Two experts have told Euronews that the EU must ready itself to stand firm in the face of belligerence from an incoming Donald Trump regime.
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00:00Donald Trump is returning to the White House and already he wants to take over Greenland,
00:12adopt Canada as the 51st state, and some of his team have talked about interfering in
00:17European politics.
00:18So what can Europe do?
00:19How can the EU respond?
00:21I catch up with Guntram Wolff, the senior fellow at Bruegel and professor of economics
00:26at ULB, and Georg Grekeles, a senior policy director at the European Policy Centre, for
00:31a look ahead at what's in store for 2025.
00:37Welcome to the Europe Conversation.
00:38I'm joined in studio by Guntram Wolff, professor of economics at ULB and a senior fellow at
00:44Bruegel, and Georg Grekeles, associate director at the European Policy Centre.
00:49Thank you very much for joining us.
00:51We have a lot to look forward to in 2025.
00:54A much more aggressive Trump White House, you might agree.
00:58I might just start with you, Guntram, because we've seen, before Christmas and very much
01:03into January, what looks like potential interference in the German elections by Elon Musk.
01:09As a German yourself, how do you feel about this?
01:12Do you think it's overplayed?
01:13Well, I would start, I think we were all taken aback by how aggressive both Musk and Donald
01:19Trump have been in this first half of January, really not attacking Russia or China, but
01:27really attacking allies, right, verbally.
01:30But with big announcements that Elon Musk has had a huge campaign against the UK current
01:35sitting government, and that has raised alarm bells all across Europe.
01:39And of course, yes, he has been involved in Germany.
01:43He has had an interview with Alice Weidel, the top candidate from the Alternative für Deutschland,
01:49the far right party.
01:52Now, is that undue or overextended interference?
01:57I would say the interview as such is fine.
02:00I don't think the interview is really a problem.
02:03What is a problem is if the algorithm of X gets manipulated to really drive far right content.
02:11But Georg, Europe has the tools there, has the Digital Services Act when it comes to,
02:15as what Guntram talked about, the algorithms.
02:19Is there a political will to act?
02:21Because we also saw just before Christmas, J.D. Vance, the vice president, saying that
02:27if there was any sort of interference from Europe to try to restrict what Elon Musk or
02:31X or social media are doing, that he would force the US administration to maybe reduce
02:36support for NATO.
02:37I mean, it's very complex.
02:39We need a political will to act.
02:41This is dead serious.
02:43This is about fundamental threats to our democracies.
02:46It is about the destructuring of our public space, the promotion of lies, of extreme content,
02:55which will make the exercise of democracy progressively more difficult or impossible.
03:02Like Guntram is saying, the problem is not an interview with the IFJ, that's freedom
03:05of expression.
03:06The problem is if these platforms have algorithms that are used to amplify lies.
03:13And that's not an acceptable period.
03:15We have not had rules against this in Europe for a long time, for too long.
03:20But now we do.
03:21It's called the Digital Services Act.
03:24It's really complex, though, because do we risk US support at NATO for Ukraine, which
03:28is existential, but at the same time we have to defend the rules that are necessary when
03:34it comes to disinformation which impacts democracy?
03:36Well, I would say you always have to stand up to bullying.
03:39If you give in immediately, the demands will only increase.
03:43And there's no guarantee whatsoever that if you don't stand up to X and bullying on X,
03:51that then all of a sudden all security problems will be solved.
03:54I mean, so let's be realistic here.
03:57This is quite a systematic confrontation of Europe and key European values.
04:05And it comes from, I think, a very unprecedented situation, one where the richest person on
04:12the planet has also direct access to the US president, meaning he has also full political
04:19support from the most powerful person on the planet.
04:23And on top of it, he has control of a major media outlet.
04:27So we have, I think, a combination of concentration of power in media, in business and in politics
04:35in one person.
04:36And if you leave that unaddressed, you basically accept that an outside billionaire with all
04:42these three powers massively intervenes into Europe and starts setting the agenda and shapes
04:48politics well beyond anything that we've seen before.
04:53So my view is we have to invest in security ourselves.
04:57We have to invest in security of Ukraine very rapidly.
04:59And what do you think is the game here?
05:02I just was listening to an interview from Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, who
05:07said, Musk just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump.
05:10If he puts the same amount of money into all of Europe that he put behind Trump, he'll
05:14flip every nation to a populist agenda.
05:17It is certainly very worrying.
05:20I think this is not about left versus right anymore in any way, really.
05:25This is about, like Guntram was saying, an agenda that has nothing to do with the respect
05:31for democracy, the respect for the rule of law, and very, very strong intent of intervention
05:43into the functioning of our society.
05:44And what we're seeing in the international sphere, the relations between countries, the
05:50big power games, which now are all about might is right, well, this is the same thing we
05:55see in the economic sphere, in the media sphere, represented by Musk.
05:59And this is what one needs to stand up to.
06:02A, should have been preparing for that after the first Trump presidency, but B, I mean,
06:08he's in two days' time going to be in power.
06:11And we still will be relying on support through NATO for him not to apply tariffs in the way
06:17that he has.
06:18I mean, is Europe really just totally vulnerable now?
06:21Well, Europe hasn't sit idly since the first election of Donald Trump.
06:27When Donald Trump was first elected, collective European spending on defence was 1.3% of GDP.
06:33We are now above 2%.
06:35So we've seen quite a turnaround on defence spending.
06:38It's still not sufficient.
06:39We're going to have to increase that further.
06:41But the truth is that the US is our biggest ally, and the whole European construction
06:48has been extremely centred on a transatlantic relation.
06:52And if that relation goes sour, the European Union and all the member states really have
06:59a big problem.
07:00And the degree of policy response will have to be an order of magnitude bigger than it
07:07has been so far.
07:08And that will be a big challenge.
07:11And my biggest fear is that our domestic political systems, national political systems, they're
07:17actually far away from really getting to do the kind of things we are talking about
07:22here.
07:23Like what?
07:24What would you say?
07:25Well, we have an election in Germany and, you know, the German debate is about do we
07:27support three billion for Ukraine, yes or no?
07:31Which is ridiculous.
07:32Of course we should.
07:33It's a ridiculous amount of money compared to the size of the German economy.
07:37So yes, Germany has been a big supporter of Ukraine, but it's by far not big enough.
07:44And the same in France.
07:45We have a political situation that is very fragile.
07:48We are undoing a pension reform that is really important for the sustainability, long-term
07:54sustainability of French public finances.
07:57So we have really very deep political divisions within our societies.
08:03And that makes the implementation of an appropriate policy response really difficult.
08:08When you say policy response, what do you mean, though?
08:11Well, I mean, we need more defence spending.
08:14That's an economic incentive against tariffs.
08:17Should the EU respond likewise?
08:18In tariffs, we have to be prepared to have retaliatory tariffs against the US.
08:24Absolutely.
08:25Geir, one of the things that we discussed before was Timothy Schneider, who is the professor
08:30of an expert in totalitarianism.
08:32And he said that the language around invading Greenland, Canada becoming the 51st state,
08:40the Panama Canal is the language of Putin in 2013.
08:43I mean, that might be over-egging it a bit, but it still is an imperialistic language
08:50coming from the White House before they even take over.
08:53I think he's right.
08:54And I think it's important that he says so and that we are clear about this.
09:00What we're hearing from Trump, from Trump Jr., from a lot of sort of the MAGA crowd
09:07is language with respect to, like you said, Canada, Greenland, Panama, which is about
09:16suggesting that borders don't matter.
09:18I don't want to put Russia and the US and the future US administration on an equal footing.
09:24But this is very dangerous to start going down that road in terms of the norms we defend.
09:30So yes, I think Timothy Schneider is very, very right in pointing this out.
09:34But do you think there's therefore this lacking of leadership here in Brussels and across
09:38the EU then?
09:39Because really the language over the past few months since Trump became president-elect
09:44has been, we'll wait and see.
09:46I think the European institutions have shown more leadership on issues such as Ukraine
09:52than most of the national leaders.
09:55So I think at the end of the day, we have a leadership vacuum in Germany.
10:00The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who's up for election and who failed his traffic
10:07light coalition just last year, has been showing insufficient leadership, clearly.
10:13I mean, Germany has not shown the kind of leadership that the biggest country in the
10:18centre of Europe in a situation of war has to show.
10:21So I think Germany is a big issue.
10:23But also France, France is an issue with the very divided politics at the moment.
10:28So I would really think it's more than at the national level.
10:31And then, of course, you've got member states like Slovakia, Hungary, who are not supportive
10:36of Ukraine, potentially Austria as well.
10:39So you don't have the unity within the EU either.
10:42Absolutely.
10:43There has been a clear element of lack of leadership.
10:45I mean, if you think back to the beginning of the Ukraine war or the Brussels aggression
10:49on Ukraine, the question was whether we could send helmets almost.
10:55So this we have not been able to react to quickly enough.
10:59We put too much effort or thought into thinking that sanctions would solve it and too little
11:04efforts into gearing up weapon support.
11:07So these are very clear elements.
11:11What sort of gives me hope at the beginning of this year is seeing, for instance, the
11:15prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, who used to be, well, Denmark used to be one
11:20of the frugals, saying no more money to the EU budget.
11:23And Finns also talked about defence bonds as well.
11:26Exactly.
11:27What Mette Frederiksen is saying this beginning of the year is no taboos anymore.
11:32And I think that's the kind of discourse we need to have coming out of Berlin, coming
11:36out of Paris, and the capacity to act from Madrid, from Rome and so on and so forth,
11:41if we want to hold the future in our own hands.
11:43OK, well, Gunther Wolff, Professor of Economics at ULB and Senior Fellow at Bruegel, and Georg
11:49Rakeles, Associate Director at the European Policy Centre, thank you very much for joining
11:53us on the Europe Conversation.
11:54Thank you so much.
11:55Thanks for having us.