In 1978, V\u00e1clav 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 \u201cWorkers of the World, Unite!\u201d He doesn\u2019t actually believe in this hollow slogan, nor do his customers\u2014rather, they are all engaged in a performative ritual, a paean to a Communist system, which, through their act, they help perpetuate.<\/p>\n
On January 20th, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, recalled Havel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cvarying rigor,\u201d a nominal allegiance to a world of norms and to win-win co\u00f6peration endured.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerican hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea-lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,\u201d 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, \u201cwe placed the sign in the window.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the first year of Donald Trump\u2019s second term has made the downside impossible to ignore. Last April, on \u201cLiberation Day,\u201d Trump announced a twenty-per-cent tariff on E.U. members. (\u201cThey rip us off,\u201d 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\u2019s problem, anyway, and that it shouldn\u2019t count on the U.S. for significant military or financial support. Just after New Year\u2019s, when Trump sent U.S. troops to Venezuela to seize President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, he suggested that more such actions would follow, telling the Times, \u201cI don\u2019t need international law.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWe\u2019re going to get it one way or the other.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1978, V\u00e1clav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident, and future President, wrote an essay, distributed clandestinely, that tells…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5007,5046,57,4399,5009,5047],"class_list":{"0":"post-5305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greenland","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-comment","10":"tag-greenland","11":"tag-magazine","12":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","13":"tag-the-lede"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}