Peter Mandelson has accused European leaders including Keir Starmer of a \u201chistrionic\u201d reaction to Donald Trump\u2019s plan to take over Greenland, arguing that without \u201chard power and hard cash\u201d they will continue to slide into unimportance in the \u201cage of Trump\u201d.<\/p>\n
In his first political comments since being sacked as Britain\u2019s ambassador to Washington last year, Lord Mandelson said Trump had achieved \u201cmore in a day than orthodox diplomacy was able to achieve in the past decade\u201d when he captured the Venezuelan president, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a>.<\/p>\n The intervention is likely to be seen as a criticism of the British prime minister, who has attempted to walk a diplomatic tightrope since the US captured Maduro. This week he signed a statement calling on the US president to respect Danish sovereignty over Greenland after a White House statement said<\/a> the US was looking into \u201ca range of options\u201d in an effort to acquire Greenland<\/a>, adding that using the US military to do so was \u201calways an option\u201d.<\/p>\n On Wednesday evening, Starmer \u201cset out his position on Greenland\u201d in a phone conversation with Trump, Downing Street said without giving further details of the call. While Starmer has steered clear of criticising Trump\u2019s actions in Venezuela, he has repeatedly said Greenland\u2019s future must be a matter for the territory and Denmark alone.<\/p>\n But in an article for the Spectator<\/a>, Mandelson argued that the reaction to Trump\u2019s manoeuvres exposed a \u201cgrowing geopolitical impotence\u201d in Europe, urging Starmer and other European leaders to use \u201chard power and hard cash\u201d to increase their relevance.<\/p>\n The former US ambassador argued that Trump would not invade Greenland, because he did not need to. \u201cWhat will happen is that the threats to arctic security posed by China and Russia will crystallise in European minds, performative statements about \u2018sovereignty\u2019 and Nato\u2019s future will fade, and serious discussion will take over,\u201d he said. \u201cThe bigger issue is how both sides of the western coin \u2013 America and Europe<\/a> \u2013 are going to establish a modus vivendi in this age of Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n While UK ministers have decried the \u201cdisintegration\u201d of the international rules-based system<\/a> and Starmer has stressed his lifelong advocacy for international law<\/a> in the aftermath of the US capture of the Venezuelan president, Mandelson said the \u201crules-based system\u201d had not existed for a long time.<\/p>\n \u201cPresident Trump is not some populist disruptor bent on destroying it; it ceased to have meaning before he was elected. He has not single-handedly broken up the postwar \u2018global order\u2019: if that ever fully existed, it started to evaporate two decades ago when China emerged as a great power contesting the US-led unipolar world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Mandelson said he believed European leaders had not \u201ceven now \u2026 adjusted to the revolution under way\u201d, and were \u201cguilty of a lazy interpretation of \u2018America First\u2019 to mean \u2018America Alone\u2019\u201d, despite US interventions in Ukraine and Gaza.<\/p>\n \u201cEurope is transfixed by the Truth Socials coming out of the White House but without following the arguments underpinning them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Instead of hand-wringing, he said, European leaders would be better \u201cto ask themselves why the US is making an adjustment and how they, as America\u2019s allies, can mitigate its consequences\u201d, adding: \u201cIn other words, how and when the piggybacking stops and Europe starts assuming its full military and financial responsibilities beyond fine words.\u201d<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThis will mean accepting that Trump\u2019s decisive approach when faced with real-world situations is preferable to the hand-wringing and analysis paralysis that has characterised some previous US administrations or, indeed, the deadlock and prevarication that so often characterise the UN and the EU respectively.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peter Mandelson has accused European leaders including Keir Starmer of a \u201chistrionic\u201d reaction to Donald Trump\u2019s plan to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-682026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115859097137197304","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}