‘No Going Back’: France Was Reportedly Prepared for a ‘Shooting War’ if Trump Moved on Greenland

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

A stunning report in The Wall Street Journal described a marathon meeting of U.S. European allies who had come to view the country as a security risk under President Donald Trump.

Citing national security, Trump has repeatedly insisted that the U.S. must acquire Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory in the North Atlantic and Arctic Circle. The U.S. already maintains one military base on the island and, under an agreement, may increase its military presence there. However, Trump has indicated he wants Greenland to become a U.S. territory.

On Jan. 3, the U.S. military raided Venezuela and abducted then-President Nicolas Maduro before bringing him to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges. Shortly after the raid, Trump reiterated his desire for Greenland. So concerned were U.S. allies in Europe, they met to discuss how to approach the president, according to a report published by the Journal on Sunday.

The leaders met at the European Council headquarters in Brussels. Cameras and phones were not allowed, and each head of government had been told to come alone. French President Emmanuel Macron was blunt in his assessment. He had just deployed French soldiers to Greenland to participate in Denmark’s Operation Arctic Endurance, in which Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden also participated. The Journal reported that the forces there, or at least the French and Danish ones, were prepared for a hot war with the U.S. Around the five-hour mark of the meeting, Macron addressed his counterparts:

“We are drawing a line here,” began Emmanuel Macron, president of France, according to several leaders present and their most senior aides. For a year, America’s closest allies had tried to placate Trump with a mix of flattery and concessions on mutual-defense and trade issues, hoping to buy time. Now, French soldiers were in Greenland, alongside Danish special forces equipped for a shooting war with America. The French president repeated an argument he’d been pressing for years, with mounting urgency: that Europe’s overreliance on America was a security risk. “There is no going back,” he said.

The report highlighted that European nations are accelerating their divestment from U.S. technology.

“Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office,” it said. “Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.”

The Journal added that European assessments of the U.S. during Trump’s second term emphasize the mercurial nature of its president:

One assessment, from Southern Europe, reads: “You are not dealing with an administration that has processes, you are dealing with a single volatile individual.” Britain’s MI6, struck by the climate of fear in Washington, offered Prime Minister Keir Starmer a more allegorical warning: Trump’s second White House, it said, “is ‘The Crucible’ meets ‘Wolf Hall,’” referencing two fictional works about the Salem Witch Trials and the court of England’s ill-tempered Henry VIII. The British spy agency instructed its staff not to broach the subject of the president with their CIA counterparts.

The report stated that European leaders have grown frustrated with Trump after their attempts to flatter him were shown to have “diminishing returns.”

The post ‘No Going Back’: France Was Reportedly Prepared for a ‘Shooting War’ if Trump Moved on Greenland first appeared on Mediaite.