A protest against President Trump in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, on Saturday.Credit...Juliette Pavy for The New York Times
In a single post on Saturday night, President Trump upended months of progress on trade negotiations with an ultimatum that puts Europe on a crash course with the United States — long its closest ally and suddenly one of its biggest threats.
In the Truth Social post, Mr. Trump demanded a deal to buy Greenland, saying that otherwise he would slap tariffs on a group of European nations, first 10 percent in February, then 25 percent in June.
It appeared to leave little room for Europe to maneuver or negotiate in a harsh and combative era of geopolitics. It also left Europe with few options to counter Mr. Trump without repercussions.
European leaders are loath to accept the forced takeover of an autonomous territory that is controlled by Denmark, a member of both NATO and the European Union.
Officials and outside analysts increasingly argue that Europe will need to respond to Mr. Trump with force — namely by hitting back on trade. But doing so could come at a heavy cost to both the bloc’s economy and its security, since Europe remains heavily reliant on the United States for support through NATO and in Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“We either fight a trade war, or we’re in a real war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels.
Europeans have spent more than a year insisting that Greenland is not for sale and have constantly repeated that the fate of the massive northern island must be decided by its people and by Denmark. Last week, a group of European nations sent personnel to Greenland for military exercises — a show of solidarity that may have triggered Mr. Trump, since the same nations are the ones to be slapped with tariffs.
The exercises were intended to reinforce Europe’s commitment to policing the Arctic. Mr. Trump has insisted that the United States needs to own Greenland to improve security in the region.
In that sense, the display was part of an ongoing effort to placate Mr. Trump. For weeks, officials across Europe had dismissed Mr. Trump’s threats to take Greenland, even by military force, as unlikely. Many saw them more as negotiating tactics and hoped that they could satisfy the American president with a willingness to beef up defense and spending on Greenland.
But Mr. Trump’s fixation on owning the island and his escalating rhetoric is crushing European hopes that appeasement and dialogue will work. Scott Bessent, the American Treasury secretary, doubled down on that message in a Sunday morning interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
American ownership of Greenland would be “best for Greenland, best for Europe and best for the United States,” Mr. Bessent said, suggesting that would be the case even if Greenland were taken by military force.
“The European leaders will come around,” he added.
There is little sign of that. Facing the reality that a negotiated compromise is less and less likely, Europeans are now racing to figure out how to respond to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign.
Within hours of the post, members of the European Parliament announced that they would freeze the ratification of the trade deal that Mr. Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, struck last summer. And members of European Parliament are openly calling for trade retaliation.
Ambassadors from across the 27-nation bloc gathered in Brussels on Sunday for an emergency meeting, where they took stock of the situation and had very early discussions about a possible response, said three diplomats briefed on the gathering.
Hitting back is complicated.
Europe has a trade weapon specifically created to defend against political coercion quickly and forcefully, and as Mr. Trump’s threats sank in, policymakers argued that this is the time to wield it.
The tool — officially called the “anti-coercion instrument,” unofficially called Europe’s trade “bazooka” — could be used to slap limitations on big American technology companies or other service providers that do large amounts of business on the continent. Some leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron of France, overtly called for its use.
But tapping it would sharply ratchet up trans-Atlantic tensions. Europe has spent the past year avoiding such escalation, and for a reason. The continent remains deeply reliant on the United States for NATO protection and for support against Russia in the war on Ukraine, so a full-on trade war could have consequences on other fronts.
“I don’t think the issue here is to create an escalation,” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, told reporters on Sunday in a televised news conference. “I believe it is rather to try to engage in dialogue.”
European officials are also entertaining the possibility of allowing a list of retaliatory tariffs worth 93 billion euros, or $107 billion — drawn up during last year’s trade war — to snap into place in February. That would put levies on American goods, a less drastic move than the trade bazooka but still an effort to stand up to the United States.
António Costa, the president of the European Council, which gives the European Union political direction, announced on Sunday that he had “decided to convene an extraordinary meeting” of European leaders in the coming days. An E.U. official added that the meeting might be in person, and could take place on Thursday.
That would allow prime ministers and presidents from across the bloc to discuss how they will respond to Mr. Trump. It would also come just as, or before, many European policymakers head to Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum meetings. Mr. Trump will also be attending — creating a chance for conversation.
While many European leaders are still hoping that they might be able to talk things out, discussions have been all but futile so far.
Foreign policy officials from Denmark and Greenland met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance in Washington last week. Afterward, the Danes and Greenlanders acknowledged that the two sides remained at an impasse, but expressed hope.
The two sides, they noted, had agreed to set up a high-level working group to work through their issues.
That optimism was quickly snuffed out when the White House said that the group was meant to work on America’s “acquisition” of Greenland.
“This is just all brute force,” said Penny Naas, an expert on European public policy at the German Marshall Fund, a research institution. “The president really wants Greenland, and he’s not backing off of it.”
Greenland shows little sign of wanting to be acquired, by money or by military force. Greenlanders have at times chafed at Danish power, but polls and interviews indicate that most don’t want to give up their free education and universal health care.
As Mr. Trump takes on a more aggressive posture, European leaders have been growing blunter about the need to fight back.
Mr. Macron, of France, wrote on social media on Saturday night that “no intimidation nor threat will influence us.” Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, wrote that “we will not let ourselves be blackmailed.”
Even Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain — which, like Norway, is not in the European Union, but was listed among the countries that will be slapped with tariffs — has pushed back. Mr. Starmer has carefully cultivated a positive relationship with the White House.
He was one of several officials who spoke to Mr. Trump on Sunday afternoon. He told him that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is wrong,” Mr. Starmer’s spokesman said.
Lizzie Dearden contributed reporting from London, Elisabetta Povoledo from London, Minho Kim from Washington and Ségolène Le Stradic from Paris.
Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 19, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Europe Eyes Its ‘Bazooka’ In Trade War
Jan. 21, 2026
By Henry J. Farrell
Dr. Farrell is a professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins.
Ever since Donald Trump started talking about taking Greenland away from Denmark, European leaders have hoped that his notoriously short attention span would save them. Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs against eight European countries may be dimming those hopes.
After the European countries held a small military exercise in Greenland, Mr. Trump announced an economic punishment. He said he would impose new tariffs, starting at 10 percent on Feb. 1 and jumping to 25 percent on June 1, until Denmark agreed to sell Greenland to the United States. While Europeans worry that Mr. Trump’s demands could destroy NATO, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suggested they have little choice. “The European leaders will come around, and they will understand that they need to be under the U.S. security umbrella,” he said. “What would happen in Ukraine if the U.S. pulled its support out? The whole thing would collapse.”
Outside threats can clarify minds. Europeans are slowly, painfully beginning to understand their true situation. The United States claims it needs to own Greenland for its national security. Now it has turned on Europe, demanding that it hand over territory and people to satisfy a president’s whim.
The only way to maintain European independence is to escalate back. To do this well, Europe needs to incorporate ideas into its economic thinking that seem alien to a continent that prefers soft power to hard security strategies — deterrence, credible threats and escalation dominance.
Repeated submission has gotten Europe into a mess. To get out, Europe needs to commit to not back down.
Credible commitments and tripwires are the strategic concepts of Thomas Schelling, the Nobel-winning economist and national security thinker who died in 2016. Mr. Schelling’s ideas shaped America’s nuclear strategy in the Cold War. He saw proxy wars and threats of missile strikes as the brutal language in which the Soviet Union and the United States bargained with each other, each seeking political advantage while avoiding mutual nuclear annihilation.
Mr. Schelling and his colleagues believed that great powers could deter attack by making credible threats of retaliation, even if actually hitting back would be difficult or painful. Ambiguity was the enemy of efficacy: Threats had to be specific, explicit and devoid of loopholes that could allow the deliverer to back down. The most credible threats were those that the deliverer had no choice but to carry out.
The notion of “escalation dominance,” developed by the RAND futurist and nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, plays a crucial role in determining who backs down and who doesn’t. Escalation dominance suggests that if a fight escalates into a tit-for-tat, the power more willing to endure pain and keep on hitting back will dominate. So long as other powers understand this, they won’t pick fights in the first place.
Such ideas may have motivated the eight European countries that ran a small military exercise in Greenland last week. They certainly didn’t think their brief expedition could defend a huge territory against an American military incursion. Instead, they were creating what Mr. Schelling called a tripwire.
During the Cold War, West Berlin was over 100 miles inside enemy territory and militarily indefensible. Mr. Schelling suggested that the United States stationed troops there so they would die if the Soviets attacked. Soviet leaders worried that if they stumbled into this tripwire, they might provoke a nuclear war. They preferred not to risk it.
Similarly, if America invades a territory that has the explicit military support of eight NATO allies, it has to worry that it will precipitate a much bigger political crisis. The tactics appear to have worked: The Trump administration quickly shifted from military threats to economic ones.
But the European Union appears to be less comfortable pulling from Mr. Schelling’s strategic playbook when it comes to economic warfare. European governments have dithered over how to fend off Mr. Trump for nearly a decade. Still, they do have an economic tripwire, however imperfect, if they can agree to deploy it: the so-called anti-coercion instrument, or trade bazooka, as it is often referred to.
The instrument was introduced in 2023, after European officials became alarmed by the increasing threat of trade weaponization. It is a platform for economic warfare, allowing European Union officials to deploy trade quotas, deny access to financial markets, revoke intellectual property, ban investment and impose import and export restrictions on countries that try to coerce Europe.
The anti-coercion instrument is very powerful in principle, but it has never been wheeled out onto the economic battlefield. It can only be deployed after fact-finding and consultation, providing European governments with opportunities to veto its use. In the past, larger E.U. member states such as Germany have cautioned against using it to avoid being dragged into economic conflicts that might hurt their national interests.
For now, the anti-coercion instrument is less a bazooka than a waterlogged firecracker. I have heard European officials claim that its mere existence is sufficient deterrent against attacks. But that’s not how deterrence works. If no one believes that you will use a weapon against him, no one will fear it.
Last year, one jaundiced European Union insider privately compared the anti-coercion instrument to the Doomsday Machine in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” (Mr. Schelling was an adviser on the movie.) The fictional weapon was automatically triggered by a nuclear attack, but it was kept top secret, rendering its ability to deter futile. European officials, on the other hand, talk incessantly about the anti-coercion instrument, but it still fails to deter because they seem so extraordinarily reluctant to deploy it.
Now an attack is underway. Mr. Trump is using tariffs and other threats to force Europe into submission. So what next?
The European Union is hedging. It is considering imposing tariffs worth 93 billion euros (about $109 billion) on America but has yet to decide or activate the anti-coercion instrument. France has proposed using it, but a majority of E.U. states want dialogue with Mr. Trump before going further, and Germany’s chancellor has said that any retaliation would have to be one that “protects Germany’s interests,” which include maintaining exports.
This is exactly the kind of situation that the instrument was designed for. Europe, however, seems too timid to use it. Mr. Bessent has scoffed that Europe’s most forceful weapon is the “dreaded European working group,” suggesting it will never get around to using the instrument. Europe seems in no hurry to prove him wrong.
If Europe wants to retain its independence, it needs to commit to action. The anti-coercion instrument, for all its faults, is the best option that Europe has. It should start the process of activating it, and quickly announce the specific measures it would impose.
Such measures could include intellectual property revocations that could damage American Big Tech. The anti-coercion instrument also allows retaliation against individuals and businesses that act on behalf of coercive governments. The limits of these tools are murky and untested, but they could weaponize the Trump administration’s rampant cronyism against itself.
Billionaires and businesses that have entangled their interests with the president’s could suddenly discover that they are vulnerable. The investors and crypto enthusiasts who are salivating over taking Greenland’s minerals and setting up their very own private government there may discover that their fantasies come with a steep price tag.
The risk of using the instrument is that Mr. Trump will rush to Armageddon, immediately withdrawing all support from Ukraine. That would be a disaster for Europe. It would also be a disaster for America and for Mr. Trump, as markets would very likely crater and the trans-Atlantic relationship collapse.
The trick for Europe would be to stand firm and escalate gradually, responding to aggression in carefully modulated increasing doses, identifying targets that are awkward for Mr. Trump to defend, and providing an exit for de-escalation.
Europe needs to deploy its tripwire if it wants to deter Mr. Trump’s attacks, and possibly in the future, China’s. If it does, it likely has the bargaining advantage. Most Americans don’t agree with Mr. Trump’s trying to buy Greenland, and many more oppose the idea of taking it by force. Fantasies deflate quickly once real costs become obvious, but it is impossible for Europe to impose costs without incurring risks itself.
Henry J. Farrell, a professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins, is the author, with Abraham L. Newman, of “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” and writes the newsletter Programmable Mutter.
