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EU Readies to Aim Economic 'Bazooka' at the US Over Trump Tariff 'Blackmail,' Greenland Threats
"The EU cannot simply move on to business as usual," said one member of European Parliament.
Jan 19, 2026
The European Union appears to be done trying to appease US President Donald Trump over his demands to be given control of Greenland.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the EU is considering deploying what has been described as an economic "bazooka" at the US after Trump threatened European countries with new tariffs because of their refusal to cede Greenland, which has been part of the Danish kingdom for hundreds of years.
Specifically, the EU has an "anti-coercion instrument" that the Times writes "could be used to slap limitations on big American technology companies or other service providers that do large amounts of business on the continent."
Enacting this policy would dramatically escalate tensions between the US and its European allies, but some international relations experts think the EU might have little choice given Trump's fixation on seizing the self-governing Danish territory.
"This is just all brute force,” Penny Naas, an expert on European public policy at the German Marshall Fund, told the Times. “The president really wants Greenland, and he's not backing off of it.”
Bernd Lange, a German member of European Parliament, said in a social media post that European leaders could no longer try to appease Trump with concessions given his overt aggression and urged the EU to respond with maximum retaliation.
"New US tariffs for several nations are unbelievable," he wrote. "This is no way to treat partners. A new line has been crossed. Unacceptable. POTUS is using trade as an instrument of political coercion. The EU cannot simply move on to business as usual."
German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil also signaled on Monday that European nations are at the end of their rope when it comes to Trump's relentless threats against them, reported Bloomberg.
“We are constantly experiencing new provocations, we are constantly experiencing new antagonism, which President Trump is seeking, and here we Europeans must make it clear that the limit has been reached," said Klingbeil. "There is a legally established European toolbox that can respond to economic blackmail with very sensitive measures, and we should now examine the use of these measures."
European officials said in a report published by Politico on Monday that they were considering fully breaking with the US over Trump's demands of territorial concessions, as they no longer feel that the US can be a trusted international partner.
"There is a shift in US policy and in many ways it is permanent," said a senior European government official. "Waiting it out is not a solution. What needs to be done is an orderly and coordinated movement to a new reality."
Europeans aren't the only ones criticizing Trump's latest actions, as Melinda St. Louis, director of Global Trade Watch at US-based government watchdog Public Citizen, said the president's latest tariffs over Greenland show that he has never cared about protecting American jobs, but only about exerting power.
"Misusing tariff authority over his wildly unpopular and head-scratching imperial claim of right to Greenland shows just how little he cares for the everyday struggles of Americans and undermines the legitimate uses of tariffs," said St. Louis.
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Head of Amnesty International Agrees Trump-Led US Is ‘Destroying World Order’
"Complicity, tacit agreement, appeasement, silence: these have a cost."
Jan 09, 2026
Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard expressed agreement Thursday that the US under President Donald Trump is tearing down world order, while also pointing the finger at other major Western powers for being part of the problem.
In a post on X, Callamard reacted to a warning delivered by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the Trump administration was undermining systems developed decades ago with the help of the US to ensure greater international stability.
Callamard agreed with Steinmeier's basic argument, but added that Germany has not been an innocent bystander.
"The US is destroying world order," wrote the Amnesty International chief. "And so did Israel for the last two years. With Germany support."
She then accused Germany and other US allies of ignoring past US violations of international law and only getting upset now that it's come back to bite them.
"German and other European leaders cannot suddenly discover that the rule-based order is on its knee when they have governed over its demise for the last two years," she wrote. "Complicity, tacit agreement, appeasement, silence: these have a cost. A high cost. And you/we will all end up paying for it."
Steinmeier's remarks came in response to increased US aggression against both Latin America, where Trump ordered the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, and Europe, where Trump has once again stated his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark.
"Then there is the breakdown of values by our most important partner, the USA, which helped build this world order," the German president said. "It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want, where regions or entire countries are treated as the property of a few great powers."
Truly extraordinary language by German President Steinmeier: pic.twitter.com/povGBrPmr9
He says the US's values are "broken", that they're changing the world "into a den of thieves in which the most unscrupulous take what they want," and treat "whole countries" as their "property".…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 9, 2026
Top Trump aide Stephen Miller earlier in the week explicitly advocated returning to an era in which great military powers are free to take whatever they want from weaker powers.
"The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere,” Miller said during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. “We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us.”
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Western Hypocrisy and the Gaza Death Toll
The West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
Dec 06, 2025
First, let’s dissect this puzzle.
On February 29, 2024, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent shockwaves when he informed lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee that over 25,000 Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza up to that date. Austin, the military chief of the Biden administration, delivered a fact that immediately subverted his own government’s rhetoric.
The announcement was shocking for two main reasons. First, Austin himself had orchestrated the relentless flow of US arms to Israel, directly enabling the very campaign that liquidated those innocent people. Second, the figure provided was noticeably higher than the casualty tally reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza for the same period—22,000 women and children in the first 146 days of the war.
The crux of the contradiction, however, is that Austin’s detailed account of the US-funded Israeli atrocities in Gaza directly subverted the official narrative regularly disseminated by the White House.
The rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted.
In fact, as early as October 25, 2023—barely two weeks into the war—President Joe Biden himself began doubting the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s death toll estimates. "(I have) no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using," he flatly declared.
Naturally, Austin's declaration neither eroded his unwavering endorsement of Israel nor softened Biden’s patronizing attitude toward the Palestinians. To the contrary, US military and political backing for Israel surged exponentially after that congressional hearing. US military and financial support for the Israeli genocide during the Biden administration in the first year of the war is estimated to be at least $17.9 billion.
These apparent contradictions, however, are not inconsistencies at all, but a perfectly calibrated, deliberate policy. Historically, this approach grants the US license to consistently flout its own declared principles. Iraq was invaded, at a horrific cost of life and societal destruction, under the banner of "good intentions": democracy, human rights, and the like. Afghanistan's protracted agony of war and instability endured for two decades in the name of fighting terror, exporting democracy, and women's rights.
The operational part of the equation satisfies military and political strategists. Meanwhile, the hollow rhetoric of democracy and human rights keeps intellectuals, both on the right and the left, mired in a protracted, perpetually unproductive debate that serves to conceal rather than influence policy.
While the US government may have perfected the craft of deliberate contradictions, it is not the original architect. In modern history, this phenomenon has been owned almost entirely by the West: Colonialism was advanced as a solution to slavery, and forced conversions were brazenly justified as civilizing missions.
The West's stance on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, however, offers the most blatant and current example of this deliberate contradiction. A concise examination of Germany's conduct in the last two years suffices to illustrate the point.
Germany is the world's second-largest supplier of weapons to Israel, after the US. Not only did it refuse to accept the genocide definition recognized by many countries, and eventually by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but it also fought ferociously to shield Israel from the mere accusation.
Domestically, it brutally suppressed pro-Palestinian protests, detained countless activists, and outlawed the use of the Palestinian flag, among numerous other draconian measures. Yet, in the same breath, Germany continued to champion freedom of speech and democracy, and criticize Global South nations that allegedly curtailed these same values.
Predictably, Germany continued to arm Israel, concocting every conceivable justification for its support of Tel Aviv, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders for the crime of extermination in Gaza. Only under immense pressure did Berlin finally yield and agree to stop approving weapons exports to Israel.
Fast forward to recent days. The BBC, among other outlets, reported on November 17 that Germany would reinstate its weapons exports to Israel, rationalizing the decision with the October 10 announcement of a Gaza ceasefire—one that Israel has flagrantly violated hundreds of times.
“Germany’s decision to lift its partial suspension of weapons shipments to Israel is reckless, unlawful, and sends entirely the wrong message to Israel,” Amnesty International declared in a press release—a condemnation that, naturally, was utterly ignored.
A week later, new research conducted by two top, highly regarded academic institutions showed that the number of Palestinians killed as a result of the Israeli genocide is substantially higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health figures. Worse, life expectancy in Gaza has plummeted by nearly half because of the Israeli war.
Of the two institutions, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is German. The globally leading research organization is largely funded by public money coming directly from the federal government—the very entity that ships the weapons that, along with US support, have fueled Gaza's escalating death toll.
In all these scenarios, the West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
But the rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted. To reclaim our collective agency, however, we must begin with a unified realization that the West’s calculated contradictions are specifically engineered to perpetuate the iniquitous relationship between Western powers and the rest of us for as long as possible.
Only by rigorously exposing and forcefully rejecting this hypocrisy can we finally liberate ourselves from the historic delusion that the solution to our problem is a Western one.
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