Trump Threatens NATO Members With Tariffs Paid Almost Entirely by Americans
Threatening European allies to further tax American citizens is unlikely to persuade them to surrender Greenland to the United States.
President Donald Trump is threatening NATO member countries with higher tariffs if they refuse to back an American acquisition of Greenland. But Trump's efforts are unlikely to be persuasive for one simple reason: Americans have borne the greatest burden of Trump's tariffs, not foreign exporters.
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a nonpartisan German think tank, released a report on Monday finding that American importers and consumers bore 96 percent of the tariff burden under the first 11 months of the Trump administration. Trump praised his protectionist policies for raising $8 trillion in revenue and foreign investment in August and inflated that number to $18 trillion in December. In reality, tariffs raised $288.5 billion in gross tariff and excise tax revenue in 2025. Applying the Kiel Institute's finding to this figure, Americans paid a whopping $277 billion in import taxes, while foreign exporters paid only $11.5 billion.
By threatening nations with which the U.S. has already reached trade agreements, Trump undermines American credibility and sows economic confusion. "Trump's tariff announcement confirms what trade policy experts have long warned," says Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute. "Because Trump's trade deals are unilateral and non-binding, they can be easily changed on a whim and are unlikely to constrain his daily tariff impulses." This unpredictability has wreaked havoc on American small businesses that import inputs and goods from abroad while failing to change the terms of trade: Instead of "slashing margins to maintain volume" in the U.S. market, foreign firms "redirect their sales to Europe, Asia, or other destinations," explain the Kiel Institute researchers.
Trump first floated the idea of purchasing Greenland in 2019 and revisited the subject shortly after winning the 2024 election. Four days after the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump's White House upped the ante by suggesting that the military could be used to seize Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.
In response, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Finland dispatched military units to Greenland last week. On Saturday, Trump threatened them with "a 10% Tariff on any and all goods sent to the United States of America" as of February 1, which will "be increased to 25%" on June 1 "until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland."
Trump stated that the U.S. needs Greenland to maximize the efficacy of the Golden Dome, a layered defense shield that is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. (The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement already allows the U.S. to establish and operate defense areas for the protection of NATO members.)
Whatever Trump's motivation for the acquisition, threatening to do to ourselves what enemies seek to do to us in times of war—preventing Americans from buying what we need to improve our situations—is unlikely to persuade NATO members.
