European leaders have responded with mixed signals to invitations to join US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace, which he reportedly hopes to have signed off on Thursday in Davos.
French President Emmanuel Macron quickly declined the offer, saying that the board's charter appeared to contradict UN principles.
Irritated by Mr Macron's snub, Mr Trump threatened to impose a 200 per cent tariff on champagne. “Well, nobody wants him because he’s going to be out of office very soon,” the US President told reporters on Monday. “I’ll put a 200 per cent tariff on his wines and champagnes and he’ll join.”
Such threats are “unacceptable” and “ineffective”, sources close to Mr Macron said. In private text messages shared by Mr Trump on Truth Social, the French President suggested setting up a G7 meeting in Paris on Thursday, after the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“I can invite the Ukrainians, the Syrians and the Russians in the margins,” Mr Macron wrote, in a message that has been confirmed by his entourage as authentic. “We are totally in line with Syria. We can do great things on Iran. I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”
Mr Trump did not publish a response.
The US has led mediation efforts over recent clashes between Kurdish militias and government forces in Syria, although France has also played a less visible appeasement role. On Iran, France has, like most western powers, condemned the brutal crackdown on nationwide protests.
On Greenland, Paris has used harsher language than most European countries to criticise Mr Trump's intentions to take over the autonomous territory that belongs to Denmark, describing it as “blackmail”. Washington has threatened a 10 per cent increase to tariffs on countries that oppose his plans, including the UK, Norway and six EU nations including France and Germany.
Other European leaders, among them German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have acknowledged receiving an invitation to join the Board of Peace but have yet to position themselves. Hungary, a close ally of Mr Trump, is the only European country to have accepted the invitation.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, visiting South Korea, told reporters her country was “ready to do our part”, although it was not clear whether she was specifically referring to Gaza or the broader peace.
The UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Canada are set to join France in choosing not to take part in the board, people familiar with their thinking told Bloomberg.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has received an invitation to join, the Kremlin said on Monday.
Potential members of the board, conceived last year as a Trump-headed body to oversee the redevelopment of postwar Gaza, began to filter out over the weekend. Invitees include world leaders from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr Trump is demanding that nations pay $1 billion for permanent membership of the board.
Reuters, which obtained a copy of the draft charter, reported that it said “durable peace requires pragmatic judgment, common-sense solutions, and the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”. There was a “need for a more nimble and effective international peace-building body”, it added.
Privately, senior European officials they saw it as a clear attempt by Mr Trump to set up a rival or replacement for the United Nations, a body of which he has been a long-standing critic. They said the board was about far more than the reconstruction of Gaza and that Mr Trump sees it as a vehicle to resolve other conflicts and control international events.
