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France’s finance minister has warned his US counterpart Scott Bessent that any move to seize Greenland would amount to a “crossed line”, endangering Europe’s economic relationship with Washington.
Roland Lescure told the FT that he delivered a similar message to the US Treasury secretary in Washington on Monday, underlining deep European unease over President Donald Trump’s claims on the Arctic territory, part of the kingdom of Denmark.
“Greenland is a sovereign part of a sovereign country that is part of the EU. That shouldn’t be messed around [with],” said Lescure.
Despite disputes with the Trump administration over everything from Greenland to tariffs and tech regulation, Lescure argued Europe still needed to work with the US on shared priorities, such as a French-led initiative at the G7 to reduce reliance on China for rare earth materials.
“When we disagree, it’s always better to stay engaged, and that’s what we are doing. The dialogue has to keep on going as long as lines that shouldn’t be crossed are not crossed,” he said, noting the US and France had been close allies for 250 years.
Asked whether the EU should retaliate with economic sanctions if Trump were to invade Greenland, Lescure said: “I’m not going there. I mean, obviously, if that happened we would be in a totally new world for sure, and we would have to adapt accordingly.”
The EU and US have by far the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, with total trade in goods and services exceeding €1.6tn in 2024, according to EU data. The US is the bloc’s biggest export market.
Trump has spooked Europe in recent weeks by repeatedly insisting that the US will take “ownership” of Greenland one way or the other, arguing it was a national security issue.
For Lescure, Trump’s designs on Greenland are just the latest example of how tricky it has become to deal with the US because of what he called the “paradox” of how it was behaving — sometimes as an ally and sometimes as an unpredictable adversary.
Another flashpoint has been the EU’s regulation of American tech giants. Lescure said Bessent had told him that US companies “do not like fines”, in an apparent reference to the bloc imposing financial penalties on tech groups, such as €120mn on Elon Musk’s X in December.
“I told him that we would apply European laws to any companies that do business in Europe,” he said.
Lescure said discussions with Bessent and other G7 finance ministers in Washington this week showed a willingness to work on diversifying rare earth supply chains to reduce dependence on China. France aims to have proposals in time for the G7 meeting in Evian in June, which could include price floors and buying agreements.
“We need to move faster on all these topics because China is not waiting, and the US is not waiting,” he said. “Europe has to assert our strength” as a major market and economic power.
But while it pushes for more aggressive foreign policy, France has been hamstrung by large deficits and a political stalemate over its 2026 budget.
Without a majority in parliament, President Emmanuel Macron’s successive prime ministers — four in 18 months — cannot pass budgets so they have been forced to make concessions to the opposition, notably the centre-left Socialists.
Lescure promised that there would be a budget “very soon” and said talks were continuing. But the prime minister later indicated that the negotiations were proving fruitless and said he would soon resort to constitutional manoeuvres to override lawmakers.
Such a move would open up the government to being toppled in a no-confidence vote.
The government is aiming to cut France’s deficit to 5 per cent of GDP in 2026, from 5.4 per cent in 2025.
Parliamentary paralysis has strengthened the far-right Rassemblement National, whose leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are well ahead of rivals ahead of a 2027 presidential race to succeed Macron.
Finding a budget deal quickly would help blunt the far right’s ascent, Lescure argued, by showing that mainstream parties could overcome differences. “I think that’s going to be a minus for the RN, not a plus,” Lescure said.
“They’re trying to disguise themselves as business-friendly, but they vote taxes in parliament that are completely inefficient, business-unfriendly and unconstitutional,” Lescure said of the RN, which he branded as “incompetent” on the economy.
Bardella has lately been wooing business leaders, and the RN was still looking to recruit advisers among investors and businesspeople in France, people who had been approached said.
As part of the budget battle, the government has chosen to scrap some of Macron’s main economic reforms, such as an increase in the retirement age. It also plans to extend what was meant to be a one-off tax last year on big companies, which has angered business leaders who once championed Macron.
Defending the taxes, Lescure said: “Political stability has a price. It shouldn’t be done at any cost, but it has a price. And it has a business price.”