Trump’s tariff threat on Greenland is a golden opportunity for Starmer – it is time to rejoin the EU
The Dutch have called it blackmail and Britain says it’s “wrong”, but Spain is the country that has best spelt out the treachery of Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs against his allies to force Greenland into his kingdom.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said that if Trump invaded Greenland it would make Vladimir Putin the “happiest man on earth”.
The EU and the UK are in emergency talks on how to face Trump’s latest threat of a 10 per cent tariff on goods from eight countries unless Greenland is sold to the US. The tariffs are to rise to 25 per cent on June 1.
Trump is a business buffoon. His companies have gone bankrupt six times and he failed to launch an airline and a university, and lost his shirt in casinos. He is also ignorant of basic economics.
He has repeatedly described tariffs, which are paid by US consumers and businesses in dollars in the US at the point of importation of foreign goods, as a “subsidy”.
The reality is that if he forces up the prices of goods from eight countries through duties, some of the rise will be carried by the producers, some by the middleman, and in most cases the majority of it by the consumer – Americans.
Trump is impervious to this reality.
Just as he is impervious to advice from longstanding allies that if he smashes Nato, the US will be vulnerable to the very threats from China and Russia that he claims he wants to protect against by bringing Greenland into the US.
Britain has stood by its Nato commitment and sent one officer as a token presence on a token European military mission to Greenland. As the UK has negotiated 10 per cent tariffs with Trump vs the EU’s 15 per cent, it has a little more to lose in a decline in UK-US trade.
But it has a huge amount to gain economically, culturally, and now in terms of its security, if the crisis caused by Trump is seized as an opportunity for Britain to rejoin the EU on terms that bind the UK to the mainland. This would make both parties safer – and stop Putin from dancing a happy jig around the Kremlin.
Last year the UK and the EU failed to agree terms for Britain to join the Security Action for Europe (Safe) programme. This is a €150bn loan mechanism to boost the EU’s defence industrial capacity in the face of Russia’s threat against Europe and invasion of Ukraine.
Britain was asked to stump up €4-6bn as the price of membership. Canada only had to pay $20m, but the UK would have been a full partner, not a “third-party” country with limited access to the funds.
Britain would have been able to benefit enormously from cherry-picking this EU facility without having to go for political integration – which is why the EU set the fee so high.
But that was years ago in Trump time. Last December on our calendars.
