After a year of largely appeasing U.S. President Donald Trump, European leaders are quickly coming to the conclusion that the time has arrived to push back.
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, their hope has been to ride out the president’s second term without provoking him. Europe could stand up against Mr. Trump, but the economic cost would be enormous, and taking him on risked casting the continent into the unknown. The continent’s postwar stability and prosperity have been built with the American alliance at their foundation.
But Mr. Trump’s determination to annex Greenland has crossed a new line. This past weekend, he threatened to hit eight European countries with tariffs if the United States is not given control of the island, which is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Military force is also an option, the White House has repeatedly said.
Why We Wrote This
With President Donald Trump adamant that the U.S. must acquire Greenland, Europe is at a crossroads. The economic tools it has to dissuade Mr. Trump are strong, but slow to roll out. And if Europe does push back, it risks injuring itself, too.
How Europe pushes back likely will not remotely resemble Mr. Trump’s own unabashedly undiplomatic statements and threats. The European Union was not made to act precipitously. It was made to do the opposite: to build consensus among 27 different nations though slow, incremental steps. If the U.S. and Europe go down the path of a trade war, Europe will do so deliberately, carefully.
Whether the EU’s 27 members can find the common ground to come together and the fortitude to stomach the consequences is an open question. But recent days have raised the memory of the recent and distant past, from Ukraine to World War II. An invasion violating national sovereignty is precisely what the European postwar order was established to prevent.
Europe knows it is powerless to prevent such a recurrence militarily. But it is now girding itself to use the economic means at its disposal – if necessary – to make its support for Greenland plain.
“The question of sovereignty and of the rule of international order are at the core of European solidarity and how the continent can function,” says Niklas Helwig, a leading researcher for the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Brussels. “We don’t want to repeat history. … There’s a sense that invading Greenland would be very dangerous.”
Signs of this solidarity came from places expected and surprising. German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said Monday, “Germany and France agree: We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed.” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the U.S. effort “totally wrong.”
Even one of the Trump administration’s closest European allies strongly condemned the move. Nigel Farage, leader of the surging far-right Reform UK party, confronted U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson on live television.
“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,” he said. “There’s no other way I can put it.”
Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP
The latest flashpoint came after several European nations sent a small deployment of forces to Greenland last week for Danish-led military exercises.
European leaders say it was an attempt to respond to Mr. Trump’s concerns that they are not taking Greenland’s security seriously. Mr. Trump saw it as an act of defiance and singled out eight participants: France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. He vowed to impose 10% tariffs on them by Feb. 1 if they did not yield Greenland. The tariffs would rise to 25% on June 1 without a deal for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”
Europe’s most obvious response would be to not ratify the trade deal struck between the U.S. and the EU last summer. The deal avoided $108 billion in tariffs that Europe had planned to impose on the U.S. It was set to be ratified in February. Now, the original tariffs could be imposed in its place.
France has gone further, proposing that the EU consider its most powerful economic tool: the anti-coercion instrument, which would shut all American businesses out of the European market. It was designed with China in mind, but the hope was it would never be used. So far, it has not been.
It is a powerful symbol of both the continent’s strengths and weaknesses.
On one hand, cutting off all access to the European market would inflict massive economic damage on the American economy. The American tech industry alone does hundreds of billions of dollars in sales annually in Europe.
On the other, the rules for using it are so cautious that, under normal circumstances, it would take up to six months to deploy, involving a monthslong fact-finding mission, negotiations with the target nation, and two votes. This could, in theory, be accelerated, but it speaks not only to the bureaucratic way the EU acts, but also to the difficulty of finding consensus.
Currently, there is no consensus to use the anti-coercion instrument, aka the “trade bazooka.” And the reasons are plain. The result would be massively damaging to many European nations, too. And more than that, what would such a move mean for Europe itself? Modern Europe has built itself on America’s protection, support, and economic cooperation.
“You’ve built a house on a foundation. Now, the foundation is shifting. What do you do with the house?” says Penny Nass, an economic analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington.
Ms. Nass says taking on the U.S. could reinvigorate Europe, giving it new purpose and direction. But she acknowledges the economic cost could also fray already strained ties and lead to the decline of the EU as an effective institution.
It would be a step into a future that, until very recently, no one imagined. Now, that realization is dawning – deliberately, carefully, but indelibly.
“There is a realization that just appeasing Trump is coming across as weak, and the administration smells weakness,” says Dr. Helwig. “We have to show strength. That doesn’t mean throwing out the transatlantic relationship, but standing up for ourselves.”
