“It’s a very small ask,” President Donald Trump said in Davos, referring to his desire to acquire Greenland, “compared to what we have given [NATO] for many many decades.”
Standing at a podium during the World Economic Forum, Trump went on to say how little NATO has given the United States — though Article 5’s collective defense clause was only ever invoked to defend the U.S. after the September 11th attacks.
Trump told European leaders that the U.S. owning Greenland would enhance the security of the NATO alliance. “You can say yes and we’ll be appreciative, or you can say no and we’ll remember.”
He invoked a memory of World War II, when the U.S. sent thousands of troops to Greenland to help Denmark protect the island from Nazi Germany. And he said the U.S. shouldn’t have “given it back,” though the U.S. never actually owned Greenland but offered to buy it.
Fears have been mounting over how far the president would go in the name of the Monroe Doctrine. Could the “immediate negotiations” he seeks turn into military force?
France, Germany, and other European countries deployed troops to Greenland out of concern that the United States would invade its NATO ally. Greenland is not for sale, officials said again and again. Trump threatened tariffs, and Vladimir Putin probably sat back on a taught, gilded couch, drinking champagne as European leaders bridled.
But in Davos, Trump tried to justify his desire for Greenland and quell fears that he would seize it. “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable,” Trump said. “But I won’t do that, okay? … I don’t have to use force, I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”
It still worth noting that covert influence to stoke separatism was reported in the summer. And in his 70-minute speech, Trump at once called Greenland “a big piece of ice,” uninhabited and undefended, yet also described it as a frontline for future wars, “a core national security interest for America.” Think strategic location and minerals. (And yet, the words Greenland, Denmark, and Arctic are not even mentioned once in the National Security Strategy. published last year.)
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Davos on Tuesday. “That the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t. So, what are our options?”
A former national security official told me earlier this week that a fracture was growing inside NATO, that it will run deep and long: European allies are saying that they are starting to prepare to go it alone, and that trust may remain broken even when U.S. presidents change.
More in the video.
