President Trump, as we've been reporting, has his sights set on Greenland. He's not one to change his mind when he's got it made up, and that would seem to be the case here, even though most of Europe is dead-set against the Stars and Stripes flying over Greenland.
However, one European leader, who has already maintained a good relationship with the American president, isn't letting anything like Greenland get in the way of her friendship with the USA, even if it causes her to take heat from her own political opposition. I am writing, of course, of Italy's Giorgia Meloni.
Within the European Union, Giorgia Meloni has always taken a pro-Atlantic stance, accentuated by the Italian prime minister’s close relationship with Donald Trump. Since the Greenland crisis erupted, Meloni has insisted on the need not to sever ties with the American president, which has angered the Italian opposition, who accuse her of betraying Italy and Europe.
On Thursday, January 22nd, the European Council is set to examine the activation of the anti-coercion instrument requested by French President Emmanuel Macron.
In this highly tense context, Meloni is striving at all costs to maintain balance.
Highly tense may be something of an understatement, but Meloni is managing to walk a pretty decent tightrope through all this.
In a private exchange with the U.S. president, Meloni described the current U.S. strategy of punishing European countries with customs duties as a “mistake.”
However, the Italian prime minister has no intention of severing ties with the United States. This is a very realistic position: the balance of power is currently very much against Europe, which will always lose out in a trade war or military engagement with the United States. Meloni believes that Trump will not go so far as to take Greenland by force—something the U.S. president verified in his Davos speech on Wednesday—and that an armed confrontation must be avoided at all costs: this is why she did not want Italian soldiers to take part in the reconnaissance mission to Greenland. Her defence minister was also very sceptical about this manoeuvre: “Imagine fifteen Italians, fifteen French and fifteen Germans in Greenland. It sounds like the beginning of a joke,” he said at the time.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that joke. There were also three mimes, a bowl of soup, and an accordion in there somewhere.
Read More: Priceless: Trump Has a Little Fun Teasing Macron in Davos - but Makes Important Point
Seriously, though, it's good that someone in Europe is willing to be the voice of reason. President Trump wants Greenland and Denmark, along with most of the rest of the countries that make up that wheezing, geriatric continent, don't want him to have it. The whole thing is beginning to look like a bunch of monkeys fighting over a peanut, and it's the perfect time for the Italian leader to step in and ask, "All of you, instead of you all firing broadsides, why don't you all sit down like adults and make a deal?"
I've been writing since this whole thing blew up that President Trump, despite his other foreign policy successes, isn't going to get Greenland. Not ownership of it, at any rate. But if we can get increased basing and mineral rights, that's very nearly as good.
Maybe Giorgia Meloni would be willing to mediate. She seems like she would be just the person for the job.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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