US and Denmark to meet next week over Donald Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland

Good morning and welcome to White House Watch. Washington’s first work week of the new year continues its breakneck pace. Also in today’s newsletter:

• The US seizes Russian tanker in Arctic

• Trump bans institutional investors from buying single-family homes

• Proposed 50 per cent increase in US defence spending

Riding high after the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro over the weekend, the Trump administration has doubled down on its desire to wrest Greenland from its Nato ally, Denmark.

On Tuesday, the White House said that the administration was exploring all options including “utilising the US military” to acquire the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

The White House remarks came as the Wall Street Journal reported that secretary of state Marco Rubio sought to reassure lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric didn’t signal an imminent invasion and that he instead wanted to purchase the Arctic island, which is rich in natural resources.

Rubio said yesterday that he would meet his Danish counterpart next week. Asked whether a military takeover of the territory was being considered, Rubio said that all US presidents retained the option to address perceived threats to national security “through military means”.

“As a diplomat, which is what I am now and what we work on, we always prefer to settle it in different ways,” he added.

The territory’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, told Danish broadcaster DR that she would also attend the meeting. “Nothing about Greenland, without Greenland,” she said.

The Trump administration’s refusal to rule out military action to seize Greenland has prompted alarm among European allies.

“The national security of some cannot come — and has never come — at the expense of the sovereignty of others. And even more so, when we are talking about long-standing mutually supporting allies,” a spokesperson for the European Commission said in response to the White House’s statement.

The suggestion of taking Greenland by force has also received a cool reception from Republican lawmakers.

“All this stuff about military action and all of that. I don’t even think that’s a possibility,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on Wednesday. “I don’t think anybody is seriously considering that, and in the Congress we are certainly not.”

— Additional reporting from Lauren Fedor, US political correspondent and Washington deputy bureau chief

The FT is compiling its seventh annual ranking of The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies and needs your help. We are looking to identify rapidly expanding companies in North, Central and South America. Here’s how to register your company or recommend one. Applications close on January 31.

The latest headlines

• The US seized a Russian oil tanker in the north Atlantic following a failed attempt to capture the vessel as it headed to Venezuela last month.

• Trump has moved to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes, posing a challenge to private capital groups that invest heavily in real estate.

• Americans should double their protein and avoid added sugar under new dietary guidelines released yesterday by officials, including health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

• Trump has called for a 50 per cent increase in US defence spending next year and says the military budget should rise to $1.5tn.

• The US president has decided to withdraw the US from the world’s most important climate treaty, as well as from dozens of other international organisations.

• Washington wants to control Venezuela’s oil sales “indefinitely”, says energy secretary Chris Wright.

Datapoint

In our Thursday newsletter, Ian Hodgson’s Datapoint gives readers a visual representation of the issues driving US politics, from trade to the economy, political donations and beyond.

Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.

After the Supreme Court voted in June that fuel producers had grounds to sue the EPA over vehicle emissions regulation, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was scathing of her Republican-appointed colleagues. In her dissenting opinion, Brown Jackson decried the “unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this court than ordinary citizens”.

A study released this week has found that the court has become increasingly divided in the past 70 years, with Republican-appointed justices far more likely to side with wealthy parties in cases that pit corporations against the public interest.

Researchers from Yale and Columbia University classified cases as either “pro-rich” or “pro-poor”, categorising a justice’s vote as siding with the pro-rich interest “if that outcome would directly shift resources to the party that is more likely to be wealthy”.

At the beginning of their sample, in 1953, Democratic and Republican appointees were “statistically indistinguishable”, each side voting in favour of the rich in roughly 45 per cent of cases. By 2022, that share was 70 per cent for Republicans and 35 per cent for Democratic justices. The researchers argue that the pattern of increasing polarisation is evident in cases spanning criminal procedure, civil rights and labour unions, the research found.

“When company A is suing company B, you ask which outcome is benefiting the consumer. When it’s people suing the government, you ask ‘is this benefiting the taxpayer — who are disproportionately the wealthy — or expanding the social safety net,’” said Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale economist who co-authored the study.

“The reason for this methodology — rather than just saying ‘the corporation won’ — is because that doesn’t tell you about the distribution of resources,” she told the FT.

The study adds to another recent paper claiming that the Supreme Court under Justice John Roberts appears to be the most pro-business in a century. But some legal scholars are sceptical of the author’s methodology, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

“In virtually every case of consequence that reaches the Supreme Court now, there are rich and poor on both sides of the case; corporate interests on both sides; various government entities on both sides,” said Adam White, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specialises in regulatory law and the Supreme Court.

“I think it’s implausible to simply categorise cases to rich versus poor given that complexity, and their analysis assumes away any notion that written laws have any basis on the judges’ (decisions),” White said.

— Ian Hodgson, FT data reporter

Viewpoints

• Is Donald Trump a fascist? After reviewing some academic papers on the question, here are Simon Kuper’s conclusions.

• The US president is now a prolific and proud interventionist and his enthusiasm for big business and foreign intervention is more Reaganite than populist, writes Janan Ganesh.

• Like the Spanish conquistadors, Trump’s search for mineral wealth in Latin America will weaken the US. Sign up for Alan Beattie’s Trade Secrets weekly briefing for more on international trade and globalisation (premium subscribers only).

• Claims of Greenland’s bountiful mineral wealth are overblown, writes science commentator Anjana Ahuja.

• Gita Gopinath, the former first deputy managing director of the IMF, argues that despite the seeming calm, the global economy is more fragile than the numbers suggest.

• The US capture of Maduro is eerily similar to Nixon’s efforts to oust Chile’s Marxist president in 1973, notes economics professor Sebastián Edwards.