Trump Threatens Tariffs on Countries That Refuse to Back U.S. Control of Greenland

President Donald Trump said Friday that he could impose tariffs on countries that refuse to support U.S. control of Greenland, even as a Congressional delegation was in Copenhagen meeting with Danish and Greenlandic officials in an effort to ease rising tensions.

Trump has repeatedly argued in recent months that the United States should take control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory belonging to NATO ally Denmark. Earlier this week, he said that any outcome short of U.S. control of the Arctic island would be “unacceptable.”

“I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland,” Trump said Friday, without offering specifics. “We need Greenland for national security.”

The president had not previously suggested using tariffs as leverage in the dispute.

Earlier this week, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland traveled to Washington for meetings with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Those talks failed to bridge the fundamental disagreements, though they did result in a decision to establish a working group. Denmark and the White House later offered sharply different public explanations of what that group would do. Greenland remains a semiautonomous territory under Danish sovereignty, and Denmark is a NATO ally of the United States