Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, and today I'm joined by Tim Shipman, the

spectator's political editor and Tim Marshall, the author and foreign affairs analyst. Now, this big story

that's been dominating this weekend was the news that Donald Trump plans to impose 10%

tariffs from the 1st of February on a series of countries that have backed Green Greenland's claim to being independent from American control. Tim, sort of explain what the American thinking is on this. Well, look, they, I think the thing to do is look at a globe rather than look at a map. Everyone seems to be getting very confused, that Greenland's this big splodge next to America and Russia's a very long way away. But if you look at a globe,

you will see that Greenland, like Iceland, is this massively strategically vital kind of

landmass in up in the Arctic. It's in the right place. It's sort of between America and Russia.

So that's the first point. The second point is there's a load of rare earth minerals there.

And the third point is that

it would play any kind of important role in monitoring the incursions of Russian naval activity and

all that kind of thing. So it's a place of military significance and a place of financial and

sort of mineral significance. The American view is that essentially this needs to be within

our kind of security area. It's part of our sort of sphere of influence and we cannot let this

fall into the hands of Russia and China. And were we not to take a more vivid kind of basis of

control, then it's possible that those two other countries could do

so, and there's not a lot defending it at the moment. The Europeans have come along and got very

upset because this is bluntly, a big brother threatening a territory controlled by a fellow

native country, and they sent military people there as a kind of, I think

it was sort of twofold mission, one to show America that they couldn't just ride roughshod

over an ally, but also to show, yes, we are acknowledging that this perhaps is a place

that's of greater strategic significance than

we've previously acknowledged. This seems to have acted like a red rag to a bull with Trump,

and he's now threatening tariffs on the countries involved, and saying, unless we get a deal

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