Euroviews. Trump will abandon the climate fight. This could be Europe’s gain

Whether it is taking Greenland by force, reclaiming the Panama Canal, or making Canada America’s 51st State, what President-Elect Donald Trump’s actual foreign policy looks like when he moves back into the White House on Monday is anyone’s guess.

The same applies to trade: on the one hand, Trump has already announced prominent foreign investment deals including Dubai’s Damac Properties putting $20 billion (€19.4bn) into building data centres in eight US states on 7 January. On the other, he has threatened a blanket tariff of 10% on all foreign imports (60% on China) that already has European nations worried.

Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) says growth in the UK could fall by as much as 0.7 percentage points in the first two years if Trump makes good on his tariffs. Trump argues that his tariffs — along with cutting corporate income tax from 35% to 21% — will incentivise foreign companies to invest in American manufacturing plants.

To be fair, Trump didn’t invent economic protectionism: it was US President Joe Biden who forced a Saudi Aramco-backed venture capital firm to sell its shares in a Silicon Valley AI chip startup owned by Sam Altman and blocked Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation from acquiring a steel mill from US Steel over national security concerns. This despite a raft of genuinely quite generous concessions from the Japanese company over production and job protections.

But investors don’t like unpredictability, and Trump’s erratic and often contradictory statements on free trade, foreign investment and everything else in recent weeks will have done little to reassure them. Hardly a hotbed of stability and reasonableness at the best of times, Europe looks like a safe pair of