The unfolding of the Greenland controversy has already become one of the most extraordinary episodes in the entire 237-year history of the presidency of the United States. As regular readers would be aware, I am generally a firm supporter of President Trump and think that in this first year of his second term, he’s had one of the most successful and productive beginnings of a term, probably since Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal in 1933. He has closed the southern border, deported millions of illegal aliens, suspended the Green straitjacket that his predecessor placed on American commerce, frightened NATO into paying its share for the Alliance’s defenc,e, attacked wokeness, DEI, bigotry in universities, dishonesty in the media and outright anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party, cut taxes, spurred economic growth, revised tariffs, shrunk the federal bureaucracy, renovated the armed forces, and many other accomplishments. With this, there have come the vagaries of the president’s public personality.
More precisely, he has increasingly starkly revealed his negotiating methods. Whatever the subject, Donald Trump developed at an early adult age as an upcoming businessman the techniques of overstating things, pounding the table, making outrageously provocative statements, taking serious liberties with the truth when not under oath and calling it “constructive hyperbole”, and when he has moved his interlocutor some distance, abruptly accepting the resulting transaction. These techniques originated in his early days as an extremely flamboyant publicity-seeking Manhattan land developer. When he was trying to borrow all of the money for the renovation of the Commodore Hotel and get a spectacular tax break in doing so, he developed the habit of waving a thick dossier in the air and claiming that it contained ”a signed agreement” to complete his transaction. Only after he completed it, did he volunteer that the document had been indeed signed, but only by him and no one else. In the midst of his argument with former New York Mayor Ed Koch, when he said he could renovate the skating rink in Central Park in half the time and at half the cost of the city (which he did), he held a press conference every day even for the most mundane announcements, such as the arrival of shipments of sophisticated conducting pipes for the ammonia to keep the rink frozen.
These techniques are evident in most of his current controversies. Obviously, his Bureau of Peace in Gaza will be utter nonsense until the IDF has completed the military extermination of the Hamas terrorist apparatus. After that the dozens of improbable countries that tentatively signed up for it can help the United States rebuild Gaza. The most astonishing pyrotechnics of Trumpian negotiation have come in the Greenland affair. American presidents since Roosevelt have expressed an interest in the US national security relationship with Greenland. Only recently have the Chinese and Russians begun approaching that vast island comprehensively by sea. And only recently has the concern for its strategic metal deposits become a matter of high geopolitical strategic interest.
In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the President of the United States would take note of this, but that does not prepare the world adequately for Trump’s statements in the last few days that, “Since Denmark didn’t give me the Nobel Peace Prize, I am less interested in peace,” and when reminded that the Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, that “I have less respect for Norway since they didn’t give me the Nobel Peace Prize,” completely oblivious to the fact that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has nothing to do with the government or people of Norway.
Even the most malapropistic and inarticulate of his predecessors would never have shredded the customary rules of diplomacy or even the normal desire of holders of great offices to speak factually when there’s no reason not to, as Trump sometimes does. It is one of the manifestations of his extraordinary self-confidence, admittedly based on an astonishingly successful career in several fields, and a presidency of distinguished accomplishment, that he does not even take the trouble and display the normal niceties of getting uncontroversial facts straight or concealing the proportions of his prodigious self-regard.
The facts are that NATO was set up as an alliance to contain the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union disintegrated 35 years ago and the major Western European countries together are a far stronger geopolitical force than Russia. Trump is correct that countries are returning to a less collective security-based and more national interest-based criterion for foreign policy planning and execution. Presumably, the fact that he only has three more years in his office is motivating him to take shortcuts to accelerate the speed of adjustment to these new factors. It is amusing at times, nerve-racking at times, and frequently irritating, but it is not the case, as his critics are now suggesting more noisily than ever, that the president of the United States has taken leave of his senses. His specialty is takeovers, in the private as in the public sector, and he will now test the mettle of Davos Man by trying to take over the World Economic Forum. Those of us who got tired of Klaus Schwab’s amiable but anesthetizing monochrome socialist pablum at Davos will enjoy the refreshing experiment there this week.
Trump’s death-blow to Iranian regime would be splendid and uplifting