Euro-American frictions

It won't take President Donald Trump long to make them clear and put them on the table, probably in his usual way of negotiating, i.e. by brutally pointing out your weaknesses before making take-it-or-leave-it offers and abide by the consequences. 

Of the many points of friction, some more than obvious and others latent, between the two sides of the Atlantic, two particularly important ones will soon emerge: one concerning what the United States considers vital to its security and interests, and another more centred on the difference in values, and therefore worldview, between Americans and Europeans. It is about the future of Greenland, on the one hand, and the shaping of global public opinion through social networks, on the other. 

Regarding the world's largest island, now under Danish sovereignty, with a self-government since 1979 and the recognised right to declare independence since 2009, Trump is not joking. His advisers and he himself have the declared intention of completing what President Harry Truman tried unsuccessfully in 1946 and Donald Trump himself in 2019: to bring this gigantic territory of 2.2 million square kilometres, 84% of which is covered by ice, under US sovereignty.

Neither the 100 million dollars with which Truman wanted to buy the island from Denmark nor those that Trump intends to contribute in his first presidential term were enough. Copenhagen replied that Greenland was not and is not for sale. It is true, however, that the Danish government agreed in 1951 to the United States setting up the Thule military air base, now renamed Pituffik space base. Copenhagen also allowed the United States to build the Camp Century nuclear base, which between 1959 and 1967 served as an early warning and monitoring base for the Soviet Union. 

The security value the US attaches to Greenland, especially as permanent Arctic sea lanes open up due to melting ice caused by climate change, is compounded by the immense strategic value of its estimated reserves of 1.5 million tonnes of rare earths. The production and trade of this set of 17 elements of the periodic table, vital for controlling the technology of the future, is currently in the almost exclusive hands of China. 

Alongside the new refusal to negotiate the hypothetical sale of the island, Denmark has been quick to offer the US negotiations to increase cooperation on the exploitation and distribution of such sensitive materials for economic and military security. Less than two weeks before his inauguration, Donald Trump held a telephone conversation with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, an exchange that sources close to the European institutions described as ‘particularly intense’. 

It so happens that Frederiksen had several dispatches with the Prime Minister of Greenland, Múte B. Egede, about the celebration of the European Union's first summit in Greenland. Egede, about holding a possible referendum on independence next spring, in which only the 57,000 inhabitants of this huge territory would have a say and, above all, a vote. No agreement was reached in these talks, at the end of which Egede insisted on his desire for independence, while at the same time making it clear that neither he nor his countrymen want to be Americans. 

In such circumstances, and however much Denmark and the European Union itself may clamour, it is not difficult to predict that Trump will bring all possible pressure to bear on Copenhagen to agree to hold this independence referendum; also that the result will be favourable, and subsequently that Washington will offer Nuuk all the protection, security and economic advantages it needs, in other words... The 500 million euros that Denmark currently contributes to Greenland's annual budget, 2.5 billion, will be covered and multiplied without any legislative and financial difficulty by the Trump Administration. The loss of Danish and European sovereignty over Greenland will consequently rob the EU of much of its strength on the global stage. 

On the second issue, the control of information - and the resulting shaping of public opinion - is a major problem. The big technology companies, led by the ultra-billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, have embraced the thesis that social networks are tools for channelling freedom of expression, which means that filters and so-called verifiers should disappear. And, above all, that they cannot set themselves up as controllers, judges and sentencers of content they do not like. 

It was clear from the moment it was passed that the European Digital Services Act (DSL) of February 2024 is completely incompatible with the First Amendment of the American Constitution, where freedom of expression is a priority and therefore there is no room for regulations that are nothing more than forms of censorship. The DSL gives states the power to appoint ‘trusted reporters’ to be the gendarmes of freedom of expression, a regulation that, in Spain, for example, they want to implement with a media law that already points to a suffocating partisan bias. 

Fabrice Epelboim, a professor at France's Science Po and a specialist in social networks, believes that this difference between the United States and Europe reflects a broader cultural clash, which ‘risks exacerbating tensions with citizens who, influenced by Hollywood for generations, imagine themselves benefiting from a freedom of expression similar to that of the United States when in reality this is not the case’. In his opinion, this crisis shows that we are at a historic turning point, so much so that he describes the American vision of democracy and the European vision of democracy as ‘irreconcilable’.