Adam Tooze: What's the trouble with U.S.-Europe rift over Greenland?

It's very strange, it has to be said.

We've just heard President Trump's speech, and it was, as some people predicted, conciliatory, you might say, or at least it was a declaration that he isn't going to invade Greenland, Denmark, Iceland. This is good news. But the general mood here is one of incredible tension, alienation, bewilderment, surprise, confusion, anguish, pain. I mean, I have dealt with some of the Trump people these days, and it is very hard work to handle them. They are very, very aggressive. It's just professionally difficult to do, and I think that sense is running across everyone here. And it is specifically the Europeans, I think, Canadians being counted as an extension of Europe in this sense. Trump singled out Mark Carney for obvious reasons, because of his powerful speech and his obvious seriousness having been to Beijing. It's very tense.

There truly is. I think we heard from the people who spoke up vocally a kind of unanimity, which is not that we aren't willing to talk with the United States about what America's interests in Greenland are, but an absolute refusal of coercion, whether it's by means of tariffs, let alone by military means, as a way of addressing those concerns. That, I think, is the bottom line on the European side: no coercion, no violence amongst somebody that you think of as your allies, between you and your allies. There cannot be that mode of interaction. And the Trump administration finds that hard to deal with because they actually desire, they like the bullying element. It's more and more clear from every interaction that you have that that's a key part of their policy. So I think that is a bottom line. But it is notable we haven't heard from everyone in the same way, and the central problem of concerting European opinion remains. The big issue for Europe, it has to be said, is Ukraine. This is the key issue. The national security concern of the East remains the abiding European preoccupation. I think it explains Europe's policy throughout this first year of the second Trump administration, and that's where you will also see very considerable differences, and the willingness, therefore, of people to compromise or stand relatively firm depends on that.

Exactly.

Well, I think actually what we've seen—the optimistic reading—is that it's exerting enough pressure for the Europeans to consolidate. And I don't regret President Trump telling us that he's not going to invade Greenland. That is a considerable source of relief. I never thought I'd say that, but I feel relieved. But what I worry about is that, that having disappeared as a threat, the energy that we were seeing in the couple of days will begin to ebb away. And that, I think, will be really regrettable because everyone who has watched this relationship since—you could say even the Obama period, because Obama was a professional international politician, but he was cool on Europe. Cool. The first Trump administration should have been the wake-up call. I think unfortunately the Biden administration, which was classically Atlanticist, put the Europeans back to sleep, and now they're waking up again. And I think this is a tendency, this has got to be something we have to fight. Europe has to understand the need to stand on its own two feet. It will, in fact, be better for its relations, I think, both with the United States and with China if Europe is stabilized as a single coherent actor able to clearly state and rationally argue for its interests.

What is fascinating is that this is a kind of multi-stranded push. And what we saw at Munich was led by Vice President Vance, and Vance for me stands for cultural revolution, a culture war politics which he took very aggressively to Munich. It was basically an accusation against mainstream European parties that they marginalized the far-right parties that the MAGA-Trump people feel themselves aligned with. So it was a kind of line struggle transatlantically, with Vance demanding more space for his political friends that ran through the whole year and manifested very slowly in the National Security Strategy, which downplayed ideological divides, conflicts between the United States and China or with Russia. It sort of took those for granted: different systems, different rules, different ideologies. Okay. But with Europe, it's different, because the MAGA campaign in the US, which does think of itself as kind of pushing a cultural revolution, understands that it has no business talking about Chinese politics or Russian politics. But Europe is the extension and the echo chamber. And places like Davos quintessentially are zones where liberal Americans, the professional-managerial class of America, goes for inspiration, consolidates its values, learns from the Europeans, and vice versa. And we've seen Gavin Newsom here, who's clearly in his element, John Kerry, that entire old guard of American liberalism. Al Gore comes back every year. This is their stomping ground. And the MAGA people quite correctly sense that confronting Europe is part of their domestic political struggle. And then there's Greenland. And no one really knows—where Greenland comes from is something out of the geopolitical imagination of, I believe, the president himself. It's very difficult to get anyone on the president's team to talk seriously about it because I don't think they really understand either. However, the issue of energy is for real.

Oil for the Europeans is a stable thing. Europe has been saturated with oil for decades. It's not a booming market. We're really talking about electricity generation. And so we're talking about the trade-off really between gas, wind, solar, and batteries. Those are the real options. And what the Europeans realized during the Ukraine conflict is the dependence on pipeline Russian gas was very risky for them because of the geopolitics. And there was a lurch towards two things: accelerate renewables, solar and wind—using large quantities of Chinese solar panels to do the solar build-out, wind is different, that's done more domestically—and buying American LNG. And the president, with his pro-American oil and gas producers hat on, is an export gas president. He goes around the world doing these giant LNG deals, and the European side opted for one. The problem is that he's also a low energy cost for American consumers president, which is totally in conflict with his commitment to the interests of the American oil producers. And so with that hat on, he's a 'let's go and take control of Venezuelan oil and pump that into the market and help to bring oil prices down.' And so there's, as with so many things in the Trump project, there's these deep contradictions between his commitment to energy dominance—and what does it really mean? Does that mean cheap energy for American consumers or big markets for American producers? Opening up the big market for American producers might reduce the pressure on the American market. But there's very little coherence in his thinking about these basic issues, which is not just a Trump problem. It's a conflict inherent in America's situation, which is that it is an oil power and a gas power both as a producer and a consumer. And that puts you constantly in conflict with yourself.

The solution is new energy types. I mean, that's the direction. They made promises to Trump; they're not going to keep them. The promises they made to Trump are really—I thought this was us, the Europeans, engaging in fake news, because there's no central gas purchasing agency in Europe that can say, 'Yes, we will buy hundreds of billions of dollars of American gas.' European firms, European generators decide how much gas they take. So the actual solution is going to be a renewable build-out.

They're very considerable and in urgency. I think that's the crucial thing. We're not really talking about big business. Once upon a time, you would have said the military-industrial complex was a large piece of the global economy. Nowadays, compared to big tech or the really big banks, it's small scale. But it's crucial for national security; it's crucial for survival. And at the high end, it intersects with technologies like AI and cloud security, when you suddenly get into the really big budgets. But what we are seeing is a scramble, and this goes to the question that preoccupies so much of the West: it's our diminished ability to make things. And the explosive quality of that question is that China, of course, has emerged as the dominant manufacturing power of the 21st century. And so you see this national security anxiety, fear about de-industrialization, the realization that China is the absolutely dominant manufacturing power, and then an argument within the politics of both Europe and America—we heard it from the president—about how you handle the distributional costs of a big armament ramp-up. I mean, Trump has been talking about 1.5 trillion—crazy numbers, he likes the big numbers. But more seriously, the Germans are pushing the share of defense spending in their GDP towards three, towards 4% quite systematically. And that will generate a very substantial new market. The problem for the Europeans is, as always, can they agree to do it together, or are we going to get a series of rivalrous projects, or are we going to get projects which are ultimately dependent on American technology for the really high-end stuff, which is missiles?

Yes.

I mean, I think that they are negotiating ploys. But as in any relationship, the harder the talk, the more aggressive the talk, the more deeper values begin to erode. And I think we are definitely at the point now where that tactical maneuvering, the aggressive actions that people are showing, and the rhetoric that's being deployed is eating away at the trust which underpins the entire relationship. You cannot describe your relations, say, as the Americans have with the Europeans in recent weeks, without fundamentally undermining the willingness of other people to work with you. And you could see the shock in Macron, President Macron of France, when he said it would be crazy if the Anti-Coercion Instrument—which was intended for use against Russia and let's face it, against China over rare earths, for instance, that's what the Europeans imagined coercion to look like—if it would have to be actually used for the first time against the United States. And that level of disbelief, almost, is beginning to move through the European system and change attitudes in quite a deep way.

Yes.

Europe is a very unusual thing in that it's a political system that is making itself up in history. It is not simply a given thing, but something that has to be created. And as one famous European, Jean Monnet, said, Europe is a series of answers we have given to the crises that we have collectively faced. And what we're seeing on defense with Ukraine and the threat of American withdrawal from Europe is a sudden willingness on the part of all of the key players in Europe to consider, for instance, common financing by debt of military spending. And those are the sorts of moves to look for in this kind of ratchet. There are crucial thresholds which you cross, and when you cross them, it changes the game. It started with COVID, and it has now moved to anti-coercion instruments. It is now moving to common funding of defense, and those are the moves to trace in real time. What Europe isn't is simply a fixed polity with a clear shape. That doesn't mean that it's not capable of developing in very, very powerful ways.