FIRST CAME the recapitulation: “It is the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice, develop it and improve it,” Donald Trump told the political leaders and captains of industry assembled at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this week. “And that’s the reason I’m seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States.” Then, just hours later, came the capitulation: he and Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, “have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland”, Mr Trump said on social media, and as a result, his threatened tariffs on eight NATO members, intended to coerce them into supporting his land-grab, would be rescinded.
As The Economist went to press, Mr Trump had not disclosed any details of his and Mr Rutte’s plan. In fact, he implied that the details were still to be worked out—a task he delegated to J.D. Vance, his vice-president, and Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, among others. But it is clear that Mr Trump is backing away, at least for now, from a titanic confrontation with America’s closest allies. Nonetheless, by even briefly pursuing the notion of seizing territory from an ally, by force if necessary, Mr Trump has done huge damage to America’s credibility and thus to its security. And, as ever with the mercurial president, there is no guarantee that he will not change his mind yet again and reignite the explosive row.
Ever since Mr Trump first took office in 2017, America’s system of global alliances, forged 75 years ago at the start of the cold war, has been in a slow-burning crisis. But the quixotic campaign to grab Greenland, a Danish territory, had sparked a five-alarm fire. Transatlantic ties were at their worst since the Suez crisis 70 years ago. An escalating sequence of punitive measures and retaliation threatened. Mr Trump had appeared on the verge of losing a continent to gain an island.
Mr Trump had mused about acquiring Greenland since his first term. The various justifications he gave for his fixation seemed entirely spurious. Nonetheless, in recent weeks his pursuit of the territory had become more insistent and aggressive. His announcement on January 17th that he would impose a 10% tariff from February 1st on imports from Denmark and seven other European countries that had sent small contingents of troops to Greenland marked a dramatic escalation in what had previously been a largely rhetorical campaign. The tariff would rise to 25%, Mr Trump said, if Greenland was not in American hands by June 1st. “There can be no going back,” he had declared, a few days before he did just that.
Greenland’s population and economy are far tinier than those of even the smallest of America’s 50 states, but the stakes were still enormous. “If the United States decides to militarily attack another NATO country, then everything would stop,” argued Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister earlier this month. “That includes NATO and therefore post-second-world-war security.”
The wrecking of America’s relations with Europe was being watched with trepidation by its allies in Asia. The Trump administration was pursuing an improbable split-screen policy: embracing Asian allies and partners and denouncing Chinese coercion in the Pacific, while scorning European allies and partners and coercing Denmark in the Atlantic. At the recent Honolulu Defence Forum, a security talkfest, Japan’s defence minister, Koizumi Shinjiro, had raised the alarm over “tensions that are on the brink of war across the globe” and warned, “The Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic are inseparable and indivisible.”
There have been rows among NATO’s members before. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, bringing it into direct conflict with Greek-Cypriot and some Greek troops. One of Greece’s responses was to pull out of NATO’s integrated military command for six years in protest. In 1996 a Greek fighter jet shot down a Turkish warplane over the Aegean Sea.
Those confrontations had little lasting impact on the alliance. American threats against Greenland are far more serious because America is the political and military backbone of NATO. Since the alliance’s inception, 75 years ago, an American general has always served as the supreme allied commander Europe (SACEUR). NATO’s defence plans for Europe—including Greenland—were written by the previous SACEUR, Chris Cavoli, and assume a high degree of American involvement. American military officers sit atop and are embedded throughout every facet of the alliance. Without American air power and intelligence, NATO forces would find it much harder and more expensive to deter Russian aggression.
The threat to absorb Greenland, whether by arm-twisting or invasion, has left European trust in Article 5, NATO’s mutual-defence clause, hanging by a thread. In his speech in Switzerland, Mr Trump suggested that he saw little value in NATO and doubted that European countries would ever come to America’s aid in an hour of need—conveniently forgetting that many did just that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. If he was contemplating dismembering a European ally himself, European governments are naturally wondering, how eager will he be to defend one being dismembered by Russia?
It is not clear what prompted Mr Trump’s change of heart. It seems unlikely that he suddenly regretted the damage he was doing to America’s alliances, given his long history of scorning them. More plausible is that the prospect of a destructive tit-for-tat spiral unnerved him. After all, the dollar and American stockmarkets had dropped sharply as the dispute began to escalate and recovered their poise when Mr Trump announced his retreat. It looks like the latest example of what Wall Street types call the TACO trade: Trump Always Chickens Out.
If so, the president was right to blink. European leaders, many of whom have tried to get into Mr Trump’s good books over the past year with unctuous sycophancy, were less emollient than usual. Many issued stentorian statements denouncing geopolitical blackmail and rejecting the law of the jungle. There was much talk about how Mr Trump responds only to shows of strength. The risk of runaway escalation was obvious.
The severity of the measures European leaders were toying with shows just how badly transatlantic relations have been harmed. The European parliament, for instance, said it was putting on hold the Turnberry Agreement, a trade deal the EU signed with America last year under which Europe accepted a 15% tariff rate without reciprocating. As a result, European tariffs were set to come into force in early February on about €93bn-worth ($108bn) of American goods. These will almost certainly now be deferred again.
Some European leaders wanted to go much further. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, suggested that the EU invoke its most powerful economic weapon, the anti-coercion instrument (ACI). This mechanism, which has never been used, would have allowed the EU not simply to adopt matching tariffs in response to America’s, but to resort to completely different forms of retaliation, from cancelling banking licences to restricting exports of the machines used to make advanced computer chips (a business in which ASML of the Netherlands has a monopoly).
Such steps would have been almost certain to prompt further escalation from America, which would have had ample means to respond. The dominance of the dollar and America’s financial system could have been used against European banks and businesses. Digital retaliation could have exploited Europe’s reliance on American cloud providers and so on. Happily, Mr Trump’s climbdown means that the ACI will remain untested for now.
But the rift has caused the previously unthinkable to be contemplated. Europe, for instance, has also been considering its military leverage over America. It would be much harder for America to project military power into Africa and the Middle East without access to European bases such as Ramstein, a sprawling medical and logistical hub in Germany, or Souda Bay in Greece, a deep-water port. America’s seizure of a Venezuelan-linked oil tanker on January 7th depended on access to British airfields and bases, for instance, as well as unspecified support from Denmark.
America could replace many of these with alternative facilities, perhaps in the Middle East. But that would take billions of dollars and many years. And some could not be replaced at all. America’s ability to monitor and counter threats in the Arctic—ostensibly what drove its pursuit of Greenland—depends on co-operation from Britain, Iceland, Greenland and Norway, among other NATO allies. The Golden Dome missile-defence project, which Mr Trump has cited as a reason America must own Greenland, depends not only on early-warning radars in Greenland, which have been there for decades, but also on sites such as RAF Fylingdales in the north of England.
Exploiting any of these dependencies would have been difficult, however, in that the Trump administration already seems eager to reduce its military commitment to Europe—something European leaders would not want to encourage. America has ended military aid of its own to Ukraine, but it still allows Europe to buy American weapons on Ukraine’s behalf. It also continues to provide battlefield intelligence to help Ukraine target Russian forces with longer-range missiles. Both of these remain vital: if America were to cut off arms sales and intelligence, Russian advances on the battlefield and Ukrainian casualties would both mount more quickly, bringing Ukraine closer to a potential collapse. It would be “catastrophic”, says a former European spy chief.
Indeed, there were fears Mr Trump might expand his campaign of coercion further, targeting NATO itself, from which he is said to have almost withdrawn America in 2018. He could begin by reducing American forces in Europe or declare Article 5 to be null and void until Greenland was handed over.
In the event of a sudden rupture, many European air forces would not be able to make the best use of the F-35, their most advanced warplane, without access to American communications, targeting data and munitions. Britain’s intelligence apparatus, its nuclear deterrent and its future submarine force would all be in jeopardy. The search for pressure points, in short, makes clear how intertwined America and Europe are militarily and so how troubling the erosion of trust between them is.
For all their fighting talk, some European leaders had worried that Greenland was too small and unimportant to warrant the abrogation of transatlantic ties and feared that a rupture could prompt Russia to attack (or at least probe) European defences. Moreover, they knew Europe had more to lose than America from a showdown with Mr Trump, whether in the form of a trade war or in terms of withdrawn military support, especially for Ukraine.
Hence the energetic search among European leaders for the “off-ramp” that Mr Rutte seems to have found. How sturdy it will prove is impossible to say without more detail. There is always a risk that Mr Trump will renew his pursuit.
Despite the baleful consequences, neither public opinion nor objections from Congress are likely to deter Mr Trump from scratching his Greenland itch in future. Taking over the territory was not a popular idea: in a poll of more than 1,500 Americans conducted for The Economist by YouGov between January 16th and 19th, just 29% of respondents approved of buying Greenland.
Congressmen, including the odd Republican, had been expressing disapproval of Mr Trump’s treatment of a close ally. A bipartisan congressional delegation visiting Copenhagen and Davos had been seeking to assure Europeans that a majority could be found to oppose a takeover.
But Republicans are much keener on Mr Trump’s expansionism than other Americans. In The Economist’s poll, 58% of them backed a purchase. Ted Cruz, a conservative senator, is among those commending Mr Trump. “I believe it is overwhelmingly in America’s national interest to acquire Greenland,” he told Fox News. A congressman has even tabled a bill authorising Mr Trump to “take such steps as may be necessary” to secure Greenland as America’s 51st state.
Mr Trump’s supporters have a habit of falling in line with his decisions, especially if they appear to be working. Our polling found that only 34% of Republicans wanted America to bomb Iran before it did so last year, but fully 70% said they approved of the bombardment after the event. Mr Trump’s ousting of Nicolás Maduro as president of Venezuela prompted a similar change of heart on the right.
Should Mr Trump start agitating about Greenland again, European leaders are likely to find themselves caught once more between public anger—62% of Germans support coming to Denmark’s aid in a conflict with America—and the reality of dependence. “The vast power of the United States is something that anyone with a strategic brain in any European capital understands very profoundly,” argued John Bew, a foreign-policy adviser to several British prime ministers, in a recent interview. Britain, France and Germany were all “careful about wishing away American support and flouncing around about the future Europe without America”, he noted. But all three, he added, were also putting “more behind-the-scenes planning in place for what you might call an orderly transition from a dominant American security umbrella”.
Britain and France, for instance, are quietly deepening their co-operation on nuclear-weapons policy. Last summer they announced that their nuclear forces would be “co-ordinated” for the first time—a big step for France, which has historically kept its nuclear cards close to its chest. In recent weeks several Swedish newspapers and the editor of the magazine of the Social Democratic party have asked whether northern Europe should develop its own nuclear deterrent. “A taboo on discussing this publicly is being broken now,” says a Swedish expert.
Even Anglo-French planning for a “coalition of the willing” in Ukraine has a dual purpose, says a British insider. Ostensibly it is to help beef up Ukraine’s defences after a ceasefire. In practice it is also a modest precursor for a Europe-led military force including non-EU members such as Britain, Canada and Turkey. “I hope that major European NATO allies are secretly gaming how they would take control of the substantial infrastructure of NATO,” says a former envoy to the alliance, “while waiting for the possibility that the US political system rights itself.” ■