There are rational explanations for the continent\u2019s muted response to US threats \u2013 but that\u2019s not how you deal with this president<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s antics over the past week have put paid to the refrain, often heard in Europe, that the president should be taken \u201cseriously but not literally\u201d. It turns out that Trump literally wants Greenland. He doubled down on his aggressive rhetoric in a raging 45-minute call<\/a> with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, a few days ago, threatening crippling tariffs unless she agreed to sell the autonomous territory to the US. In response to Denmark\u2019s sharp increase in military spending for the Arctic, including ships and drones, he derided Copenhagen\u2019s \u201cdog-sled\u201d defences for Greenland, the world\u2019s largest non-continental island, which pale in comparison with the strength of the US military base there.<\/p>\n The threat to take over the territory of a European country by force is something that Europeans now know all too well. Russia has repeatedly threatened east European countries, making good on those threats by invading Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014. Yet many Europeans are gobsmacked that such a threat is now coming from its greatest ally.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are rational explanations for the continent\u2019s muted response to US threats \u2013 but that\u2019s not how you deal with this president Donald Trump\u2019s antics over the past week have put paid to the refrain, often heard in Europe, that the president should be taken \u201cseriously but not literally\u201d. It turns out that Trump literally … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}