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French sculptors pledge to build titanium Statue of Liberty – and Elon Musk approves
Henry Samuel
Wed, March 19, 2025 at 1:45 PM PDT
3 min read171
France’s self-professed last sculpture foundry has weighed into a row over whether the US should return the Statue of Liberty to its country of origin by proposing to build a new one out of titanium.
The proposal by Nice-based Atelier Missor, which specialises in sculpting famed French figures such as Napoleon and Joan of Arc, received approval from Elon Musk, who called the idea “cool” on X.
The foundry’s plan to build a new Statue of Liberty “to withstand millions of years” followed a call by French centre-Left MEP Raphael Glucksmann for America to return the original.
During a political rally of his Place Publique movement, Mr Glucksmann launched a blistering attack on the Trump administration in which he said: “We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: ‘Give us back the Statue of Liberty.’”
Mr Glucksmann is a member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and a staunch supporter of Ukraine.
France gave the statue, which stands 305 feet tall and weighs 450,000lbs, to the US as a gift on July 4, 1884, to commemorate the 108th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The iconic copper-clad sculpture was created by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and sits on Liberty Island in New York Harbour.
“We gave it to you as a gift,” Mr Glucksmann went on, citing the United States’ founding values of freedom and liberty. “But apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home.”
He concluded his remarks by stating France would welcome top researchers who were fired in the cuts to the US National Institutes of Health and similar organisations.
His comments prompted a fiery rebuke from Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, who said: “My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.
“So they should be very grateful to our great country.”
French commentators pointed out that if it weren’t for French military and financial support during the War of Independence, America would likely still be a “British colony” today.
Mr Glucksmann later fired back: “No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty. The statue is yours. But what it embodies belongs to everyone. And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe.”
Wading into the row, Atelier Missor wrote: “To our fellow Americans: we are the last sculpture foundry in France and we have a message for you.”
“Keep the Statue of Liberty; it’s rightfully yours. But get ready for another one.
“A New Statue of Liberty, much bigger, made out of titanium to withstand millions of years.
“We, the French people, are going to make it again!”
The foundry, which said its aim was to fulfil Napoleon’s dream to “make Paris the capital of the universe”, was recently commissioned to build a monument statue of Joan of Arc for the French Riviera city of Nice.
However, in January, the local state prefect cancelled the €170,000 contract and ordered the 4.5-ton golden bronze statue to be taken down, saying Nice’s Right-wing town hall had failed to respect the proper public tender process.
Atelier Missor said the annulment had left it on the verge of bankruptcy. A crowdfunding campaign to pay for the statue launched by Nice former deputy mayor in charge of culture has gathered €50,000.
The Call to Return the Statue of Liberty to France, Explained
“The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone,” said French politician Raphael Glucksmann in a sharp rebuke of Trump’s attacks on democracy.
Isa Farfan16 hours ago
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A call that could easily have gone unnoticed for the Statue of Liberty to be repatriated to France has generated a media swarm over the sculpture and sparked a war of words between a European Parliament member and the White House press secretary.
Raphaël Glucksmann, one of France’s 79 members of the European Parliament, called for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty to be returned to its sender, citing President Trump’s allegiance to “tyrants” and gutting of scientific research institutions at a center-left convention on Sunday, March 16.
While it was a passing remark made at a French political event, the comment nonetheless found itself at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s podium on Tuesday when a reporter asked her head-on whether the infamous gift would be returned.
So will the Statue of Liberty, which has sat in the New York Harbor since October 1886, be uprooted, dismantled, and shipped across the Atlantic back to France?
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“Absolutely not,” Leavitt said. “My advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now, so they should be grateful to our great country.”
Responding to Leavitt’s jabs, Glucksmann posted a statement on X, in English, clarifying his calls for the “symbolic” repatriation of the statue.
“No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty,” Glucksmann said. “The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone. And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe.”
The statue, a fixture of the New York Harbor horizon, was conceived as a gift to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery the year prior.
France dug into public funds to construct the statue and Americans fundraised to construct the foundational pedestal through benefit art exhibitions and auctions and a direct call for donations by Joseph Pulitzer in his newspaper, New York World.
The American-funded pedestal is marked by a 1903 bronze plaque inscribed with Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” which imagines the “mighty woman with a torch” declaring: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
However, Glucksmann argues, the United States has strayed from the values the statue’s inscription purports.
“We are counting on you,” Glucksmann wrote.
Brussels hold’em: European cards against Trumpian coercion
Tobias Gehrke@tobiasgehrke on Bluesky
Senior Policy Fellow
- Policy Brief
- 20 March 2025
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Table of contents
- Summary
- At the card table
- Why deterrence matters
- Assessing Europe’s hand
- Europe’s cards
- How to build Europe’s economic deterrence regime
- The long game
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
Summary
- Faced with an aggressive new Trump administration, Europeans must understand the assets they can use as deterrents
- Across trade, technology, infrastructure, finance and people-to-people relations, the EU and its European partners hold “cards” they can play
- Policymakers should assess the relative merits of doing so, and the costs to Europe that this would entail
- The EU should create an economic deterrence infrastructure and strengthen its existing anti-coercion instrument
At the card table
“The European Union”, posted Donald Trump on his Truth Social account on March 13th, is “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”. For good measure, the US president added that the EU “was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States”. The broadside was just the latest reminder that his administration’s trade wars against Canada, China and Mexico are heading Europe’s way, too. Already its 25% levy on steel and aluminium imports has hit the EU. At the time of writing, there appears to be a significant chance of Trump going far beyond these with sweeping multi-sectoral tariffs.
This is part of a wider story. The second Trump administration has challenged Europe’s territorial sovereignty (by threatening to annex Greenland), its digital model (by attacking its technology regulations), and its traditional political party systems (by courting radical European political forces). The president’s approach to America’s supposed allies on the continent evokes less a sober “strategic rebalancing” than the Ming dynasty’s tributary system, with European leaders expected to kowtow to the emperor in Washington. Trump also appears inclined to pressure Ukraine and its European backers into a peace deal favourable to Russia, and to withdraw significant parts of America’s security commitments on the continent.
The president has implicitly revealed why he thinks he can push Europe around like this. In a comment during his hectoring encounter with Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House on February 28th, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart: “You don’t have the cards.” Cards are Trump’s euphemism for power and leverage. And to the extent that the American president is capable of threatening Europe across a series of fronts, this is a function of the cards he holds and his willingness to play them aggressively. In other words: Trump seeks to exploit Europe’s economic, technological, political and security vulnerabilities for coercive ends.
Europeans need to learn quickly how to play cards. They must assess the hand they have—Europe’s own sources of leverage over Trump and Trump’s America—and how to strengthen that hand. They must develop a clear and realistic plan of what they want to achieve in the transatlantic game of poker that is likely only just beginning. Where do they want to remain aligned with the US? Where do they want to rebalance the relationship? And where do they want to break from America? Then, Europeans will need to play their hand cannily in pursuit of those ends.
The first step in this process is to review that European hand of cards, what it would mean to play them and how Europeans should proceed with such decision making. Providing that review is the purpose of this policy brief.
Why deterrence matters
First, however, it is worth asking whether Europeans really should threaten to retaliate, and then do so if Trump follows through on his many threats.
After all, Canada and Mexico have deployed significant deterrents, alongside concessions and incentives, but nonetheless now face significant new tariff barriers. Trump evidently sees those not just as a form of leverage but as ends in themselves; a means of bringing manufacturing back to the US and a way to finance tax cuts. So seeking to raise their cost to an administration that sees the EU as an ideological foe may be a futile exercise. Europeans might wonder whether it is not better to let the costs of US tariffs rebound onto American businesses and households, and wait for Trump to reap a domestic backlash.
The EU and its European partners should indeed seek negotiated outcomes and hope that markets will eventually constrain the president. But neither of these considerations overrides the reality that Trump most fundamentally cares about cards—or in other words, power. So any European response will need to be rooted primarily in power rather than economics, rules or US domestic politics.
To use an analogy, nuclear weapons are bad for everyone. But if Vladimir Putin threatens to use them against Europe, that does not mean that Europe should simply pledge not to use such weapons in the hope that the Kremlin will recognise the lose-lose logic. Credible deterrence is needed. The same is true of Trump’s threats today.
Can Europe put up such deterrence? The US president does not appear to believe so. Asked at a press briefing what would happen if Europeans retaliated against US tariffs, Trump retorted: “They can’t. They can try. But they can’t. […] We are the pot of gold. We’re the one that everybody wants. […] We just go cold turkey; we don’t buy anymore. And if that happens, we win.” In other words: the US has “escalation dominance” over Europe; holding a superior position across a range of fronts—from military and diplomatic to economic and technological—that could make European retaliation a losing bet.
But the reality is more complex. If the essence of nuclear deterrence is mutual assured destruction (MAD), Europe needs to demonstrate another kind of MAD: mutual asymmetric dependency. Significant aspects of America’s prosperity and geopolitical power have for years and sometimes decades benefited from good relations with Europe. And Europeans command certain of these chokepoints. In other words: they do hold cards.
Indeed, they have played them before. In 2018, when the first Trump administration threatened tariffs on European cars, Jean-Claude Juncker as European Commission president travelled to Washington with a basket of threats and offers, successfully deterring the US president from escalating the dispute. To be sure, Trump is markedly more aggressive and unchecked in his second administration, so what worked seven years ago would likely be inadequate this time. But the EU too has evolved over the intervening years and developed a harder geoeconomic edge and new deterrent tools. For example, its Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI, sometimes dubbed the “bazooka”) entered into force in December 2023 and provides the union with a structure for calibrating collective responses, such as counter-tariffs, to detrimental third-country policies.
It is a reminder that Europeans have cards, can continue to improve their hand and must now think hard about how to play them.
Assessing Europe’s hand
The following tables set out Europe’s options. They are split into five categories of measures: tariff and trade; services, intellectual property (IP) and digital; critical technology and infrastructure; financial; and people-to-people. Inevitably, there is some overlap between the categories. Equally inevitably, the tools in question are a dense thicket of acronyms; a brief, clarifying guide to which precedes each options table. The tables themselves indicate the rationale for using each measure, the actions and tools involved in doing so, and the prospective cost to Europeans on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is the greatest risk of self-damage). That final point deserves particular reflection. None of the options listed involve no risk at all to European interests; but the degree of risk they present—and where in the EU they would fall heaviest—varies significantly.
Some further caveats are in order. Firstly, the damage scores are merely indicative, and the question of the potential harm done by each of these measures warrants further research. Secondly, this brief exclusively maps Europe’s technological and economic deterrence options. It does not cover “cards” linked to non-commercial aspects of transatlantic defence and security cooperation, like US military access to European territory, air space and waters, or Europe-US intelligence sharing. Thirdly, this brief does not recommend any options above others. Which cards to play will depend on the actions of the US administration, as well as wider European considerations about how to combine and phase responses, how to blend deterrence with concessions and incentives to compromise, and how to manage and mitigate the costs to European interests.
Europe’s cards
Tariff and trade measures
Other than the ACI, the most obvious trade and tariffs tool is the Enforcement Regulation, which enables the commission to impose countermeasures in the absence of a functioning World Trade Organisation (WTO) dispute settlement system. But the EU can also weaponise its agricultural and environmental standards to discriminate against American products; for example through its Farm to Fork Strategy (acts and regulations advancing food sustainability), its Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), its Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals regulation (REACH) and its Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation (ESPR, which limits market access to non-European competitors failing to meet sustainability criteria).
Rosamond Press 
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