British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has spoken to US President Donald Trump after speaking to the leaders of Denmark, the EU and NATO, to say he believed “applying tariffs on allies in pursuit of the collective security of NATO allies is wrong”.
A Downing Street spokesman said Starmer held phone calls with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte before speaking to Trump.
“In all his calls, the Prime Minister reiterated his position on Greenland, saying that security in the High North is a priority for all NATO allies to protect Euro-Atlantic interests,” the spokesperson said.
‘Europe will not allow itself to be blackmailed’
Earlier, major European Union states including Germany and France labeled Trump’s tariff threats over Greenland as blackmail, while France proposed responding with a series of untested economic countermeasures.
All eight countries, already subject to US tariffs of 10 percent and 15 percent, have sent small numbers of troops to Denmark’s vast Arctic island as a row with the United States over its future escalates.
“Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral,” they said in a joint statement.
The Danish exercise in Greenland was intended to strengthen security in the Arctic and posed no threat to anyone, they said. They added that they were ready to engage in dialogue based on principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement that she was pleased with the consistent messages from other states, adding: “Europe will not be blackmailed”, a position echoed by the German finance minister and the Swedish prime minister.
“What he is doing is blackmail,” Foreign Minister David van Weel said on Dutch television about Trump’s threat.
Coordinated European response
Cyprus, holder of the six-month rotating EU presidency, summoned ambassadors to an emergency meeting in Brussels late on Sunday as EU leaders stepped up contacts.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said during a visit to his Norwegian counterpart in Oslo that Denmark will continue to focus on diplomacy, referring to an agreement Denmark, Greenland and the US made on Wednesday to establish a working group.
“Even though we are now faced with these threats, we will of course try to stay on that path,” Rasmussen said.
“The US is also more than the US president. I have just been there. There are also checks and balances in American society,” he added.
Meanwhile, a source close to Emmanuel Macron said the French president is pushing to activate the Anti-Coercion Instrument, which could restrict access to public procurement, investments or banking activities or limit trade in services, in which the US has a surplus with the bloc, including digital services.
Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin said that while there is no doubt the EU will retaliate, it was “a bit premature” to activate the instrument.
And Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is closer to the US president than some other EU leaders, described the tariff threat on Sunday as “a mistake”, adding that she had spoken to Trump a few hours earlier and told him what she thought.
“He seemed interested in listening,” she said during a briefing with reporters during a trip to Korea.
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