Mandelson accuses European leaders of ‘histrionic’ reaction to Trump’s Greenland stance | Peter Mandelson
Peter Mandelson accused European leaders, including Keir Starmer, of a “histronic” response to Donald Trump’s plan to seize Greenland, arguing that without “hard power and cash” they would continue to fade into insignificance in the “age of Trump”.
Lord Mandelson, making his first political comment since being sacked as Britain’s ambassador to Washington last year, said Trump had “achieved more in one day than orthodox diplomacy has achieved in the last decade” when he caught up with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The intervention is likely to be seen as a criticism of the British prime minister, who has tried to walk a diplomatic tightrope since the US take on Maduro. This week, he signed a statement urging the US president to respect Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland after the White House said the US was exploring “a range of options” for seizing Greenland, adding that using the US military to do so was “always an option”.
Starmer “explained his position on Greenland” in a phone call with Trump, Downing Street said on Wednesday evening, without giving further details of the call. While Starmer has refrained from criticizing Trump’s actions in Venezuela, he has repeatedly said that Greenland’s future should be solely a matter for the region and Denmark.
But inside An article for the audienceMandelson argued that the reaction to Trump’s maneuvers had revealed “increasing geopolitical impotence” in Europe, encouraging Starmer and other European leaders to use “hard power and hard cash” to boost their own interests.
The former US ambassador argued that Trump will not invade Greenland because he does not need it. “What will happen is that the threats posed by China and Russia to Arctic security will crystallize in the minds of Europeans, performance statements about ‘sovereignty’ and the future of NATO will fade and serious debates will come to the fore,” he said. “The bigger question is what modus vivendi both sides of the Western coin (America and Europe) will establish in the Age of Trump.”
While UK ministers condemned the “disintegration” of the international rules-based system and Starmer stressed his lifelong defense of international law after the US captured the Venezuelan president, Mandelson said the “rules-based system” had not existed for a long time.
“President Trump is not a populist separatist bent on destroying it; it had lost its meaning before he was elected. He did not single-handedly disrupt the post-war ‘global order’: if it existed at all, it began to evaporate two decades ago when China emerged as a major power against the US-led unipolar world,” he said.
Mandelson said he believed that despite U.S. interventions in Ukraine and Gaza, European leaders “even now… have failed to adapt to the revolution that is taking place” and are “guilty of the lazy interpretation of ‘America First’ to mean ‘America Alone.'”
“Europe is under the influence of the Truth Socials coming out of the White House, but it is not following the arguments that support them,” he said.
Rather than wringing hands, European leaders would be better off “asking themselves why the United States is making an arrangement and how they, as America’s allies, can mitigate its consequences,” adding: “In other words, how and when will the piggybacking end and Europe begin to assume all its military and financial responsibilities, beyond nice words?”
He added: “This will mean that Trump’s decisive approach when faced with real-world situations is preferable to the hand-wringing and analysis paralysis that has characterized some previous US administrations, or indeed the stalemate and evasiveness that has often characterized the UN and EU respectively.”
