Greenland Special
Executive Incoherence
Today, just a few notes on developments in and around Greenland. And because Greenland dominates the news in what we may or may not still call the North Atlantic Alliance, tomorrow I’ll share an entirely escapist travel story I wrote about a summer 2016 visit to Greenland.
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GREENLAND: The president came to office in 2017 demanding that NATO allies do more in defense of Europe. In fact, he’s held that opinion since at least September 1987, when he bought this full page “open letter” ad in the New York Times:
But now that the Europeans have sent a symbolic contingent of military reinforcements to Greenland, Donald Trump has attacked the Europeans for doing so, saying that only the U.S. could secure the island.
In a social media post on Saturday (January 17th, 2026), Trump threatened eight northern European countries with new import tariffs, to continue “until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland.”
The tariffs will take effect on Feb. 1 and increase to 25% on June 1, Trump said.
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THE KREMLIN CROWS ABOUT NATO’S COLLAPSE: It’s important to remember that the more policy making energy this dispute takes from the Europeans, the less there is for Ukraine, which is still there, and which is freezing.
Amid stories of “Russia’s ‘all in’ attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid,” and a Polish drive that raised $330,000 to buy generators for Kyiv, the Kyiv Independent reported today:
“Russian officials welcomed U.S. President Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs on NATO allies over Greenland, with Kremlin economic negotiator Kirill Dmitriev claiming on Jan. 17 that the move signals the ‘collapse’ of the transatlantic alliance.”
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The 27 EU ambassadors were meeting in crisis talks on Sunday evening, with French president Macron tabling the idea of using for the first time an anti-coercion mechanism that enables the EU to impose punitive economic measures on a country seeking to force a policy change. Politico reports:
“The instrument offers the EU various punitive trade measures that can be taken against trade rivals that try to threaten the bloc. Those measures include restrictions on investment and access to public procurement schemes, as well as limits on intellectual property protections.”
EU political players will slowly begin to voice previously unasked questions, like why not really take the fight to the US? Why not challenge the Americans like the Americans challenge us, they will wonder. With an ally like the United States, whose own self-image is so bound up in its ability to project power in, for example, the Middle East and Persian Gulf, why not question the deployment of American military assets on the continent?
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Both Trump’s European favorite European politicians, when it gets down to it, turn out to be … European. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, called the threatened tariffs a “mistake” and said she had given the president her views directly in a phone call, while the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, says “Tariffs would undermine the transatlantic relationship and risk a dangerous downward spiral.”
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Here’s a pertinent question: Is the president painting himself into a corner? Is he getting himself too committed to this Greenland idea to turn back? The US is taking its biggest contingent ever to Davos this week, and the Greenland question, which should be no question at all, will dominate.
Mark Rutte (Remember him? He’s NATO’s secretary general, or, as Politico suggested in this illustration this week, NATO’s chiller in chief) solemnly announced that he talked to Donald Trump today. And that’s just about all he said. For our edification, here, in full, is all the leader of an alliance under threat had to say:
The potential death of the alliance Rutte leads because of Greenland wasn’t predicted by many. Neither was his unwillingness to protect it.
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See you tomorrow with a Greenland travelogue. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. Like we say in Georgia, ‘It don’t cost nothing.’ And do let me hear from you.
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Cheers,
Bill
