According to former White House strategist and current MAGA influencer and podcaster Steve Bannon, there is. “They’re playing with fire,” he told POLITICO. “They’re totally dependent on us for trade.” He also added a dark warning about “the Alberta secession movement picking up momentum” — Bannon and other MAGA luminaries have been encouraging the oil-rich Canadian province to break away.
Bannon also cited the deal Trump recently struck with Denmark and Greenland as an example of U.S. power and Washington’s ability to get what it wants. “Our Greenland deal shows the reality of Canada’s inability to defend itself from being the next Ukraine — this time in the Arctic,” he said.
But Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, draws a different lesson from the Greenland deal, which extends an earlier agreement dating from 1951 and does not give Trump control of the island, as he said he wanted. For Daalder, this deal shows that when allies stand their ground, the U.S. president backs down. “With that deal Trump literally got nothing,” he told POLITICO.
“I think what’s happening is the allies are starting to understand how to play him,” said Daalder. “Now they’re ignoring his bluster, and do and say what they think is important for their own good. By doing so, they have as good a chance as any in getting what they want.”
It’s also not surprising that Macron was quicker to taunt Trump than other Western leaders, said Daalder. “He’s French, after all.” Even during the first Trump presidency, Macron was willing to go mano a mano with the U.S. president, squeezing his counterpart’s hand in a handshake until their knuckles turned white and refusing to let go even when Trump tried to pull away.
But the French president’s tone seems sharper now, his actions even more pointed. Fort his, Daalder points to Macron’s maneuvering of Trump this June into inking an interim deal with Iran at Versailles — a palace infamous for a treaty that ended one world war but led to another. Macron, Trump’s critics trumpeted, had pulled off an epic diplomatic “troll.”