President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would hike duties on several European countries amid intensifying opposition to his comments around annexing Greenland, leaving the future of a U.S.-European Union deal uncertain.
Military personnel from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Sweden were dispatched to the Arctic this week, with French President Emmanuel Macron promising additional "land, air and sea assets" in the coming days.
The countries were responding to mounting demands from Trump that the U.S. take over Greenland, a Danish territory, to bolster U.S. national security.
In a post to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, Trump said that countries and Denmark would all face new 10% tariffs on their U.S. exports, which would rise to 25% on June 1.
“This Tariff will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland,” the president wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions from Agri-Pulse on whether the tariffs would be applied alongside existing tariffs or when to expect the 10% duty to go into effect.
The president has made multiple tariff threats in recent weeks and months that have not yet materialized, however. In October, he said the U.S. would impose a 10% tariff on Canada over the government of Ontario’s purchase of a televised ad attacking his tariffs.
More recently, on Tuesday, Trump said that countries doing business with Iran would face a 25% tariff “effective immediately.” But the administration has not provided any additional details on the tariff, including when it will go into effect.
It also is not clear what the new tariffs might mean for the future of recent trade pacts with the UK and EU. The UK agreed to provide additional market access for U.S. ethanol and beef exports as part of a bilateral deal negotiated in May in exchange for the U.S. keeping tariffs on most UK exports to 10%.
Similarly, the EU agreed to lower a slate of trade barriers for U.S. ag products under a July deal announced in Turnberry, Scotland. The U.S. committed to a tariff cap of 15% on most EU exports under the deal.
Even before Trump’s latest tariff threats, European lawmakers were weighing delaying the implementation of that deal over the president’s Greenland comments and refusal to rule out military actions. U.S. officials had hoped the European Parliament would approve the deal early this year, but the latest tariff threats may have torpedoed that timeline.
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"Approval is not possible at this stage," Manfred Weber, the president of the largest party in the European Parliament - the European People's Party (EPP) - wrote in a statement posted online Saturday. "The 0 percent tariffs on U.S. products must be put on hold."
Bernd Lange, who chairs the European Parliament's international trade committee, called on the European Commission to go even further and retaliate through its new anti-coercion mechanism.
"A new line has been crossed," he wrote in a social media post. "The EU cannot simply move on to business as usual."
French President Emmanuel Macron responded to Trump by affirming France's commitment to European sovereignty: “No intimidation or threat will influence us—neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations,” Macron said in a statement.
He said Europeans would “respond in a united and coordinated matter” if Trump goes through with his tariff threat.
Peter Harrell, a former Biden-era White House trade and economic official, noted on X that the Supreme Court could dash Trump’s Greenland tariff ambitions, however. The court could issue a ruling on the president’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs as soon as Tuesday.
“I really, really hope we get a ruling on IEEPA tariffs on Tuesday,” he wrote. If “the Supreme Court doesn’t start requiring tariffs to go [through] regular order laws, U.S. policy is about to become even more chaotic.”
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, also vowed to use "every tool available" to overturn the tariffs.
"Threatening our longstanding allies makes every American less safe and fractures the alliances that are essential to containing Russia and China," Wyden said in a statement. "Once again, Donald Trump is abusing power and hiking costs and taxes on Americans to advance a pointless imperialist fantasy."
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