Trump’s New Greenland Threat Outrages Allies, and China’s Birthrate Plunges
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From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, January 19th. Here's what we're covering.
President Trump's campaign to make Greenland part of the United States escalated this weekend as he threatened to slap tariffs on European nations that don't cooperate with him. He announced he would hit some of the U.S. 's closest allies, including Britain, France and Germany, with a 10 percent tariff starting in February. And he said he'd ramp it up to 25 percent in June, quote, until such time as a deal is reached for the complete and total purchase of Greenland. The countries he targeted are all NATO members that have expressed solidarity with Denmark in the face of Trump's repeated demands that it should give up control of Greenland. They called the tariff threat intimidation and unacceptable.
What we saw as soon as it happened was just an absolute scramble to find a solution. There were bilateral calls between European leaders. There were calls between European leaders and the president of the United States. You know, I think it was just an absolutely panicked uproar coming out of this. And we saw the ambassadors from across the European Union nations meet in Brussels on Sunday night for an emergency meeting.
My colleague Gina Smilick covers the EU. She says that the bloc could retaliate with a drastic tool it's never used before, officially called the anti-coercion instrument. Unofficially, it's called Europe's trade bazooka, and it could be used to slap restrictions on big American tech companies or other corporations that do a lot of business in Europe. Gina says that some officials, including the president of France, have suggested it's time to use it. But for now, the EU is leaning more toward negotiation than retaliation.
So the Europeans have a good reason to want to talk this out, which is that they are extremely dependent on the United States for military capabilities, especially when it comes to NATO defenses and the war in Ukraine. They're relying on America for a lot of technology and a lot of support. They would ideally like to resolve this without a deeper rupture between the U.S. and Europe because that would have serious consequences here.
President Trump has repeatedly said the U.S. needs Greenland for national security purposes to push back against Russian and Chinese interests in the Arctic. In the past, the U.S. did have a large military presence on the island. It closed a lot of its facilities there after the Cold War. But the U.S. has the right to reopen about 16 bases in Greenland. Trump, however, has insisted that's not enough, saying ownership was important, quote, because that is what I feel is psychologically needed for success. In Minnesota, a federal judge has ordered ICE agents to stop using excessive force against protesters. Her ruling outlined a pattern of misconduct in how officers responded to incidents in December, even before tensions escalated after the fatal shooting of Renee Good.
In the case, plaintiffs described how they were hit with pepper spray without warning and surrounded by ICE agents pointing semi-automatic weapons at them at close range. One woman described how she was put face down in the snow and then taken to a federal building where some of her clothes were removed, her wedding ring was cut off, and she was shackled.
What are the implications of Trump's Greenland tariff threat?
She was told she'd be charged with obstructing an officer, but no charges were filed. One legal scholar said the behavior evoked how police attacked civil rights protesters in the early 1960s.
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