{"id":14481,"date":"2026-02-16T00:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T00:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/14481\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T00:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T00:53:08","slug":"republican-senator-calls-trump-irresponsible-over-greenland-threats-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/14481\/","title":{"rendered":"Republican senator calls Trump \u2018irresponsible\u2019 over Greenland threats"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Republican senator who has become one of Donald Trump\u2019s most frequent critics on the issue of foreign policy called his threats towards Greenland a mistake on Sunday.<\/a><\/p>\n

Sen. Thom Tillis told CBS News that the president was \u201cirresponsible\u201d for seeking anything beyond a reaffirmation<\/a> of previous agreements giving the U.S. the ability to project naval power across the arctic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is, to me, it was irresponsible to go anywhere other than figuring out how we modernize the 1951 Agreement, where Greenland and Denmark agreed to more or less give us unfettered access in Greenland to project power in the Arctic,\u201d said the senator.<\/p>\n

Tillis appeared on CBS\u2019s Face the Nation for an interview on Sunday with Ed O\u2019Keefe. During the interview, he blamed both the president and European leaders for using \u201chyperbolic language\u201d to describe the situation with Greenland and NATO,<\/a> in response to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declaring that the post-war liberal international order was \u201cover\u201d during a speech to the Munich Security Conference, where he declared that \u201cthis order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly if the chancellor allows it to [end],\u201d Tillis responded.<\/p>\n

\"Sen.<\/p>\n

Sen. Thom Tillis is a frequent critic of Trump on issues such as trade, foreign policy and immigration (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The North Carolina senator experienced a falling-out with Trump in 2025 over passage of the Republican \u201cBig, Beautiful Bill\u201d. Since then, he has been one of Trump\u2019s strongest critics from the right on the issue of support for Europe and the NATO alliance, as well as on other issues like his mass deportation operation headed up by Kristi Noem and Tom Homan.<\/p>\n

On Sunday he asserted that the U.S. and its European allies could reach a friendlier dynamic around the issue of NATO and Greenland if NATO countries acknowledged that the years of not making a 2% GDP benchmark of defense spending was a mistake. That benchmark, not required until 2024 and only a loose guideline prior to 2014, is now being met by every country in the alliance according to NATO data.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the NATO countries who came up short for decades would just admit that that was a mistake and then double, redouble their efforts, I think this goes away just like the hyperbolic language around Greenland,\u201d said Tillis. \u201cThey\u2019re not wrong to point out the deficiencies of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s just have an honest discussion with family members, and get the family right,\u201d Tillis said.<\/p>\n

\"Donald<\/p>\n

Donald Trump walked back his threat to invade Greenland during a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos (Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

President Trump\u2019s threats to Greenland resumed in January and quickly caused a political earthquake across the Atlantic. The president asserted to Norway\u2019s prime minister in a letter<\/a> that he was considering using force to take the territory as a result of being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize. He later told reporters on Air Force One<\/a> that \u201cif we don\u2019t take Greenland, Russia or China will. And I\u2019m not letting that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that the territory would become a U.S. possession \u201cone way or another,\u201d and refused to elaborate. In the days following, his aides Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt caused further alarm by refusing to rule out military force when questioned directly by journalists. The president also threatened to mount 10% flat import tariffs against the U.K. and other European nations until Greenland was formally traded to the United States.<\/p>\n

But he later backed down in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, vowing that military force was off the table as an option. His announcement drew sighs of relief, and worries that enough damage to the U.S. ‘s standing with its NATO allies had already been done. The White House also walked back threats to impose new tariffs.<\/p>\n

During Trump’s second term last year, the NATO alliance pledged to make a new 5% GDP benchmark for defense spending by 2025. At least one country, Spain, says it will likely not meet this new goal.<\/p>\n

The U.S. spent around 3.2% of its GDP on defense spending last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Republican senator who has become one of Donald Trump\u2019s most frequent critics on the issue of foreign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[10900,184,10901,1584,235,57,74,10899,10898,10897],"class_list":{"0":"post-14481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greenland","8":"tag-defense-spending","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-ed-okeefe","11":"tag-foreign-policy","12":"tag-friedrich-merz","13":"tag-greenland","14":"tag-nato","15":"tag-nato-countries","16":"tag-republican-senator","17":"tag-thom-tillis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}