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January 8, 2025 - 4:00pm
Sigmund Freud famously claimed there was no such thing as a joke. Listening to Trump’s latest pronouncements on America’s acquisition of Greenland and Canada, Washington’s Nato clients are increasingly inclined to agree. Threatening “economic force” to erase the “artificially drawn line” currently known as the US-Canada border, and refusing to rule out military force to wrest Greenland from Denmark, observing that “we need Greenland for national security reasons,” Trump has made the implicit power relationships of the Nato alliance explicit: the United States is an empire, and the West is its primary sphere of influence.
The relationship, indeed, is not so different from that between Russia and Belarus. That it has remained obscured for so long is the product of both the self-deception of European security elites — for whom submissive compliance to Washington’s whims has for decades been the necessary stance for career advancement — and the delicatesse of previous generations of American emperors and imperial officials, more sensitive than Trump to native mores.
Protests from loyal Atlanticist stalwarts like Denmark, whose Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insists that America is the country’s “most important and closest ally,” now sound like long-delayed transmissions from another era. Indeed, if Trump can intimidate Nato members Canada and Denmark, he can and probably will do it to Europe as a whole — and the Ukraine war, the outcome to which he is indifferent, presents an obvious pressure point.
Europe’s Biden-era stance against Russia was predicated on the belief that, should Putin turn his gaze westward from Ukraine, the United States would always, in the end, ride to the rescue. This dependency (the product of Europe’s securocrat class, which mocked French ambitions of strategic autonomy), presents the incoming Trump administration with tremendous leverage. The Russian threat, looming in the background, now becomes a force-enabler for Trump to impose whatever demands, economic or diplomatic, he wishes on a weak, increasingly poor and divided Europe.
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, Putin has made it clear that any future reworking of Europe’s security architecture should happen over the heads of European leaders, through direct negotiations with Washington: this no longer appears a fanciful outcome. In a world dominated by the naked power politics of civilisation-states like Russia and China, the failure of Europe’s ancient civilisation to become a state leaves it, ultimately, at the mercy of a great state, the US, which is something less than a civilisation.
Trump’s naked expansionism is, in its own paradoxical way, a marker of imperial retrenchment. Shoring up Washington’s core empire, including its control of current and future trade routes in Central America and the Northwest Passage is a reversion to America’s 19th century mean as the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere rather than the provider of global order. For Europe, inclusion under America’s security umbrella will come at a hefty price. Trump’s vision of Nato as something closer to an arrangement for paying protection money than the visions of “progressive realism” that animate our diplomatic class may not sound well at security conferences, but at least has the virtue of being true.
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SubscribeThis article deserves to have a place in the main Unherd section. Although short-form, it succinctly points up several vital realities about the incoming US administration and the implications for the rest of the world.
If Starmer epitomises anything, its the ineptitude of our political class over at least the last three decades, possibly post-war (with the notable exception of 1979-90).
His disastrous input into the Democrat campaign leaves him exposed to the winds of Washington to an unprecedented degree, and his claims that he and Lammy were well-received during dinners with Trump simply demonstrates his naivety.
Yes. The political class are under the complacent illusion that the UK punches above its weight and have been so for decades. Labour’s stupidity in trying to aid the Democrats in the election was a piece of naïveté that a more intelligent leader would have noisily discouraged.
An idiot who accuses an ordinary (!) American Musk of interfering in Britain’s internal affairs, forgetting that he recently sent official politicians to influence the outcome of the US elections. And, as usually happens in such cases, he also backed the wrong horse
Well said! Labour sends party faithful to the USA to help the Harris campaign, the Foreign Secretary, and incoming Ambassador have called Trump a tyrant and racist. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, probably no surprise that the Trump Team is firing back….Politics is blood sport so enter the ring at your peril…Musk posts on Twitter….don’t like it then don’t read it.. why amplify it….unless they need a distraction…same goes for his posts on Germany
Starmer and his gang are still using the old elite political quid pro quo playbook. The old playbook is tattered and useless. The world is changing but Labour (and the Conservatives, already punished) have not yet realised that they need to align with the new elite.
As the great Morgoth puts it, Labour is Woke North Korea at this point.
Trump could be Europe’s unlikely savior. The UK, France, and Germany appear to have willingly adopted policies edging them toward submission under Islamist influence, reducing native Europeans to kuffars and dhimmis under a de facto Caliphate, paying a modern-day jizya through generous welfare to entitled Muslim immigrants.
Hard to know how much of Trump’s pronouncements are serious and what is outrage bait.
Either way, I’d favour Britain becoming more self-reliant so we don’t have to be in hock to America or the EU.
The interesting ;point about Trump’s Greenland bluster is that he has nothing to gain by it. The US already has a military base on Greenland, and already dominates its security position. As for resources and economy, US strategic rivals do not have a foothold and are not likely to get one. Militarily or economically, the US could pretty much gain anything it wants anyway, just with a few discreet nudges. The risk that Greenland might break away and make a deal with China some time in the 2100’s is too fanciful to worry about.
So, if there is no national US interest to an outright take-over, what is the point? Most likely ego and propaganda. Greenland makes for great theatre and wonderful images, it is a hard-fought real-estate deal, which is where Trump feels at home, Proudly fighting for US advantage is a good look (even if you have those advantages already). ‘Gaining’ Greenland for the US will guarantee Trump a place in the history books, and will prove to his base that he really is ‘making America Great’, even if all his other promises fail. And, of course, continuing with diplomacy requires, shock horror, cooperation with someone. Trump does not like cooperation, and does not feel he has properly won unless and until he has humiliated his adversary. Strange way to run a railroad, but, hey, that is what y’all voted for.
Agreed. Under the Democrats the US projected great strength abroad. The great deterrence of the Biden/Harris administration brought unparalleled peace and cooperation to the world. Despite this unparalleled success, the unenlightened still voted against Democrats.
I cannot speak for what kind of deterrence the US under Biden could exercise on Iran, North Korea, Russia, or Turkey. I can say that there was pretty much unlimited respect for US power in Denmark and Greenland already (we are not insane), and that beating up on Denmark is not really an effective way to impress anyone with your strength.
Actually you can examine the difference between how aggressive Russia and Iran acted under Trump vs Biden. What you’ll see is they were far more emboldened to act aggressively with Biden than with Trump.
Nobody is “beating up” on colonial Denmark and nobody in the US is going to allow Denmark to get beat up. As the other poster stated, its almost certainly a troll.
nobody in the US is going to allow Denmark to get beat up. You forgot to add “by anyone else”. Threatening economic and military war to get what you want would qualify as ‘beating up’, I think. Was there not a crime under British law called “obtaining money by menaces”?
As for Trump deterring other powers, 1) Russia and Ukraine were fighting in the Donbass from 2014 onwards – it just escalated in 2022. 2) There were also no major earthquakes during the Trump presidency. Does that mean he successfully deterred the earths crust? Or is that, too, just a coincidence?
He’s trolling, and making Europeans ask the question, “what are they going to about it?” The answer is nothing because Europe can’t defend itself, and maybe they might become more aware of that now.
Yes, ego is usually the point with Trump. He just wants attention and says things out loud that shouldn’t be said out loud. As for the voters, we had exactly two choices and one of the two was basically a stand in for an unnamed and unknown blob of bureaucrats. A lot of people don’t like the way the country is going and would basically vote for anybody who was an outsider and promised big changes. Fault them for it or call it foolish if you want, but that’s how it is, and until the establishment comes up with some better answers or at least a better argument, there will be more Trumps and more populism.
Internationally speaking, the bottom line is that the US government is no longer going to provide a military umbrella for all of Europe or the entire world on the dime of the US taxpayers. The people don’t want to pay for the huge military anymore when we’re defending places that spend a tiny fraction of what America spends. If you’re arguing for demilitarization and just letting Putin and Xi have what they want because it’s not worth fighting them, that’s an argument that Americans might listen to. If you’re arguing that things should stay the same as they were from 1991-2016 and cite the nebulous benefits of ‘global trade’ as justifying unilateral military expenditures, that’s just not going to fly anymore. That world is not sustainable. Trump’s may not be any more sustainable, but we’ll see.
Ultimately, I fear Trump will probably fail and this populist/globalist dynamic will go on until it ends in one of two places, either another global depression that displaces the financial oligarchs and ruins most everyone else besides, or a third world war that obligates nations to return to a model based on national economic security rather than global efficiency and material wealth. Ultimately, though I don’t like Trump, I hope for his policies to succeed and for the country to prosper because I fear the alternative, that things keep getting worse and people get angrier at elites and at one another, pushing us ever closer to one of the outcomes I mentioned.
If you look at the world, the next big rumbling conflict is possibly China and Taiwan. No-one in the West is paying attention to it – eg Chinese incursions into Taiwanese territorial waters – and perhaps, if China did annex Taiwan, the West would shrug its shoulders having been ‘warmed over’ to China being China.
Intriguingly, Trump’s ‘threats’ to the US neighbours are not so far away from the overtures China makes towards Taiwan. Being Trump, he amplifies the issue to cartoon-like proportions. However, along the way his statements sensitise the public to the issue of national territorial rights. Whether or not he means what he says doesn’t matter so much, if along the way it also makes it more difficult for China to play the same games, but more quietly.
What makes you think (re China – Taiwan) that “No-one in the West is paying attention to it…”?
Do you expect to be briefed by the Pentagon on their systems of monitoring? Or the foreign offices of the UK & EU?
The US military is definitely paying attention. They’re in the process of preparing for a possible conflict by conducting war games, stocking critical Pacific bases, and so on. Are they as prepared as they should be? Probably not, but they are doing what they can and definitely monitoring the situation closely.
Trump will bigly liberate the indigenous people of True Iceland from a millenia of Danish oppression! The Horticultural fake news spread by Erik the Red has marginalized the great people of Greenland for far too long!
Let’s fight colonialism together!!!
I honestly don’t know what point the author is making here. Just one note; the U.S. could offer every man, woman and child in Greenland $100,000 and the cost would be $5.7 billion. I’m sure people there would likely jump at an offer like that.
Would you sell your country out for 100 grand?
It depends…
Greenland isn’t meaningfully Denmark.
Plenty of Argentines said same about Falkland Islands….
But 99% of Falkland Islanders disagreed.
Hell yes. I’d become the 51st state for free. Bring it on. I’m sick of our inept politicians of the last 30 years. They’ve wrecked Britain. Perhaps getting a First and Second Amendment might breed some better ones.
why don’t you just emigrate
There is more to living somewhere than its governance. I may well look into it, when I retire, but I would be unable to transfer my profession and work in the USA, in answer to your trite question.
Maybe. Depends on the buyer. This is actually how some corporate mergers work. Somebody with a ridiculous amount of cash pays stockholders way more than what their shares are worth. There would be some other factors. Russia, no. China, big no, Israel, maybe, anybody else in the middle east, definitely no, Canada, maybe. Japan, probably. I’m a big anime fan and their government seems a lot closer to competent than ours has been recently.
Martin Layfield said “Would you sell your country out for 100 grand?”
What does that even mean in the present case? Lithium, fuorite, tantalum, niobium, hafnium and zirconium don’t just jump out of the ground. Greenland has them, it seems, but doesn’t remotely have the funds to mine them.
So external investors are needed, and China has already put $264.5 billion into its Greenland projects. But the US negotiated military rights on Greenland with Denmark after WWII, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command has been based there since the end of the 1950s (a joint US and Canadian installation). Recently, Russia, with the longest Arctic coastline, has entered into joint naval “patrols” with China in Arctic waters.
So Greenland will eventually “sell itself” either to the US or to China. Obviously, any investor who pumps many billions into Greenland for what is still quite a speculative endeavour will want to ensure that it doesn’t suddenly lose its massive investment after some futue Greenland election. If the US makes the investment, it doesn’t want to hear some day that the mines are being nationalised or handed over to China. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, for China and its investments. Short of an unlikely rapprochement between the two superpowers, Greenland will have difficulty sustaining its current policy of accepting influence from both.
So what is that glorious alternative for a proud, independent Greenland that you have in mind? What would you not call “selling out”?
5.7 billion is almost a rounding error in the federal budget. In terms of money spent, the biggest categories are in the hundreds of billions while the smallest category, helpfully labelled “other” so taxpayers can know what their money is spent on, is over three times as large.
Speaking as a US citizen: it’s very pleasant living in the USA. So good, that I’m doing it for free. But of course I wish someone would had offered me $100K to do it.
Unfortunately $100k wouldn’t pay off your share of our national debt . . .
Meanwhile the MoD is talking about battlefield electric vehicles. Unfortunately, we deserve whatever is coming our way.
Good article here. I will refrain from poking fun at globalists or mocking their foolishness. The fact that reality has shattered much of their worldview stands as a cruel enough punishment. The rules based international order was always a fiction sustained by American dominance and maintained under the implied permission of the American taxpayers.The danger in sustaining such fictions is that after a while even the people who started the fiction start to actually believe it and start making decisions that look suicidal in terms of geopolitical power and national self preservation. Europe unfortunately did buy into the fiction to a much larger degree than anybody else and put themselves into a basically untenable position. Now America is not so dominant and the American taxpayers are not so beneficent and not so willing to sacrifice for the defense of others and many of Europe’s decisions now look like so much self-flagellation for not much purpose.
In a world without rules or order, it comes down to multiple great powers competing. America is broke and selling what it has to sell, and what it has to sell is a still very formidable military that most countries don’t want to pick a fight with, including the other great powers. If you think about it from Trump’s perspective, he’s making a deal. I can just see him pitching it in his best deal maker voice.
It’s a win-win deal for both of us, we have something you need you have things we need. We defend you, and you just give us a little something in return. I’m flexible so we can be creative here. Maybe you can buy more weapons from one of our great American companies, or buy more of our natural gas now that I’ve opened up more land for drilling, or maybe you’re short on cash, I know how that is, so maybe you just give us an island you’re not really using all that much. You know the one I mean, the big one up north with the ice. You won’t even miss it, and we’ll build all this stuff there and it’ll be wonderful, just wonderful.
Agree with all of this except your view that our elites have suffered enough with having their fantastical delusions shattered.
I’m not so magnanimous.
I’ll stop there in case I get arrested.
A somewhat one-sided article. There are implications for the US too should Trump decide to follow what appears to be an isolationist yet imperialist policy.
Trump is presumably thinking about competition from China by wanting control over Greenland, Canada and the Panama canal. But if its allies start to mistrust it (presumably a process that is already well underway, and it won’t only be those directly mentioned that will distrust) then the US position is not strengthened, it is weakened. What if Europe, Canada, maybe Australia, move nearer to China as a consequence? What if Canada sees fit to increase defence of the border with the US – the US has to respond, tying up military resource and reducing trade?
Do you trust politics like Trudeau?
I’m not sure what your point is – that politicians aren’t generally trustworthy?
Trudeau hasn’t directed threats towards allied countries.
My point is that if we continue to live under leaders like Trudeau, we don’t have much time left.
Do you trust Trump? (There is no such thing as ‘a politician like Trump’)
I trust the wave he found himself riding on.
How many of Russia’s or China’s allies, or “allies”, actually trust them? It’s about time Europe’s leaders and our own started putting the national interest first and forgot about the crumbling international rules-based system and winning brownie points at Davos.
Why are you so vague? Its almost unfalsifiable writing.
Your first statement isn’t even cognitive dissonance. Its doubletalk. You’re aware of the contradiction but don’t care. It’s not possible to be both “isolationist and “imperialist.”
Likewise, what exactly is Trump doing that would make the “allies” trust Communist China (who is allied with Russia) more than the US?
Isolationist because he does not seem to care whether he loses allies or not, assuming there is some substance to what he is saying.
Imperialist because he is talking about taking over other countries, or part of them, including allies.
It is a strange combination, but it is not me that it is coming from. There is also historical precedent of such policies – the quote below describes Britain at the height of its imperial power.
“Splendid isolation is a term used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances from 1815 to 1902.”
It’s not necessarily a case of trusting China more, just trusting the US less.
However, all I really wanted to get across was the one-sidedness of the article and I tried to come up with some possible implications for the US, which the article didn’t care to consider.
That description doesn’t fit the definition of isolationism. By the way the term “Ally” is a transactional term that implies mutual obligations. Everyone in the alliance understands the US has the primary role of chief protector. Some members of the alliance haven’t always met their defense spending obligations. It’s more than fair for the chief protectorate to demand mutual obligations be met. I don’t understand why the US has to always disproportionately shoulder the load when we have our own domestic problems to focus on.
As far as Imperialism…if Denmark were to sell it’s colony, I don’t believe that fits the traditional definition of imperialism either. The US isn’t going to take it by force.
European Left Wingers have disrespected America for decades. Maybe we should place the shoe on the other foot and ask if Americans might trust Europeans less due to the continual disrespect they’ve showed us. This can’t be a one way street where we do all the work and then get spit on.
Some NATO countries haven’t met their spending obligations, and this has clearly been a mistake. I get why the US is frustrated, perhaps angry, by that – I am too because of the position it leaves Europe in.
Possibly Trump just wants Denmark to spend more on keeping Greenland secure, possibly he wants it for the US because it’s valuable strategically or economically, who knows? Not me, not you.
Are you sure Trump wouldn’t take Greenland by force if he felt it necessary? I’m not. The UK occupied Iceland in WW2 to prevent German occupation, then later transferred it to the US (you still have a base there). It’s not inconceivable to me that Trump could do something similar with Greenland, but it would have implications.
Fazi has now written a much better article.
You have inadvertently pointed out the biggest selling point Trump has. The alternatives are, even with the most optimistic mindset, not any more reliable or friendly than the US. At least the US is offering to pay for territory rather than just marching in the troops like Putin. You really want to take your chances with Chairman Xi and have CCP officials spying on you, cordoning off your internet, and censoring your press? I’ll refrain from listing the various things Russia and China have done to the nations you’ve listed there. Trump has done what exactly? Threatened to raise tariffs and offered to buy an island that’s mostly uninhabited. How horrid of him. Let’s try to keep things in perspective here. The USA is not going to be as magnanimous as it once was, and Trump is a tactless boor who thinks everything has to be said out loud to the media so all his admirers can hear it, but there do exist worse people and countries in the world than annoying, confrontational, boorish Trump. At any rate, the choices are what they are and until somebody better comes along, other nations are free to choose whichever seems the least awful, kind of like every Presidential election.
Why have you come to the conclusion that I want the things I’ve described? They are potential consequences if Trump follows through on his words, and his words have not excluded the use of troops.
Have you not heard the apt prescription: Take Trump seriously, not literally?
Trump should have campaigned on the slogan: Let’s make Greenland green again
Bringing the green to Greenland.
To be sure, to be sure.
The Danes could realistically start a negotiating position at well over a trillion dollars for Greenland – let’s find out how badly Trump wants it. The sale would give the US a very strong geopolitical strategic position in the arctic circle, and of course all natural resources that will be discovered within its land and maritime boundaries.
The US has a 36 trillion dollar national debt (!!). It spent 6 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which they gained them absolutely nothing. 1 trillion doesn’t seem an unreasonable price to expand it’s geographical area by a full 20%.
At no point had anyone pointed out that Trump is only saying what many previous US politicians have said for the last 200 years. The US has always challenged Denmarks sovereignty over Greenland.
I believe the British empire may have been involved in that dispute as well through Canada. It wouldn’t surprise me if Denmark has it because it was a compromise neutral nation between the US and UK.
Unfortunately we are going to have to wait 4 years to remove this bunch of incompetents- then how long will it take to sort out our institutions?
(maybe we should just copy the US form of government ?)