America

Europe has come up with a way to hit back at Donald Trump. What began last week as a suggestion that the continent’s football nations should boycott this summer’s World Cup has grown into a popular campaign. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, the man who first floated the idea was Oke Goettlich, a senior member of the German Football Association’s executive committee and one of its eleven vice presidents. ‘What were the justifications for the boycotts of the Olympic games in the 1980s?’ said Goettlich, referring to the US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the USSR’s retaliation four years later. ‘By my reckoning,

If one is in any doubt as to Great Britain’s decline and fall, look no further than 20 January, when we alienated ourselves from our once-held global status and from our allies and partners. Donald Trump took to social media that morning to declare that Britain’s deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius was an ‘act of great stupidity’. The US president followed this up by telling Keir Starmer to ‘fix your country’. Never had truer words been spoken. Several hours later, the British government gave the green light for the construction of a new Chinese super-embassy in London. That decision demonstrated not a care in the world

Can Donald Trump veto the UK’s cession of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius? And if he can, does he want to? On Tuesday, he termed it an act of ‘great stupidity’, which certainly seems to imply opposition. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, followed up to say that the UK was ‘letting down’ the US by handing over the Islands to Mauritius. But Sir Keir Starmer was unmoved during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, claiming that in denouncing the Chagos deal Trump was simply trying to put pressure on the UK to abandon Denmark and Greenland, which Starmer of course rightly refused to do. The implication, which may be correct, is that Trump does not really

The world is in a dangerously volatile state, with multiple fires burning simultaneously. At precisely the moment when calm leadership and strategic coherence are required, one individual appears determined not to extinguish the flames but to pour petrol upon them. The most baffling and potentially destabilising of these fires is Donald Trump’s expressed desire to ‘own’ Greenland, ostensibly to protect America from Russian and Chinese threats. This proposition is comprehensively illogical. Greenland is already protected. It is a de facto Nato territory, and the Nato alliance exists precisely to defend the North Atlantic. The clue, as ever, is in the name. Greenland sits squarely within the alliance’s defensive umbrella, and

When Donald Trump stood up at Davos today and repeated his ambition to acquire Greenland, he did more than revive one of his own fixations. He offered a live demonstration of how the world now works. Here was a US president discussing the future of allied territory in the language of interest, security and leverage, not law or precedent. He may have ruled out the use of force, but that did not alter the underlying point: power, not process, was doing the talking. If anyone still doubts that the post-Cold War rules-based order has given way to something more transactional and harder-edged, Greenland should put the matter beyond dispute. It

A Tesla would whisk you to the airport. The planes would be self-flying. And robots would serve the over-priced sandwiches, while, inevitably, every seat is hooked up to a live X feed. A full-scale takeover of Ryanair by Elon Musk may still be some way off, but with the billionaire polling his followers on X on whether he should make a bid for the budget airline, it is no longer impossible. Ryanair’s long-suffering passengers should welcome the prospect of a Musk takeover – because, while the airline revolutionised low-cost travel, Ryanair is stuck in a rut. The spat between Elon Musk, and Ryanair’s pugnacious CEO Michael O’Leary is certainly entertaining

When Donald Trump sets his sights on something, it’s hard to prevent him getting what he wants. That hasn’t, however, stopped Greenland and Denmark from trying. The Danish army has announced that, from today, it is boosting its presence on Greenland. It will be backed up by a cohort of European troops, arriving over the coming days as part of an effort to prove to the US that Copenhagen can secure the island’s defences. Earlier today, France confirmed that 15 troops had arrived on the island. In the coming hours they will be joined by 13 soldiers from Germany, two from Norway, one from Britain, one from the Netherlands and an undisclosed