Greenland tensions continue at Davos
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The World Economic Forum in Switzerland has been dominated by President Trump's ambition to take control of Greenland and his threat to impose tariffs on European countries that resist. President Macron of France accused the US of trying to weaken and subordinate Europe.
Also in the programme: A new ceasefire announced in Syria; and we hear from the Ugandan opposition leader, Bobi Wine.
(Picture: France's President Emmanuel Macron at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Credit: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.3 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. |
| 0:15.3 | I'm Tim Franks. And we begin with two questions. What is going on and what is to be done? Simple questions to the point of banality, you might think. But as it happens, questions whose possible answers seem to be confounding much of the Western world at the moment. Donald Trump, a year to the day since he returned to the White House, appears to be a man unbound, a man who locks on to certain ambitions |
| 0:40.3 | which convention, or to be more specific, the liberal Western rules-based |
| 0:46.0 | multilateral consensus has recoiled at. |
| 0:49.7 | You can't do that, the guardians of the consensus have insisted. |
| 0:56.4 | Watch me, has been President Trump's retort. Most recently and most prominently, of course, has been the President's insistence that the |
| 1:01.7 | US will annex Greenland, the semi-autonomous Danish territory, which has prompted some |
| 1:06.9 | unusually strong pushback today from European leaders. |
| 1:12.7 | They've been gathering at the International Summit at the political and business elite and the Swiss ski resort of Davos. |
| 1:16.6 | First to the lectern today, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. |
| 1:21.9 | Of course, nostalgia is part of our human story, |
| 1:24.8 | but nostalgia will not bring back the old order. |
| 1:28.3 | And playing for time and hoping for things to revert soon will not fix the structural dependencies we have. |
| 1:38.3 | So my point is, if this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently too. It is time to seize |
| 1:50.8 | this opportunity and build a new independent Europe. So that was in a sense the answer to the |
| 1:58.4 | second question, what is to be done? As for the first, |
| 2:01.4 | what is actually going on? Well, there were then these trenchant words from the French |
| 2:07.1 | President Emmanuel Macron, not mentioning the US by name, but saying, it's a shift towards a world |
| 2:14.0 | without rules. Where international law is trampled underfoot, and where the only law that seems to matter |
| 2:22.8 | is that of the strongest, and imperial ambitions are resurfacing. |
| 2:29.2 | Even the calm tones of the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney carried this challenging |
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