A Nobel Prize winner believes Donald Trump was left looking much less confident after his Davos speech.
The president’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland did not go as planned according to Paul Krugman, who says Trump failed in his aims to threaten Europe with financial sanctions. The economist, writing in his Substack, says the plan from Trump’s administration went about as well as could be expected.
He wrote, “Donald Trump and his team clearly went to Davos determined to demean and insult their hosts. It was, one might say, a novel approach to diplomacy: ‘You’re pathetic, your societies and economies are falling apart, now give us Greenland.’
“And it worked about as well as you’d expect. Trump may have imagined that the Europeans would cower in the face of his wrath. Instead, they humiliated him. He dropped his latest tariff threats in return for a ‘framework’ that gave the United States essentially nothing it didn’t already have — and left behind a Europe that is finally united in resistance to his bullying.
“The Trump team went to Europe in a state of malign ignorance, exemplified by Trump saying during his Davos harangue that ‘without us, you’d all be speaking German.’ Most Swiss speak … German.”
Trump’s rhetoric at the World Economic Forum drew ridicule from European leaders, with Krugman calling on those in power to take on board a lesson from the president’s speech.
He wrote, “But even Eurocrats have their limits. Operation Arctic Endurance, the deployment of European military forces to Greenland, might equally well have been called Operation Rising Gorge. There was rational calculation behind that deployment, but it was also a way for European leaders to say that enough is enough, that they’re done with trying to make nice.”
“And when Trump threatened to put tariffs on the exports of nations that have sent troops to Greenland, Europe didn’t cower in submission — it got ready to strike back at U.S. businesses.”
“Appeasing a bully doesn’t work, especially when, as anyone watching Trump’s Davos rant could see, that bully is experiencing rapid cognitive decline. But standing up to him does work. The question now is whether and when enough influential people here at home will learn the same lesson.”
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