On Monday, after President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that the U.S. had reached a security deal with Greenland, the editor of a leading conservative magazine warned that the “minor concessions” made by the icy island nation were not worth the diplomatic “damage” they cost. This is according to Luke Nicastro, Senior Editor at the American Conservative, who asserts that the “fractures” Trump created with U.S. allies in Europe will be the agreement’s true legacy.
“The Great Greenland Crisis has ended, and Donald Trump has declared victory,” writes Nicastro. “The barren, icy prize is finally ours. Or is it? Despite the usual bluster, bravado, and social media posts showing Greenland colored in with the Stars and Stripes, Trump’s avowed aim of annexation was not accomplished.” As Nicastro notes, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen emphasized that the deal “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom [of Denmark] and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination.” Nicastro also points out that the deal also doesn’t appear to give the U.S. new economic privileges, which had been another of Trump’s purported goals. Instead, “the deal amounts to a kind of tinkering with the status quo.”
For the past 75 years, the U.S. military presence in Greenland has been governed by the Greenland Defense Agreement, a pact that grants the U.S. military basing and access rights across the territory for an indefinite period of time. And as Nicastro explains, “Most of the benefits the White House has highlighted since Friday — the access to all of Greenland, the lack of U.S. payments, even what the president arrestingly called the pact’s ‘Infinite Life’ — were in fact already provided for by the 1951 agreement.” The only noteworthy changes, says Nicastro, are provisions that will prevent non-NATO nations from basing forces on the island and put guardrails around adversaries’ investment on it. But the deal’s biggest impact, Nicastro argues, is in how Trump’s strategy for reaching it has changed Europe’s perception f the U.S.
“For a year and a half, the Trump administration has employed cajolery, bluster and bullying to obtain an outcome Europe has always held to be flatly unacceptable,” writes Nicastro. “Trump has sought to buy Greenland; he has tried to use tariffs to dislodge it from Denmark; he has suggested the United States may take the island by force. And behind the half-baked security rationales, the true motive has always been clear: to close America’s biggest real estate deal since the Mexican cession, at Europe’s expense. The effect has been to unnerve Europe, and to force its leaders to question their most deeply held assumptions about American policy and power. More than anything else in the last few years, it has persuaded the Europeans that the United States has changed. That the old guarantor of security, which could be depended upon to commit its blood and treasure to defending the other side of the Atlantic — and even defer to its wards on the planning and conduct of that defense — was no more.”
In other words, Trump’s Greenland efforts have pushed allies to question whether American security commitments are “dependable or even desirable.” According to Nicastro, “The damage will endure. The fractures created by an American president threatening economic and even military devastation in order to seize European territory cannot be entirely papered over. Even if the push was initially attributable to Trump’s personal proclivities, the fact that the entire U.S. policy apparatus (including the Pentagon) was willing to sustain such an adversarial campaign against a treaty ally will resonate in Old World capitals for years to come.”
