Allies Under Pressure: Trump’s Elastic Power

When Donald Trump announced that beginning February 1, 2026, eight of America’s closest allies would face a blanket 10% tariff on all goods entering the United States, the shock was not merely economic. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland—this is not a rogues’ gallery of adversaries. These are NATO partners, treaty allies, and, until recently, presumed beneficiaries of a special status in Washington’s strategic imagination.

 

The justification was stranger still. The United States, Trump argued, had “subsidized” these countries for centuries by refraining from tariffs. World peace, he warned, was now at stake. The bill had come due.

 

At one level, this fits neatly into Trump’s long-standing worldview: tariffs as leverage, pressure as policy, transaction as diplomacy. But focusing only on trade misses the deeper significance. What is unfolding here is not simply another chapter in a trade war. It is a test case for a far more expansive idea—that economic coercion, national security, and even territorial ambition can be folded into a single, elastic justification for executive power.

 

The immediate trigger, according to Trump, is Greenland. Without presenting evidence, he has argued that China and Russia covet the island, that Denmark is incapable of defending it, and that only the United States can guarantee its security. The tariff threat—explicitly tied to forcing an agreement over Greenland, and slated to rise to 25% by June—functions less like a trade measure than a sanction. It is designed to compel a change in state behavior.

 

In substance, this is not new. Great powers have long used economic pressure to achieve political ends. Britain’s naval blockades, America’s Cold War sanctions regimes, even the oil embargoes of the 1970s all testify to the same logic. Tariffs, in this sense, are simply sanctions with a different name.

 

What is new is the target. For perhaps the first time so openly, U.S. allies are being treated as acceptable collateral damage in a strategy historically reserved for adversaries. Alliance status no longer guarantees insulation. The norms that governed transatlantic relations after the Cold War—the assumption that disputes would be managed quietly, cooperatively, and within institutional frameworks—are eroding.

 

Yet the most consequential battlefield is not in Copenhagen or Brussels. It is in Washington, specifically at the Supreme Court. Trump’s tariff regime still sits under a legal cloud. Federal courts have already ruled that parts of his reciprocal tariff framework, imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, exceed presidential authority. The issue is not tariffs per se, but whether a president can unilaterally invoke emergency powers to reorder global trade.

 

This is where Greenland becomes legally relevant. Trump frames the island as a national security necessity, while justifying tariffs primarily on economic security grounds. Critics see a mismatch: statutes designed for financial emergencies being stretched to serve territorial and geopolitical goals Congress never authorized. Supporters counter that in a globalized world, economic and national security are inseparable.

 

Both sides have a point. The post–9/11 era has taught Americans that security rationales expand easily and contract rarely. Surveillance, border controls, financial regulations—all grew under the banner of emergency and became permanent features of governance. Trade is now being absorbed into that same logic.

 

Trump has appealed directly to the Supreme Court, effectively asking it to clarify (or expand) the outer limits of executive discretion in trade policy. On paper, he faces a conservative court, three of whose justices he appointed. But judicial ideology is not political loyalty. In 2025 alone, the Court issued several rulings cutting against Trump’s agenda. An adverse decision on tariffs is entirely plausible.

 

Yet even such a ruling would likely be more symbolic than constraining. At most, it would prevent Trump from relying solely on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The broader toolkit remains intact. The Trade Act of 1974 offers multiple alternative pathways for imposing tariffs, including provisions allowing duties of up to 15% for 150 days without congressional consultation. These routes are slower and messier, but they exist—and Trump knows it.

 

Which brings us to the larger point. The Greenland episode is not fundamentally about Greenland. It is about how the definition of national security continues to expand, absorbing trade, alliances, supply chains, and even real estate. As that definition stretches, so too does presidential power, often at the expense of Congress and America’s traditional partners.

 

History offers cautionary lessons. The Roman Republic did not collapse because Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in a vacuum; it collapsed because emergency powers had become routine long before he did. The Weimar Republic did not fall because Article 48 existed, but because it was used so often that governing by decree became normal. Democracies rarely die in one dramatic act. They erode through precedents that feel justified at the time.

 

To be clear, none of this is an argument that Trump’s concerns about Greenland are wholly fanciful. The Arctic is becoming strategically significant as ice melts and shipping routes open. China has shown interest in polar infrastructure. Russia has militarized parts of the region. Great powers ignore geography at their peril. The United States itself explored purchasing Greenland in the 19th century, and the idea resurfaced periodically during the Cold War.

 

The question is not whether America has interests in Greenland. It is whether tariffs against allies are an appropriate (or sustainable) means of pursuing them. Once tariffs become the default instrument of geopolitical negotiation, alliance management, and territorial ambition, the logic is hard to contain. Today it is Greenland. Tomorrow it could be basing rights, voting patterns at the United Nations, or domestic regulatory policies.

 

And once that logic gains international acceptance, reversing it becomes difficult. Other powers will follow suit. Economic coercion will normalize. The distinction between friend and foe will blur further. A world already skeptical of American leadership will grow more transactional, more fragmented, and more brittle.

 

Whether Trump ultimately secures Greenland is almost beside the point. The precedent is already being set. Tariffs are no longer just economic tools; they are becoming instruments of power rolled into one—pressure, diplomacy, and ambition fused together. The long-term question is not how this episode ends, but what kind of international order emerges when emergency becomes routine, and leverage replaces trust.

 

That is a question far larger than Greenland. And far more enduring than any single presidency.

 

By M A Hossain