“I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” wrote Emmanuel Macron in a private message to Donald Trump this week. Trump posted the text on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, seemingly to humiliate the French president. But Macron might have been speaking for millions of bewildered European citizens.
As Russia’s war physically tears into Ukraine, Trump’s phoney war on Europe over Greenland risks breaking apart the western defence alliance Nato.
By Trump’s unhinged logic – which includes him linking his actions over Greenland to having been snubbed for the Nobel peace prize – Europe has no right to prevent him from acquiring Greenland from Denmark. In a rambling speech at Davos on Wednesday, Trump stepped up his claim to the territory although he ruled out military force to seize it, saying he was seeking “immediate negotiations” instead. But he again insisted that only the US was capable of securing Greenland.
And if the US is even theoretically prepared to use coercion against a Nato ally, supposedly to keep the Arctic safe from Russia and China (the Guardian’s maps show what melting Arctic ice is doing to the region), then the mutual defence clause underpinning Nato ceases to have much meaning.
The Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, was not overstating the surreal nature of the crisis when he earlier said: “A Nato country is threatening another Nato country with military invasion.”
Trump has meanwhile upped the ante over Greenland with a volley of trade threats: punitive new tariffs on the eight European countries that briefly deployed troops to the Arctic to reassure the US that they could boost lax security around Greenland. For their trouble, they now face 10% tariffs from 1 February, rising to 25% from 1 June, if Trump does not get Greenland.
Diplomats hoped a confrontation between Trump and his one-time European allies could be averted in Davos if the president was truly committed to the compromise that he insisted would make Nato and the US “very happy”.
Either way, Trump’s intimidation and blackmail tactics could backfire, amid signs that Europe may finally be ready to abandon appeasement as a tactic. A crisis summit of 27 EU leaders on Thursday is being billed as a possible turning point, where Europe pushes back after a year of cajoling and flattery.
What can Europe do?
Retaliatory tariffs on €93bn of imports of US goods such as soya and bourbon have been primed in Brussels, ready to launch in response to any new US tariffs on 1 February. MEPs have also agreed to suspend ratification of the EU-US trade deal sealed in July. This would have seemed too radical a step until recently.
Macron wants to go further and roll out the EU’s most powerful trade weapon, the anti-coercion instrument (ACI), its so-called “ bazooka”. The instrument came into force in 2023, mainly to protect the EU from China, but has never yet been deployed. It would allow the EU such steps as blocking aggressor country companies from operating in the single market.
With some governments still calling for dialogue, is the EU united enough on the Trump threat to do so? The Guardian’s Brussels correspondent Jennifer Rankin says that, so far, the bloc is united rhetorically, but the coming days and weeks will reveal whether it is united in practice. “The club of 27 is still a long way from firing the big bazooka. A crisis meeting of EU ambassadors on Sunday showed there was no majority for this step.”
“The EU is more likely first to turn to the €93bn package of countermeasures. Punitive tariffs on US goods could snap into place on 7 February, barring any agreement otherwise.” Divisions may yet emerge between France and Germany, however. “I’m struck by differences in tone,” Jennifer says. “Macron typically is taking a much more assertive stance, although has not yet formally asked to trigger the ACI, while the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni, are putting the emphasis on dialogue.”
‘Boycott the World Cup’
At Europe’s “moment of truth”, as Gordon Brown described the crisis, the chance of European leaders chickening out of using the toughest economic weapons they have remains high.
“The EU wants to de-escalate with Trump over Greenland but still show that it has the capacity to exert leverage over him. That is mission impossible,” Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at the business school HEC Paris, said. “The instinct is still to go for a proportionate, calibrated trade response, but that would be a major mistake.”
Alemanno called for deployment of the “big bazooka” – along with “a coordinated boycott of the forthcoming football World Cup in the US”.
There would be real costs for Europe with this approach, he admitted, adding: “But the cost of not acting is worse: permanent subordination to an increasingly adversarial power. Ultimately, the goal for Europe isn’t to punish America, it’s to make Europe immune to American blackmail.”
Georg Riekeles, of the European Policy Centre thinktank agrees, arguing that the EU should use the bazooka to hit a range of US services including US digital platforms operating in Europe.
“The US has leverage over Europe, but the reverse is also true. And for Europe, the stakes are existential.”
“Despite persistent myths, the anti-coercion instrument need not take long at all. With [US] coercion as blatant and public as now, the legal case is clearcut. The instrument could be mobilised rapidly, giving Brussels a powerful retaliatory set of tools.”
Tariffs on US goods should be reactivated and the Turnberry trade deal, struck by Trump with Ursula von der Leyen last summer, “should be declared null and void”, Riekeles said, since the premise it was based on has been “shredded”.
The German MEP Damian Boeselager said that both the use of bazooka and the freezing of the EU/US trade deal were necessary. “You do not fire a bazooka lightly. Simply making its use a credible option changes the balance of power – and that is the only language Trump understands. The good news is that Europe is not defenceless. We are an economic superpower.”
Nathalie Tocci, professor of practice at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe, has argued for months that the cost of appeasing Trump is bigger than the cost of going it alone, even in the defence of Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Von der Leyen urged European governments to reach for their own” levers of power” and in a “lawless world”, abandon their “traditional caution”. But Tocci is not convinced that EU leaders will do what it takes.
“We’ve bent the knee for far too long. And whereas a year ago it was still an open question whether the tactic of appeasement worked or not, it seems clear by now that it does not. My guess is that EU leaders will leave their economic options open and move to retaliatory tariffs only if Trump proceeds with his tariffs on 1 February. Even then, the EU would not trigger the bazooka – at least not yet.”
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