Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t observe the courteous fiction that the transatlantic alliance is one of equals. He has stripped all that away; his approach to diplomacy is that he is the boss and his allies need to understand their places.
Time and again, he has put Washington’s transatlantic allies on the spot — from last April’s “Liberation Day” global tariffs to the roughing up of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, from his red-carpet Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin to his recent threats to annex mineral-rich Greenland come what may.
The one reassuring takeaway in his hour-and-twelve-minute-long speech in Davos, sections of which reprised his White House press conference on Tuesday night, was that he ruled out taking Greenland by force. “We would be frankly unstoppable. But I won’t do that,” Trump told world leaders at Davos, adding: “I don’t want to use force, I won’t use force.”
That will have come as a relief, as he has several times previously declined to rule out invading the Arctic island.
His bid to wrest Greenland from Denmark, a fellow NATO member, on the grounds of countering Russia and China has left the U.S.’s traditional European allies fearing an immediate rupture in transatlantic relations.
Earlier this month Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, had warned that an American invasion of Greenland would mark the end of NATO and “therefore post-Second World War security.” The American military intervention in Venezuela only added to the panic, especially after Trump followed it with a threat to impose punitive tariffs on the countries that opposed him.