Donald Trump came to Europe expecting to dominate it. Instead, he was sent away with a flea in his ear.

Like many people watching this drama unfold, I was preparing myself for the worst. A new generation of gunboat diplomacy, the dissolution of Nato and the fracturing of the rules-based order. 

However, the row over Greenland tells us something important about the world we are now living in – something to give us hope. Trump arrived armed with threats, tariffs and performative bluster, assuming that European countries could be picked off one by one. He assumed that pressure would fracture solidarity, that intimidation would produce concessions, and Europe would blink.

It didn’t. Europe closed ranks.

What Trump discovered is that Europe recognised his playbook because it has lived it, refined it, and ultimately abandoned it.

Europe invented coercive power politics. For centuries, European states built empires through a ruthless blend of military force, trade pressure, legal fictions and strategic intimidation. They perfected the art of getting what they wanted without always firing a shot. They learned how to extract concessions, how to divide opponents, how to cloak power in respectability.

Europe knows exactly how coercion works because it once ruled much of the world through it.

But Europe also learned something else, the hard way. When empires collapse and there are no weaker territories left to dominate, coercion between peers does not produce stability. It produces catastrophe.

Twice in the twentieth century, European states tore themselves apart in wars of unprecedented scale. Those wars were not accidents. They were the logical endpoint of unrestrained power politics between economically, militarily and organisationally comparable nations. By 1945, the lesson was unavoidable. Among equals, intimidation does not deliver lasting advantage. It delivers ruin.

That is why post-war Europe rebuilt itself on alliances, law and economic interdependence. Not out of sentimentality, but out of survival. Institutions were not designed to express virtue – they are the bedrock of the bloc. They were designed to prevent a return to the world that had nearly destroyed the continent.

This is the context that Trump, who has an instinctive hatred for strong institutions, misread in respect of Greenland.

When he threatened tariffs to force European acquiescence, he expected compliance. Instead, European leaders treated the threat as what it was: an attempt at coercive bargaining. They responded collectively, legally and calmly. The result was telling. The tariffs were shelved. Sovereignty was upheld. Trump was left claiming a vague “framework” and a promise to talk, more or less the outcome he would have achieved had he asked nicely in the first place… and with far less damage to his own credibility.

Europe did not defeat Trump by matching his bluster with bluster. While it did escalate the situation – with the implicit threat to deploy the anti-coercion instrument or “trade bazooka” – it did so legally, collectively and predictably. That is what Trump’s style of coercion cannot easily overcome.

In an increasingly illiberal world, it was a demonstration that liberal societies do not reject the use of power. We reject arbitrary power. The anti-coercion instrument is power made legible, constrained and accountable. It is escalation with rules, not escalation driven by ego.

The danger now is that Trump won’t have learned restraint from this episode. The risk is he will now pivot towards weaker states, places where institutions are thinner, alliances looser, and resistance more costly.

But the Greenland episode should give liberals confidence. When voters ask why liberals defend international law, alliances and European cooperation, the answer is simple:

Because we know what happens when power goes unchecked. Europe tried intimidation, empire and might-makes-right. It didn’t end well. The rules-based order isn’t naïve. It’s the lesson Europe learned from its own worst mistakes.

* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames