European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said Wednesday that the United States “is behaving very strangely” for an ally, amid tensions over US President Donald Trump’s bid to acquire Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.
Gatekeepers News reports that speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, Lagarde highlighted the growing rift between Washington and Europe, noting that Trump’s threats of tariffs and other trade restrictions against countries opposing his Greenland ambitions are “not really behaving like an ally.”
“When you are allies under the North Atlantic Treaty, when you have been allies for decades and have been part of each other’s history, threatening to seize territory that is clearly not for sale, such as Greenland, and waving tariff restrictions… is not really behaving like an ally,” she said.
Lagarde said she was not planning a personal meeting with Trump, but would pay close attention to his speech at the forum.
“Once President Trump has redefined his position this afternoon in Davos, it will allow Europeans to determine what they are going to do together. For me, what seems fundamental is unity and determination,” she added.
Speaking later on a panel, Lagarde also warned that increased protectionism and fragmented data policies could hinder global economic growth, particularly in the artificial intelligence sector.
“If you ask the ‘big spenders’ in AI what they need, they will say access to data as large as possible, they will say scale. Now that would be significantly jeopardised if we have limited access to data because of different privacy laws around the world and more protectionist barriers that would prevent the scaling of this investment,” she said.
Lagarde’s comments come amid growing concern in Europe over the US’s increasingly unilateral foreign policy and its potential economic repercussions.
