Macron “will be in contact all day with his European counterparts and will ask, in the name of France, for the activation of the Anti-Coercion Instrument,” his team said on Sunday ahead of an emergency meeting of EU ambassadors to discuss how to respond to Trump’s latest tariff announcement.
Relations between Washington and Europe have been rocky for months as the U.S. president has wavered on support for Ukraine, pressured EU countries into accepting a lopsided trade deal and forced NATO allies to massively increase their spending on defense.
Even at the height of those tensions, EU leaders stopped short of hitting back — arguing that the risk of having the United States pull out of NATO was greater than any bad trade deal.
But now, as Trump ramps up his claims on Greenland, sparking protests over the weekend in the streets of Nuuk and Copenhagen, European leaders are facing increasingly loud calls to drop their softly-softly approach and prepare for confrontation. The fact that Trump triggered his tariffs just after the EU signed a major trade deal with Latin American countries is only deepening the sense of resolve among some Europeans.
“I’m convinced that we must not give in,” said Jérémie Gallon, a former French diplomat and current senior managing director at McLarty Associates, an international strategic advisory firm based in Washington. “Resisting a new attempt at humiliation and vassalization is the only way Europe can finally assert itself as a geopolitical actor.”
“The EU should be prepared to deploy targeted and proportionate countermeasures,” Valérie Hayer, head of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament, posted on X late Saturday. “The activation of the EU Anti-Coercion Instrument should be explicitly considered, as it was designed precisely for situations of economic intimidation of this nature.”