“Friends can disagree in private, and that’s fine. That’s part of life, part of politics,” Farage told the senior Republican, who is set to address the British parliament Tuesday. “But to have a U.S. president threatening tariffs unless we agree that he can take over Greenland, by some means, without it seems even getting the consent of the people of Greenland … this is a very hostile act. There’s no other way I can put it.”
Responding, Johnson acknowledged that Trump “has a certain manner in which he goes about doing things,” and accused the U.S. “far-left media” of taking the president “always literally and not seriously.”
“I think what the president has in mind with Greenland is that he understands the strategic significance of it, the increasing significance,” Johnson argued.
Farage said he had heard and agreed with Trump’s concerns about Arctic security, and praised the U.S. president for highlighting that “Europeans haven’t paid enough” toward the continent’s defense.
But he warned “this is the biggest fracture in our relationship since Suez in 1956.” That crisis represented a watershed moment in U.S.-U.K. relations, with President Dwight Eisenhower exerting heavy pressure on the U.K. to withdraw an invading force from Egypt.
“If we don’t get past this,” Farage said of the current rift with the U.S., “it genuinely would be a rupture.”