Is Greenland free?

0:01Noel King:President Trump spoke for about 90 minutes at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland yesterday. Everyone was on edge waiting to see what he'd say about Greenland after days of making threats about Greenland. He sort of got there. I'm helping NATO and until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy. I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money. Back to Greenland. Now, the big surprise was that at Davos, Trump made no threats. He didn't threaten tariffs. He didn't threaten troops or force.

0:36Noel King:He just said, again, All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland. Then, later in the day, he made noise on Truth Social about a framework that was sort of giving concepts of a plan. What brought Trump back from the brink? That's coming up on Today Explained.

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2:00This is Today Explained.

2:06Noel King:David Rennie, geopolitics editor at The Economist. All right, so you were watching as Donald Trump spoke at Davos yesterday. You know that he'd said he would levy tariffs on eight European countries if they opposed his bid for Greenland. But then, yesterday, he didn't mention the tariffs. Not only did he not mention tariffs, hours later, you know, when people came out of that speech saying, OK, optimistic view is, he didn't mention tariffs, no use of force, pessimistic view, where, you know, we're still potentially facing anything up to invasion. And then he goes and meets the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, a man who has sacrificed his own reputation by kind of calling him daddy and constantly praising him.

2:45Daddy has to sometimes use strong language. But I think he, I think genuinely Mark Rutte, who's a very, very smart, experienced former Dutch Prime Minister. I think he thinks he's taking one for the team and he's doing his best to keep Donald Trump on side. And they do this provisional deal that then Trump is calling a concept of a deal, whatever that means, that does appear to stop a long way short of owning Greenland. And so if you are the Europeans and you are optimists, and that's not a lot of optimists in European capitals right now, you would say that, I don't know if people are saying this is a taco, you know, was Trump chickening out, but certainly it was not irrelevant.

3:28People suspect that the markets were in, you know, fell sharply the day before. That tends to get, you know, Trump's billionaire finance friends on the phone saying, you know, this is not great. And the very first flickers of, I don't know if it's twitching of the corpse, I'm referring to the willingness of the US Congress to stand up to the president. There's no emergency with Greenland, that's ridiculous. There's no threat in Greenland. To invade Greenland would be weapons grade stupid. So I guess for Europeans, the lesson is that provoking Donald Trump head on seems to be a pretty bad idea, certainly very risky.

4:08But raising the costs and making him realize that there is going to be resistance to his latest piece of bullying can sometimes work. And so there is a certain degree of confidence that the worst has been avoided for now. But the big, big picture is that trust is being shredded and destroyed in ways that are not coming back as long as Donald Trump is in the Oval Office.

4:38Noel King:Do we know, David, what is in this framework, this provisional deal, what it actually sets out? There are leaks to various news organizations. The Danish government, let alone the Greenlandic government, have not been involved in formal negotiations on this. And so it's like a kind of game of telephone, right? We're sort of trying to guess what was said in a room between the Secretary General of NATO and the President of the United States. But at least there, the ideas seem to be actually pretty unobjectionable ideas about a new enhanced security presence for NATO with American command, but other NATO members rolling in to do more to protect the Arctic, perhaps more guarantees that America gets first dibs, to use the technical term, on rare earths and minerals that are lying under the kind of permafrost in Greenland.

5:27But the tragedy, if you're Denmark or any other European government right now, is that Donald Trump could have had all of those perfectly sensible things before he started threatening to take Greenland and before he started posting social media pictures of him looking at Greenland with the stars and stripes on the map. He doesn't need to own, let alone invade Greenland to have a bigger American force on the island and to get American companies to sign deals to extract the minerals. That's what to Europeans is just so baffling and worrying and ultimately depressing about this whole utterly unnecessary crisis.

6:06And so even if it's now being unwound, what was it all for?

6:11Noel King:Explain, if you would, why Trump didn't need to do this. There was a treaty in place here already, right? At the end of World War II, the Americans basically occupied Greenland. It became incredibly strategically important during the Cold War because basically Greenland is the thing that Soviet missiles would have flown over had they ever been launched at the continental US. As a result, during the Cold War, the US had 17 bases on Greenland and up to 10 ,000 troops and radar stations and airplanes. And all of that was entirely covered by a treaty between the US and Denmark goes back to, I think, 1951, just after the end of World War, to update it in the early 2000s to give the US even greater liberty to put whatever it wanted in the one base that still remains.

7:03Denmark was basically totally happy to let the Americans do whatever they wanted on Greenland for America's security. There was no need to pick this fight.

7:12Noel King:How did European leaders act yesterday when Trump announces there's a framework? Did they say, you know, yeah, he did the art of the deal on us? So no, I think they are congratulating themselves on having raised the costs and hoping that that is why he climbed down. I think there is now immediately concern that European unity, which was reasonably solid at the beginning of the week when Trump was threatening to put tariffs on those countries that had sent a few troops to Greenland recently to show solidarity with the Danes and show that NATO was taking Greenland security seriously. That led to quite a lot of unity.

7:50Now that Donald Trump has said he's not going to impose those tariffs, Europe still needs to decide what it's going to do about a big trade deal agreed months ago with the US, which is frankly pretty one-sided, back a week ago, five days ago, when there was European unity in the face of the latest Trump threats, it looked as if the whole EU-US trade deal was probably on ice, and there was going to be quite a unified pushback. And so as ever, because nothing is neat and tidy in the kind of the universe that we now live in, Trump has climbed down. That's a huge relief for Denmark. But actually, Europe now has a problem in terms of unity, because there will undoubtedly be European countries going, OK, crisis over.

8:35Let's not pick a trade war with this guy. He's not going to tariff a group of us. So do we really want to pick a larger fight about the trade deal that was struck with him last year? And so there is, you know, when the pressure goes off, the unity tends to crumble. So there's always a cloud to every silver lining in Trump world, right?

8:56Noel King:There's been this question in the US in the last week or so among people who do not like Donald Trump and the way he conducts himself on the world stage, which is, will Europe grow a spine? Will Europe push back? You said Europe is asking itself, did it successfully raise the cost here? If it did, how did it raise the cost? What was the threat from Europe that may have put Trump in his place.

9:23So if it turns out to be, you know, we open the papers the next, you know, the next two days, and we see kind of TikToks where people are saying, you know, it was the markets crashing, people made phone calls, then maybe that European threat to start hitting Trump tariffs with counter tariffs from Europe, you know, 93 billion dollars, more or less of retaliatory tariffs, maybe that did the trick. But not just because I'm sitting in London, and I'm a Brit, and therefore in my heart, part of Europe, even if we left, I have a lot of sympathy for European leaders. And actually, I have sympathy for the British government, too, because it's all very well to say, you know, we should just tell Donald Trump where to get off.

9:59And I can tell you, there are plenty of ordinary British people I speak to who know what I do for a living. And when, you know, when we talk about Trump, they're like, why don't we just tell the guy to back off and, you know, just get stuffed? And to use the kind of technical term. The problem is that Britain, along with several other European countries, our defence is absolutely dependent on the United States for years to come. And we saw the British Prime Minister on Monday this week give a press briefing about Greenland where he was pretty tough on Greenland. Any decision about the future status of Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark alone.

10:41But then he said, and his face betrayed his kind of deep, deep, deep kind of anxiety, stroke, despair. He said, I need to remind people, we need a good relationship with America to look after our defence. Under President Trump, as under previous presidents, we're determined to keep that relationship strong, constructive and focused on results. And that approach is delivering. Through sustained engagement, our cooperation on defence, nuclear capability and intelligence remains as close and effective as anywhere in the world, keeping Britain safe in an increasingly dangerous environment. We're now into a totally, totally new and really frightening world for Europe.

11:30So for sure, Europe can be a bit kind of Euroweenie, but our dilemmas are real and painful.

11:45Noel King:David Rennie of leading magazine The Economist. Coming up, how did Europe raise the cost, David's words, for Donald Trump?

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15:49Noel King:I'm Noelle King. All right. So the question is, why did President Trump climb down yesterday instead of dancing one step closer to World War III? Did Europe do something or have something to deter him? We called up Henry Farrell. He's a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins. And in the hours before Trump pulled back on his threats, Professor Farrell wrote an op-ed for The New York Times called Europe Has a Bazooka, Time to Use It. It's about deterrence strategy. Professor Farrell, let's start this way. It's been roughly 80 years since the last world war, which means we've been doing something right, all of us.

16:26Noel King:How do big powers deter attacks from other big powers? So I think that you really want to start with the nuclear age and the nuclear era. And you even want to start with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a moment when the United States and the USSR scared the hell out of each other. because it was very, very close to a situation in which we would have actually had a nuclear war and possibly the extinction of humanity. So missiles are 1 ,500 miles range and more. We're pointing at American cities. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the course of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.

17:10So after that, we began to see the development of a set of concepts, a set of ideas, which really tried to figure out how can you work through the situation of nuclear crisis, the risk of nuclear Armageddon, the fact that the United States and the USSR have fundamentally different political interests, and how can you actually get to a place of stability. First of all, I think you want to avoid a nuclear Armageddon by treating the fact that these weapons actually exist as incredibly important, nuclear weapons that is, but at the same time trying to avoid using them. So in a certain sense, what you're doing is you're bargaining and you're debating in the shadow of this possibility of Armageddon and the shadow of the possibility of using these kinds of weapons.

17:58So you begin to get the development of all of these ideas by people such as Thomas Schelling, who won a Nobel Prize for economics. He's a game theorist who begins to work out how do you deter? How do you, in a sense, use the fact that you have nuclear weapons as something that people will pay attention to without ever actually having to use them? The name comes from games like chess, but most game theory went well beyond what they call zero-sum games, which are games of pure opposition, and became situations in which there is both conflict and a need for cooperation to avoid disastrous outcomes.

18:34And then on top of that, there is a second set of questions which involve, if you actually get into a nuclear confrontation, how do you deal with this? How do you figure out ways that you can not sort of march straight up the ladder to outright Armageddon, but perhaps figure out ways to defuse, to step back and create a situation in which you step back from the brink of the precipice? and so the key example which I think shows some of the brutality in a certain sense of this way of thinking that Schelling offers is troops in West Berlin during the Cold War the idea behind this was that as Schelling describes these people these soldiers their job in a certain sense was to as he said it bluntly their job is to die how can 12 ,000 western troops or 7 ,000 Americans defend Berlin, what they're really doing is they're threatening to die.

19:34And what he meant by that was something like the following, that the United States did not want the USSR and Eastern Germany to take over West Berlin. It would have been super duper easy for them to do that in conventional military terms because West Berlin is about 100 miles inside East Germany's national territory. And so what the calculus is, is that if you have these soldiers there. These soldiers are, in a sense, they're not going to be able to defend the city particularly well, but they will die or be captured if the city is, in fact, attacked by the Soviet Union. And if that happens, then any president is not going to want to be able to stand over the fact that thousands of troops have been captured and killed.

20:16This is likely to lead further escalation. And so Schelling's argument is that this risk of further escalation and the possibility, maybe a 10 % possibility that this might actually lead to nuclear war, that this is sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from attacking. Part of the effectiveness of those troops in Berlin was the Soviets couldn't really perceive what might happen, and they couldn't be sure that a U.S. president wouldn't do something foolhardy like starting a third world war.

20:49Noel King:Okay, so all of this history is on your mind when you write an op-ed for the New York Times that ends up being titled, Europe has a bazooka, it's time to use it. So explain to me how from the Cold War and those incidents decades ago, you map this onto the present day where, yes, the U.S. and Europe have different interests here. Nobody is threatening anybody with a nuclear weapon, but Donald Trump is making some statements that very clearly make Europe very nervous. Where do we see deterrence theory operating now, today? So I think we see it in two ways. First of all, we see these eight European countries who send a small military force for a brief period of exercises to Greenland.

21:34Noel King:Europe is pushing back on President Trump's push to acquire Greenland, with troops from several European countries now arriving there. NATO forces are on exercise in Greenland at a time when American designs on the island threaten the alliance's very existence. And so what they are doing here is they are setting up a tripwire, which is like a less powerful version of what the United States did with West Berlin. So really what they're doing here is they are saying, effectively, they are communicating to Trump. They deny that they're doing this, but it's very clearly the message that they are trying to send.

22:10They're communicating to Trump that if Trump actually goes ahead and invades Greenland, that there are going to be eight other NATO allies who are willing to be on Greenland and Denmark's side if this happens. And so the implicit message there pretty clearly is you invade Greenland, you're going to get rid of NATO. You don't want to get rid of NATO. And that message is received loud and clear. And that is one of the reasons, plausibly, why Trump initially, he goes from these saber-rattling threats where he suggests that he is indeed going to invade Greenland, very possibly. He moves instead to economic measures of one sort or another, in particular these tariffs.

22:49He imposes tariffs against these eight European countries in order to punish them for what they do. And then that leaves a second set of questions for Europe, which is how did they respond to that? And they have this very weird, very complicated, very awkward legislative mechanism called the anti-coercion instrument, which possibly serves as a very imperfect tripwire. And that is more or less where the argument goes.