European capitals tread cautiously after week of mixed salvoes from Trump

The Guardian

27-01-2025

European leaders had nearly got to the end of the first week of living with Donald Trump back in the White House, with the sole consoling thought that it might have been worse. But then the re-elected and reinvigorated president started talking about Greenland again.
Any hope that the US acquisition of the autonomous arctic territory from Denmark was just a passing whim was dispelled by his insistence over the weekend that 'I think we're going to have it', amid reports that he had threatened Copenhagen with targeted tariffs, an extortion campaign against a close Nato ally.
'In Trump 1, it was this weird thing, that he was going to buy Greenland, but this time there is more clarity,' said Nathalie Tocci, the director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali thinktank in Italy, said. 'He has said he is ready to use economic and military coercion to take it.'
Prior to that, European capitals could point to a few glints of consolation from Trump's barnstorming first few days. While he railed against the US trade deficit, Trump did not immediately announce tariffs on European goods (although he made clear they were coming) and his first move on Ukraine was to put pressure on Vladimir Putin.
His demand that European Nato allies spend 5% of GDP on defence was so unrealistic it was not taken seriously, and, for now, the president has muted earlier threats to walk out of the alliance.
'Nobody thinks he's going to actually do that,' said Leslie Vinjamuri, the director of the US and Americas programme at the Chatham House thinktank. 'His nominees are mostly solidly onboard with Nato, and he has gone silent on the threat of withdrawal.'
In response to these mixed early salvoes, Europe has trod cautiously. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, did not even mention Trump by name.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, met in Paris on Wednesday to project a unified front at the EU's core, and calm in the face of Trump's so far vague – but determined – tariff threat to Europe.
Scholz admitted that Trump would be a 'challenge' but he added: 'Our position is clear. Europe is a large economic area with around 450 million citizens. We are strong. We stand together. Europe will not duck and hide.'
Macron looked to the silver lining that the new administration in Washington would make it more necessary than ever for Paris and Berlin to consolidate 'a united, strong and sovereign Europe'.
Europe at the moment does not feel any of those things. Macron and Scholz are in weak positions domestically. The German chancellor is likely to be in his last few weeks in office as the country approaches elections on 23 February.
Across the continent, the far right is on the rise, offering itself as an ally to Trump in undermining such European cohesion. The most established among the hard-right leaders, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, hailed the Trump inauguration as a tipping point in the struggle for Europe's soul.
'Hereby I launch the second phase of the offensive that aims to occupy Brussels,' Orbán said.
Another ultra-nationalist, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was the only European leader invited to Trump's inauguration. He has hailed her as a 'fantastic woman' and she has presented herself as a transatlantic bridge to the new administration and Europe – 'consolidating the dialogue between the United States and Europe'.
Some of Meloni's fellow European leaders hope that she can leverage Trump's fondness for her and her politics to soften his approach to the whole continent. Italy has a lot to lose from a hostile Washington, with a €42.1bn ($43.6bn) trade surplus with the US, the second highest in the EU after Germany, and defence spending well below the current goal of 2% GDP.
What influence Meloni might have on Trump is very much in question, however. She was not given a hoped-for private meeting with the new president when she was in Washington.
'It is just naive to believe that a nationalist Eurosceptic will all of a sudden become the sort of spokeswoman for Europe, rather than being Trump's spokeswoman in Europe,' Tocci said.
Trump's return to Washington has also underlined the UK's vulnerability outside the EU, with London's threat of retaliatory sanctions far less of a deterrent than Europe combined.
'The EU is probably big enough to protect itself from Trump's tariffs. I'm not convinced the UK is,' Anand Menon, European politics professor at King's College London, said.
'In a way, one of the things that Trump shows us is that outside of the European Union, the UK finds itself quite exposed in these troubled times,' Menon told a London School of Economics blog.
The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, played down the fact that he was not invited to the inauguration alongside Trump favourites Meloni and the Argentinian president, Javier Milei. A Conservative predecessor, the former prime minister Boris Johnson, was the only British politician inside the Capitol Rotunda for the ceremony. The Reform leader, Nigel Farage, attended inauguration parties where Republicans hailed him as Britain's 'future prime minister'.
While the phrase 'special relationship' is unlikely to have much usage in the coming months, Downing Street insisted Starmer congratulated Trump on his inauguration and noted that the two leaders had spoken several times before it.
Further complicating an already fraught situation, it is hard for western European capitals to know whether they are dealing with just Trump or a Trump-Musk administration.
Britain and the EU have legislation regulating social media platforms that could seriously affect Elon Musk and X. The UK's Online Safety Act is in the process of being codified, and would penalise X if it fails to take down illegal material.
Concerns are felt across Europe that attempts to regulate X and other US-based platforms will lead to reprisals from a Trump administration, but Vinjamuri believes that X, with its relentless promotion of the far right, is too big a threat to ignore.
'I don't think Europe has any alternative but to push back against Musk and to do something about trying to counter this very powerful technological platform,' she said.
Spain's socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has offered Trump polite though hardly effusive congratulations on his inauguration. But he spoke out sharply about Musk.
'The owner of a small restaurant is responsible if their food poisons customers; social media tycoons should be held responsible if their algorithms poison our society, Sánchez, adding his own twist on the Trump own mantra. 'Let's take back control. Let's make social media great again.'
Trump's merger with Musk is not the only reason his second term looks more threatening as seen from Europe than the first. It is also the fact his leadership is no longer seen as an aberration, and at a time when Europe's own cohesion is waning.
'Trump 1 was really perceived as this blip in history, whereas now Trump 2 has all the flavour of ongoing regime change in the United States,' Tocci said. 'That has very deep implications for Europe.'