European leaders have lined up to condemn Donald Trump’s “new colonialism” and warn 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 the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, 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, wearing sunglasses because of an eye condition.
Saying nothing about the old colonialism with Denmark owning indigenous land such as Greenland.
I don’t know enough about Greenland’s desire for independence, and I assume it’s messy the same way the question of Puerto Rico’s future is, but there’s a lot of injustice that Trump’s expansionism is just the most recent example of.
The Danes arrived on Greenland before the Inuit. They then settled and left after a few centuries, but indigenous is a problematic argument for Greenland being independent.