Donald Trump fights as brutally as the UFC cage fighters he’s invited to slug it out on the South Lawn of the White House to mark America’s 250th birthday.
America’s NATO allies, experts in genteel if often flinty diplomacy, therefore face a huge challenge in denying the president’s demands for Greenland.
Beating Trump is hard.
It’s test failed by two Democratic presidential candidates, more than a dozen GOP presidential hopefuls, various prosecutors, countless business foes, and almost every lawmaker who’s ever tried to stand up to him.
Adversaries may cite rules, laws, the Constitution or common decency to try to tame him. But Trump just battles asymmetrically, ignoring the way normal people behave.
It may be time for Europe to adopt some of his tactics — to find ways outside normal diplomatic protocols to hurt the rampant US president.
The alarm across the ocean is impossible to overstate.
“This madness mustn’t escalate any further than it already has,” Rasmus Jarlov, a member of the Danish parliament, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on “The Source.”
“We can never give in to a demand that we should just hand over land and people that the United States has absolutely no right to,” Jarlov said, warning that Trump’s demands mean Danes no longer recognize the US.
“It is not you. It is not who you are,” Jarlov said.
Some Europeans want to hit back in a trade war. Others want to target the US tech industries. And some lawmakers in Britain and Germany have even contemplated the nuclear option — a boycott of this summer’s FIFA World Cup, partly hosted by the US, at which Trump is clearly planning to steal the spotlight.
In the showdown over Greenland, Trump has put the security of the Western world and nearly 80 years of common history on the line because he wants to close the world’s largest real estate deal and add Greenland to the US.
This is a classic example of his no-compromise negotiating technique. Trump often appears ready to metaphorically shoot the hostage — in this case, NATO — to get what he wants.
Democrats learned this lesson during the government shutdown last year. Trump was unmoved by the intense suffering of federal workers deprived of pay and, when nutrition benefits ran out, that of low-income Americans. Democrats, operating in a conventional political world and unwilling to be complicit in the misery any longer, had little option but to end the shutdown short of their goals.
The huge risk for NATO’s European members is that the nightmare scenario of which they warn — the collapse of the world’s most successful military alliance — might not seem too steep a price to Trump, who thinks it’s one big rip-off.
Trump’s Greenland claim is getting more bizarre
European leaders who’ve drawn a red line over Greenland have another problem: How do they reason with a president who lives in his unique reality? This is a man who convinced millions of Americans — and himself — that he was cheated in the 2020 election. No one can talk him out of his alternative universe.
Trump’s claims on Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, didn’t make much sense to begin with. And they’re getting increasingly peculiar. He may therefore be impervious to any logical arguments in return.
For instance, he insists that Greenland could be invaded by Russia or China and that Denmark can’t defend it. But the island is NATO territory. Any attacker would immediately be at war with all alliance members. The US can send whatever forces it wants there already under a treaty with Denmark.
Trump says America must have Greenland to site his proposed Golden Dome missile defense system. But the island already hosts a US Space Force base and missile early warning systems. It had multiple US facilities during the Cold War.
In any case, Trump has moved on from geopolitics.
Emboldened by the spectacular special forces extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, he now seems to think he can take what he wants. This approach was described to CNN’s Jake Tapper by top White House aide Stephen Miller. “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said.
Now it’s getting personal for Trump. He told The New York Times this month that owning Greenland was “psychologically important for me.”
On Monday, he came up with the most bizarre rationale yet, implying in a text to Norway’s prime minister that he was entitled to the island as some sort of consolation prize for his failure so far to become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
It was one of those Trump moments when you had to check your phone to make sure the story was real and not the work of an AI-powered bot.
But it was not the first time that Trump’s obsession with the prize has driven critical policy that affects millions of people.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s Nobel laureate María Corina Machado presented him with her own Nobel medal. Trump’s lack of shame in accepting it was cringe-worthy. But more troubling was his coopting of Venezuela’s junta, which means he has more say in the fading freedom dreams of its people than his guest, who masterminded a suppressed democratic election victory.
Previous presidents have made many mistakes, some of them rooted in personality failings, excessive pride or political expediency. But it’s hard to recall a time when a commander in chief’s vanity has been such a public, driving force of foreign policy. No wonder there are growing questions about the 79-year-old Trump’s state of mind and a second term in which his volatile character has made the US the world’s greatest force of instability.
Some Europeans have tried appealing to Trump’s morals or sense of history.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen on Monday publicly told Trump, “You can’t cross this line.”
“It is really, really important that all of us who believe in international law speak out,” Rasmussen said. “So, forget it. We live in 2026.”
Talking to Trump about international law won’t work. He told the Times that he’s got no need for it. His assault on Venezuela and the killings of alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean seem to prove his point.
Appealing to the president about NATO’s heritage and force multiplier effect are hopeless. He thinks its members have long taken advantage of the US. After decades of gutted European defense budgets, he’s not all wrong, either.
And NATO is a very un-Trumpian organization anyway.
Its Article 5 mutual defense guarantee enshrines a one-for-all-and-all-for-one ethos. But Trump is more of an “all for one” guy. A new national security strategy that stresses the dominance of US power means this is now MAGA foreign policy.
In any case, the administration views its allies with contempt.
“The United States right now, we are the hottest country in the world. We are the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Can Europe prove the administration wrong?
It might as well try, because appeasement and flattery have failed.
A sumptuous royal banquet at Windsor Castle, a parade of fawning visits by European leaders to the Oval Office, and calling him NATO’s “daddy”didn’t stop Trump threatening new tariffs on US NATO allies if they don’t hand over Greenland.
European members of NATO showed unusual unity in their flurry of statements, warnings and calls for the sovereignty of Denmark and the right of self-determination of Greenlanders to be respected.
But their feel-good factor — and dawning understanding that Trump won’t rule out the once-unthinkable notion that one NATO member could attack another — won’t sway the president.
Is it time for Europe’s own version of strength, force and power?
Maybe Europe should follow the example of China, the only nation to force Trump into a serious capitulation in his second term. Beijing wielded its dominance over rare earth minerals, which power the US tech industry, to force him to suspend his trade war with China.
Europe might be a military paper tiger. But, with the US, it’s one half of the world’s biggest trade relationship. Millions of American jobs in a US economy that’s giving Trump political trouble may rely on European trade.
A US-European Union trade deal that Trump touted as a triumph will fall apart if he doesn’t back off Greenland. French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly asked the bloc to activate its “trade bazooka” anti-coercion instrument that could block some US access to EU markets or impose export controls.
All this could lead to higher prices for already-angry consumers who’ve lost faith in Trump’s supposed economic “golden age.” It might also tank stock markets, which are one of the positive signs to which the president can point out to voters.
“Inevitably, if Donald Trump persists, a showdown is necessary,” France’s top newspaper, Le Monde, wrote in an editorial. “Donald Trump seems to respect only those who stand up to him. The European Union does not lack weapons, provided it finally decides to use them.”
A descent into a full-blow trade war with reciprocal US tariffs could be a disaster for both sides and might finish off NATO.
But if it needs to hurt Trump, Europe may have no choice, even if boycotting the World Cup might also infuriate football-mad electorates already furious with weak governments.
Will Europe really follow through?
It agreed to a one-sided trade deal with Trump last year to defuse a trade war, knowing it couldn’t afford to provoke his anger, given both its deep reliance on US defense capabilities and that it needs him if there’s to be a just end to the Ukraine war.
This time, the hope seems to be that showing a willingness to fight may change Trump’s mind.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday warned that “calm discussion” between allies was the way out, while rejecting Trump’s threats to Greenland’s sovereignty and his new tariffs on Europeans.
Any European trade offensive against Trump would be tough for Britain, which after Brexit is even more dependent on the United States.
And a US trade war would mean real pain for European economies at a time when a crumbling NATO would likely cause excruciating cuts to social programs in order to put their shrunken armed forces on a wartime footing.
So hope endures that Trump’s bluster is just a classic negotiating tactic. But what kind of win can Europe conjure for the president, given his extreme demands?
In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” King Claudius says that “you cannot speak of reason to the Dane and lose your voice” — meaning that it’s never a waste of time to make sensible arguments to him.
The Danes, and their European friends, are finding out you can’t speak of reason to Trump.
