Closing post
European leaders have lined up to condemn Donald Trump’s “new colonialism”, on the first full day of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
They warned that the continent was facing a crossroads as the US president said there was no going back on his goal of controlling Greenland.
After weeks of aggressive threats by Trump to seize the vast Arctic island, which is a largely autonomous part of Denmark, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said on Tuesday he preferred “respect to bullies” and the “rule of law to brutality”.
Macron told WEF that now was “not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”, criticising the “useless aggressivity” of Trump’s pledge to levy tariffs on countries that opposed a US takeover of Greenland.
The US was seeking to “weaken and subordinate Europe” by demanding “maximum concessions” and imposing tariffs that were “fundamentally unacceptable – even more so when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty”, he said.
Macron was speaking after European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told WEF that Europe must strengthen its independence.
Von der Leyen also pledged an “unflinching, united and proportional” response to Trump’s tariff threat.
She was followed by Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, who warned against allowing the international order to sink into a “law of the jungle”.
But Canada’s Mark Carney told Davos that the world’s ‘middle powers’ need to work together to build a better world order.
He said:
“It seems that every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading.”
Carney warned that the world faces “the end of a pleasant fiction and the dawn of a harsh reality of geopolitics” in which the great powers are unconstrained.
He also said Canada stood with Denmark and Greenland.
Rachel Reeves, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, told an event in Davos that she would urge everyone to keep cool heads over the US threat of new tariffs.
The day began with US treasury secretary Scott Bessent urging Europe not to retaliate against Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs if they oppose his acquisition of Greenland.
Bessent said countries and companies should pause and “let things play out”, and accused the media of hysteria for reporting that Europe coud retaliate by selling their holdings of US government debt.
We’ll be back tomorrow morning, when Donald Trump will deliver a special address to Davos….
Updated
Davos attendees should note that the European parliament will freeze ratification of the EU-US trade deal in response to Donald Trump’s tariff threats to European countries who oppose his takeover of Greenland, my colleague Jennifer Rankin reports from Brussels.
The European parliament had been due to vote in the coming weeks on introducing 0% tariffs on US industrial goods, a key part of the deal signed between Ursula von der Leyen and Donald Trump at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland last summer.
Senior MEPs on the European parliament’s international trade committee are expected to announce the formal suspension of ratification of the Turnberry deal on Wednesday, following a deal between the largest political groups, a European parliament source said.
The writing was on the wall after the leader of the European parliament’s largest political group, the centre-right European People’s Party, announced over the weekend that approval of 0% tariffs for the US must be put on hold. “The EPP is in favour of the EU–US trade deal, but given Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, approval is not possible at this stage,” Manfred Weber said after Trump’s X announcement.
Socialists, centrist MEPs and Greens had already called for the deal to be put on hold over Trump’s threats to Greenland. ENDS
