President Trump pounces on weakness, but retreats from strength. That’s one reason for Europe’s present troubles: For too long it was weak both toward Putin in the East and toward the new menace arising in the West.
That’s certainly Trump’s perception. “I think they’re weak,” Trump said last month of European leaders, and he had a point. They fawned over him and meekly surrendered as he steamrolled them with tariffs.
Trump was preying upon that weakness as he threatened to seize Greenland and effectively destroy NATO, while warning of a new trade war if Europe resisted. In Davos on Wednesday, perhaps reacting to European pushback, he backed off somewhat: “I don’t have to use force” to acquire Greenland, he said. “I won’t use force.” Later in the day he withdrew, at least for now, the threat to impose new tariffs on Europe over the Greenland dispute.
Earlier, he had posted a map showing Greenland, Canada and Venezuela all as part of the United States.
It has come to this: Canadian military planners reportedly are gaming how they might repel an American invasion with guerrilla tactics similar to those used by Afghan fighters.
Fortunately, the shock of Trump’s Greenland demands may finally be leading world leaders to awaken to the American threat. (How weird even to type that!)
“Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House,” Prime Minister Bart De Wever of Belgium said Tuesday. “We were very lenient, also with the tariffs, we were lenient, hoping to get his support for the Ukraine war.”
“But now so many red lines are being crossed,” he added. “Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else.”
The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, made a similar point on social media: “Appeasement is always a sign of weakness,” he wrote. “Europe cannot afford to be weak — neither against its enemies, nor ally. Appeasement means no results, only humiliation.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France called Trump’s latest tariff threats “unacceptable.” He added, in a statement that notably equated the menace from Trump to that of Putin: “No intimidation or threat will influence us — neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland.”
The dangers of appeasement should, of course, have been fully absorbed by Europeans in the 1930s. As Winston Churchill warned Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after the Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”
President Richard Nixon and other conservative Americans likewise counseled the importance of standing up to Communists by quoting a supposed instruction by Lenin: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.”
Leaders who pushed back at Trump did better than the Europeans. One is China’s president, Xi Jinping, who retaliated aggressively against Trump’s tariffs by curbing exports of rare earth minerals — forcing Trump to back off. Indeed, Trump has since then been unusually conciliatory toward Beijing, allowing sales of advanced chips and quietly accepting China’s bullying of Japan and Taiwan.
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The other is Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney. His predecessor, Justin Trudeau, had been conciliatory, but the result was mockery from Trump and calls for Canada to become America’s 51st state. Carney from the outset was polite but resistant, and Trump has been somewhat more respectful toward Canada since, even as Ottawa has pursued new partnerships elsewhere.
Just last week, Carney reached a landmark trade deal with China that laid the groundwork for much closer economic ties. Some Americans are angry, but Carney said bluntly that China is now a “more predictable” trade partner than the United States. And Trump, instead of erupting with venom, calmly accepted the Canada-China deal.
“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said in a quite brilliant speech in Davos on Tuesday. He did not shake his fist or indulge in insults, but he indicated that the United States was no longer trustworthy and that Canada would find its own way forward.
“When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself,” he said, describing this as a “rupture” with the past. “But let’s be cleareyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.”
He’s right, and that is indeed the world that Trump is leading us all into. It’s a tragedy for Americans as well as our former allies.
That’s why it’s important that Europeans respond to new Trump tariffs, if he revives them, with retaliatory tariffs and their “bazooka” sanctions on American service companies. Indeed, it seems probable that Trump dialed back threats of force and of new tariffs because of the hostile reaction, including from the stock market.
I reached out to Lord Patten, one of the European figures I most respect — a former senior figure in Britain’s Conservative Party, then governor of Hong Kong and later Europe’s foreign policy chief and chancellor of Oxford University. Patten returned my call just as a particularly erratic Trump was telling a press conference that America had never been more respected, and he could hear Trump’s voice in the background.
“You’re listening to those rambling mendacities,” he said, “of the demented leader of the free world.” Those are the words of a temperate British conservative who has been an outspoken fan of America throughout his career, yet who is today aghast at the sight of the United States destroying its soft power worldwide. Patten hopes European leaders will be willing to stand up to Trump because, “sooner or later, he has to be stopped.”
The paradox is that Trump is coercing Greenland on the basis of national security considerations and concerns about Russia and China. Yet what Putin covets far more than Greenland is the destruction of NATO, which Trump may now deliver. Russian newspapers and commentators are chortling.
“Trans-Atlantic unity is over,” declared Kirill Dmitriev, a Putin associate. And all this is distracting global attention from Russia’s barbaric bombing of Ukraine and the need to support Ukrainians. As Patten told me, “Putin is the really big winner.”
Indeed, if Trump were systematically trying to shore up the Kremlin and undermine the United States position in the world, he could hardly do better than he has over the last year. “China and Russia must be having a field day,” observed Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign affairs chief.
Today the presidents of Russia and the United States are both working to undermine NATO and the entire American-created system that since 1945 has greatly benefited all of us.
It pains me as an American to urge leaders to defy my own country, and perhaps this seems disloyal. But it’s not. Seizing Greenland won’t benefit Americans any more than occupying Iraq did; we don’t want our children patrolling Nuuk or Toronto any more than we wanted them in Falluja or Kandahar.
“Our friends and allies must stop indulging, enabling, and submitting to America’s madman president,” urged Larry Diamond, a democracy scholar at Stanford University. “Only forthright resistance and tough love will get us out of our downward spiral.”
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