Lord Peter Mandelson, the British Ambassador in Washington until last September, when he stepped down after his close connections to Jeffrey Epstein were revealed, is giddy with the prospects of U.S. President Donald Trump’s might-makes-right “diplomacy” in Venezuela. Trump’s “dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve,” Mandelson wrote in an op-ed published in The Spectator on Jan. 7. “It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolás Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t,” he wrote.
“Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this brutal reality. The future of Greenland is being misunderstood. Trump is not going to ‘invade’ it. He doesn’t need to. He’s already there. What will happen is that the threats to Arctic security posed by China and Russia will crystallize in European minds, performative statements about ‘sovereignty’ and NATO’s future will fade, and serious discussion will take over.”
