President Donald Trump attends the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.Harun Ãzalp/Anadolu/Getty
After previewing his plans to acquire Greenland through economic warfare, President Donald Trump abruptly announced that he would not impose tariffs he had scheduled to take effect next month, citing work on a future deal regarding Greenland with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte.
That move came despite the unmistakable warning embedded in Trump’s rambling, complaint-heavy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, where he blasted European leaders and appeared to threaten retaliation if the US does not acquire Greenland.
“We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump told the audience, before warning, “They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”
While Trump said that he wouldn’t “use force” to seize Greenland, he justified his ongoing demands to acquire the territory because the US keeps “the whole world afloat.”
“Without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps,” he said. “After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now?”
The president then shared a startling anecdote, which many viewed as an implicit warning of how the US could retaliate if it did not acquire Greenland. Trump told the audience that after initially planning to slap a 30 percent tariff on Switzerland’s exports to the US, he ultimately went up to 39 percent because Switzerland’s president at the time, Karin Keller-Sutter, had rubbed him “the wrong way.”
“She just rubbed me the wrong way, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump told the audience. “And I made it 39 percent.” The US later reduced the tariff on Switzerland to 15 percent, which Trump described on Wednesday as evidence of his compassion: “I don’t want to hurt people.”
The remarks appeared to underscore the exact warnings Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shared at the World Economic Forum just the day before.
“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” Carney said on Tuesday, stressing that “great powers” like the US have used “tariffs as leverage” and “financial infrastructure as coercion.”
Now, some leaders in Europe seem to be taking Carney’s approach.
In response to the Trump administration’s continued threats to take Greenland, the chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee announced on Wednesday that it would pause a EU-US trade deal that would have, in part, suspended tariffs on all industrial goods.
Update, January 21: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s Truth Social post dropping the tariff threat.
