Senior minister backs Greenland, Denmark as Trump threatens allies with tariffs
Senior Minister Katy Gallagher says Greenland’s future “is a matter for Greenland and Denmark”, while Donald Trump threatens European allies who oppose the US takeover with punitive tariffs.
In his latest tactic to pressure Denmark to sell Greenland to Washington, the US President promised overnight that he would impose 10 percent tariffs on imports from several European countries starting in February.
Mr Trump said the duties would apply to all goods coming from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland, rising to 25 per cent on June 1, and would remain in place until a deal was reached for a “whole and total acquisition” of Greenland.
All countries were involved in the French-led military deployment into self-governing Danish territory.
“These countries that are playing this very dangerous game have posed a level of risk that is not defensible or sustainable,” Mr. Trump said on social media.
“Therefore, to maintain Global Peace and Security, it is imperative that strong measures be taken to bring this potentially dangerous situation to a swift and unquestioned end.”
Senator Gallagher said on Sunday that Canberra’s position on both tariffs and Greenland’s sovereignty was “clear”.
“In terms of some of the reporting I’ve seen this morning on tariffs and things like that, our position on that has been clear; we haven’t supported tariffs; we support free trade,” he told reporters.
“But when it comes to the sovereignty of Greenland, that is a matter for Denmark and Greenland.”
He refused to speculate, as Mr. Trump and the White House have done, about the government’s response if the United States seized Greenland using military force.
Mr. Trump first raised the issue of taking Greenland, a self-governing autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark, in 2019 and has drawn the ire of Copenhagen with escalating statements since then.
He used national security to justify his latest push into the region after giving the green light to US special forces to force out Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolas Maduro and vowing that his administration would “govern” the South American country.
Greenland, a huge island in the Arctic, is 80 percent covered in ice, forcing most of its 57,000 residents to live on an ice-free coastline.
Beneath the ice sheet lie vast untapped oil reserves and rare earth deposits.
Greenland’s location is also key to the security of North America because it forms, along with Iceland and the United Kingdom, a choke point for maritime traffic, including Russia’s nuclear-armed submarines.
