Podcast
In this episode of The World at Your Feet, we analyze whether there is a post-Davos, post-Greenland Europe, reinvigorated in its self-esteem and with weapons it didn’t know it had, or is Trump’s retreat from tariffs and threats just an interregnum before yet another attack? Ana França invites Catarina Maldonado Vasconcelos and David Dinis to the conversation
These consecutive turmoil imposed on Europe and the international order by the new Trump Administration should no longer surprise anyone, but the complete unpredictability of the behavior of the President of the United States always manages to leave European allies disconcerted. When the year began, the idea of an attack on Venezuela was relatively dormant and yet on January 3, Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped by US special forces and is now in prison awaiting trial in New York.
The idea of acquiring or annexing Greenland had also already floated in Trump’s speeches, but the escalation of the last two weeks was not taken into account by the European allies, who were forced to urgently meet and send a few dozen soldiers to show some type of unity.
Until the end of last week, Danish soldiers on the island had not even been officially authorized to fire on the North American invaders; this order was only given about five days ago, according to public broadcaster DR. It is natural that it was not in the protocol, after all, the United States is a member of NATO and, until about 10 years ago, NATO was an organization that the United States supported without any “ifs” or “buts”.
The instability of the Atlantic alliance when there is a war in Europe is just one of the chapters of this new history, of this new world order, the phrase that has been so often used to explain the rupture that came from the other side of the Atlantic, but there is more: the economic war or the permanent threat of launching one, the end of North American funding for key institutions such as the World Health Organization, the break with pillar concepts such as the independence of Justice and the media, and many, many other things that today are less certain than when Donald Trump came to power.
In the middle of all this, there are the EU Member States, the richest bloc of countries in the world, the largest market in the world, but also a group of democracies that have become accustomed to leaving Defense in the hands of the North American giant and focusing, instead, on the stability of the welfare state. Of course, much of what Trump says about Europe is a lie. A brief analysis of crime, wages and economic figures, which Nobel Prize winner for Economics Paul Krugman shows that the sharp decline in European countries, which Trump’s ministers talk about so much, is not exactly real.
But suddenly we have all been woken up to a huge degree of exposure of our economy and security and it seems that, at least this time, in Davos, European leaders managed to show Donald Trump that the EU is still a power that must be respected. Volodymyr Zelensky, frightened by the lack of protagonism in his war, decided on a strategy of someone who no longer knows what else to do to show the Europeans that if Ukraine falls, it is not just Ukraine that falls and all that was left was to insult, by name, each of the rulers. Will it work?
