Trump threatens to impose tariffs on countries opposing his plan to take Greenland

President Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on countries such as Denmark that aren’t on board with his plan for the U.S. to annex Greenland.

At a White House event Friday to talk about rural health care, Mr. Trump began discussing his tariff policies when he warned that he could use tariffs to exert economic pressure in his bid to take control of Greenland.

“I may do that for Greenland, too,” Mr. Trump said of tariffs. “I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland because we need Greenland for national security.”

Mr. Trump did not offer more specifics about the plan, such as how steep the proposed tariffs would be or which countries would be hit with the levies.

The president has argued that the U.S. needs to take control of Greenland, a vast, largely frozen island in the Arctic, for national security reasons. Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that Greenland is vital to U.S. interests because of its supply of precious minerals and to counter the geopolitical threat posed by Russia and China.

The White House has refused to rule out military action to seize the island from Denmark, setting off alarm bells with U.S. allies and rattling the NATO alliance. Greenland is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, which is a NATO member.

A key tenet of the NATO alliance is that an attack on one member would be met with force by all other members.

On Wednesday, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance on the issue.

After the meeting, Mr. Rasmussen and Ms. Motzfeldt said the Trump administration had not budged on the position that it must acquire Greenland, and they called such an outcome an unacceptable breach of sovereignty.

“It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland,” Mr. Rasmussen said.