Duty. There is no political or geopolitical conflict in which Donald Trump does not use the trade war card to try to twist the arm of his interlocutors. And now it is beginning to do so with its dispute over Greenland, a territory dependent on Denmark, Washington’s NATO ally.
At an event on health investments in rural areas of the United States, Donald Trump recounted how he threatened countries like France and Germany with 25% tariffs if they did not pay more for medicines.
According to Trump, he called French President Emmanuel Macron and told him: “You have to raise drug prices.” Trump claimed that he threatened France with 25% tariffs if it did not do so.
And, then, he said that he could use the tariffs to pressure Denmark and the rest of the countries that oppose annexation: “I may impose a tariff on countries that do not accept the Greenland thing, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do it.”
France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands are mobilizing and have sent or announced they will send troops to Greenland.
The threat from the US president comes 24 hours after the meeting at the White House between his vice president, JD Vance, and his secretary of State, Marco Rubio, with the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, Lars Loekke Rasmussen and Vivian Motzfeldt, respectively. Both Rasmussen and Motzfeldt rejected Trump’s imperialist ambitions.
“The Kingdom of Denmark continues to believe that the long-term security of Greenland can also be guaranteed within the current framework, the 1951 agreement on the defense of Greenland, as well as the NATO Treaty,” Loekke Rasmussen said this Thursday at the press conference after the meeting at the White House, in front of the Danish embassy in Washington DC: “For us, ideas that do not respect the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the right of self-determination of the people Greenlandic are, of course, totally unacceptable and we therefore continue to have a fundamental disagreement, but we also agree that we disagree and will therefore continue to engage in dialogue.”
“I think it is very important to repeat how important it is for us to strengthen our cooperation with the United States, but that does not mean that we want to be owned by the United States,” said Greenlandic Minister Vivian Motzfeldt.
Source: www.eldiario.es
