By Andrew Stuttaford
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Using a bad tactic to pursue a counterproductive
strategy, the president is now threatening to use tariffs as a weapon against
countries that oppose his wish that the U.S. should take over Greenland.
With an eye, I imagine, to the Supreme Court, Trump has said that the U.S. “may put a tariff on countries if they
don’t go along with Greenland because we need Greenland for national security.”
That is because presumably the administration would claim
that its authority for any such tariffs derives from either the International
Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) or Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act
or both.
IEEPA empowers a president to take various economic
actions “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its
source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national
security, foreign policy or economy.” Do those actions include imposing
tariffs, and, if they do, what conditions apply? The Supreme Court should be
letting us know about that shortly.
Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act is meant to apply
to imports that in one way or another “threaten to impair” U.S. national
security. To say that this would entitle the administration to use tariffs as
leverage in order to persuade other countries to submit to security-related
demands that bear no obvious connection to imports seems to me to be a stretch,
but who knows?
The irony of all this is that the administration has been right to stress that under-defended and very sparsely populated Greenland is both a vulnerability and, through its raw materials, an opportunity. At the same time, however, the way it has set about remedying the former and pursuing the latter has been counter-productive and, in the case of the former, something that could largely have been resolved under existing treaty arrangements. Using tariffs to bully Denmark and Greenland would, in all probability, make an unnecessarily bad situation even worse. Believing that they would lead to a situation that improves national security seems . . . optimistic.
No comments:
Post a Comment