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Peter Mandelson has accused European leaders including Keir Starmer of a “histrionic” reaction to Donald Trump’s plan to take over Greenland, arguing that without “hard power and hard cash” they will continue to slide into unimportance in the “age of Trump”.
In his first political comments since being sacked as Britain’s ambassador to Washington last year, Lord Mandelson said Trump had achieved “more in a day than orthodox diplomacy was able to achieve in the past decade” when he captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.
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 the US was looking into “a range of options” in an effort to acquire Greenland, adding that using the US military to do so was “always an option”.
On Wednesday evening, Starmer “set out his position on Greenland” in a phone conversation with Trump, Downing Street said without giving further details of the call. While Starmer has steered clear of criticising Trump’s actions in Venezuela, he has repeatedly said Greenland’s future must be a matter for the territory and Denmark alone.
But in an article for the Spectator, Mandelson argued that the reaction to Trump’s manoeuvres exposed a “growing geopolitical impotence” in Europe, urging Starmer and other European leaders to use “hard power and hard cash” to increase their relevance.
The former US ambassador argued that Trump would not invade Greenland, because he did not need to. “What will happen is that the threats to arctic security posed by China and Russia will crystallise in European minds, performative statements about ‘sovereignty’ and Nato’s future will fade, and serious discussion will take over,” he said. “The bigger issue is how both sides of the western coin – America and Europe – are going to establish a modus vivendi in this age of Trump.”
While UK ministers have decried the “disintegration” of the international rules-based system and Starmer has stressed his lifelong advocacy for international law in the aftermath of the US capture of the Venezuelan president, Mandelson said the “rules-based system” had not existed for a long time.
“President 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 ‘global order’: 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,” he said.
Mandelson said he believed European leaders had not “even now … adjusted to the revolution under way”, and were “guilty of a lazy interpretation of ‘America First’ to mean ‘America Alone’”, despite US interventions in Ukraine and Gaza.
“Europe is transfixed by the Truth Socials coming out of the White House but without following the arguments underpinning them,” he said.
Instead of hand-wringing, he said, European leaders would be better “to ask themselves why the US is making an adjustment and how they, as America’s allies, can mitigate its consequences”, adding: “In other words, how and when the piggybacking stops and Europe starts assuming its full military and financial responsibilities beyond fine words.”
He said: “This will mean accepting that Trump’s 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.”
