President Donald Trump on Friday floated slapping potential tariffs on countries that oppose the U.S. acquiring the Danish territory of Greenland.
Trump made the remarks after describing threatening European allies, including France and Germany, with 25 percent tariffs if they did not pay more for prescription drugs.
“I went through country after country,” Trump said at a White House roundtable on rural health care. “I just went one after another.”
“I may do that for Greenland on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland because we need Greenland for national security,” he said.
The president’s remarks come one day after troops from various European countries, including the U.K., France, Germany, Norway and Sweden, arrived in Greenland amid Trump’s intensifying calls for the U.S to control the territory. On Wednesday, Denmark announced it was increasing its military presence in and around Greenland.
Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with their Danish and Greenlandic counterparts at the White House on Wednesday, but the two sides did not come to an agreement over the future of Greenland.
Trump said hours before the meeting that anything less than U.S. control of Greenland was “unacceptable.”