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Donald Trump’s antics over the past week have put paid to the refrain, often heard in Europe, that the president should be taken “seriously but not literally”. It turns out that Trump literally wants Greenland. He doubled down on his aggressive rhetoric in a raging 45-minute call with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, a few days ago, threatening crippling tariffs unless she agreed to sell the autonomous territory to the US. In response to Denmark’s sharp increase in military spending for the Arctic, including ships and drones, he derided Copenhagen’s “dog-sled” defences for Greenland, the world’s largest non-continental island, which pale in comparison with the strength of the US military base there.
The threat to take over the territory of a European country by force is something that Europeans now know all too well. Russia has repeatedly threatened east European countries, making good on those threats by invading Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014. Yet many Europeans are gobsmacked that such a threat is now coming from its greatest ally.
That said, the reaction has been muted. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the European Council president, António Costa, have said nothing, while the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, while speaking out initially, have joined in the collective silence. What’s going on?
There are several rational explanations. Against the backdrop of great power rivalry and the climate crisis, which is opening seaways in the melting Arctic, Washington’s appetite for resource-rich Greenland is growing. At the same time, the relationship between Copenhagen and Nuuk (Greenland’s capital) is complex, with the latter now pushing for independence. Although results from a recent survey published in the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq and the Danish Berlingske reveal that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to join the US, Denmark fears that if its reactions to Trump’s territorial designs are too vocal, it could alienate Greenlanders and push the island further into the US orbit. Tread carefully are the watchwords coming from Copenhagen to its European partners.
And European leaders are heeding the call. Both the public silence and behind-the-scenes work appear to be coordinated, with Frederiksen meeting with the leaders of Norway, Sweden and Finland, as well as Germany, France and Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, in recent days. Cooperation between the EU and Greenland is also intensifying on issues such as energy and critical raw materials. The upfront explanation for Europe’s silence on Greenland is, therefore, that it is a deliberate, coordinated tactic not to feed the beast of transatlantic escalation, giving space for officials to quietly mitigate and defuse the threat.
An equally rational, though less edifying, explanation is that Europeans have bigger fish to fry with Washington. They need to make sure Trump remains engaged on the question of European military security, starting with Ukraine, and they want to dissuade the US president from unleashing a trade war. European silence on Greenland is, therefore, also a question of priorities; the last thing Europeans want is to antagonise the man such that he pulls the plug on Nato. Countries in northern and eastern Europe that would be hurt most by US disengagement from Ukraine, as well as western and southern European countries that would be most exposed to a transatlantic trade war, will be thinking that it’s not worth making too much of a fuss about Greenland.
But these rational explanations only go so far, and don’t take into account the potentially high costs of inaction – such as undermining the notion of European political solidarity.
Instead of reason, it might be worth thinking about emotions. Two contrasting ones are mutually reinforcing. Europeans are scared. They fear Trump and their fear is paralysing. It freezes their actions and quiets their rhetoric. The more Trump confirms their fears through his repeated threats, the less they are inclined to react. Trump presumably smells the fear, and like all bullies revels in it, upping the ante.
Yet Europeans also paradoxically feel insufficiently anxious. They cling to the conviction that the storm will pass. Waiting translates into silence, a complacent wish that Trump’s threat to Europe will wither away or that his attention will inevitably turn elsewhere. Insufficient anxiety means that Europe lacks the adrenaline to act.
In other words, faced with yet another serious crisis, Europe – through a combination of reason and fear – is deciding to just muddle through. But convincing ourselves that everything will be all right is precisely what prevents the radical renewal that the continent badly needs. And a mere week into Trump’s presidency, a vital question looms: if a US president threatening an EU member state doesn’t jolt Europe out of its complacent slumber, then what will?
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Nathalie Tocci is director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, part-time professor at the School of Transnational Government, European University Institute, Florence and Europe’s Futures fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna
