exceed years).
The US is anti immigration? Well, we’ll bring in more immigrants (as an absolute number) than them, even though our population is approximately 10% of theirs.
We elected Carney on a campaign of “elbows up” against the US - despite his party basically ruining our economy over the last 10 years, we decided that rather than appease the giant superpower next to us and the source of most of our trade, we’d rather be prickly about it and make everything worse. Because we hate Trump.
Hell, go to /r/Canada on Reddit and look at any thread about immigration - you’ll see lots of people talking about how badly we need to remove people who overstay their visas, but we can’t do ICE because it’s facist.
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How cucked (or blinded by greed) you have to be to sell weapons to country you intend to forcibly annex? Do you recall Russia selling armaments to Ukraine (after 2014)?
I presume one difference is that the US can disable their weapons, at least F-35s, remotely. So that's not cucking.
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EU defense spending has been growing for 11 years and is now at least at 20 year highs.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/defence-numbers/
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Donald Trump is an impulsive bully. He thinks grabbing territory is a big-dick move and is thug-brained enough to not grasp the diplomatic consequences. All this talk about polar competition is clumsy rationalization.
(Or, if we want to go fully tinfoil, "I'm going to invade Greenland jk unless..." is a preferable headline to "I'm a pedophile.")
I wonder if the United States government did anything in the past year that might be construed as hostile towards Canada or otherwise make them doubt the integrity of the relationship?
And it's not as if the US isn't engaged in its own schizophrenic courtship with China.
What problem is being solved by antagonizing them? Canada, in particular, could be totally, absolutely useless and the US would still need their cooperation in the arctic. I know people here love the idea that it's all 4d chess to troll US allies into rearmament, but it's not. It's never 4d chess.
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Yeah, sounds. What's actually happening behind those doors is "oh shit, please we're sorry about our stupid Boomer electorate for fucking up the country, don't go", in a way that simply isn't symmetric for the US (since the Boomers are more likely to support Trump). A lot of the teeth-gnashing about Trump is because the elites in those countries know that, and having the populace angry means they can blame Trump for their own cascade of failures to reinvest in their own countries (and hence, youth) over the last 20 years. Not that Trump makes himself hard to blame, but I digress.
Hence why the only people who want to muster a workable defense against the US are the Boomers in those countries. It's hard to prosecute a war with septuagenarian soliders.
That's also why the Canadians haven't bought the F-35 yet, of course. How long's it been now, 20 years? Dead pilots only cost a few million. Strange, I wonder why nobody wants to join the Air Force now that we've decided we need one? (confused_travolta.gif)
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Because Trump has got it in his head that great leaders are the ones who expand their country's territory and Greenland seems like the easiest possibility for expanding bigly. I don't think there's anything else to it at this point, the given explanations don't hold water. Just monkey brain going ""Give Greenland me give annex Greenland me annex Greenland give me annex Greenland give me you."
But is he wrong?
Yes, he is acutely retardedly wrong.
He’s giving up the entire system of being the central node in the worlds largest military alliance and being the privileged position in its whole economic organization just to gain a bit of extra territory.
The territory that he’d be functionally losing far outweighs the frozen island.
But I guess “undid the world order” and “committed hegemon suicide” are both solid ways for him to get into the history books and this may be actually the main thing he’s aiming at.
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Is this the sort of a motive where words like "right" or "wrong" even have any meaning?
I mean: is he wrong about what great leaders do?
In the US context, he's mostly wrong, yeah?
Depending on your political alignment, "best president" lists vary widely, but I don't think I've ever seen one where adding territory was a particularly important criterion? It's not nothing, but domestic economics and policies (JFK on one end or Regan on the other) tend to generally be considered more important that territorial expansion?
Or winning wars (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), I guess, but most of those didn't actually come with territory.
The US is so big already and has so much wilderness already that adding more doesn't really move the needle all that much.
Do you think adding territory is what great leaders do in the modern day? Are there specific leaders you're thinking of?
The Louisiana Purchase is usually cited among Jefferson's claims to fame. But "bought a quarter of the country for a song" is impressive in a way that historically-standard conquests usually aren't; Polk isn't given much reverence for Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
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Taking Greenland now puts the US in a better position to take Canada later.
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Trump has said repeatedly that it's needed for Golden Dome. This makes me wonder if the US plans to put nuclear interceptors there - Danish territory is nuclear-free, although they let us bend the rules in Greenland during the Cold War and still might.
I suppose another possibility is that we think if we owned the land outright we would be able to better bar security threats from the territory in a way the Danes can't or won't.
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