Donald Trump links Greenland threats to Nobel snub as EU trade war looms | Greenland

Donald Trump has linked his repeated threats to seize control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel peace prize, as transatlantic tensions over the Arctic island escalated further and threatened to rekindle a trade war with the EU.

In an extraordinary text message sent on Sunday to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, the US president wrote that after being snubbed for the prize, he no longer felt the need to think “purely of peace”.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote, adding that the US needed “complete and total control” of Greenland.

Trump has ramped up his push to grab the island, a largely self-governing part of Denmark, in recent weeks, saying that the US would take control of the Arctic island “one way or the other” and, over the weekend: “Now it is time, and it will be done!!!”

On Saturday he threatened to impose from 1 February a punitive 10% tariff, increasing later to 25%, on imports from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland unless they dropped their objections to his plan.

The dispute has plunged trade relations between the EU and the US into fresh chaos, forcing the bloc to consider retaliatory measures, and also risks unravelling the Nato transatlantic alliance that has guaranteed western security for decades.

Trump has rocked the EU and Nato by refusing to rule out military force to seize the strategically important, mineral-rich island, which is covered by many of the protections offered by the two organisations since Denmark is a member of both.

He has repeatedly said the US needs to take control of the territory for “national security”, despite the US already having a military base on the island and a bilateral agreement with Denmark allowing it to massively expand its presence there.

In a brief telephone interview with NBC on Monday, Trump declined to comment on whether he would rule out seizing Greenland by force, insisted he would “100%” push ahead with his tariff plans, and blamed Norway for denying him the Nobel prize.

“Norway totally controls it despite what they say. They like to say they have nothing to do with it, but they have everything to do with it,” he added.

The Nobel peace prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel committee, a five-member private body whose members – mostly retired politicians – are appointed by Norway’s parliament but whose decisions are independent of the government.

Trump campaigned hard to win last year’s prize, which was awarded to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader. She collected it in Oslo last month but has since dedicated it to Trump and last week gave her medal to him.

In his text message to Støre, Trump said Denmark “cannot protect” Greenland from Russia or China, adding: “Why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago.”

The US president said he had “done more for Nato than anyone else since its founding, and now Nato should do something for the United States”. The world was “not secure unless we have Complete and Total control of Greenland”, he said.

Denmark’s defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, said on Monday he and the Greenlandic foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, had discussed with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, the possibility of a Nato mission in Greenland and the Arctic.

The Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said it was “important that all of us who believe in international law speak out to show Trump you can’t go down this road”. Trump had to see that “putting pressure on us” would not work, he said.

Greenland said it was a democratic society and must be allowed to decide its own future. “We will not be pressured,” said the territory’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen. “We stand firm on dialogue, respect and international law”.

EU leaders will meet for an emergency summit in Brussels on Thursday to discuss their response, which could include a package of tariffs on €93bn (£80bn) of US imports that has been suspended for six months since the two sides reached a trade deal last year.

Another possibility is the bloc’s anti-coercion instrument” (ACI), which has never been used but would limit US access to public tenders, investments or banking activities and restrict trade in services, including digital services. The EU said it was continuing to engage “at all levels” and the use of the ACI was not off the table. Germany’s vice-chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, and France’s finance minister, Roland Lescure, both denounced Trump’s tariff plans as blackmail.

Støre, who had not been scheduled to attend this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he would do so on Wednesday and Thursday, overlapping with Trump’s planned appearance at the annual political and business gathering.

Støre said on Monday Trump’s Sunday text message had come in response to a message from him half an hour earlier saying he and the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, wanted to “take this down and de-escalate”, and proposing a phone call.

Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he would also try to meet Trump in the Swiss resort on Wednesday, adding that “if we are confronted with tariffs we consider unreasonable, then we are capable of responding”.

Merz said Germany and other EU countries agreed “that we want to avoid any escalation in this dispute if at all possible”, but “if necessary, we will of course protect our European interests as well as our German national interests”.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, said he was working closely with EU leaders and called for calm discussion between allies. Trump’s tariff plans were “completely wrong”, he said, but he added he did not think military action to take Greenland was likely.

Several EU states including Germany, Denmark and Italy, as well as the UK, have suggested Trump believes the eight Nato countries that sent troops to Greenland last week – and are now the targets of his tariffs – did so as a warning shot to the US.

Some diplomats have said this may be a misunderstanding based on biased US TV reports: the troops were on a reconnaissance mission, and their deployment was in line with US concerns over a supposedly growing Russian threat in the Arctic.

Others lean more towards wilful misinterpretation in Washington: US representatives were present when the joint operation’s purpose was outlined at a Nato council meeting last week, and the US was invited to join it.

“The difficulty is that as trust breaks down, Trump makes his decisions based on wild speculation on US TV, and not from his diplomatic allies,” one western diplomat said.