Donald Trump’s latest sabre-rattling over Greenland, complete with the threat of punitive tariffs on European allies, has done more than jolt the transatlantic relationship.
It has exposed, once again, an uncomfortable truth at the heart of the European Union: when confronted with a fast-moving geopolitical crisis, the EU’s leadership model looks curiously ill-suited to the moment.
The European Commission’s response was swift in tone, if not in substance. Ursula von der Leyen warned of a “downward spiral”, the familiar Brussels phrase deployed when events are slipping beyond its comfortable zone of managed consensus. Yet the episode has underlined how limited the Commission’s authority really is when power politics intrudes. It can issue statements, convene meetings, and draft communiqués — but it cannot truly act.
This is not a personal failing of the current Commission president. It is a structural one. The EU still operates on what might be called a “Commission-down” model of leadership: executive authority concentrated in an unelected body whose legitimacy derives indirectly from member states, rather than directly from European voters. In an age of transactional geopolitics and muscular statecraft, that model is showing its age and its’ inadequacies.
Trump’s tariff threat — tying trade penalties to European resistance over Greenland — would once have been dismissed as implausible. Today it is a live test of European resolve. The Commission can warn, but it cannot negotiate with democratic authority. It can caution against escalation, but it cannot credibly retaliate without laborious consultation. Above all, it cannot speak with the political weight of a body that Europeans feel they have chosen.
What is striking is how member states have finally begun to recognise this inadequacy. Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen did not wait for Brussels to take the lead. They spoke for themselves, forcefully and politically, because they understand that sovereignty — even pooled sovereignty — still requires visible, accountable leadership. The Commission follows; the capitals act.
This growing dissonance raises a question that has long been whispered in European circles but rarely confronted openly: is the European Commission still fit for purpose as the EU’s executive?
The idea that Europe’s most powerful institution is staffed by commissioners most voters could not name, appointed through opaque bargains between governments, is increasingly hard to justify. The EU now claims to be a geopolitical actor, yet its executive lacks the basic democratic mandate expected of such a role. That tension is no longer theoretical. Greenland has made it tangible.
There is an alternative — one that would have been unthinkable when the EU was primarily a regulatory and economic project, but which deserves serious consideration today. Why should executive authority not rest with a directly elected, publicly accountable European executive, rooted in the European Parliament?
The Parliament is the only EU institution with a direct democratic mandate. Yet it remains curiously sidelined, its elections treated as second-order contests and its influence diluted by the Commission’s monopoly on executive initiative. A rebalancing — or even a replacement — would not be a federalist fantasy, but a pragmatic response to reality.
A Europe that wishes to stand up to American pressure, Russian aggression or Chinese leverage cannot do so through press releases alone. It needs leaders who can credibly claim to speak for European citizens, not merely for treaty provisions. A directly elected executive, emerging from parliamentary majorities and subject to parliamentary scrutiny, would at least allow voters to know who is responsible — and to remove them if they fail.
Critics will argue that dismantling the Commission would destabilise the Union. In truth, the greater danger lies in preserving an arrangement that no longer commands confidence at home or respect abroad. The EU already suffers from a perception of distance and technocratic aloofness. Persisting with an unelected executive while asking Europeans to accept ever greater geopolitical risk is a recipe for cynicism.
None of this implies abandoning cooperation or undermining the single market. On the contrary, clearer political accountability would strengthen Europe’s hand abroad. Allies — and adversaries — respond to power they can recognise. They struggle to engage with committees and collective leadership statements.
Trump’s Greenland gambit may yet fizzle out. But its deeper significance should not be ignored. It has revealed a Union caught between ambition and architecture: eager to act like a power, yet governed like a permanent conference.
If the EU is serious about learning the lessons of this crisis, it should look inward as well as outward. The problem is not simply American unpredictability. It is Europe’s reluctance to finish the job of democratic leadership it began decades ago.
