The head of the U.S. oil industry’s top lobbying group said Tuesday that American producers are prepared to be a “stabilizing force” in Iran if the regime there falls — even as they remain skeptical about returning to Venezuela after the capture of leader Nicolás Maduro. “This is good news for the Iranian people — they’re taking freedom into their own hands,” American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers said of the mass protests that have embroiled Iran in recent days. President Donald Trump is said to be weighing his options for potential actions against the Iranian government in response to its violent crackdown on the protests. “Our industry is committed to being a stabilizing force in Iran if they decide to overturn the regime,” Sommers told reporters following API’s annual State of American Energy event in Washington. “It’s an important oil play in the world, about the sixth-largest producer now — they could absolutely do more,” he said of the country. Iran’s oil industry, despite being ravaged by years of U.S. sanctions, is still considered to be structurally sound, unlike that of Venezuela’s. In order for companies to return to Venezuela, on the other hand, they will need long-term investment certainty, operational security and rule of law — all of which will take significant time, Sommers said. “If they get those three big things right, I think there will be investment going to Venezuela,” he said. Background: Experts who spoke earlier from the stage at API’s event also underscored the differences between Iran and Venezuela, whose oil infrastructure has deteriorated under years of neglect from the socialist regime. “Iran was able to add production under the weight of the most aggressive sanctions the U.S. could possibly deploy,” said Kevin Book, managing director at the energy research firm ClearView Energy Partners. “Imagine what they could do with Western engineering.” Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said the prospects for growing Iran’s oil production are “completely different” from Venezuela’s. “You can imagine our industry going back there — we would get a lot more oil, a lot sooner than we will out of Venezuela,” McNally said. “That’s more conventional oil right near infrastructure, and gas as well.” No equity stakes: Sommers told reporters that API would oppose any efforts by the Trump administration to take a stake in oil companies that invest in Venezuela. The administration has taken direct equity stakes in a range of U.S. companies in a bid to boost the growth of sectors it sees as a geopolitical priority, such as semiconductor manufacturing and critical minerals. “We would be opposed to the United States government taking a stake in any American oil and gas companies, period,” Sommers said. “We’d have to know a little bit more about what the administration is proposing in terms of stake in [Venezuelan state-owned oil company] PdVSA, but we’re not for the nationalization of oil companies or for there to be a national oil company in the United States.”

LONDON — The U.K. government must “dare to have principles” and help Greenland repel threats by Donald Trump, a senior minister in Greenland’s government told lawmakers in London.  Speaking after a briefing with MPs in the U.K. parliament Tuesday, Greenland’s Business and Energy Minister Naaja Nathanielsen said: “Dialogue is really, really what is needed at this point. And … even though problems in this world [are] complex, this should not be a reason not to go into these complex dialogues. They can be solved through dialogue instead of violence and force.”  Nathanielsen held the meetings amid growing pressure from the White House, where Trump is ramping up his threats to take control of Greenland — a minerals-rich, semi-autonomous territory within Denmark — including by military force.  The region is essential to securing U.S. security against threats from Russia and China, Trump claims. The U.S. will take over Greenland “the easy way” or “the hard way,” he said last week.  Nathanielsen said: “We feel betrayed. We feel that the rhetoric is offensive, as we have stated many times before — but also bewildering, because we have done nothing but support the notion that Greenland is a part of the American national self-interest.”  Nathanielsen made her plea to politicians in London after Denmark warned U.S. aggression would cripple the NATO military alliance. The leaders of Denmark and Greenland both say Greenland is “not for sale”.  DEAR KEIR Asked about the message she was bringing to U.K. politicians and Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Nathanielsen said: “To insist on having the dialogue, even though it’s difficult, to dare to have principles and belief in international law. I think we will all be asked about that in the next couple of years.”  She said she would “like to repeat my gratitude” for Starmer’s support of Greenland, and said the U.K. must “insist upon the global community upholding international law” and “stress the relevance of NATO as a relevant and important alliance.” Starmer has warned Trump that Greenland’s future must be decided by Denmark and Greenland alone. Danish PM Mette Frederiksen has told the U.S. it has no right to the Arctic territory.  But the U.K. leader is also keen not to get into fights with Trump on too many fronts, at a time when his government is trying to both secure a favorable U.S. trade deal and influence the White House’s approach to striking peace between Russia and Ukraine.  Trump says that securing Greenland is essential for bolstering U.S. security. But Nordic governments have rejected his claims that Chinese and Russian vessels are operating in waters near Greenland.   Nathanielsen said Greenland did not “detect an actual threat” but was “quite content” with increased monitoring around the Arctic.  Leaders in Greenland are clear that “we have no intention of becoming American” and are “quite happy with being part of the Kingdom of Denmark,” she stressed.   She would not be drawn on whether Greenland would expect backing from NATO allies, including the U.K. if the U.S. were to invade Greenland.  Keir Starmer has warned Trump that Greenland’s future must be decided by Denmark and Greenland alone. | Pool Photo by Ludovic Marin via EPA “If this scenario was to happen, I think everybody in this room and everybody in your countries would have to figure out: What is this new world order about?” she said.   In that scenario “we would all be under attack,” she added.  END OF APPEASEMENT One British MP who helped organized Nathanielsen’s visit said it was time for the U.K. government to take a firmer line on Trump’s aggression in the region.  “I have a huge sympathy, because I know and I can understand it. If you’re sitting in a foreign office right now, then this is a problem which would keep you awake at night,” said Brendan O’Hara, a Scottish National Party MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Greenland.   But the time for “trying to keep this guy [Trump] on board” has gone, O’Hara added.  “I don’t blame them for trying. But when you appease somebody to this extent, and then they still openly talk about invading a NATO ally — it’s incredible,” he said.   Dywne Ryan Menezes, founder of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative think tank, which also helped organize Tuesday’s briefing, said the U.K. could do more to show its support for Greenland.   “I’ve been saying for years now: With Greenland, we can’t see it as a small country. 
It might be a small country population-wise, but it is a geopolitical giant that’s getting hotter by the day,” he said.  Menezes urged ministers to prioritize free trade talks with Greenland. “It’s one thing we can do to demonstrate that, you know, we take it seriously. It is action, and not just words.”  Nathanielsen said she was meeting a trade minister from the Labour government, Chris Bryant, later on Tuesday, as part of “very early discussions” on a possible free trade agreement between the two countries.  “Of course, when hopefully all of this cools down a bit, that you continue your collaboration investments in Greenland, we are quite happy about your partnerships,” she added.  BIG DAYS But the future of Greenland, she acknowledged, may not lie in its own hands. Foreign ministers from Greenland and Denmark are set to meet U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington Wednesday. Greenland officials hope the meeting will allow them a better understanding of the “actual wishes from the American side,” Nathanielsen said.   Asked whether a deal proposing U.S. control should be put to a vote inside Greenland, she agreed this was essential.   “I think we should be able to have a say ourselves in the future of our lives. For others, this might be a piece of land, but for us it’s home.” 

BRUSSELS — On Greenland’s southern tip, surrounded by snowy peaks and deep fjords, lies Kvanefjeld — a mining project that shows the giant, barren island is more than just a coveted military base. Beneath the icy ground sits a major deposit of neodymium and praseodymium, rare earth elements used to make magnets that are essential to build wind turbines, electric vehicles and high-tech military equipment. If developed, Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, would become the first European territory to produce these key strategic metals. Energy Transition Minerals, an Australia-based, China-backed mining company, is ready to break ground. But neither Copenhagen, Brussels nor the Greenlandic government have mobilized their state power to make the project happen. In 2009, Denmark handed Greenland’s inhabitants control of their natural resources; 12 years later the Greenlandic government blocked the mine because the rare earths are mixed with radioactive uranium. Since then the project has been in limbo, bogged down in legal disputes. “Kvanefjeld illustrates how political and regulatory uncertainty — combined with geopolitics and high capital requirements — makes even strategically important projects hard to move from potential to production,” Jeppe Kofod, Denmark’s former foreign minister and now a strategic adviser to Energy Transition Minerals, told POLITICO. Kvanefjeld’s woes are emblematic of Greenland’s broader problems. Despite having enough of some rare earth elements to supply as much as 25 percent of the world’s needs — not to mention oil and gas reserves nearly as great as those of the United States, and lots of other potential clean energy metals including copper, graphite and nickel — these resources are almost entirely undeveloped. Just two small mines, extracting gold and a niche mineral called feldspar used in glassmaking and ceramics, are up and running in Greenland. And until very recently, neither Denmark nor the European Union showed much interest in changing the situation. But that was before 2023, when the EU signed a memorandum of understanding with the Greenland government to cooperate on mining projects. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act, proposed the same year, is an attempt to catch up by building new mines both in and out of the bloc that singles out Greenland’s potential. Last month, the European Commission committed to contribute financing to Greenland’s Malmbjerg molybdenum mine in a bid to shore up a supply of the metal for the EU’s defense sector.  But with United States President Donald Trump threatening to take Greenland by force, and less likely to offer the island’s inhabitants veto power over mining projects, Europe may be too late to the party. “The EU has for many years had a limited strategic engagement in Greenland’s critical raw materials, meaning that Europe today risks having arrived late, just as the United States and China have intensified their interest,” Kofod said. In a world shaped by Trump’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy and China’s hyperactive development of clean technology and mineral supply chains, Europe’s neglect of Greenland’s natural wealth is looking increasingly like a strategic blunder. With Donald Trump threatening to take Greenland by force, and less likely to offer the island’s inhabitants veto power over mining projects, Europe may be too late to the party. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images A HOSTILE LAND That’s not to say building mines in Greenland, with its mile-deep permanent ice sheet, would be easy. “Of all the places in the world where you could extract critical raw materials, [Greenland] is very remote and not very easily accessible,” said Ditte Brasso Sørensen, senior analyst on EU climate and industrial policy at Think Tank Europa, pointing to the territory’s “very difficult environmental circumstances.”  The tiny population — fewer than 60,000 — and a lack of infrastructure also make it hard to build mines. “This is a logistical question,” said Eldur Olafsson, CEO of Amaroq, a gold mining company running one of the two operating mines in Greenland and also exploring rare earths and copper extraction opportunities. “How do you build mines? Obviously, with capital, equipment, but also people. [And] you need to build the whole infrastructure around those people because they cannot only be Greenlandic,” he said.  Greenland also has strict environmental policies — including a landmark 2021 uranium mining ban — which restrict resource extraction because of its impact on nature and the environment. The current government, voted in last year, has not shown any signs of changing its stance on the uranium ban, according to Per Kalvig, professor emeritus at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, a Danish government research organization. Uranium is routinely found with rare earths, meaning the ban could frustrate Greenland’s huge potential as a rare earths producer. It’s a similar story with fossil fuels. Despite a 2007 U.S. assessment that the equivalent of over 30 billion barrels in oil and natural gas lies beneath the surface of Greenland and its territorial waters — almost equal to U.S. reserves — 30 years of oil exploration efforts by a group including Chevron, Italy’s ENI and Shell came to nothing. In 2021 the then-leftist government in Greenland banned further oil exploration on environmental grounds.  Danish geologist Flemming Christiansen, who was deputy director of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland until 2020, said the failure had nothing to do with Greenland’s actual potential as an oil producer. Instead, he said, a collapse in oil prices in 2014 along with the high cost of drilling in the Arctic made the venture unprofitable. Popular opposition only complicated matters, he said. THE CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECT From the skies above Greenland Christiansen sees firsthand the dramatic effects of climate change: stretches of clear water as rising temperatures thaw the ice sheets that for centuries have made exploring the territory a cold, costly and hazardous business. “If I fly over the waters in west Greenland I can see the changes,” he said. “There’s open water for much longer periods in west Greenland, in Baffin Bay and in east Greenland.” Climate change is opening up this frozen land. Climate change is opening up this frozen land. | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images Greenland contains the largest body of ice outside Antarctica, but that ice is melting at an alarming rate. One recent study suggests the ice sheet could cease to exist by the end of the century, raising sea levels by as much as seven meters. Losing a permanent ice cap that is several hundred meters deep, though, “gradually improves the business case of resource extraction, both for … fossil fuels and also critical raw materials,” said Jakob Dreyer, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen.   But exploiting Greenland’s resources doesn’t hinge on catastrophic levels of global warming. Even without advanced climate change, Kalvig, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, argues Greenland’s coast doesn’t differ much from that of Norway, where oil has been found and numerous excavation projects operate.     “You can’t penetrate quite as far inland as you can [in Norway], but once access is established, many places are navigable year-round,” Kalvig said. “So, in that sense, it’s not more difficult to operate mines in Greenland than it is in many parts of Norway, Canada or elsewhere — or Russia for that matter. And this has been done before, in years when conditions allowed.”    A European Commission spokesperson said the EU was now working with Greenland’s government to develop its resources, adding that Greenland’s “democratically elected authorities have long favored partnerships with the EU to develop projects beneficial to both sides.” But the spokesperson stressed: “The fate of Greenland’s raw mineral resources is up to the Greenlandic people and their representatives.” The U.S. may be less magnanimous. Washington’s recent military operation in Venezuela showed that Trump is serious about building an empire on natural resources, and is prepared to use force and break international norms in pursuit of that goal. Greenland, with its vast oil and rare earths deposits, may fit neatly into his vision. Where the Greenlandic people fit in is less clear.

President Donald Trump’s promise to revive the Venezuelan oil industry drew praise from U.S. energy executives on Friday — but no firm commitments to invest the vast sums of money needed to bring the country’s oil output back from the doldrums. The lack of firm pledges from the heads of the companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips that Trump summoned to the White House raised doubts about the president’s claim that U.S. oil producers were ready to spend $100 billion or more to rebuild Venezuela’s crude oil infrastructure. The country boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, but its production has cratered since the regime pushed most of those companies out decades ago. Exxon CEO Darren Woods offered the starkest assessment, telling Trump in the live-streamed meeting in the East Room that Venezuela is “uninvestable” under current conditions. He said major changes were needed before his company would return to the country, and that big questions remain about what return Exxon could expect from any investments. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela today, it’s uninvestable,” Woods told Trump. “Significant changes have to be made to those commercial frameworks, the legal system. There has to be durable investment protections, and there has to be a change to the hydrocarbon laws in the country.” Still, Woods said he was confident the U.S. can help make those changes, and said he expected Exxon could put a technical team on the ground in Venezuela soon to assess the state of its oil infrastructure. Harold Hamm, a fracking executive and major Trump ally, expressed more enthusiasm but still fell short of making any commitments. “It excites me as an explorationist,” Hamm, whose experience has centered on oil production inside the U.S., said of the opportunity to invest in Venezuela. “It is a very exciting country and a lot of reserves — it’s got its challenges and the industry knows how to handle that.” Still, Energy Secretary Chris Wright pointed reporters after the meeting to a statement from Chevron — the only major U.S. oil company still operating in Venezuela — that it was ready to raise its output as a concrete sign the industry was willing to put more money into the country. Chevron currently produces about 240,000 barrels a day there with its partner, the Venezuelan state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA. Mark Nelson, Chevron’s vice chairman, told the gathering the company sees “a path forward” to increase production from its existing operations by 50 percent over the next 18 to 24 months. He did not commit to a dollar figure, however. Wright indicated that the $100 billion figure cited by Trump on Thursday was an estimate for the cost of reconstructing Venezuela’s dilapidated oil sector — rather than a firm spending commitment made by producing companies. “If you look at what’s a positive trajectory for Venezuela’s oil industry in the next decade, that’s probably going to take about $100 billion investment,” said Wright, who later told Bloomberg Television he is likely to travel to Venezuela “before too long.” Most of the nearly two dozen companies in attendance at Friday’s meeting expressed tepid support for the administration’s plan, though others indicated they were eager to jump back quickly. Wael Sawan, the CEO of the European energy giant Shell, said the company had been pushed out in Venezuela’s nationalization program in the 1970s, giving up 1 million barrels per day of oil production. Now it was seeking U.S. permits to go back, he said. “We are ready to go and looking forward to the investment in support of the Venezuelan people,” he said. Jeffery Hildebrand, CEO of independent oil and gas producer Hilcorp Energy and a major Trump donor, said his company was “fully committed and ready to go to rebuild the infrastructure in Venezuela.” Trump said during the meeting that companies that invest in Venezuela would be assured “total safety, total security,” without the U.S. government spending taxpayer dollars or putting boots on the ground. He indicated that Venezuela would provide security for the U.S. companies, and that the companies would bring their own protection as well. “These are tough people. They go into areas that you wouldn’t want to go. They go into areas that if they invited me, I’d say, ‘No, thanks. I’ll see you back in Palm Beach,’” Trump said of the oil companies. Before the executives spoke, Trump insisted that oil executives are lining up to take the administration up on the opportunity. “If you don’t want to go in, just let me know,” he said. “There are 25 people not here today willing to take your place.” Following the public meeting, the companies stayed for further discussions with administration officials behind closed doors. The president also dismissed speculation that the administration may offer financial guarantees to back up what he acknowledged would be a risky investment. “I hope I don’t have to give a backstop,” he said. “These are the biggest companies in the world sitting around this table — they know the risks.” Trump also laughed off the billions that Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips are owed for the assets seized by the Venezuelan regime decades ago. “Nice write-off,” he quipped. “You’ll get a lot of your money back,” Trump told ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance. “We’re going to start with an even plate, though — we’re not going to look at what people lost in the past because that was their fault.” ConocoPhillips spokesperson Dennis Nuss said in a statement that Lance “appreciates today’s valuable opportunity to engage with President Trump in a discussion about preparing Venezuela to be investment ready.” The White House at the last minute shifted the meeting from a closed-door session in the Cabinet Room to a live-televised spectacle in the East Room. “Everybody wants to be there,” the president wrote of the oil executives on social media just ahead of the meeting. POLITICO reported on Thursday that the White House had scrambled to invite additional companies to the meeting because of skepticism from the top oil majors about reentering the country. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged in an appearance Thursday that “big oil companies who move slowly … are not interested,” but said the administration’s “phones are ringing off the hook” with calls from smaller players. Bethany Williams, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, called Friday’s meeting “a constructive, initial conversation that highlighted both the energy potential and the challenges presented in Venezuela, including the importance of rule of law, security, and stable governance.” Venezuela — even with strongman Nicolás Maduro in custody in New York — remains under the rule of the same socialist government that appropriated the rigs, pipelines and property of foreign oil companies two decades ago. Questions remain about who would guarantee the companies’ workers’ safety, particularly since Trump has publicly ruled out sending in troops. Kevin Book, a managing director at the energy research firm ClearView Energy Partners, noted that few CEOs in the meeting outright rejected the notion of returning to or investing in Venezuela, instead couching any sort of presence on several conditions. Some of those might be nearer term, such as security guarantees. Others, like reestablishing legal stability in Venezuela, appear more distant. “They need to understand the risk and they need to understand the return,” Book said. “What it sounded like most of the companies were saying … is that they want to understand the risk and the return and then they’ll look at the investment.” Evanan Romero, a Houston-based oil consultant involved in the Trump administration’s effort to bring U.S. oil producers back to Venezuela, said international oil companies will not return to the country under the same laws and government that expropriated their assets decades earlier. “The main contribution that [interim president] Delcy [Rodríguez] and her government can do is make a bonfire of those laws and put it on fire in the Venezuelan Bolivar Square,” Romero said. “With those, we cannot do any reconstruction of the oil industry.” Zack Colman and Irie Sentner contributed to this report.

The first American pope is on a collision course with U.S. President Donald Trump. The latest fault line between the Vatican and the White House emerged on Sunday. Shortly after Trump suggested his administration could “run” Venezuela, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV appeared at the Angelus window overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver an address calling for the safeguarding of the “country’s sovereignty.” For MAGA-aligned conservatives, this is now part of an unwelcome pattern. While Leo is less combative in tone toward Trump than his predecessor Francis, his priorities are rekindling familiar battles in the culture war with the U.S. administration on topics such as immigration and deportations, LGBTQ+ rights and climate change. As the leader of a global community of 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo has a rare position of influence to challenge Trump’s policies, and the U.S. president has to tread with uncustomary caution in confronting him. Trump traditionally relishes blasting his critics with invective but has been unusually restrained in response to Leo’s criticism, in part because he counts a large number of Catholics among his core electorate. “[Leo] is not looking for a fight like Francis, who sometimes enjoyed a fight,” said Chris White, author of “Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy.” “But while different in style, he is clearly a continuation of Francis in substance. Initially there was a wait-and-see approach, but for many MAGA Catholics, Leo challenges core beliefs.” In recent months, migration has become the main combat zone between the liberal pope and U.S. conservatives. Leo called on his senior clergy to speak out on the need to protect vulnerable migrants, and U.S. bishops denounced the “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence” leveled at people targeted by Trump’s deportation policies. Leo later went public with an appeal that migrants in the U.S. be treated “humanely” and “with dignity.” Leo’s support emboldened Florida bishops to call for a Christmas reprieve from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. “Don’t be the Grinch that stole Christmas,” said Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami. As if evidence were needed of America’s polarization on this topic, however, the Department of Homeland Security described their arrests as a “Christmas gift to Americans.” Leo also conspicuously removed Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Trump’s preferred candidate for pope and a favorite on the conservative Fox News channel, from a key post as archbishop of New York, replacing him with a bishop known for pro-migrant views. This cuts to the heart of the moral dilemma for a divided U.S. Catholic community. For Trump, Catholics are hardly a sideshow as they constitute 22 percent of his electorate, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. While the pope appeals to liberal causes, however, many MAGA Catholics take a far stricter line on topics such as migration, sexuality and climate change. To his critics from the conservative Catholic MAGA camp, such as Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, the pope is anathema. U.S.-born Pope Leo XIV appeared at the Angelus window overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver an address calling for the safeguarding of Venezuela’s “sovereignty.” | Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Last year the pope blessed a chunk of ice from Greenland and criticized political leaders who ignore climate change. He said supporters of the death penalty could not credibly claim to be pro-life, and argued that Christians and Muslims could be friends. He has also signaled a more tolerant posture toward LGBTQ+ Catholics, permitting an LGBTQ+ pilgrimage to St Peter’s Basilica. Small wonder, then, that Trump confidante and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer branded Leo the “woke Marxist pope.” Trump-aligned Catholic conservatives have denounced him as “secularist,” “globalist” and even “apostate.” Far-right pundit Jack Posobiec has called him “anti-Trump.” “Some popes are a blessing. Some popes are a penance,” Posobiec wrote on X. PONTIFF FROM CHICAGO There were early hopes that Leo might build bridges with U.S. hardliners. He’s an American, after all: He wears an Apple watch and follows baseball, and American Catholics can hardly dismiss him as as foreign. The Argentine Francis, by contrast, was often portrayed by critics as anti-American and shaped by the politics of poorer nations. Leo can’t be waved away so easily. Early in his papacy, Leo also showed signs he was keen to steady the church after years of internal conflict, and threw some bones to conservatives such as allowing a Latin Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and wearing more ornate papal vestments. But the traditionalists were not reassured. Benjamin Harnwell, the Vatican correspondent for the MAGA-aligned War Room podcast, said conservatives were immediately skeptical of Leo. “From day one, we have been telling our base to be wary: Do not be deceived,” he said. Leo, Harnwell added, is “fully signed up to Francis’ agenda … but [is] more strategic and intelligent.” After the conclave that appointed Leo, former Trump strategist Bannon told POLITICO that Leo’s election was “the worst choice for MAGA Catholics” and “an anti-Trump vote by the globalists of the Curia.” Trump had a long-running feud with Francis, who condemned the U.S. president’s border wall and criticized his migration policies. Francis appeared to enjoy that sparring, but Leo is a very different character. More retiring by nature, he shies away from confrontation. But his resolve in defending what he sees as non-negotiable moral principles, particularly the protection of the weak, is increasingly colliding with the core assumptions of Trumpism. Trump loomed large during the conclave, with an AI-generated video depicting himself as pope. The gesture was seen by some Vatican insiders as a “mafia-style” warning to elect someone who would not criticize him, Vatican-watcher Elisabetta Piqué wrote in a new book “The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis.” NOT PERSONAL Leo was not chosen expressly as an anti-Trump figure, according to a Vatican official. Rather, his nationality was likely seen by some cardinals as “reassuring,” suggesting he would be accountable and transparent in governance and finances. But while Leo does not seem to be actively seeking a confrontation with Trump, the world views of the two men seem incompatible. “He will avoid personalizing,” said the same Vatican official. “He will state church teaching, not in reaction to Trump, but as things he would say anyway.” Despite the attacks on Leo from his allies, Trump himself has also appeared wary of a direct showdown. When asked about the pope in a POLITICO interview, Trump was more keen to discuss meeting the pontiff’s brother in Florida, whom he described as “serious MAGA.” When pressed on whether he would meet the pope himself, he finally replied: “Sure, I will. Why not?” The potential for conflict will come into sharper focus as Leo hosts a summit called an extraordinary consistory this week, the first of its kind since 2014, which is expected to provide a blueprint for the future direction of the church. His first publication on social issues, such as inequality and migration, is also expected in the next few months. “He will use [the summit] to talk about what he sees as the future,” said a diplomat posted to the Vatican. “It will give his collaborators a sense of where he is going. He could use it as a sounding board, or ask them to suggest solutions.” It’s safe to assume Leo won’t be unveiling a MAGA-aligned agenda. The ultimate balance of power may also favor the pope. Trump must contend with elections and political clocks; Leo, elected for life, does not. At 70, and as a tennis player in good health, Leo appears positioned to shape Catholic politics well after Trump’s moment has passed. “He is not in a hurry,” the Vatican official said. “Time is on his side.”

LONDON — Choosing your Brexit camp was once the preserve of Britain’s Tories. Now Labour is joining in the fun.  Six years after Britain left the EU, a host of loose — and mostly overlapping — groupings in the U.K.’s ruling party are thinking about precisely how close to try to get to the bloc. They range from customs union enthusiasts to outright skeptics — with plenty of shades of grey in between. There’s a political urgency to all of this too: with Prime Minister Keir Starmer tanking in the polls, the Europhile streak among many Labour MPs and members means Brexit could become a key issue for anyone who would seek to replace him. “The more the screws and pressure have been on Keir around leadership, the more we’ve seen that play to the base,” said one Labour MP, granted anonymity like others quoted in this piece to speak frankly. Indeed, Starmer started the new year explicitly talking up closer alignment with the European Union’s single market. At face value, nothing has changed: Starmer’s comments reflect his existing policy of a “reset” with Brussels. His manifesto red lines on not rejoining the customs union or single market remain. Most of his MPs care more about aligning than how to get there. In short, this is not like the Tory wars of the late 2010s. Well, not yet. POLITICO sketches out Labour’s nascent Brexit tribes. THE CUSTOMS UNIONISTS  It all started with a Christmas walk. Health Secretary Wes Streeting told an interviewer he desires a “deeper trading relationship” with the EU — widely interpreted as hinting at joining a customs union. This had been a whispered topic in Labour circles for a while, discussed privately by figures including Starmer’s economic adviser Minouche Shafik. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said last month that rejoining a customs union is not “currently” government policy — which some took as a hint that the position could shift. But Streeting’s leadership ambitions (he denies plotting for the top job) and his willingness to describe Brexit as a problem gave his comments an elevated status among Labour Europhiles.  “This has really come from Wes’s leadership camp,” said one person who talks regularly to No. 10 Downing Street. Naomi Smith, CEO of the pro-EU pressure group Best for Britain, added any Labour leadership contest will be dominated by the Brexit question. MPs and members who would vote in a race “are even further ahead than the public average on all of those issues relating to Europe,” she argued. Joining a customs union would in theory allow smoother trade without returning to free movement of people. But Labour critics of a customs union policy — including Starmer himself — argue it is a non-starter because it would mean tearing up post-Brexit agreements with other countries such as India and the U.S. “It’s just absolutely nonsense,” said a second Labour MP.    Keir Starmer has argued that the customs union route would mean hard conversations with workers in the car industry after Britain secured a U.K.-U.S. tariff deal last summer. | Colin McPherson/Getty Images And since Streeting denies plotting and did not even mention a customs union by name, the identities of the players pushing for one are understandably murky beyond the 13 Labour MPs who backed a Liberal Democrat bill last month requiring the government to begin negotiations on joining a bespoke customs union with the EU. One senior Labour official said “hardly any” MPs back it, while a minister said there was no organized group, only a vague idea. “There are people who don’t really know what it is, but realize Brexit has been painful and the economy needs a stimulus,” they said. “And there are people who do know what this means and they effectively want to rejoin. For people who know about trade, this is an absolute non-starter.” Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, said a full rejoining of the EU customs union would mean negotiating round a suite of “add-ons” — and no nations have secured this without also being in the EU single market. (Turkey has a customs union with the EU, but does not benefit from the EU’s wider trade agreements.) “I’m not convinced the customs union works without the single market,” Menon added.  Starmer has argued that the customs union route would mean hard conversations with workers in the car industry after Britain secured a U.K.-U.S. tariff deal last summer, a person with knowledge of his thinking said. “When you read anything from any economically literate commentator, the customs union is not their go-to,” added the senior Labour official quoted above. “Keir is really strong on it. He fully believes it isn’t a viable route in the national interest or economic interest.” THE SINGLE MARKETEERS (A.K.A. THE GOVERNMENT) Starmer and his allies, then, want to park the customs union and get closer to the single market.  Paymaster General Nick Thomas-Symonds has long led negotiations along these lines through Labour’s existing EU “reset.” He and Starmer recently discussed post-Brexit policy on a walk through the grounds of the PM’s country retreat, Chequers. Working on the detail with Thomas-Symonds is Michael Ellam, the former director of communications for ex-PM Gordon Brown, now a senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office. Ellam is “a really highly regarded, serious guy” and attends regular meetings with Brussels officials, said a second person who speaks regularly to No. 10.   A bill is due to be introduced to the U.K. parliament by summer which will allow “dynamic” alignment with new EU laws in areas of agreement. Two people with knowledge of his role said the bill will be steered through parliament by Cabinet Office Minister Chris Ward, Starmer’s former aide and close ally, who was by his side when Starmer was shadow Brexit secretary during the “Brexit wars” of the late 2010s. Starmer himself talked up this approach in a rare long-form interview this week with BBC host Laura Kuenssberg, saying: “We are better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment.” While the PM’s allies insist he simply answered a question, some of his MPs spy a need to seize back the pro-EU narrative. The second person who talks regularly to No. 10 argued a “relatively small … factional leadership challenge group around Wes” is pushing ideas around a customs union, while Starmer wants to “not match that but bypass it, and say actually, we’re doing something more practical and potentially bigger.”  A third Labour MP was blunter about No. 10’s messaging: “They’re terrified and they’re worrying about an internal leadership challenge.” Starmer’s allies argue that their approach is pragmatic and recognizes what the EU will actually be willing to accept. Christabel Cooper, director of research at the pro-Labour think tank Labour Together — which plans polling and focus groups in the coming months to test public opinion on the issue — said: “We’ve talked to a few trade experts and economists, and actually the customs union is not all that helpful. To get a bigger bang for your buck, you do need to go down more of a single market alignment route.”  Stella Creasy argued that promising a Swiss-style deal in Labour’s next election manifesto (likely in 2029) would benefit the economy — far more than the “reset” currently on the table. | Nicola Tree/Getty Images Nick Harvey, CEO of the pro-EU pressure group European Movement UK, concurred: “The fact that they’re now talking about a fuller alignment towards the single market is very good news, and shows that to make progress economically and to make progress politically, they simply have to do this.”  But critics point out there are still big questions about what alignment will look like — or more importantly, what the EU will go for.  The bill will include areas such as food standards, animal welfare, pesticide use, the EU’s electricity market and carbon emissions trading, but talks on all of these remain ongoing. Negotiations to join the EU’s defense framework, SAFE, stalled over the costs to Britain. Menon said: “I just don’t see what [Starmer] is spelling out being practically possible. Even at the highest levels there has been, under the Labour Party, quite a degree of ignorance, I think, about how the EU works and what the EU wants.   “I’ve heard Labour MPs say, well, they’ve got a veterinary deal with New Zealand, so how hard can it be? And you want to say, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but New Zealand doesn’t have a land border with the EU.”  THE SWISS BANKERS Then there are Europhile MPs, peers and campaigners who back aligning with the single market — but going much further than Starmer.  For some this takes the form of a “Swiss-style” deal, which would allow single market access for some sectors without rejoining the customs union.   This would plough through Starmer’s red lines by reintroducing EU freedom of movement, along with substantial payments to Brussels.  But Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe (LME), argued that promising a Swiss-style deal in Labour’s next election manifesto (likely in 2029) would benefit the economy — far more than the “reset” currently on the table. She said: “If you could get a Swiss-style deal and put it in the manifesto … that would be enough for businesses to invest.”  Creasy said LME has around 150 MPs as members and holds regular briefings for them. While few Labour MPs back a Swiss deal — and various colleagues see Creasy as an outlier — she said MPs and peers, including herself, plan to put forward amendments to the dynamic alignment bill when it goes through parliament.  Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer and the former communications director of the People’s Vote campaign (which called for a second referendum on Brexit), also suggests Labour could go further in 2029. “Keir Starmer’s comments at the weekend about aligning with — and gaining access to — the single market open up a whole range of possibilities,” he said. “At the low end, this is a pragmatic choice by a PM who doesn’t want to be forced to choose between Europe and America.   “At the upper end, it suggests Labour may seek a second term mandate at the next election by which the U.K. would get very close to rejoining the single market. That would be worth a lot more in terms of economic growth and national prosperity than the customs union deal favoured by the Lib Dems.”  A third person who speaks regularly to No. 10 called it a “boil the frog strategy.” They added: “You get closer and closer and then maybe … you go into the election saying ‘we’ll try to negotiate something more single markety or customs uniony.’”  THE REJOINERS? Labour’s political enemies (and some of its supporters) argue this could all lead even further — to rejoining the EU one day. “Genuinely, I am not advocating rejoin now in any sense because it’s a 10-year process,” said Creasy, who is about as Europhile as they come in Labour. “Our European counterparts would say ‘hang on a minute, could you actually win a referendum, given [Reform UK Leader and Brexiteer Nigel] Farage is doing so well?’”  With Prime Minister Keir Starmer tanking in the polls, the Europhile streak among many Labour MPs and members means Brexit could become a key issue for anyone who would seek to replace him. | Tom Nicholson/Getty Images Simon Opher, an MP and member of the Mainstream Labour group closely aligned with Burnham, said rejoining was “probably for a future generation” as “the difficulty is, would they want us back?” But look into the soul of many Labour politicians, and they would love to still be in the bloc — even if they insist rejoining is not on the table now. Andy Burnham — the Greater Manchester mayor who has flirted with the leadership — remarked last year that he would like to rejoin the EU in his lifetime (he’s 56). London Mayor Sadiq Khan said “in the medium to long term, yes, of course, I would like to see us rejoining.” In the meantime Khan backs membership of the single market and customs union, which would still go far beyond No. 10’s red lines.  THE ISSUES-LED MPS Then there are the disparate — yet overlapping — groups of MPs whose views on Europe are guided by their politics, their constituencies or their professional interests. To Starmer’s left, backbench rebels including Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler backed the push toward a customs union by the opposition Lib Dems. The members of the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group frame their argument around fears Labour will lose voters to other progressive parties, namely the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP, if they fail to show adequate bonds with Europe. Some other, more centrist MPs fear similar. Labour MPs with a military background or in military-heavy seats also want the U.K. and EU to cooperate further. London MP Calvin Bailey, who spent more than two decades in the Royal Air Force, endorsed closer security relations between Britain and France through greater intelligence sharing and possibly permanent infrastructure. Alex Baker, whose Aldershot constituency is known as the home of the British Army, backed British involvement in a global Defense, Security and Resilience Bank, arguing it could be key to a U.K.-EU Defence and Security Pact. The government opted against joining such a scheme.   Parliamentarians keen for young people to bag more traveling rights were buoyed by a breakthrough on Erasmus+ membership for British students at the end of last year. More than 60 Labour MPs earlier signed a letter calling for a youth mobility scheme allowing 18 to 30-year-olds expanded travel opportunities on time limited visas. It was organized by Andrew Lewin, the Welywn Hatfield MP, and signatories included future Home Office Minister Mike Tapp (then a backbencher).  Labour also has an influential group of rural MPs, most elected in 2024, who are keen to boost cooperation and cut red tape for farmers. Rural MP Steve Witherden, on the party’s left, said: “Three quarters of Welsh food and drink exports go straight to the EU … regulatory alignment is a top priority for rural Labour MPs. Success here could point the way towards closer ties with Europe in other sectors.”  THE NOT-SO-SECRET EUROPHILES (A.K.A. ALL OF THE ABOVE) Many Labour figures argue that all of the above are actually just one mega-group — Labour MPs who want to be closer to Brussels, regardless of the mechanism. Menon agreed Labour camps are not formalized because most Labour MPs agree on working closely with Brussels. “I think it’s a mishmash,” he said. But he added: “I think these tribes will emerge or develop because there’s an intra-party fight looming, and Brexit is one of the issues people use to signal where they stand.” A fourth Labour MP agreed: “I didn’t think there was much of a distinction between the camps of people who want to get closer to the EU. The first I heard of that was over the weekend.”  The senior Labour official quoted above added: “I don’t think it cuts across tribes in such a clear way … a broader group of people just want us to move faster in terms of closeness into the EU, in terms of a whole load of things. I don’t think it fits neatly.” For years MPs were bound by a strategy of talking little about Brexit because it was so divisive with Labour’s voter base. That shifted over 2025. Labour advisers were buoyed by polls showing a rise in “Bregret” among some who voted for Brexit in 2016, as well as changing demographics (bluntly, young voters come of age while older voters die).  No. 10 aides also noted last summer that Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist party Reform UK, was making Brexit less central to his campaigning. Some aides (though others dispute this) credit individual advisers such as Tim Allan, No. 10’s director of communications, as helping a more openly EU-friendly media strategy into being. For all the talk of tribes and camps, Labour doesn’t have warring Brexit factions in the same way that the Tories did at the height of the EU divorce in the 2010s. | Jakub Porzycki/Getty Images THE BLUE LABOUR HOLDOUTS  Not everyone in Labour wants to hug Brussels tight.  A small but significant rump of Labour MPs, largely from the socially conservative Blue Labour tribe, is anxious that pursuing closer ties could be seen as a rejection of the Brexit referendum — and a betrayal of voters in Leave-backing seats who are looking to Reform. One of them, Liverpool MP Dan Carden, said the failure of both London and Brussels to strike a recent deal on defense funding, even amid threats from Russia, showed Brussels is not serious.   “Any Labour MP who thinks that the U.K. can get closer to the single market or the customs union without giving up freedoms and taking instruction from an EU that we’re not a part of is living in cloud cuckoo land,” he said. A similar skepticism of the EU’s authority is echoed by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), led by one of the most pro-European prime ministers in Britain’s history. The TBI has been meeting politicians in Brussels and published a paper translated into French, German and Italian in a bid to shape the EU’s future from within.   Ryan Wain, the TBI’s senior director for policy and politics, argued: “We live in a G2 world where there are two superpowers, China and the U.S. By the middle of this century there will likely be three, with India. To me, it’s just abysmal that Europe isn’t mentioned in that at all. It has massive potential to adapt and reclaim its influence, but that opportunity needs to be unlocked.”  Such holdouts enjoy a strange alliance with left-wing Euroskeptics (“Lexiteers”), who believe the EU does not have the interests of workers at its heart. But few of these were ever in Labour and few remain; former Leader Jeremy Corbyn has long since been cast out. At the same time many Labour MPs in Leave-voting areas, who opposed efforts to stop Brexit in the late 2010s, now support closer alignment with Brussels to help their local car and chemical industries. As such, there are now 20 or fewer MPs holding their noses on closer alignment. Just three Labour MPs, including fellow Blue Labour supporter Jonathan Brash, voted against a bill supporting a customs union proposed by the centrist, pro-Europe Lib Dems last month.  WHERE WILL IT ALL END?  For all the talk of tribes and camps, Labour doesn’t have warring Brexit factions in the same way that the Tories did at the height of the EU divorce in the 2010s. Most MPs agree on closer alignment with the EU; the question is how they get there.  Even so, Menon has a warning from the last Brexit wars. Back in the late 2010s, Conservative MPs would jostle to set out their positions — workable or otherwise. The crowded field just made negotiations with Brussels harder. “We end up with absolutely batshit stupid positions when viewed from the EU,” said Menon, “because they’re being derived as a function of the need to position yourself in a British political party.” But few of these were ever in Labour and few remain; former Leader Jeremy Corbyn has long since been cast out. | Seiya Tanase/Getty Images The saving grace could be that most Labour MPs are united by a deeper gut feeling about the EU — one that, Baldwin argues, is reflected in Starmer himself. The PM’s biographer said: “At heart, Keir Starmer is an outward-looking internationalist whose pro-European beliefs are derived from what he calls the ‘blood-bond’ of 1945 and shared values, rather than the more transactional trade benefits of 1973,” when Britain joined the European Economic Community.  All that remains is to turn a “blood-bond” into hard policy. Simple, right?

Donald Trump wants the U.S. to own Greenland. The trouble is, Greenland already belongs to Denmark and most Greenlanders don’t want to become part of the U.S. While swooping into Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and taking over Venezuela-style seems fanciful ― even if the military attack on Caracas seems to have provided a jolt to all sides about what the U.S. is capable of ― there’s a definite pathway. And Trump already appears to be some way along it. Worryingly for the Europeans, the strategy looks an awful lot like Vladimir Putin’s expansionist playbook. POLITICO spoke with nine EU officials, NATO insiders, defense experts and diplomats to game out how a U.S. takeover of the mineral-rich and strategically important Arctic island could play out. “It could be like five helicopters … he wouldn’t need a lot of troops,” said a Danish politician who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “There would be nothing they [Greenlanders] could do.” STEP 1: INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN TO BOOST GREENLAND’S INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT Almost immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration began talking up independence for Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. An unshackled Greenland could sign deals with the U.S., while under the status quo it needs Copenhagen’s approval. To gain independence, Greenlanders would need to vote in a referendum, then negotiate a deal that both Nuuk and Copenhagen must approve. In a 2025 opinion poll, 56 percent of Greenlanders said they would vote in favor of independence, while 28 percent said they would vote against it. Americans with ties to Trump have carried out covert influence operations in Greenland, according to Danish media reports, with Denmark’s security and intelligence service, PET, warning the territory “is the target of influence campaigns of various kinds.” Felix Kartte, a digital policy expert who has advised EU institutions and governments, pointed to Moscow’s tactics for influencing political outcomes in countries such as Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. “Russia mixes offline and online tactics,” he said. “On the ground, it works with aligned actors such as extremist parties, diaspora networks or pro-Russian oligarchs, and has been reported to pay people to attend anti-EU or anti-U.S. protests. “At the same time, it builds large networks of fake accounts and pseudo-media outlets to amplify these activities online and boost selected candidates or positions. The goal is often not to persuade voters that a pro-Russian option is better, but to make it appear larger, louder and more popular than it really is, creating a sense of inevitability.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, told CNN on Monday that “nobody is going to fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland.” | Joe Raedle/Getty Images On Greenland, the U.S. appears to be deploying at least some of these methods. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, told CNN on Monday that “nobody is going to fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland.” Last month, Trump created the position of special envoy to Greenland and appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry to the role. He declared his goal was to “make Greenland a part of the U.S.”  Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President JD Vance, on a visit to the territory in March, said “the people of Greenland are going to have self-determination.” He added: “We hope that they choose to partner with the United States, because we’re the only nation on Earth that will respect their sovereignty and respect their security.” STEP 2: OFFER GREENLAND A SWEET DEAL Assuming its efforts to speed up Greenland’s independence referendum come to fruition, and the territory’s inhabitants vote to leave Denmark behind, the next step would be to bring it under U.S. influence. One obvious method would be to fold Greenland into the U.S. as another state — an idea those close to the president have repeatedly toyed with. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was on Monday forced to say that “the U.S. has no right to annex” Greenland after Katie Miller — the wife of Stephen Miller — posted to social media a map of the territory draped in a U.S. flag and the word “SOON.” A direct swap of Denmark for the U.S. seems largely unpalatable to most of the population. The poll mentioned above also showed 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose the territory becoming part of the U.S., and even Trump-friendly members of the independence movement aren’t keen on the idea. But there are other options. Reports have circulated since last May that the Trump administration wants Greenland to sign a Compact of Free Association (COFA) — like those it currently has with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Under the deals, the U.S. provides essential services, protection and free trade in exchange for its military operating without restriction on those countries’ territory. The idea resurfaced this week. Kuno Fencker, a pro-independence Greenlandic opposition MP who attended Trump’s inauguration and met with Republican Congressman Andy Ogles last year, said he tries to “explain to [the Americans] that we don’t want to be like Puerto Rico, or any other territory of the United States. But a Compact of Free Association, bilateral agreements, or even opportunities and other means which maybe I can’t imagine — let them come to the table and Greenlanders will decide in a plebiscite.” Compared to Nuuk’s deal with Copenhagen, things “can only go upwards,” he said.  Referring to Trump’s claim that the U.S. has a “need” for Greenland, Fencker added: “Denmark has never said that they ‘needed’ Greenland. Denmark has said that Greenland is an expense, and they would leave us if we become independent. So I think it’s a much more positive remark than we have ever seen from Denmark.” But Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defense College that provides training and education for the Danish defense forces, warned that Greenland is unlikely to get the better of Trump in a negotiation. “Trump’s primary identity as a deal-maker is someone who forces his will on the people he’s negotiating with, and someone who has a very long track record of betraying people who he’s negotiated deals with, not honoring his commitments, both in private and public life, and exploiting those around him … I really see zero benefits to Greenlandic people other than a very temporary boost to their self esteem.” And, he added, “it would be crazy to agree to something in the hope that a deal may come. I mean, if you give away your territory in the hopes that you might get a deal afterwards — that would be just really imprudent.” STEP 3: GET EUROPE ON BOARD Europe, particularly Denmark’s EU allies, would balk at any attempt to cleave Greenland away from Copenhagen. But the U.S. administration does have a trump card to play on that front: Ukraine. As peace negotiations have gathered pace, Kyiv has said that any deal with Putin must be backed by serious, long-term U.S. security guarantees. Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President JD Vance, on a visit to the territory in March, said “the people of Greenland are going to have self-determination.” | Pool photo by Tom Brenner vis Getty Images The Americans have prevaricated on that front, and in any case, Kyiv is skeptical about security guarantees, given those it has received from both Russia and the West in the past have amounted to nothing. One potential scenario an EU diplomat floated would be a security-for-security package deal, under which Europe gets firmer assurances from the Trump administration for Ukraine in exchange for an expanded role for the U.S. in Greenland. While that seems like a bitter pill, it could be easier to swallow than the alternative, annoying Trump, who may retaliate by imposing sanctions, pulling out of peace negotiations — or by throwing his weight behind Putin in negotiations with Ukraine. STEP 4: MILITARY INVASION But what if Greenland — or Denmark, whose “OK” Nuuk needs to secede — says no to Trump? A U.S. military takeover could be achieved without much difficulty.  Crosbie, from the Royal Danish Defense College, said Trump’s strategists are likely presenting him with various options. “The most worrisome would be a fait accompli-type strategy, which we see a lot and think about a lot in military circles, which would be simply grabbing the land the same way Putin tried to grab, to make territorial claims, over Ukraine. He could just simply put troops in the country and just say that it’s American now … the United States military is capable of landing any number of forces on Greenland, either by air or by sea, and then claiming that it’s American territory.” According to Lin Mortensgaard, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and an expert on Greenlandic security, Washington also has around 500 military officers, including local contractors, on the ground at its northern Pituffik Space Base and just under 10 consulate staff in Nuuk. That’s alongside roughly 100 National Guard troops from New York who are usually deployed seasonally in the Arctic summer to support research missions.  Greenland, meanwhile, has few defenses. The population has no territorial army, Mortensgaard said, while Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command in the capital includes scant and out-of-date military assets, largely limited to four inspection and navy vessels, a dog-sled patrol, several helicopters and one maritime patrol aircraft. As a result, if Trump mobilizes the U.S. presence on the ground — or flies in special forces — the U.S. could seize control of Nuuk “in half an hour or less,” Mortensgaard said. “Mr. Trump says things and then he does them,” said Danish Member of European Parliament Stine Bosse. “If you were one of 60,000 people in Greenland, you would be very worried.” Any incursion would have no “legal basis” under U.S. and international law, said Romain Chuffart, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Arctic Institute, a security think tank. Any occupation beyond 60 days would also require approval from the U.S. Congress.  Meanwhile, an invasion would “mean the end of NATO,” he said, and the “U.S. would be … shooting itself in the foot and waving goodbye to an alliance it has helped create.” Beyond that, a “loss of trust by key allies … could result in a reduction in their willingness to share intelligence with the U.S. or a reduction in access to bases across Europe,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. troops in Europe. “Both of these would be severely damaging to America’s security.” Reports have circulated since last May that the Trump administration wants Greenland to sign a Compact of Free Association (COFA) — like those it currently has with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images NATO would be left unable to respond, given that military action must be approved unanimously and the U.S. is the key member of the alliance, but European allies could deploy troops to Greenland via other groupings such as the U.K.-Scandinavian Joint Expeditionary Force or the five-country Nordic Defence Cooperation format, said Ed Arnold, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. But for now, NATO allies remain cool-headed about an attack. “We are still far from that scenario,” said one senior alliance diplomat. “There could be some tough negotiations, but I don’t think we are close to any hostile takeover.” Max Griera, Gerardo Fortuna and Seb Starcevic contributed reporting.

LONDON — Dorian Gerhold already had his doubts about plans for a Holocaust memorial in the heart of Westminster when he discovered something unexpected. “I spent a morning at the London archives, and it was very easy to find that there was actually an act of Parliament that said that the southern part of Victoria Tower gardens could not be built on,” he recalled. The retired parliamentary clerk, who for 33 years walked to work through the small strip of green on the north side of the River Thames, had begun researching the proposals for a memorial out of curiosity about how the site was chosen. His discovery in 2018 proved a serious setback to an initiative begun four years earlier under David Cameron’s government, which set up a commission to plan a monument to ensure that “in 50 years’ time the memory and lessons of the Holocaust will be as strong and as vibrant as today.” Twelve years and several changes of prime minister later, construction on the site, on the north side of the River Thames, has not yet begun. Ministers were forced to legislate to repeal the building ban discovered by Gerhold — and that bill is still crawling its way through parliament. Far from commanding national consensus, the endeavor has driven a wedge between politicians, local residents and Jews in Britain. Supporters believe the project has already been delayed for too long. They say its completion is all the more urgent because the Holocaust is receding further from living memory. But its vociferous critics fear the memorial will oversimplify the U.K.’s relationship with its past, and fudge questions about present-day antisemitism.  Martin Stern, who survived concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt, told POLITICO there is “parochialism” to the way the Holocaust is remembered today. “I narrowly survived because, for some reason, my name and my sister’s name were not on the list when children were being loaded for the train to Auschwitz. It’s very close to me, but that doesn’t mean I want everybody just to be deeply immersed in only about me.” ‘STRIKING AND PROMINENT’ There is almost no aspect of the memorial, which will feature 23 large bronze fin structures and an underground learning center in the park next to the Palace of Westminster, which isn’t contested. Most hotly debated of all is the location. A site was not specified in the original Commission report, which stated only that the new memorial should be “striking and prominent.” A year after the report, Cameron announced it would be built in Victoria Tower Gardens to “show the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust.” The choice sparked consternation among local residents and users of the park, who complained it would dominate the space and detract from its existing monuments, the Burghers of Calais and a memorial to the anti-slavery campaigner Richard Buxton. There is almost no aspect of the memorial, which will feature 23 large bronze fin structures and an underground learning center in the park next to the Palace of Westminster, which isn’t contested. | Vuk Valcic/Sopa/Images/LightRocket via Getty Images After the government threw its weight behind the Westminster location, it was subject to several legal challenges, which were decided against the site and eventually necessitated legislation to override the relevant statute.  Others have criticised the placement on security grounds. Alex Carlile, a lawyer, crossbench peer and former reviewer of counter-terror legislation, has argued that placing it so close to parliament is a “lure to terrorists.” The design and cost of the memorial have attracted further criticism. The fin-like structure was devised by David Adjaye, a renowned British-Ghanaian architect who has since faced allegations of sexual harassment, which he denies.  Ruth Deech, a crossbench peer whose father arrived in Britain after fleeing Poland at the start of the Second World War, said: “As soon I saw the design and the concept, I felt instinctively it did not do honor to my grandparents, my family, because the design is meaningless.” “The Jewish tradition of remembering departed souls would be a light,” she added. “That’s what you do for people who die. You don’t build something that looks like a dinosaur’s rib cage.” The memorial, which will be partly funded by the taxpayer with additional money from donations, has ballooned in cost from an estimated £50 million at its inception to £138.8 million in 2023. HOW TO REMEMBER The concept of a “learning center” has also proved to be a fraught one.  A year after the report, Cameron announced it would be built in Victoria Tower Gardens to “show the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust.” | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Stern balked at the term, arguing: “The concept of education is much deeper than the concept of learning… If you’re having a center in London that is intended to teach people about these things, to provide a national resource, it needs to be much bigger.” Deech warned that it will give “a very, very limited, almost misleading account of Britain and the Holocaust when what we really need is an overall exposition of a whole of Jewish life in Britain over 1,000 years.” There was until recently a Jewish Museum based in north London, which closed its doors two years ago due to lack of funds. Opponents have raised concerns about the contents and focus of the learning center — in particular, the prospect that it could become a more generalized exhibit about genocides, which does not treat the Holocaust as distinct. Members of the House of Lords recently passed an amendment designed to ensure it would specifically commemorate the mass slaughter of Jews by the Nazis. Discussions about how to enact this requirement are ongoing, according to one person working on the bill, granted anonymity to speak freely — part of the reason it has not yet been scheduled to return to parliament. But Deech’s more fundamental fear is that the effect of the Westminster memorial will be to “package the Holocaust in an airtight box — it was 80 years ago. It was German. It was nothing to do with us. Much better today. And that is simply not working anymore.” At this point, the memorial’s historical focus smashes up against the present. Some argue it will make present-day antisemitism worse, locating it conveniently in the past while acting as a physical lightning rod for anti-Jewish hatred. One lawyer, who has carried out research on legal challenges to the site and asked to remain anonymous due to his other public duties, claimed it would “protect the dead but not the living.” URGENT CASE Yet those who have been involved with the project from the beginning insist it is all the more needed in light of the October 7, 2022 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. Eric Pickles, a Tory peer who until recently served as the U.K.’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, said that the objection the memorial would not engage with wider antisemitism “has no basis in reality.” He told POLITICO the site would have “a great importance in terms of getting out a very solid message against antisemitism” and would “ensure that the narrative after the last survivor is gone is one that’s going to be built on truth and honesty and verifiable fact.” Pickles defended Victoria Tower Gardens as “exactly the right location, right next to Parliament, because ultimately, the Holocaust shows you what happens when governments decide to use all the resources of the state to kill their citizens.” He also stressed that opposition was not universal among local residents, and mostly amounted to “special pleading” by people “who didn’t want this memorial to be near their property.” Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, highlighted the link between the function of the memorial and its location. She said that “to have a physical, tangible memorial in the heart of London will be a focal point for a lot of the learning and the commemorations and a reminder of how the Holocaust impacted in Britain.” Marks-Woldman resisted the idea that it will paint Britain’s wartime record in a wholly positive light, pointing out that “while Kindertransportees have rebuilt their lives here… their parents weren’t allowed in, and mostly their parents were murdered.” The long-running debate over the monument has perhaps touched on something wider about the British fondness for raising objections, particularly over building projects. As Danny Finkelstein, a Conservative peer who has recently taken on American far-right commentator Nick Fuentes, has written: “Really you can find some sort of case against everything. Even against creating a small exhibition centre for people to learn how bad the Nazis were.” Barring a massive volte-face, plans for the memorial will clear their legal hurdles this year and work will begin — but deep skepticism about the wisdom of the project is unlikely to fade.

Venture capitalist Finn Murphy believes world leaders could soon resort to deflecting sunlight into space if the Earth gets unbearably hot. That’s why he’s invested more than $1 million in Stardust Solutions, a leading solar geoengineering firm that’s developing a system to reduce warming by enveloping the globe in reflective particles. Murphy isn’t rooting for climate catastrophe. But with global temperatures soaring and the political will to limit climate change waning, Stardust “can be worth tens of billions of dollars,” he said. “It would be definitely better if we lost all our money and this wasn’t necessary,” said Murphy, the 33-year-old founder of Nebular, a New York investment fund named for a vast cloud of space dust and gas. Murphy is among a new wave of investors who are putting millions of dollars into emerging companies that aim to limit the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth — while also potentially destabilizing weather patterns, food supplies and global politics. He has a degree in mathematics and mechanical engineering and views global warming not just as a human and political tragedy, but as a technical challenge with profitable solutions. Solar geoengineering investors are generally young, pragmatic and imaginative — and willing to lean into the adventurous side of venture capitalism. They often shrug off the concerns of scientists who argue it’s inherently risky to fund the development of potentially dangerous technologies through wealthy investors who could only profit if the planet-cooling systems are deployed. “If the technology works and the outcomes are positive without really catastrophic downstream impacts, these are trillion-dollar market opportunities,” said Evan Caron, a co-founder of the energy-focused venture firm Montauk Capital. “So it’s a no-brainer for an investor to take a shot at some of these.” More than 50 financial firms, wealthy individuals and government agencies have collectively provided more than $115.8 million to nine startups whose technology could be used to limit sunlight, according to interviews with VCs, tech company founders and analysts, as well as private investment data analyzed by POLITICO’s E&E News. That pool of funders includes Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, and four other investment groups that have more than $1 billion of assets under management. Of the total amount invested in the geoengineering sector, $75 million went to Stardust, or nearly 65 percent. The U.S.-Israeli startup is developing reflective particles and the means to spray and monitor them in the stratosphere, some 11 miles above the planet’s surface. At least three other climate-intervention companies have also raked in at least $5 million. The cash infusion is a bet on planet-cooling technologies that many political leaders, investors and environmentalists still consider taboo. In addition to having unknown side effects, solar geoengineering could expose the planet to what scientists call “termination shock,” a scenario in which global temperatures soar if the cooling technologies fail or are suddenly abandoned. Still, the funding surge for geoengineering companies pales in comparison to the billions of dollars being put toward artificial intelligence. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has raised $62.5 billion in 2025 alone, according to investment data compiled by PitchBook. The investment pool for solar geoengineering startups is relatively shallow in part because governments haven’t determined how they would regulate the technology — something Stardust is lobbying to change. As a result, the emerging sector is seen as too speculative for most venture capital firms, according to Kim Zou, the CEO of Sightline Climate, a market intelligence firm. VCs mostly work on behalf of wealthy individuals, as well as pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. “It’s still quite a niche set of investors that are even thinking about or looking at the geoengineering space,” Zou said. “The climate tech and energy tech investors we speak to still don’t really see there being an investable opportunity there, primarily because there’s no commercial market for it today.” AEROSOLS IN THE STRATOSPHERE Stardust and its investors are banking on signing contracts with one or more governments that could deploy its solar geoengineering system as soon as the end of the decade. Those investors include Lowercarbon Capital, a climate-focused firm co-founded by billionaire VC Chris Sacca, and Exor, the holding company of an Italian industrial dynasty and perhaps the most mainstream investment group to back a sunlight reflection startup. Even Stardust’s supporters acknowledge that the company is far from a sure bet. “It’s unique in that there is not currently demand for this solution,” said Murphy, whose firm is also supporting out-there startups seeking to build robots and data centers in space. “You have to go and create the product in order to potentially facilitate the demand.” Lowercarbon partner Ryan Orbuch said the firm would see a return on its Stardust investment only “in the context of an actual customer who can actually back many years of stable, safe deployment.” Exor, another Stardust investor, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Other startups are trying to develop commercial markets for solar geoengineering. Make Sunsets, a company funded by billionaire VC Tim Draper, releases sulfate-filled weather balloons that pop when they reach the stratosphere. It sells cooling credits to individuals and corporations based on the theory that the sulfates can reliably reduce warming. There are questions, however, about the science and economics underpinning the credit system of Make Sunsets, according to the investment bank Jeffries. “A cooling credit market is unlikely to be viable,” the bank said in a May 2024 note to clients. That’s because the temperature reductions produced by sulfate aerosols vary by altitude, location and season, the note explained. And the warming impacts of carbon dioxide emissions last decades — much longer than any cooling that would be created from a balloon’s worth of sulfate. Make Sunsets didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has previously attracted the attention of regulators in the U.S. and Mexico, who have claimed it began operating without the necessary government approvals. Draper Associates says on its website that it’s “shaping a future where the impossible becomes everyday reality.” The firm has previously backed successful consumer tech firms like Tesla, Skype and Hotmail. “It is getting hotter in the Summer everywhere,” Tim Draper said in an email. “We should be encouraging every solution. I love this team, and the science works.” THE NEXT FRONTIER One startup is pursuing space-based solar geoengineering. EarthGuard is attempting to build a series of large sunlight deflectors that would be positioned between the sun and the planet, some 932,000 miles from the Earth. The company did not respond to emailed questions. Other space companies are considering geoengineering as a side project. That includes Gama, a French startup that’s designing massive solar sails that could be used for deep space travel or as a planetary sunshade, and Ethos Space, a Los Angeles company with plans to industrialize the moon. Both companies are part of an informal research network established by the Planetary Sunshade Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the development of a trillion-dollar parasol for the globe. The network mainly brings together collaborators on the sidelines of space industry conferences, according to Gama CEO Andrew Nutter. “We’re willing to contribute something if we realize it’s genuinely necessary and it’s a better solution than other solutions” to the climate challenge, Nutter said of the space shade concept. “But our business model does not depend on it. If you have dollar signs hanging next to something, that can bias your decisions on what’s best for the planet.” Nutter said Gama has raised about $5 million since he co-founded the company in 2020. Its investors include Possible Ventures, a German VC firm that’s also financing a nuclear fusion startup and says on its website that the firm is “relentlessly optimistic — choosing to focus on the possibilities rather than obsess over the risks.” Possible Ventures did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia-backed Reflect Orbital is another space startup that’s exploring solar geoengineering as a potential moneymaker. The company based near Los Angeles is developing a network of satellite mirrors that would direct sunlight down to the Earth at night for lighting industrial sites or, eventually, producing solar energy. Its space mirrors, if oriented differently, could also be used for limiting the amount of sun rays that reach the planet. “It’s not so much a technological limitation as much as what has the highest, best impact. It’s more of a business decision,” said Ally Stone, Reflect Orbital’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a matter of looking at each satellite as an opportunity and whether, when it’s over a specific geography, that makes more sense to reflect sunlight towards or away from the Earth.” Reflect Orbital has raised nearly $28.7 million from investors including Lux Capital, a firm that touts its efforts to “turn sci-fi into sci-fact” and has invested in the autonomous defense systems companies Anduril and Saildrone.” Sequoia and Lux didn’t respond to requests for comment. The startup hopes to send its first satellite into space next summer, according to Stone. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose aerospace company already has an estimated fleet of more than 8,800 internet satellites in orbit, has also suggested using the circling network to limit sunlight. “A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth,” Musk wrote on X last month. Neither he nor SpaceX responded to an emailed request for comment. DON’T CALL IT GEOENGINEERING Other sunlight-reflecting startups are entering the market — even if they’d rather not be seen as solar geoengineering companies. Arctic Reflections is a two-year-old company that wants to reduce global warming by increasing Arctic sea ice, which doesn’t absorb as much heat as open water. The Dutch startup hasn’t yet pursued outside investors. “We see this not necessarily as geo-engineering, but rather as climate adaptation,” CEO Fonger Ypma said in an email. “Just like in reforestation projects, people help nature in growing trees, our idea is that we would help nature in growing ice.” The main funder of Arctic Reflections is the British government’s independent Advanced Research and Invention Agency. In May, ARIA awarded $4.41 million to the company — more than four times what it had raised to that point. Another startup backed by ARIA is Voltitude, which is developing micro balloons to monitor geoengineering from the stratosphere. The U.K.-based company didn’t respond to a request for comment. Altogether, the British agency is supporting 22 geoengineering projects, only a handful of which involve startups. “ARIA is only funding fundamental research through this programme, and has not taken an equity stake in any geoengineering companies,” said Mark Symes, a program director at the agency. It also requires that all research it supports “must be published, including those that rule out approaches by showing they are unsafe or unworkable.” Sunscreen is a new startup that is trying to limit sunlight in localized areas. It was founded earlier this year by Stanford University graduate student Solomon Kim. “We are pioneering the use of targeted, precision interventions to mitigate the destructive impacts of heatwave on critical United States infrastructure,” Kim said in an email. But he was emphatic that “we are not geoengineering” since the cooling impacts it’s pursuing are not large scale. Kim declined to say how much had been raised by Sunscreen and from what sources. As climate change and its impacts continue to worsen, Zou of Sightline Climate expects more investors to consider solar geoengineering startups, including deep-pocketed firms and corporations interested in the technology. Without their help, the startups might not be able to develop their planet-cooling systems. “People are feeling like, well wait a second, our backs are kind of starting to get against the wall. Time is ticking, we’re not really making a ton of progress” on decarbonization, she said. “So I do think there’s a lot more questions getting asked right now in the climate tech and venture community around understanding it,” Zou said of solar geoengineering. “Some of these companies and startups and venture deals are also starting to bring more light into the space.” Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting.

President Donald Trump has told his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to consider aligning the U.S. vaccination schedule with those in Europe, where many countries recommend fewer vaccines. Kennedy has taken up the charge with gusto and is considering advising parents to follow Denmark’s childhood schedule rather than America’s. Many who specialize in vaccination and public health say that would be a mistake. While wealthy European countries do health care comparatively well, they say, there are lots of reasons Americans are recommended more shots than Europeans, ranging from different levels of access to health care to different levels of disease. “If [Kennedy] would like to get us universal health care, then maybe we can have a conversation about having the schedule adjusted,” Demetre Daskalakis, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases before resigning in protest in August, told POLITICO. Children, especially those who live in poor and rural areas, would be at greater risk for severe disease and death if the U.S. were to drop shots from its schedule, Daskalakis said. Denmark, for instance, advises immunizing against only 10 of the 18 diseases American children were historically recommended immunizations against. It excludes shots for potentially serious infections, including hepatitis A and B, meningitis and respiratory syncytial virus. Under Kennedy, the government has already changed its hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for newborns this year, even as critics warned the new advice could lead to more chronic infections, liver problems and cancer. The health department points out that the new guidance on hepatitis B — that mothers who test negative for the virus may skip giving their newborn a shot in the hospital — now align more closely with most countries in Europe. Public health experts and others critical of the move say slimmer European vaccine schedules are a cost-saving measure and a privilege afforded to healthier societies, not a tactic to protect kids from vaccine injuries. Kennedy’s interest in modeling the U.S. vaccine schedule after Europe, they point out, is underpinned by his belief that some childhood vaccines are unsafe and that American kids get too many too young. Kennedy’s safety concerns don’t align with the rationale underpinning the approach in Europe, where the consensus is that childhood vaccines are safe. Wealthy European countries in many cases eschew vaccines based on a risk-benefit calculus that doesn’t hold in America. European kids often don’t get certain shots because it would prevent a very small number of cases — like hepatitis B — or because the disease is rarely serious for them, such as Covid-19 and chickenpox. But since the U.S. doesn’t have universal access to care, vaccinating provides more return on investment, experts say. “We just have a tradition to wait a little bit” before adding vaccines to government programs, said Johanna Rubin, a pediatrician and vaccine expert for Sweden’s health agency. Swedish children are advised to get vaccines for 11 diseases before they turn 18. Rubin cited the need to verify the shots’ efficacy and the high cost of new vaccines as reasons Sweden moves slowly to add to its schedule. “It has to go through the health economical model,” she said. VACCINE SAFETY’S NOT THE ISSUE Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish native and former Harvard Medical School professor who led Kennedy’s vaccine advisory panel until this month, pointed to that country’s approach to vaccination and public health in an interview with POLITICO earlier this year. Before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month dropped its recommendation that children of mothers who test negative for hepatitis B receive a vaccine within a day of birth, Kulldorff cited Sweden’s policy. “In Sweden, the recommendation is that you only do that if the mother has the infection. That’s the case in most European countries,” he said. “You could have a discussion whether one or the other is more reasonable.” The U.S. policy, as of Dec. 16, more closely resembles Sweden’s, with hepatitis B-negative mothers no longer urged to vaccinate their newborns against the virus at birth. But Sweden’s public health agency recommends that all infants be vaccinated, and the country’s regional governments subsidize those doses, which are administered as combination shots targeting six diseases starting at 3 months. Public health experts warn that even children of hepatitis B-negative mothers could catch the virus from others via contact with caregivers who are positive or shared household items. The prevalence of chronic hepatitis B in the U.S. is 6.1 percent compared to 0.3 percent in Sweden, according to the Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination, a Georgia-based nonprofit which receives funding from pharmaceutical companies, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, among others. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the U.S. has taken a more comprehensive approach to vaccination, in part because its population is sicker than that of some Western European countries, and the impact of contracting a disease could be more detrimental. Osterholm pointed to the Covid pandemic as an example. By May 2022, the U.S. had seen more than 1 million people die. Other high-income countries — though much smaller — had more success controlling mortality, he said. “People tried to attribute [the disparity] to social, political issues, but no, it was because [peer nations] had so many more people who were actually in low-risk categories for serious illness,” Osterholm said. Kennedy and his advisers also cited European views on Covid vaccination in the spring when the CDC dropped its universal recommendation, instead advising individuals to talk to their providers about whether to get the shot. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad, linked the deaths of 10 children to Covid vaccination without providing more detailed information about the data behind his assertion. European countries years ago stopped recommending repeat Covid vaccination for children and other groups not considered at risk of becoming severely sick. Covid shots have been linked to rare heart conditions, primarily among young men. European vaccine experts say Covid boosters were not recommended routinely for healthy children in many countries — not because of safety concerns, but because it’s more cost-effective to give them to high-risk groups, such as elderly people or those with health conditions that Covid could make severely sick and put in the hospital. In the U.K., Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths declined significantly after the pandemic, and now are “mostly in the most frail in the population, which has led to more restricted use of the vaccines following the cost-effectiveness principles,” said Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group in the United Kingdom, which works on developing vaccines and was behind AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 shot. Pollard led the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, which advises the U.K. government, for 12 years before stepping down in September. In the U.S., more moves to follow Europe are likely. At a meeting of Kennedy’s vaccine advisers earlier this month, Tracy Beth Høeg, now acting as the FDA’s top drug regulator, pointed to Denmark’s pediatric schedule, which vaccinates for 10 diseases, while questioning whether healthy American children should be subject to more vaccines than their Danish counterparts. Danish kids typically don’t get shots for chickenpox, the flu, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, respiratory syncytial virus and rotavirus, like American children do, though parents can privately pay for at least some of those vaccines. The country offers free Covid and flu vaccines to high-risk kids. After the vaccine advisory meeting wrapped, Trump said he was on board, directing Kennedy to “fast track” a review of the U.S. vaccine schedule and potentially align it with other developed nations. He cited Denmark, Germany and Japan as countries that recommend fewer shots. Last week, Kennedy came within hours of publicly promoting Denmark’s childhood vaccine schedule as an option for American parents. The announcement was canceled at the last minute after the HHS Office of the General Counsel said it would invite a lawsuit the administration could lose, a senior department official told POLITICO. The notion that the U.S. would drop its vaccine schedule in favor of a European one struck health experts there as odd. Each country’s schedule is based on “the local situation, so the local epidemiology, structure of health care services, available resources, and inevitably, there’s a little bit of political aspect to it as well,” said Erika Duffell, a principal expert on communicable disease prevention and control at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, an EU agency that monitors vaccine schedules across 30 European countries. Vaccine safety isn’t the issue, she said. For example, even though most Europeans don’t get a hepatitis B shot within 24 hours of birth, the previous U.S. recommendation, “there is a consensus that the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine has been confirmed through decades of research” and continuous monitoring, she said. European nations like Denmark and the U.K. have kept new cases of hepatitis B low. Denmark recorded no cases of mother-to-child transmission in 2023, and Britain’s rate of such spread is less than 0.1 percent — though the latter does routinely recommend vaccinating low-risk infants beginning at 2 months of age. European experts point to high levels of testing of pregnant women for hepatitis B and most women having access to prenatal care as the reasons for success in keeping cases low while not vaccinating all newborns. The major differences between the U.S. and the U.K. in their approach to hepatitis B vaccination are lower infection rates and high screening uptake in Britain, plus “a national health system which is able to identify and deliver vaccines to almost all affected pregnancies selectively,” Pollard said. The CDC, when explaining the change in the universal birth dose recommendation, argued the U.S. has the ability to identify nearly all hepatitis B infections during pregnancy because of ”high reliability of prenatal hepatitis B screening,” which some European experts doubt. “If we change a program, we need to prepare the public, we need to prepare the parents and the health care providers, and say where the evidence comes from,” said Pierre Van Damme, the director of the Centre for the Evaluation of Vaccination at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He suggested that, if there was convincing evidence, U.S. health authorities could have run a pilot study before changing the recommendation to evaluate screening and the availability of testing at birth in one U.S. state, for example. WHERE EUROPEANS HAVE MORE DISEASE In some cases, European vaccination policies have, despite universal health care, led to more disease. France, Germany and Italy moved from recommending to requiring measles vaccination over the last decade after outbreaks on the continent. The U.S., until recently, had all but eradicated measles through a universal recommendation and school requirements. That’s starting to change. The U.S. is at risk of losing its “measles-elimination” status due to around 2,000 cases this year that originated in a Texas religious community where vaccine uptake is low. The 30 countries in the European Union and the European Economic Area, which have a population of some 450 million people combined, reported more than 35,000 measles cases last year, concentrated in Romania, Austria, Belgium and Ireland. Europe’s comparatively high rate is linked to lower vaccination coverage than the level needed to prevent outbreaks: Only four of the 30 countries reached the 95-percent threshold for the second measles dose in 2024, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Kennedy touted the U.S.’s lower measles rate as a successful effort at containing the sometimes-deadly disease, but experts say the country could soon see a resurgence of infectious diseases due to the vaccine skepticism that grew during the pandemic and that they say Kennedy has fomented. Among kindergarteners, measles vaccine coverage is down 2.7 percentage points as of the 2024-2025 school year, from a peak of 95.2 percent prior to the pandemic, according to CDC data. That drop occurred before Kennedy became health secretary. Kennedy and his advisers blame it on distrust engendered by Covid vaccine mandates imposed by states and President Joe Biden. But Kennedy led an anti-vaccine movement for years before joining the Trump administration, linking shots to autism and other conditions despite scientific evidence to the contrary, and he has continued to question vaccine safety as secretary. In some EU nations, vaccines aren’t compulsory for school entry. Swedish law guarantees the right to education and promotes close consultation between providers and patients. Some governments fear mandates could push away vaccine-hesitant parents who want to talk the recommended shots over with their doctor before giving the vaccines to their children, Rubin explained. In the U.S., states, which have the authority to implement vaccine mandates for school entry, rely on the CDC’s guidance to decide which to require. Vaccine skeptics have pushed the agency to relax some of its recommendations with an eye toward making it easier for American parents to opt out of routine shots. Scandinavian nations maintain high vaccine uptake without mandates thanks to “high trust” in public health systems, Rubin said. In Sweden, she added, nurses typically vaccinate young children at local clinics and provide care for them until they reach school age, which helps build trust among parents. CHICKENPOX Another example of where the U.S. and Europe differ is the chickenpox vaccine. The U.S. was the first country to begin universal vaccination against the common childhood illness in 1995; meanwhile, 13 EU nations broadly recommend the shot. Denmark doesn’t officially track chickenpox — the vaccine isn’t included on its schedule — but estimates 60,000 cases annually in its population of 6 million. The vastly larger U.S. sees fewer than 150,000 cases per year, according to the CDC. Many European countries perceive chickenpox as a benign disease, Van Damme said. “If you have a limited budget for prevention, you will spend usually the money in other preventative interventions, other vaccines than varicella,” he said, referring to the scientific term for chickenpox. But there’s another risk if countries decide to recommend chickenpox vaccination, he explained. If the vaccination level is low, people remain susceptible to the disease, which poses serious risks to unborn babies. If it’s contracted in early pregnancy, chickenpox could trigger congenital varicella syndrome, a rare disorder that causes birth defects. If children aren’t vaccinated against chickenpox, almost all would get the disease by age 10, Van Damme explained. If countries opt for vaccination, they have to ensure robust uptake: vaccinate virtually all children by 10, or risk having big pockets of unvaccinated kids who could contract higher-risk infections later. Europe’s stance toward chickenpox could change soon. Several countries are calculating that widely offering chickenpox vaccines would provide both public health and economic benefits. Britain is adding the shot to its childhood schedule next month. Sweden is expected to green-light it as part of its national program in the coming months. While the public doesn’t see it as a serious disease, pediatricians who see serious cases of chickenpox are advocating for the vaccine, Rubin told POLITICO. “It is very contagious,” she said. “It fulfills all our criteria.” The U.K. change comes after its vaccine advisory committee reviewed new data on disease burden and cost-effectiveness — including a 2022 CDC study of the U.S. program’s first 25 years that also examined the vaccine’s impact on shingles, a painful rash that can occur when the chickenpox virus reactivates years later. Scientists had theorized for years that limiting the virus’ circulation among children could increase the incidence of shingles in older adults by eliminating the “booster” effect of natural exposure, but the U.S. study found that real-world evidence didn’t support that hypothesis.