How Trump Brought Us to a “Rupture in the World Order”

0:04Welcome to the political scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Good morning, Jane, and good morning, Susan. Hey, Evan. Hey there, great to be with you.

0:24Well, this just may be remembered as the week when some big American allies stopped pretending to get along with Donald Trump. In barely 100 hours, he swung from threatening to get Greenland and fight NATO to backing down, at least temporarily. So what's the net effect? Well, a European Union diplomat put it memorably to Politico, quote, our American dream is dead, adding Donald Trump murdered it. That's quite an image from a diplomat. So Jane, Susan, what happened here for people who didn't follow every twist and turn? Well, as we know, Trump has been fixated on Greenland, a Danish territory, and Denmark is a NATO ally, and he's threatened to seize Greenland and impose tariffs on Denmark.

1:16And on Wednesday, Trump pulled back, claiming he and NATO reached a framework for a deal. Framework being a very broad— Doing a lot of work. Doing a lot of work here. A concept of a plan? An out— Yeah, right. What was that? That was what he said. The concepts of a plan. Yeah. You know, and Trump's ability both to sort of seize the world's imagination with some wacky scheme or another, you know, we're 10 years into that. But this did feel to me like something different happened this week. And having the president go to Switzerland where all the world leaders are gathered, the CEOs, and essentially treat Europe like hostile territory.

2:00You had J.D. Vance, in fact, congratulating him for going into the lion's den and speaking hard truths. A remarkable statement from the United States. Trump chose to end his visit after brandishing these threats against Europe by convening this, quote unquote, board of peace, this sort of make-believe, you know, new league that's going to have him as the chairman of the world and somehow displace the United Nations. Really remarkable scene. So you could have the president of the United States flanked by all of America's traditional allies, the great powers of Britain and France and Germany and all the countries of the European Union.

2:39Those are our friends. Those are our allies. No, he's invited Vladimir Putin, the instigator of the worst war in Europe since World War II, to join his board of peace. And I think for me that image sums up this crisis moment. You're absolutely right that that split screen is the thing that stays with me this week, because you had this moment when the countries that would be traditionally in America's intellectual camp, in our sphere of values, places like France, Norway, Sweden, Italy, all of them saying, no way, we're not getting involved in this board of peace. And instead, you have these other countries that are, let's call them what they are.

3:19They're either tattered democracies like Turkey or they are outright authoritarian states. So there is a parting of blocks at the moment between countries that are, in a sense, being forced to choose to actually embrace the essence of. Yeah, except that we're the leader of the Democratic bloc. That's the problem. Are we though, Susan? But you know what, Evan? We're treaty allies with all of those countries. Those are the lions in the lion's den. You know, the allies are. And meanwhile, of course, he's disinvited Canada. Exactly. And never did invite Denmark to join his peace group. You know, I had this moment where I just by coincidence happened to be meeting with a bunch of European analysts who were coming through town and they all had the deer in the headlights expression, having kind of gone around Washington for a few days.

4:09And it was just fascinating to see that at its core, honestly, this was all unfolding right when we were seeing each other. At its core, what they said was it's clear to us that we do not share a perception of reality. That's the term. That's a remarkable description of how far apart these two places are. In a nutshell, that's what we saw this week is Donald Trump's alternate reality goes to Davos. And the people who are living in reality, reality say, what the hell? Right. What the hell? No. Right. All right. Well, to make some sense of this, we are fortunate, guys, that we have a guest today who has spent decades thinking about the relationship across the Atlantic, about power, about alliances.

4:56Joining us is Carl Bilt. He is co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and is a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden. And Carl joins us now. Carl, welcome to the show. Thank you. A pleasure. You've been watching this week's extraordinary events, I think, like all of us have been. Trump, as you know, gave this much anticipated speech in Davos. We're just going to listen to a representative sample. And I should note at the outset for listeners that Trump refers repeatedly to Iceland here, but in fact, he seems to mean Greenland. I'm helping Europe. I'm helping NATO.

5:36And I've until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy, right? Last time. Very smart man said he's our daddy. He's running it. I was like running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being. but now what I'm asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located, that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection. It's a very small ask compared to what we have given them for many, many decades. But the problem with NATO is that we'll be there for them 100%. But I'm not sure that they'd be there for us. Carl, you've heard a lot of Donald Trump over the last 10 years.

6:31We all have. But why did this moment, this week, feel so different to European leaders? Because it was sort of a tornado of statements and threats and possible actions. I mean, it was a thing every day coming. It looked rather unhinged in entirety. And I think the speech that he gave, more than an hour, was rather sort of rambling and incoherent. And then I think he decided himself to add Greenland. He mixed it up with Iceland. The Icelanders were horrified. The Greenlanders were not particularly pleased to be called a piece of ice. And then what happened thereafter with Secretary Rutte, we'll learn more about that.

7:16But it was an extraordinary, incoherent, and disturbing experience. Just to be very clear, you've used the word that I think everybody has on their mind, which is unhinged. There was a cumulative effect that seems to be a man departing the plane of a familiar reality. Is that how it felt to people who were actually comprehending the impact on your own lives in Europe? Yeah, roughly. And it wasn't just the speech in Davos, but it was everything that happened in the days preceding that. You see the escalation of the Greenland issue after Venezuela, where he seemed to have been after that sort of intoxicating with his own powers.

7:52And we had sort of social media postings that were sort of strange in the extreme. We had Stephen Miller with statements. We had even Secretary Bessett talking in distinctly insulting terms about Denmark. So it was one thing after another coming. You know, it's raised, of course, the issue that for 10 years Donald Trump has been saying worrisome, even dangerous, disruptive, unhinged things about Europe, about NATO. And there's been a circular logic to it, right? You know, what exactly, if anything, is Europe going to do in a collective sense about it? Donald Trump used this language about daddy.

8:35You mentioned Secretary General Mark Rutte of NATO, who's the one who called Trump daddy. Where do you fall down on the kind of just appease Trump, make him feel better and everything will be OK versus, no, this actually is a decisive break and we need to act differently? I think what we need to do as Europeans is to do our own thing, to be quite frank. I mean, we now have the United States that, from our point of view, is unpredictable, probably from your point of view as well, by the way. Yes. And that means that it's also unreliable. And we certainly don't want to have any break with the United States.

9:13That's obviously neither desirable nor possible. But what we need to do, frankly, is, and that's the discussion going on, We need to have an element of de-risking in our relationship with the United States, all across the board, because we don't want to be subject to this sort of outburst of unpredictability and whatever it is that the White House is delivering at the moment. So Sweden was one of two countries, along with Finland, that had resisted for years the idea of NATO membership. And then, of course, after Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine during the Biden administration, joined NATO.

9:52So you're sort of the newest members of this alliance that Donald Trump is sort of now calling into question. Do you think that's causing any reconsideration in Sweden about the course of NATO integration? Or is it that you can envision now a future of NATO without the United States? It's not leading to any reconsideration. There are no signs of that. But what it's leading to is that we must face the fact that we are probably going to have a NATO with, not without the United States, hopefully not, but with significantly less the United States. and that we must adjust both ourselves and NATO to that particular effect.

10:29NATO membership, from our point of view, has a lot of advantages, irrespective of the United States, by the way, because the integration of our forces in Northern Europe in itself creates that strength. So even taking the United States out of the picture, NATO membership will continue to strengthen us quite a lot. You know, when it comes to a vision of a different future, it seems that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who spoke at Davos the day before Trump arrived, really hit a note that resonated with many of the participants there about the power of the middle countries working together.

11:13I'd like to play an excerpt from that speech. Let me be direct. we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. I'm curious, what did you take away from that?

11:59And does it give you a direction or some kind of path forward? I think the Marconi speech is the thing that is going to be remembered after this Davos. Because I think he expressed in very eloquent terms roughly what people have been thinking. Or the direction in which the thinking of people have been evolving in most of the other countries, call them middle countries or Europe or whatever. So that's a speech that's going to be talked about, that's going to be read. And a lot of people are going to see it, will see it as a fault. saying that's the way it is. It's notable to me that one of the other things that Carney mentioned is, as he said, we know the old water is not coming back.

12:43We shouldn't mourn it. And then this is the phrase that stays with me. Nostalgia is not a strategy. That is orienting this relationship in a way that says, in effect, the trust, the faith, the understandings that came before are no longer operative or at least not dispositive. Does that sound right? I think that is right. If you take Trump out of the picture, because he's a rather unique personality, I don't see him as particularly intellectually interesting. I mean, he is obviously in favor of tariffs and against windmills, but I don't see much of, yeah, I don't seen very much of Koreans elsewhere.

13:25But if you take the J.D. Vance or the Stephen Millers and the other crowd around, and that is really what we need to be aware of. They are engaged in a civilizational battle for the future of the United States and for the future of the Western world. And it's a completely different relationship. Can I just ask you one follow-up question about the dedicated ideology of people like J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller. Is this an ideology that looks familiar to you as somebody in Europe? Have you seen it before? That's a good question. Let's not go down that particular route. But it's clearly a different concept of society.

14:08It's more sort of authoritarian, conservative reaction, I would say, in a lot of different ways. I mean, they would describe it differently. But the sort of what we have, the rule of the law, the division of powers and those sorts of things, the powers of minorities, that is not really things that uppermost in their minds, if I phrase it like that. Just to press for one second more, I just am interested in the way this kind of leadership echoes in Europe. Europe has, in a way, and at Davos, stood up in a way that the United States has not, in many ways, to trump. I mean, at least not the elected officials and not the Republican Party.

14:51And I do wonder if that's because there's an echo here of the history that Europe has experienced. Do you feel that maybe Europe is more sophisticated or more alarmed because of its history? There could be a little bit of that, but I think there's a more relevant factor. That is, we are less polarized societies. I mean, we are societies where there's pluralism and we disagree in politics and whatever, but the depolarization and nearly hatred that we find in different segments of EU society, we don't have that in Europe. We don't understand it. We see these dangers from that point of view. I wouldn't even go long and say we are better functioning societies in Europe at the moment than the United States is.

15:35We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to look more closely at this rupture and what it means for Europe and geopolitics. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

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16:07Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

16:44So let's talk about, you know, the Russians are celebrating, in effect, Donald Trump. I noted that Sergei Lavrov just the other day had a press conference and absolutely cited Donald Trump's threats to take over Greenland. And it's hard to see the distinction, frankly, between the rationalization that the United States' leader has used to take over Danish territory with Russia's seizure of Crimea. Some of the language that we've seen in recent days from President Trump is not only echoing Russia now, but, you know, some of what we heard in the 20th century. What does it mean for Russia to have the United States acting in this way?

17:24They are, of course, happy, satisfied, and supportive. I mean, that's it. If you see the social media posts of Kirill Dimitrov, who's the man, who's now the point man towards the Trump team on Ukraine, I mean, look at what he's posting. I mean, he's supporting all of this, applauding all of this coming out of the Trumps and the Millers and the J.D. Vance. They feel a sort of ideological affinity with that kind of approach to politics. And that adds to all of the other sort of the war and the territorial issues and the disrespect for international law and the disrespect for territorial integrity.

18:04But there's a deep, deeper rapprochement between that Russia and that United States. Do you see the United States and Russia, in effect, working together now in these negotiations such as they are over the war? Do you believe there's any serious prospect of a negotiated peace at this point that would be fair to Ukraine? Well, I would hope that would be. But what's surprising me is, I mean, what I understand is the number one outstanding issue, which I draw in the rest of the remaining part of the Donetsk region, that Putin has not been able to get his hands on and he demands it. And what is surprising to me is that Trump supports it.

18:51The U.S. position is trying to pressure Ukraine into that particular that they should not only accept what Russia has taken, but they should head over even more. That, I think, is nearly incomprehensible that the United States is on that particular position. But that's a fact. A deniable fact. A question, Carl, about where this goes from here. We started the week, of course, with the United States, in effect, threatening harsh trade tariffs on European allies, the possibility of even military action in Greenland. Eventually, of course, Trump backed off. And it will be a story to be written about why, what worked.

19:33Was it the stock market? Was it, in fact, the threat of real repercussions from Europe, what was known as the trade bazooka, the idea of serious trade restrictions and investment restrictions? There is also a pattern emerging here, which is that when you're trying to understand what Trump responds to, you see that he changed after that idea was raised, this idea of harsh, call them iron consequences. And we saw something similar when he threatened China and they responded by choking off critical minerals. All of a sudden, he rapidly evolved in his thinking. I'm beginning to hear from some people who say, well, it seems to be that the only thing he understands is the tool he uses himself, which is economic pain.

20:22Do you sense that there is an emerging clarity among European leaders that it is not enough to try to flatter him or move him along or pretend that you reached an agreement that in fact you do need to show some real willingness to undertake hard consequences? Yes, that's clearly been an evolution of European thinking. If you go back to the spring, after the famous Liberation Day and all of the tariffs and all of his threats, there was a discussion in Europe, should we take countermeasures to him or should we sort of try to have some sort of accommodation and be nice and whatever. It ended up with the agreement in July between Bolsonaro and Trump.

21:01No countermeasures were taken and we got that particular agreement. Now, when he came with the 10 % threat, you saw the reaction in Europe was very different from in this period. Everyone said, now we really have to make clear to them that we will take countermeasures. Carl, as you put it, Trump is a unique personality. He is only going to be with us as president ostensibly for three more years. And there are, of course, people allied with him who could pick up the reins, as you've mentioned. J.D. Vance is a possibility. But there's also the possibility that because the United States is very divided politically, a very different and much more pro-NATO kind of leadership will take back power in the United States.

21:50Do you think Europe will welcome that and be prepared to fall back into its old relationship? Or do you think that relationship has been in some ways irreparably ruptured, as Carney has put it? I think it has been changed because go back a couple of years, we had the Trump one. And we had, no question about it, enormous relief when there was Biden. But even that there was some lingering, is it Biden or Trump? It's going to be the historical parenthesis. and turned out to be Biden. And if sort of Trump leaves in three years, do we really know what lies ahead of us? And we also saw, by the way, with the Biden administration, it was a different one, no question about that.

22:34But there were quite a number of things that Trump one did that he didn't undo. So there was elements of continuity from Trump one into Biden, and then we have this sort of big leap that Trump two is doing. but I don't think anyone is under illusion that all of this could disappear. And let me just end on the note we began with this week, which is Greenland itself. I'm just curious, you know, three years from now, do you think that Donald Trump will succeed in some way in taking over Greenland or changing the nature of its relationship with Denmark? I don't think he will succeed to make it a part of the United States.

23:13I think that's very difficult And exactly how this evolved, we haven't a clue. That could be a social media post in two minutes from now. Well, it could be, where we have a new policy. And the sort of framework that they discussed, evidently, Mark Rutte and President Trump in Davos yesterday, didn't touch the key issues. So exactly where we're headed, I think we are going to have further drama on it, but I doubt he will succeed. But at least Iceland is probably safe. I would hope so. I would hope so. But Iceland has really got nervous. Yeah, well, when he said it four times, I mean, that was the part that really got me.

23:56Well, Carl, Bill, talking to us from Zurich, there are a lot of people who would have liked to talk to you this week. We're grateful for your time. And we hope you'll come back on another occasion. Hopefully, we won't be talking about Iceland. Thank you. All the best. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. All right, we're going to take a quick break. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

24:28Come see Critics at Large live on February 19th. We're going to be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a conversation about Wuthering Heights. There's a new adaptation coming up starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and we will certainly be getting into that, but we'll also do what we, humbly I'll say, what we do best. Returning to the text, we're going to go deep on the gothic and Emily Bronte. Join me, Vincent Cunningham, and my co-hosts, Alex Schwartz, and Nomi Frye for the discussion. And crucially, if you buy a VIP ticket, you'll join us for an after party too. Go to 92ny.org for more information.

25:11That's 92ny.org. Hope to see you there.

25:27Well, that was bracing, I would say. Yeah, I think that is the word. You know, it comes through very clearly. I'm curious what you guys took from this. But you hear about a man on a tightrope. You hear him describing a world in which Europe does not want to have, as Carl said, a break with the United States. But it is also coming to the very harsh conclusion that the world that used to exist no longer does. And his shock that the United States would be helping or taking Russia's side in Ukraine. I think it's just so much for Europe to try to grapple with at this particular point. I was also struck just with his tone.

26:10It's the old world tone. A diplomat, a leader who sounds careful, thoughtful, cautious about what he's trying to say so that he doesn't cause offense or collateral damage. It's so different. But also a person who's grieving. I mean, who is grieving clearly for the world that has been the defining modus operandi of his professional career. Well, and again, if you listen, right, you know, the tone is so much more measured than the kind of, you know, hate speech that's casually thrown around now in the United States. At the same time, the actual words are pretty straightforward, unvarnished, not super diplomatic, saying, you know, the president of the United States is unhinged.