President Donald Trump’s long, meandering speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, this week, wasn’t the bombshell everybody thought it was going to be. Despite Trump’s fixation on claiming Greenland for the United States and his threat to slap 10% tariffs on Washington’s closest European allies until they caved to these ambitions, Trump’s remarks were quite boring.
In fact, outside of his commitment not to use force to acquire Greenland, which many people in the room probably didn’t believe anyway, Trump’s speech simply reflected his already well-established views. These should be well known by now.
First, the belief that U.S. allies are spoiled children who don’t pay the U.S. back for all the generosity it has bestowed on them since the end of World War II. Second, the U.S. is respected again on the world stage, unlike those ineffectual, stale, and morally superior dunces who occupied the office in the past. Third, the days when U.S. allies operated with a sense of entitlement are over. And fourth, as the strongest nation, the U.S. reserves the right to use its leverage wherever and whenever possible.
Of course, foreign policy analysts across the political and ideological spectrum will take issue with many of these points. Some of the brushbacks will be more legitimate than others. Deploying a strategy of coercion to effectively annex Greenland, for instance, not only goes against one of the most fundamental beliefs that Washington has promoted since the mid-20th century — that no nation has the right to claim another democratic nation’s territory by force — but is also geopolitically mindless. After all, it unnecessarily alienates friendly countries.
Indeed, everything the U.S. realistically needs or wants in Greenland, whether it’s exploiting the rare earth deposits located underneath the ice or establishing more U.S. military bases to defend the territory from a virtually nonexistent Russian or Chinese threat, the U.S. can get through a regular negotiation with the Danes. And to be honest, that probably will not be a hard negotiation to pull off; Danish politicians have repeatedly made the point that they’re willing to grant Washington enormous concessions short of outright annexation.
Instead, Trump has been unwilling to settle for anything less than his maximalist demand, manufacturing a national security crisis that could have been avoided.
Other criticisms, however, are less serious. Trump isn’t wrong to continue harping on the massive disparity within NATO between the U.S. and everybody else. Trump’s proclamation that NATO would be a useless organization without U.S. firepower is overly obnoxious. But the sentiment behind them isn’t totally off the mark: NATO would be in much worse shape if it weren’t for the U.S. carrying most of the load, spending most of the money, and taking a leadership role in operations NATO buried itself with earlier in the decade. If you don’t believe me, just look at what happened in Libya in 2011, when the Obama administration took a back seat to France and Britain, only to have to bail both of them out once they ran out of munitions. NATO has addressed some of these problems in the 15 years that followed, but the alliance still very much depends on Washington for the command and control, intelligence, and surveillance capabilities that are critical to fighting and winning wars.
Consider that Trump’s machinations about possibly capturing Greenland by force wouldn’t be resulting in such anxiety in Europe today if the military balance of power inside NATO were not so unequal in favor of the Americans. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that?
In the end, I suspect Trump will strike some kind of deal with Denmark short of full annexation. What that deal will look like is anybody’s guess, but it is likely to include the kinds of economic and security concessions that will scratch Trump’s itch and allow him to claim a public victory. We may all look back at this episode in a few months’ time and chalk it up to another short, chaotic chapter in Trump’s tenure.
Unfortunately, this is a glass half-full perspective. Trump’s rhetoric may be similar, but his unpredictability tends to dominate the policy.