Trump rants about Greenland and cutting off all trade with Spain

Trump is in his “mad king” phase again. He said today that he would cut off all U.S. trade with Spain. That’s dumb, because America has a trade surplus with Spain, and benefits from its trade with Spain. Spain is part of the European Union, and America has trade deals with the European Union. Cutting off U.S. trade with Spain would violate America’s agreements with Europe.

Reuters reports:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered an immediate halt to all trade with NATO ally Spain, escalating tensions over ‌defence spending and the Iran war, despite European Union rules requiring trade negotiations to be conducted as a single bloc.

During a NATO summit in Ankara, which European leaders had hoped would cap rifts within the military alliance, Trump instead reignited the dispute with Spain, calling it a “terrible partner”. He also irked another NATO ally Denmark by reiterating that his country should control Greenland. Denmark promised to defend every inch of ​its territory.

Cutting off trade with Spain would mean thousands of jobs in America would be wiped out. It would eliminate the jobs of Americans who currently make the goods America exports to Spain. America exported $39.2 billion in goods to Spain in 2025, and imported $35.3 billion in imports from Spain. “That means that the US exported $3.96 billion more to Spain than we imported from it. Benefits of trade can include higher wages and job growth, a wider variety of products available at lower prices, increased productivity, and more efficient resource allocation,” explains USA Facts.

Hopefully, Trump will back down and not illegally cut off trade with Spain. He already lost a lawsuit in the Supreme Court when he illegally imposed a bunch of tariffs on many foreign countries.

Trump is pressuring Denmark to sell Greenland to America, but “Buying Greenland would likely be a bad investment, experts say”:

Most of the minerals in Greenland are too costly to access, even with advances in mining, because of how remote and icy Greenland is. “The idea of turning Greenland into America’s rare-earth factory is science fiction. It’s just completely bonkers,” said Malte Humpert, founder and senior fellow at The Arctic Institute. “You might as well mine on the moon.”

Defenders of President Trump’s push to acquire Greenland have cited the presence of minerals in Greenland as a reason to acquire Greenland. But experts see little potential profit in Greenland, compared to other places like Alaska and Siberia that had far more oil, and are not covered by ice (unlike Greenland, which is mostly covered by a thick ice cap). Yet Trump administration officials have mulled paying between $5.7 billion and $57 billion to acquire Greenland ($10,000 to $100,000 for each of the 57,000 people in Greenland). $57 billion would be far more than Greenland is worth. Indeed, Greenland would likely cost the U.S. more to administer than it would make from Greenland.

As CNN notes, even Trump has finally recognized the difficulty of accessing most of Greenland’s minerals: Recently, Trump “downplayed Greenland’s natural resources, including in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, when he said acquiring rare-earth minerals wasn’t the reason America needed the territory.”

“Everyone talks about the minerals. There’s so many,” Trump said. But “to get to this rare earth, you got to go through hundreds of feet of ice. That’s not the reason we need it. We need it for strategic national security and international security.”

Trump’s claim that “we need” Greenland “for national security” is odd, because we don’t need to acquire Greenland to put American bases or troops there. Denmark historically allowed the U.S. to operate as many bases on Greenland as it wanted.

The U.S. closed most of its bases on Greenland over the years because a U.S. presence on most of Greenland was considered unnecessary. Denmark let the U.S. put bases wherever it wanted, but after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. decided it didn’t need most of its Greenland bases anymore.

As the New York Times explains,

Under a little-known Cold War agreement, the United States already enjoys sweeping military access in Greenland. Right now, the United States has one base in a very remote corner of the island. But the agreement allows it to “construct, install, maintain, and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and waterborne craft.”

Denmark runs a loss every year controlling Greenland. It is a burden on Danish taxpayers for Greenland to be part of Denmark. So Greenland could be a burden on American taxpayers if it became part of the United States.