00:00is our correspondent in Brussels joining us live. Dave, a very good evening to you.
00:04What's the latest you can tell us from where you are?
00:09Well, all the leaders have arrived and they are now getting their meeting started up there.
00:15This is a weird one because this summit was called as an emergency summit
00:19in reaction to Trump's tariff threats on Saturday. But then last night he rescinded that threat.
00:24So we were left with the question of whether the summit was still happening.
00:27They decided to go ahead with it and bill it as kind of a broad discussion about transatlantic relations.
00:34But based on what the EU leaders were saying as they were coming in here over the last two hours,
00:39it's clear that everybody has a very different perspective about what just happened here.
00:43If you heard that soundbite from President Macron before, he believes that Trump backed down
00:48because the EU was tough, because Europe was tough, I should say, sending troops to Greenland,
00:54threatening to use the anti-coercion instrument. It's because the EU, Europe stood up to Trump
01:01that he backed down. However, you could hear from the comments of several others like Italy's prime
01:06minister, Georgia Maloney, the leader of Lithuania, several others saying that, no, no, no,
01:11this was a result of European calmness. This was a result of Europeans wanting to negotiate with Trump.
01:17So you really have a different perspective. I don't think people, the leaders aren't in agreement
01:22right now about the narrative of the past several days. And that's going to be a problem
01:28because they need to decide tonight whether they're going to task the commission with drawing up
01:34and preparing that anti-coercion instrument to use in case Donald Trump decides to go ahead
01:40with those threats after all. You heard all kinds of perspectives on this. It is clear that there is not
01:47unanimous approval to ask the commission to do that. There's several leaders. From what I could hear
01:53from Germany's Chancellor Merz and also Italy's Maloney, they're worried that asking the commission
01:59to draw that up is going to provoke Donald Trump and that you would undo the good development of last night
02:06because all of a sudden he can go back and say, how dare you draw up that plan? I am going to tariff you.
02:11But France, for instance, is very insistent that that needs to be drawn up, not to use it,
02:17but just to have it prepared and ready to go. Because the thing is, preparing the anti-coercion
02:23instrument, we're told, is going to take three months. So if they wait until the United States
02:29is actually tariffing the U.S., it will take three months to draw it up. If you start preparing it
02:33now, it makes it a much more credible threat because Europe can start using it at the drop of a hat.
02:39Is this then, David, part of what Emmanuel Macron is talking about? Europe needs to remain vigilant
02:45regardless of the fact that Trump has made this U-turn.
02:52Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's also where they're clearly divided because you had some leaders coming in
02:57just now really, you know, heaving a sigh of relief. Thank goodness everything's back to normal.
03:02And then you had others like the Danish prime minister, like the French president,
03:07cautioning, yeah, let's wait and see where we need to remain vigilant here. Because, you know,
03:13it's still not even clear. I don't think it's even clear to the Danish prime minister
03:16what this deal was last night between the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Donald Trump.
03:23We've got kind of an outline now, we think, but it's basically just describing the arrangements
03:29that were already in place for the United States, which already, because of its treaty with Denmark,
03:34enjoys basically unlimited access to putting its troops in Greenland, to building bases.
03:39It doesn't appear that any concessions were actually made, but I think that European leaders
03:44are hesitant to actually point that out. They kind of want to go along with the fiction here
03:49that there was a deal and that concessions were made so that Donald Trump can sell that to his
03:55supporters. They don't want to humiliate him. They're trying to give him off ramps in which he
04:01can still sell this as a victory. But if the deal is, as has been described as Bloomberg was reporting
04:08tonight, it really is simply the status quo restated. Strange times, David. Thank you for
04:14explaining the ins and outs. Dave Keating, our correspondent, joining us there from Brussels.
Comments