European leaders, rattled by Donald Trump’s latest global gambit, are looking to present a united front in Davos, as CEOs warned against an emotional response to the US president’s ambition to take over Greenland.
Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever said the 27-member bloc was ‘at a crossroads’ where it must decide on how to get out of a ‘very bad position’ after trying to appease Trump to get his support for the Ukraine war.
“So we should unite and we should say to Trump ... ‘You’re crossing red lines here.’ We either stand together or we will stand divided,” De Wever said on a panel discussion.
Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch told Reuters that attempts to win over Trump with flattery, as some European leaders have tried in the past, would not work.
“Stroking the cat along the line of its fur is not going to do the trick this time. The EU needs to toughen up and hold the line,” she said, adding that the bloc needed to keep options for trade retaliation ‘locked and loaded’.
However, some senior bankers and executives in Davos, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they saw the response from European leaders to Trump’s moves as emotional rather than pragmatic. Two suggested the continent needed to look beyond the way the US president delivers his message and have a negotiation.
“But they won’t even want to have that conversation, because they’re so offended by the style. And so what you have in Europe is a very, very, delicate balance of a continent that cannot move together,” one senior banker told Reuters.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, however, voiced confidence that the United States and European countries would find a solution and avoid what some have warned could become a prolonged trade war.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said yesterday that he was ready to join other global leaders in Davos, but only if the US was ready to sign documents on security guarantees for Ukraine and a post-war prosperity plan. “Ukraine is ready for meetings ... if those meetings are actually effective,” he wrote on X.
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