A Republican senator who has become one of Donald Trump’s most frequent critics on the issue of foreign policy called his threats towards Greenland a mistake on Sunday.
Sen. Thom Tillis told CBS News that the president was “irresponsible” for seeking anything beyond a reaffirmation of previous agreements giving the U.S. the ability to project naval power across the arctic.
“The reality is, to me, it was irresponsible to go anywhere other than figuring out how we modernize the 1951 Agreement, where Greenland and Denmark agreed to more or less give us unfettered access in Greenland to project power in the Arctic,” said the senator.
Tillis appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation for an interview on Sunday with Ed O’Keefe. During the interview, he blamed both the president and European leaders for using “hyperbolic language” to describe the situation with Greenland and NATO, in response to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declaring that the post-war liberal international order was “over” during a speech to the Munich Security Conference, where he declared that “this order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.”
“Only if the chancellor allows it to [end],” Tillis responded.
The North Carolina senator experienced a falling-out with Trump in 2025 over passage of the Republican “Big, Beautiful Bill”. Since then, he has been one of Trump’s strongest critics from the right on the issue of support for Europe and the NATO alliance, as well as on other issues like his mass deportation operation headed up by Kristi Noem and Tom Homan.
On Sunday he asserted that the U.S. and its European allies could reach a friendlier dynamic around the issue of NATO and Greenland if NATO countries acknowledged that the years of not making a 2% GDP benchmark of defense spending was a mistake. That benchmark, not required until 2024 and only a loose guideline prior to 2014, is now being met by every country in the alliance according to NATO data.
“If the NATO countries who came up short for decades would just admit that that was a mistake and then double, redouble their efforts, I think this goes away just like the hyperbolic language around Greenland,” said Tillis. “They’re not wrong to point out the deficiencies of the past.”
“Let’s just have an honest discussion with family members, and get the family right,” Tillis said.
President Trump’s threats to Greenland resumed in January and quickly caused a political earthquake across the Atlantic. The president asserted to Norway’s prime minister in a letter that he was considering using force to take the territory as a result of being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize. He later told reporters on Air Force One that “if we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will. And I’m not letting that happen.”
He added that the territory would become a U.S. possession “one way or another,” and refused to elaborate. In the days following, his aides Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt caused further alarm by refusing to rule out military force when questioned directly by journalists. The president also threatened to mount 10% flat import tariffs against the U.K. and other European nations until Greenland was formally traded to the United States.
But he later backed down in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, vowing that military force was off the table as an option. His announcement drew sighs of relief, and worries that enough damage to the U.S. ‘s standing with its NATO allies had already been done. The White House also walked back threats to impose new tariffs.
During Trump’s second term last year, the NATO alliance pledged to make a new 5% GDP benchmark for defense spending by 2025. At least one country, Spain, says it will likely not meet this new goal.
The U.S. spent around 3.2% of its GDP on defense spending last year.
