In 1978, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident, and future President, wrote an essay, distributed clandestinely, that tells of a greengrocer who hangs a sign in his shopwindow reading “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t actually believe in this hollow slogan, nor do his customers—rather, they are all engaged in a performative ritual, a paean to a Communist system, which, through their act, they help perpetuate.
On January 20th, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, recalled Havel’s essay at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, during a speech that, for one delivered by a head of state, offered a rare degree of intellectual, even emotional, candor. Carney applied the condition of Havel’s greengrocer to the rules-based international order that came into being after the Second World War, much of it backstopped by the United States and wielded to its benefit. Even as powerful countries regularly acted as they pleased and international laws and regulations were applied with “varying rigor,” a nominal allegiance to a world of norms and to win-win coöperation endured.
“American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea-lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney said. And it undergirded NATO, an alliance that had allowed for an unprecedented near-century of peace. That order, however imperfect, had more benefit than downside. So, Carney said of Canada and its European allies, “we placed the sign in the window.”
But the first year of Donald Trump’s second term has made the downside impossible to ignore. Last April, on “Liberation Day,” Trump announced a twenty-per-cent tariff on E.U. members. (“They rip us off,” he said.) His attempts to end the war in Ukraine featured an unmistakable sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while indicating that the war is really Europe’s problem, anyway, and that it shouldn’t count on the U.S. for significant military or financial support. Just after New Year’s, when Trump sent U.S. troops to Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro, he suggested that more such actions would follow, telling the Times, “I don’t need international law.”
Yet nothing has thrown the diverging paths of the U.S. and Europe into plain view more than the crisis over Greenland, an autonomous Arctic territory that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. For the past year, Trump has said that he intended to take possession of the island, with its militarily strategic location and its abundant, if difficult-to-access, rare earths. Only the U.S. can defend Greenland from the likes of Russia and China, he argued, telling Congress, “We’re going to get it one way or the other.” That is, the signal member of NATO, a collective-security body based on the principles of mutual self-defense, was threatening to seize the territory of another member.
For a time, Denmark and other NATO members seemed to think that they could placate Trump with promises to devote more resources to the Arctic. (An agreement from 1951 allowed the U.S. to maintain military installations in Greenland during the Cold War—it now operates only one—with an option to add other facilities.) For the past year, in fact, Europe has shown a willingness to engage in flattery and transactional dealmaking—a proven formula with Trump. At a NATO summit in June, in The Hague, it largely worked; the main goal was to keep the U.S. in NATO, preserving its role and its capabilities. States pledged to spend five per cent of G.D.P. on defense, and Trump deemed the summit “tremendous.” But, on Greenland, he appeared to be operating in another realm. “You defend ownership,” Trump said in early January. “You don’t defend leases.”
Later in the month, Denmark and several other European countries sent troops to Greenland for military exercises—ostensibly to prove that they are serious about safeguarding it from adversaries like Russia and China, though clearly also to send a message to Trump. “The fact that Europe felt it had to deploy a trip-wire force against the one power that, for generations, was seen as providing the ultimate trip-wire force for Europe’s defense is a complete reversal of our entire understanding of the world,” Fabrice Pothier, a former director of policy planning at NATO, said. Trump responded by announcing additional tariffs—rising to twenty-five per cent—which would remain in force until a U.S. acquisition of Greenland was finalized.