President Donald Trump said on January 21 that he will not implement punitive tariffs on eight European NATO members after reaching what he described as a ‘‘framework’’ agreement on Greenland with NATO figures. The announcement, made on his Truth Social platform, said the talks produced a concept that could yield benefits for the United States and all NATO members, and therefore the 10 percent tariffs due to take effect on February 1 would be cancelled.
Trump framed the understanding as covering Greenland and the wider Arctic, hinting that the deal could include US mineral rights and participation by allies in a US-proposed missile-defence programme referred to as the Golden Dome. He named a negotiating team — Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, envoy Steve Witkoff and ‘‘other necessary people’’ — who will handle the discussions and report directly to him as more details are worked out.
The tariff threat, announced last weekend, had targeted imports from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland with a 10 percent levy rising to 25 percent from June if the Europeans did not agree to a ‘‘comprehensive, complete purchase of Greenland’’ by the United States. The tariffs were widely read as leverage for the White House’s renewed push to secure US commercial and strategic access to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark that both Copenhagen and Nuuk have repeatedly said is not for sale.
There are oddities in the White House account. Trump said the talks were with ‘‘NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte’’ — conflating two public figures, since Mark Rutte is the prime minister of the Netherlands and not NATO’s secretary-general. That slip underscores the informal, transactional tone of the diplomacy and may complicate reception of the announcement in Europe, where officials had earlier staged symbolic military exercises to signal their commitment to defend Greenland.
For European capitals the episode exposes a recurring dilemma: the US remains a security partner but also treats alliances as venues for bilateral bargaining. For the Biden-era successor foreign policy watchers, and for NATO collectively, the prospect that tariff threats and direct commercial demands will be used as instruments in Arctic geopolitics is troubling. The announcement also signals that Washington regards the Arctic as an arena of growing strategic competition — alongside Russia and increasingly China — where mineral resources, base access and missile-defence architecture converge.
Trump insisted in interviews that he will not deploy US forces to seize Greenland and described the framework as ‘‘a concept for a deal’’ that still requires negotiation. Whether European governments will accept arrangements that include US mineral rights or co-investment in missile-defence infrastructure without clearer legal and political guarantees remains uncertain. The story is likely to unfold as a mix of formal diplomacy inside NATO, bilateral talks with Denmark and Greenland, and public posturing by all sides.