Good morning,
When the Trump administration kidnapped Venezuela’s autocrat president Nicolas Maduro in December and presented him in a New York courtroom, the following day EU leaders were criticised for refusing to criticise his gunboat diplomacy.
Whether on trade, Venezuela, Greenland or Gaza, Europeans simply don’t know how to handle the Donald.
But it appears that Trump’s threat of 10 percent tariffs against the eight countries – six of them EU members – who contributed troops to the Nato Arctic Endurance mission in Greenland is the final provocation. Germany and France want the EU Commission to draw up plans to use the bloc’s anti-coercion trade instrument against the US, which would shut out American firms from much of the service economy and impose hefty tariffs on its goods.
EU leaders are not alone in struggling to know what to do with Trump.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer has decided to stick as close to Trump as possible, offering him a state visit replete with a white tie dinner with King Charles. It hasn’t done him any good.
Nor are EU states the only allies targeted for a trade war.
Last week, the US house of representatives passed a bill that would extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) until the end of 2028. The law, which offers duty and quota-free trade to most African countries, had expired last September. AGOA looked to have gone. Now it is expected to be passed by the senate in the coming weeks.
But there’s a catch. The Trump administration would like South Africa, whom it has levied 30 percent tariffs on, to be shut out from AGOA. There’s no logical reason why South Africa should have been targeted like this. Trump’s claims of ‘genocide’ being perpetrated against white farmers by Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC government are not supported by any evidence. Meanwhile, the US exports $1.5bn more to South Africa than it imports, so a trade war would actually hurt US businesses.
Perhaps the real reason for Trump’s dispute with Ramaphosa is that the South African president had the temerity to quietly call him out when Trump tried to humiliate him in the Oval Office last year.
With the US president threatening to seize a territory belonging to an EU state, the bloc has little choice. If it doesn’t back Denmark to the hilt, it is hard to see what the point of the EU is. That might mean short-term economic pain. More likely is that Trump – like most bullies when they are challenged – will climb down.
- Benjamin Fox, Africa editor
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