Click to view full size

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump said Sat­ur­day that he would charge a 10% im­port tax start­ing in Feb­ru­ary on goods from eight Eu­ro­pean na­tions be­cause of their op­po­si­tion to Amer­i­can con­trol of Green­land, set­ting up a po­ten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous test of U.S. part­ner­ships in Eu­rope.

Den­mark, Nor­way, Swe­den, France, Ger­many, the Unit­ed King­dom, the Nether­lands and Fin­land would face the tar­iff, Trump said in a so­cial me­dia post while at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Flori­da. The rate would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Com­plete and To­tal pur­chase of Green­land” by the Unit­ed States, he said.

The Re­pub­li­can pres­i­dent ap­peared to in­di­cate that he was us­ing the tar­iffs as lever­age to force talks with Den­mark and oth­er Eu­ro­pean coun­tries over the sta­tus of Green­land, a semi­au­tonomous ter­ri­to­ry of NA­TO al­ly Den­mark that he re­gards as crit­i­cal to U.S. na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.