Why Trump will get Greenland Europe is too weak to fight

You can draw a neat line around the eight countries Donald Trump has targeted for his 10% punitive tariff: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Europe’s liberal north-west is trying to frustrate Trump’s grab of Greenland.

But there are 21 other member states who have not been sanctioned. One is Italy. Giorgia Meloni has already said she told Trump that his tariff threat was a mistake. I think it was too. But is Meloni going to break with the President over a patch of land that is far away and irrelevant to Italy’s security and economy? Will Spain? Or Greece? Or Malta and Cyprus? What about eastern Europe? Will Viktor Orbán, Andrej Babiš, and Robert Fico — the populist prime ministers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia respectively — run to the rescue of their liberal friends in Denmark? Even Poland, with a government that is as pro-EU as it can get, is hardly going to sacrifice its strategic alliance with America over a few rocks of ice near the Arctic.

The truth is that the Europeans never really cared about Greenland. It was the first country to leave the EU – in 1985 – long before Brexit. It’s a fishing nation; fish is over 90% of its exports. And it left because EU fisheries policies would have deprived it of the right to manage its own stocks. Greenland could have been the EU’s, had it really wanted to keep it.

So here is my bold prediction: Trump will win his battle for Greenland. The Europeans will not stop him, for they are weak and divided. The irony is that the EU chose this military and geostrategic weakness. It chose to deprive our militaries of necessary resources in favour of welfare transfers and support for NGOs. A decade ago, the eurozone had an opportunity to create a political, economic and financial union in response to the sovereign debt crisis. But it chose not to because it was inconvenient. Meanwhile, the UK chose to leave.

When the European member states of Nato decided to bow to Trump’s pressure and increase defence spending last year, they did not create a European defence union. They can’t agree on anything: a joint Franco-German-Spanish fighter aircraft project is on the rocks because the three countries cannot agree the workshare. Instead, each has only reinforced its dependence on the US. Everybody thinks they are better off with their own special relationship. But as Benjamin Franklin once said: “He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”

And the Europeans have just woken up, and this time they are really cross, clamouring to issue press statements to condemn Trump. I am hearing commentators urging the EU to deploy the Anti Coercion Instrument, a legal device that came into force two years ago to counter economic pressure from adversaries. They insist that the EU is stronger than it thinks. It is the world’s largest single market and customs union, is it not? And it deems itself a regulatory super-power.

It is deluded. The EU’s single market is full of regulatory barriers. Its hostile green and tech regulation did not change the world for the better; it succeeded only in damaging Europe’s competitiveness. As a result, unlike China and America, Europe will not share in the AI boom. The EU, in its current form, is further from becoming a superpower than it was 30 years ago.

A union in which member states retain full sovereignty is only as strong as its weakest member. And that’s Germany right now. Given the state of Germany’s economy, and its dependence on the US, it would be utter madness for the EU to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs.

 

What also mitigates against joint action is the bloc’s lingering delusion that someone or something out there is going to stop Trump. Last year, European leaders believed that the financial markets would push back against his tariffs, only to be shocked that after an initial wobble, Wall Street lined up behind its President. When the Trump administration went after Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, last week, the markets missed another opportunity to crash. Now the Europeans are convinced that the Supreme Court will block the tariffs.

On this narrow issue, they may actually be right. But they are missing the bigger picture. We know there is going to a Supreme Court ruling tomorrow that may be the long-awaited ruling on the tariffs. We know that some of the justices reacted with scepticism to the legal arguments in a hearing with Trump’s lawyers. There is indeed a chance that the Trump administration will lose the case. I can already see The Guardian’s celebratory headlines.

But even if the ruling goes against Trump, he will still win. This case is not about whether a US president is allowed to impose tariffs for reasons of national security. It is about whether the Carter-era International Emergency Economic Powers Act is the correct legal base for his tariffs. Trump choose IEEPA because it gave him the largest degree of discretion. But there are alternative laws that would allow him to get the same done.

Trump could, for example, reinstitute a crippling tariff bureaucracy as he did with steel and aluminium. I recall a story from a German exporter of agricultural machinery who was forced to list the steel and aluminium content of the 15,000 parts of the product. He gave up. It was an impossible undertaking.

In protest at this latest tariff threat, the European Parliament decided to freeze the ratification of the EU-US trade deal, under which it promised to cut tariffs on US goods to zero. As a result, the deal may collapse. Similarly, the UK-US deal is also now at risk. I don’t think Trump is quaking in his boots.

The President has many ways to force the Europeans into line. He could impose his own peace treaty on Ukraine, side-lining the EU. He could also go further and switch off US intelligence sharing not only for Ukraine, but for European Nato members as well. He could also announce that he would not authorise US troops to protect any Nato countries that push against American interests — effectively giving Vladimir Putin free licence to wage war in Europe.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the only people outside the US who celebrated his tariff announcement were the Russians. Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and a Putin adviser, posted on X that finally the US and Europeans have something important to talk about in Davos this week.

So, what are Europe’s options? The EU was never going to be a military alliance, but at least it had chance to become an economic one. To be ready for a geopolitical fight today, though, the EU would have needed to evolve into a political union a decade ago. The eurozone crisis between 2008 and 2015 was the final, missed, moment where the bloc could have taken that step. Since then, Right-wing parties have been on the rise in France and Germany; so has euro-scepticism. The window for political unification has closed.

So should Europe send more troops to Greenland? Fight the guy, some hot-headed commentators suggest, transitioning from complacency to panic without a moment’s pause. Fight Putin and Trump at the same time? I think not. Such a move would be Europe’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” moment.

No. The only option the EU has now is to let Trump be Trump. These tariffs reveal the US strategy. He does not seek a military solution. He is not a natural warrior. Nor are we. So, with no alternative on offer, let’s drive up the price. And when all is said and done, why not hand him the Nobel Peace Prize too?

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