DAVOS, Switzerland — President Donald Trump on Wednesday remained unyielding in his demand that the United States acquire Greenland, ruling out military force while underscoring his willingness to use economic and diplomatic pressure against allies in a speech before foreign leaders and business executives gathered for a forum meant to foster global cooperation.
“We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it. We’ve never asked for anything else,” Trump told a packed room at the World Economic Forum. “They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”
The address underscored a defining feature of Trump’s second term: a willingness to wield U.S. power coercively — through threats, tariffs and leverage — even against allies, while showing little interest in persuasion or consensus-building. Rather than tailoring his message to an event created to foster international collaboration, Trump delivered a speech that rebuked alliances that have defined U.S. foreign policy for generations and derided Europe’s economic policies.
He spoke for more than an hour, weaving from the economy to nostalgia for the age of European imperialism and the backlash to his immigration crackdown in Minnesota during his second speech in as many days defending policies that have struggled to gain traction at home and abroad.
The fallout was swift. Shortly after his remarks concluded, the European Parliament suspended ratification of the E.U.-U.S. trade deal that Trump reached last year. In a statement, Bernd Lange, chair of the legislative trade committee, said U.S. threats against Denmark and Greenland left lawmakers no choice.
“By threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of an E.U. member state and by using tariffs as a coercive instrument, the U.S. is undermining the stability and predictability of E.U.-U.S. trade relations,” he said.
The pending trade deal would have eliminated European tariffs on all U.S. industrial goods while leaving products from Europe facing a 15 percent tariff imposed by Trump, a structure analysts said favored Washington. The European Union is the nation’s largest trading partner; total two-way goods trade each year is roughly $1 trillion.
European lawmakers said work on the deal will not resume “until the U.S. decides to reengage on a path of cooperation rather than confrontation,” Lange said.
Trump and his aides had previewed the Davos appearance as an opportunity to project U.S. strength while addressing domestic economic concerns. American presidents, in part because of the opulent optics, have mostly skipped the forum. But Trump chose to return for the second time, this year with the largest and most senior delegation in U.S. history.
The president is joined in Davos by multiple cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom Trump repeatedly praised during his speech in rare moments that drew applause. In one revealing aside, Trump praised European imperial expansion, saying there was nothing wrong with nations having expanded their territory through empire-building and drawing an explicit comparison to his push to acquire Greenland.
It was a sharp break from the post-World War II U.S. foreign policy consensus, which has supported countries’ desire for independence from their colonial powers, then built a globalized trading system to weave those nations together through economic interdependence.
On the overnight flight to Davos, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told reporters that Trump will travel next week to Iowa for a speech tailored to energy and the economy, and will make weekly trips ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump on Wednesday also discussed the executive order he announced the previous night to keep large investors from buying up single-family homes. The action directs federal agencies to join in the effort, tells the attorney general and Federal Trade Commission to review acquisitions for anticompetitive practices, and says the White House will work on legislative recommendations to make the policies law.
But Trump’s urgent interest in taking over Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, and his willingness to lambaste the E.U. overshadowed his effort to focus on his economic policy, at least to the throngs at Davos who had spent days in public and private weighing how to best thaw the tension with Trump.
“The lesson from the Greenland tariff threats is that no agreement with the U.S. is ever final,” said William Reinsch, a trade specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Trump made the agreement with the E.U. six months ago, and he’s now tearing it up with new demands.”
Markets have been unsettled by heightened tensions between the U.S. and its NATO allies. Investors appeared relieved that Trump said he would not invade Greenland. Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq turned higher on the news after posting shallow losses earlier in the morning, with all three indexes ticking up as markets opened during the speech.
“Overall it feels like a relatively subdued address on the topics everyone anticipated,” said one banking executive in a text message, who spoke on the condition anonymity to avoid professional retribution.
Onstage, Trump’s voice sounded hoarse as he described falling gas prices. He appeared to confuse Greenland with its neighbor Iceland four times, attributing the Tuesday slide in the stock market to Iceland and not the trade war he started over his demands to purchase Greenland.
“Without us right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese perhaps,” he said to the crowd in Switzerland, where German is one of four national languages and the most commonly spoken.
Trump also recounted how he imposed 30 percent tariffs on Swiss imports before raising them to 39 percent after a conversation with the Swiss president “rubbed me the wrong way, I’ll be honest with you.”
Eventually, he backed down, he said, “because I don’t want to hurt people.”
The personal attack on the leader of the country hosting a large U.S. delegation this week underscored Trump’s readiness to use U.S. economic power coercively, even against close partners.
At a bilateral meeting shortly after the speech, Switzerland’s new president, Guy Parmelin, remained a cordial host.
“Without you, it’s not truly Davos,” Parmelin said.
“I agree,” Trump responded.
Trump was scheduled to meet with the leaders of Poland, Belgium and Egypt on Wednesday, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. He will then address business executives at a reception and meet with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Trump told reporters that he would meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was still in Ukraine as of Wednesday, on Thursday.
Also on Thursday, Trump is scheduled to lead a charter signing of the Board of Peace, which he is marketing as an international peace-building organization with permanent seats worth $1 billion. Nearly three dozen countries have agreed to at least temporarily join the project, a senior administration official said.
As Trump walked out of the room, attendees returned to the standard rituals of this economic conference, where access and leverage remained the central currencies — and none mattered more than proximity to the U.S. president.
Birnbaum reported from Washington. David Lynch, Rachel Siegel and Jacob Bogage in Washington and Ishaan Tharoor in Davos contributed to this report.
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