Transcript of The Global Showdown Over Greenland

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketraff. This is The Daily. For weeks, President Trump has been ratcheting up tensions across the world by claiming he would stop it nothing in his quest to seize Greenland from Denmark. Then on Wednesday, Trump appeared to back down, announcing that he'd agreed, at least for now, to an off-ramp. Today, my colleague, Marc Landler, on the dizzying ups and downs of Trump's Greenland Gambit and why this whole saga may mark the beginning of a new world order. It's Thursday, January 22nd. Mark, what a week this has been. Welcome to The Daily.

Thanks. It's great to be back.

In the last couple of days, we've seen this incredible pressure build over Trump's desire and stated intention to take over Greenland. Then just today, Wednesday, we got this announcement that Trump and NATO had reached some framework for a deal. We don't know all that much about it, but just orient us. What do we know?

Well, as you said, we don't know a great deal. There appears to be the outlines of an agreement under which the US would perhaps be granted some form of ownership or sovereignty, if you will, over small pockets of land in Greenland, probably US military bases. It appears that that would be something that would allow President Trump to claim what he has wanted all along, which is some American ownership of Greenland, while for the Danish government maintaining the reality of this situation, which is that this is Danish territory. So it appears to be something that Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, is trying to craft that will somehow molyify Trump while preserving Denmark's claim over Greenland, which was shaping up to be an unbreakable conflict between the United States and Denmark. How it all shakes out? Very unclear. For those of us that have covered Trump in the past, we know that these traumas tend to have multiple acts, and what you find out in Act I often changes radically into Act Two and Act Three. But it does appear on the face of it that the Europeans have managed to edge Trump away from a rather dangerous cliff edge on this whole issue.

The upshot is, at as far as we know for now, that they've reached some agreement that falls way short of the United States owning all of Greenland. But there is some compromise that's been made. It's been a It's been a head-spinning day. It's been a head-spinning week. Let's talk about how we got to this point. Why does Trump want Greenland so badly? Can you explain that?

Well, I guess I would answer that on two levels. I think Donald Now, Trump wants Greenland, in a sense, coming from his background as a real estate developer. He wants to acquire territory for the United States. Greenland would be a larger new acquisition for the United States in square miles than the Louisiana Purchase, then Alaska, then some of the other major expansions of the United States. So that's on a very visceral level. It's simply about expanding the footprint of the country while he is President. But there's also a more strategic argument here. And that argument is that Greenland sits in a very contested part of the world in the Arctic. It sits atop these very valuable minerals known as rare earth minerals. For that reason, other countries are going to become increasingly interested in Greenland, the Russians, the Chinese. And Trump's argument, in short, is we need Greenland. We need Greenland as a frontline place to protect US national security. We need Greenland because we want to exploit its mineral riches, and we can't do any of that unless we actually own it. It's not just enough to have a military base there, which the United States does have.

We need to be the owners in order to get the full advantage of the protection of Greenland to be able to exploit it economically.

Is he right, Mark, that owning Greenland would somehow secure all of these new benefits?

Well, the point The question is, the US could already obtain virtually all of these benefits under the existing arrangement between the United States and Denmark. A 1951 Treaty gives the US a great deal of flexibility to expand its military facilities on the island. President Trump's argument is you're never going to defend something if it's a license agreement, which is the way he characterizes our current arrangement in Greenland. But the The truth is we could build up our military footprint on Greenland a great deal under the existing arrangement. Furthermore, the Danes would welcome that. The Danish government has said over and over again, we are willing to have discussions with the United States. We would welcome greater involvement, not just military, but commercial. I think the President is not quite right when he makes this argument.

Right. Which is why when Trump originally started talking about owning Greenland, people really didn't take him seriously. It seemed like the US already had this access to Greenland, and taking it over was either a joke or a completely empty threat. But then, obviously, that changed.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that there was one specific event that happened that changed the calculations of a lot of people. That was the military operation in Venezuela, in which the President, Nicolas Maduro, was removed by American military forces and taken to the United States to face criminal drug trafficking charges. I think that event, more than any other single thing, caused a lot of people to sit up and say, Hey, wait a minute. When he's talking about Greenland, he's actually serious. For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States. You had a number of the President's advisors, memorably Stephen Miller, go on TV and make the point this flexing of muscle is something that the world should expect to see from the United States elsewhere. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

We need Greenland for national security.

And in effect, this brute philosophy of might makes right started being widely broadcast by the President himself.

Ownership is very important to you.

Why is ownership important?

Because that's what I feel is psychologically needed for success.

And so Europeans are suddenly extremely worried.

We had what I would describe as a frank but also constructive discussion.

The Danes send officials, along with Greenland officials, to meet with President Trump's aides at the White House to try to work out some a compromise. The President has made his view clear, and We have a different position. They leave empty-handed.

Denmark is now boosting its military presence on this strategically located island, along with allies from France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden.

You have NATO allies of Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom, pledging to send small numbers of troops to Greenland as a show of solidarity.

Things are really ratcheting up.

Things are really ratcheting up, and suddenly this is a genuine full-blown crisis. At at that point, President Trump reenters the fray very directly and says to Europe. A new threat from President Trump in the standoff over Greenland.

The President says he'll impose a 10% tariff on Denmark.

If you're not willing to back off, I will reopen the trade deals that I made with each of your countries and with the European Union and slap new tariffs on top of the existing tariffs. And so what had been a diplomatic and geopolitical crisis now is also a full-blown economic crisis.

And that brings us to this week, to Davos, where world leaders and business leaders had assembled for their annual meeting in the Swiss Alps. This is something they do every year. But now, this year, there are these enormous stakes bearing down on this meeting. Trump arrives Wednesday morning to deliver a speech that everyone was waiting to hear, With the real sense that the future of America's relationship with Europe, with Canada, with some of our closest allies was hanging in the balance here. I watched this speech. I know you did, too. What struck you the most about it?

Well, if the hope of the people waiting in that room was to be reassured, I think that President Trump let them down quickly and let them down pretty hard.

Would you like me to say a few words of Greenland? I was going to leave it out of the speech, but I thought I think I would have been reviewed very negatively.

This was Trump at his most swagering, his most menacing, really delivering in perhaps the purest form we've seen, a message that he's been articulating for months, that this is a world in which the strong survive and the weak have to learn how to deal with it.

The fact is, no nation or group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States.

He said he wants Greenland. He wants the United States to take ownership and control of Greenland.

We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstable. But I won't do that.

But notably, he also took military action off the table.

It's the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice, develop it and improve it.

So he came in and at one level, he said, Look, I'm not going to use force to take over this huge hunk of ice in the North Atlantic.

And that's the reason I'm seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States.

But I want to have immediate negotiations, and I want you, Europeans, to be compliant. He said, They have a choice.

You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative.

If we can do a deal, I'll be most appreciative.

Or you can say no.

Or you can say no, and we will remember. So it was a deeply unsettling and menacing message delivered with Trump's trademark mix of contempt and vitriol.

How is this speech received in Davos?

What you see is that after a very long period of trying to flatter Trump, of trying to mollify Trump, of trying to cajole Trump. European leaders are now showing a bit more of a willingness to stand up to him. They're beginning to say, No way, we won't tolerate this. We won't accept it. That's a really fascinating moment in the evolution of how foreign leaders, particularly European leaders, have dealt with President Trump. Nato allies, in the words of one former American diplomat, had gone through five stages of grief with President Trump. It began with denial right after he got back into the White House. It transitioned very quickly to anger, perhaps after that terrible meeting that Trump had with Vladimir Zelenskyy of Ukraine, shifted bargaining, continued into depression, and has finally arrived at something approaching acceptance.

Can you explain, Mark, why this is the thing that has prompted that change? Why is this the moment that leaders in Europe are turning away from, as you said, the strategy of placating Trump to now going much harder at him?

I think what it has to do with is the fact that these leaders who felt during the period of time that they were negotiating with President Trump over tariffs, that there was a deal to be done, that they could do business with him, that they could get some of the damage limited. I think in this case, they view this as far more fundamental, far more existential. It's one in which they felt they had to take a stand, they had to draw a line. This is not open to negotiation. This is a moment where you have to stand up for your values.

We'll be right back. Okay, Mark. You just said that America's allies essentially came to the view that this Greenland issue was much bigger than just Greenland itself. Itself. They came to see this as something you described as existential. Just describe, if you can, why they view these threats as such a fundamental risk.

Because Europe really views the system of international law of a rules-based order as central to its existence, to its economic prosperity, and frankly, to Western liberal democracy. All of that is put at risk by having a sudden rupture, a shattering of this rules-based order. And so what you saw in Davos was a series of leaders stepping up on the dais to warn about the costs of this and to begin to talk about what they need to do to respond to it. You had President Macron of France get up and talk about how we prefer partners to bullies. Most extraordinarily, you had Prime Minister Mark of Canada deliver, I think, what's going to be remembered for years as an extremely significant speech.

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry.

In which he described what's at stake in the loss of the international order.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.

He went back into history and how this order was set up, who had benefited, of course, principally the United States.

An American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system.

How there were elements of dishonesty and hypocrisy to that system.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.

Which nevertheless US, everybody went along with because not only did the United States benefit, but the smaller and middle powers did, too, both through the economic ties that were generated by it and, crucially, the protection it afforded to the weaker states. Essentially, what Mark Harnes said is-Let me be direct.

We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

That system is over. That bargain no longer exists between the great powers and the middle powers.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

We now live in an openly predatory world.

The powerful have their power. We have something, too. The capacity to stop pretending.

For countries like Canada, like other European countries, to survive in that world, they're going to need be much more pragmatic, to some extent less values-driven, willing to cut deals with a greater number of actors, including China.

That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us. Thank you very much.

If Donald Trump, in his characteristically visceral way was laying out the threat. Mark Carny was supplying in a deeply articulate way the response.

The speech by Carny was especially striking. Worth noting it got a standing ovation. But for the purposes of understanding this moment, essentially what Carny is saying is that this fiction of a rules-based world order is now over. The mask is off. The hegemon that we've all been relying on the United States, is now essentially turning against us. My question, Mark, is in standing up to that hegemon, what cards does the rest of NATO actually have to play?

Well, This is, of course, the heart of the matter. On one level, you have to say they don't have a lot of cards. Were the United States to launch an all-out military assault on Greenland, there is a zero % chance that Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Denmark are going to go to war with the United States. Now, remember, of course, President Trump appeared to rule that out. But with regard to other threats, notably the threat in Ukraine, the threat from Russia, you're already beginning to see the outlines of that response. Germany has joined France and the UK in building what they call a Coalition of the Willing, a proposal to send tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine or Ukraine to help secure the country in the event of a ceasefire with Russia. You could see a series of smaller alliances between Baltic countries or between Mediterranean countries. So it doesn't have the overarching feel of the NATO alliance. But there are these more piecemeal arrangements that countries can make with each other. I think this is what Carny is talking about. It's messier, it's riskier, it's more expensive. But in this predatory world, it may be the best that these middle powers can hope for.

Basically, you're saying that one strategy would be for these NATO countries to get themselves in a position to eventually rely a lot less on the United States when it comes to security, especially with regard to the threat from Russia. Obviously, that would be a long-term strategy. That would take time to play out.

Generations. Europe, because it was under this American security umbrella since the end of World War II, would It would have to take literally decades to build up an independent security force that had no reliance or little reliance on the United States. That would involve extremely difficult decisions by governments about how to spend public resources. Remember, these are countries that are used to generous social welfare programs, welfare programs that are funded by governments that historically did not have to spend as much on defense in the military as the United States did. So that's on one level. On the economic level, it is true that these countries, at least in theory, do have some leverage. On the trade front, for example, the European Union can impose what they call anti-coerasion measures against other countries, including the United States. This is something that's colloquially known as the bazooka.

What is the bazooka exactly?

Well, so bazooka is basically a series of very draconian measures that the Europeans can impose on another country that they think has hit them with unfair trade practices. And of course, that would be very painful for the many American companies and investors that do business in Europe. So that is a form of leverage. But there seems to be well short of unanimity within the European Union about using measures like that. And that goes to what is the perennial problem with Europe, which is achieving enough unity around any of these positions to make them truly effective when you're facing a major adversary like the United States.

I presume also part of the reason it's hard to get on the same page about using what you call this economic bazooka is that there's a risk to it.

There's a huge risk to it. At this moment, Trump is saying he's not going to impose the additional new tariffs he had threatened, but he goes back and forth on tariffs all the time. If you were to impose bazooka on the United States, what's to stop President Trump from imposing 100% tariffs or 150% tariffs, which could have really calamitous consequences for German car makers or French luxury goods exporters. That's a real issue for these European countries because these are politicians dealing with their own domestic pressures and tanking your economy to make a point with the United States is not going to do you any favors at the ballot box.

We should point out that this whole time, there have also been risks on the US side from this Greenland gambit. We saw Wall Street didn't seem to like this. There are Republican senators that seem uncomfortable with it. I mean, let's be honest, it's not like there's a huge hunger within the American public to own Greenland. Taking all the things that you've just described about the dangers for Europe and the potential pitfalls for the United States here, it makes sense, actually, that both sides had a real incentive to find an off-ramp here, which is exactly what it looked like they did just hours after Trump gave that speech in Davos, when he and Mark Rota come out and announced that they've come to some deal.

Yes. Again, we don't know how solid this off-ramp is or what it entails as of Wednesday evening. But yes, it does seem like everybody backed off the the edge of this particular cliff.

But I have to ask, Mark, whatever this deal or potential deal turns out to be, doesn't this whole saga, this saga of the US threatening to subsume territory of another NATO state by force, doesn't that make clear that NATO is fundamentally rotten? This is an alliance that at its core is supposed to be about protecting each other from outside threats, defending each other's sovereignty. This time, the threat came from inside the family, one member against the rest.

You just put your finger on it right there. When the largest, the central, the linchpin member of the alliance now poses a direct threat to another member of the alliance, that fundamentally makes NATO no longer tenable. I think you're right in saying that even the fact that we're having this conversation and that it's a serious conversation and that leaders in Europe are having to make decisions based on the potential of an American takeover of Greenland, that is already deeply, deeply damaging to the underlying principles of NATO. And so while we've had this deal today that perhaps postpones the moment of reckoning that gives NATO a sense of preservation, it doesn't resolve or change the underlying reality of what happened here, which is that the animating theories behind NATO have been unraveled through this process.

What's ironic about some of this is that Trump's foreign policy at one point seemed to be geared toward persuading the rest of the world to break its dependence on China. That was the goal of the US's tariff war with China and with a lot of what Trump was doing on the global stage. But now it seems as though his brand of foreign policy in term two has actually had the effect of pushing the world to break its dependence on the United States, probably to China's benefit. Is that the right assumption?

I mean, in a sense, what he's done is driven these countries into the arms of China. Because one thing that all of these European and other middle power countries are going to have to reckon with is if they can't rely on the United States, if you can't rely on being a member of the American camp, you, in a sense, have to balance between the great powers and the great commercial power, the great economic power of the future is China. So one of the things that I think you will see much more of is Europeans, the Canadians and others going to China, fashioning deeper ties with China, being more open to China. And as you pointed out, that is precisely what Trump set out to avoid. And that's what successive American administrations have always set as a priority, which is to use our great alliances, not just militarily, but economically, and build this great coalition that would be a proper competitor for China. Now you're going to see countries, instead of saying, We're with the United States, they're going to say, Well, we're going to our interests. We're going to hedge against this uncertainty that we now perceive in the United States, and we're going to do it by drawing closer to China.

On the other hand, I have to wonder whether there's some way that Trump would actually see that outcome that you're describing as a win for the US. He would have expanded US territory, demonstrated raw American power, and pushing smaller countries into the arms of China, he may just view that as an inevitable result of his quest to realize this worldview that he has, which you, Mark, have described on this show, that the great powers should divide the globe into these spheres of influence that they dominate.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that in Trump's world, it's the great powers that set the tone for everybody else. I mean, there's a really interesting saying by a Greek historian, Thusser, acidities. It's making the rounds a lot these days, and it encapsulates Trump's philosophy. It goes, the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. I think, in essence, what we're seeing over the last few weeks, most vividly, but it really has been the story of Trump's second term, is putting that ancient idea into practice. He really does see three major traditional great powers dividing up the spoils, the United States, Russia, and China. Europe unhappily finds itself wedged uncomfortably between two of those major great powers, but without some of the key ingredients, the key weapons that make one a great power, it has to navigate this rather dangerous and unfriendly world, making partnerships and alliances where it can. And yet at the same time, I think we need to be careful not to indulge in too much declinism. The Europeans do have a future. It's a future that will require them to make some difficult choices, but will give them a chance to become every bit as big a sphere of influence as some of these others.

After all, remember, Russia, for all of its sabre-raddling, is in many ways a weak country.

The Europeans, in this case, seem to get Trump to back down.

Yeah, bully for them. It seems like, in a sense, this was the best scenario that one could have imagined for this situation. It's also a reminder that Europe is, for all its weaknesses, still a player. They can still find ways to fend off the worst threats. They have massive economies, an educative workforce, diplomatic soft power, powerful cultural values. In this new global order that Donald Trump is creating in this great global game, I think writing off Europe today would be as big a mistake as it would have been 200 years ago.

Mark, thank you so much.

Thank you, Natalie.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court signaled it was likely to reject President Trump's effort to fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cooke. Trump announced last summer that he was going to remove Cooke, claiming she'd engaged in mortgage fraud. Cooke has disputed the allegations, and her lawyer has said that the case was really an effort by Trump to change the makeup of the Fed and get the board to lower interest rates faster.

But on that, your position that there's no judicial review, no process required, no remedy available, very low bar for cause that the President alone determines, and that would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve that we just discussed.

During the oral arguments in the case, the justices question questioned whether the allegations against Cook were serious enough to allow the President to fire her.

Let's talk about the real-world downstream effects of this, because if this were set as a precedent, it seems to me, just thinking big picture, we're really at at-will removal. So what are we doing here?

The court seemed likely to allow Cook to keep her job for now, effectively freezing the President's push to reshape the Fed. And a panel has voted to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Nine Democrats voted with Republicans in an extraordinary first step in referring the Clintons to the Justice Department for prosecution. The charges carry penalties of a steep fine and imprisonment for up to a year. The Clintons have offered to be interviewed by the chair of the Oversight Committee under oath but have refused to appear at a formal deposition with the committee. They've said the process is politically motivated and designed to result in their imprisonment. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Claire Tennisgetter, and Diana Wyn. It was edited by Maria Byrne and Paige Cawet. Contains music by Alisha Baetup and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. For The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrelet. See you tomorrow.