When President Donald Trump took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20th, he delivered a speech that was characteristically bombastic, tangential, and yet—beneath the noise—revealing of fundamental truths about the transatlantic relationship and the future of European power. To understand what Trump said requires the discipline to separate his inflammatory rhetoric from the substantive policy signals buried within it. First and foremost, Trump made clear that he wants a confident and strong Europe, not one that is becoming, in his words, more and more unrecognisable due to mass immigration from the non-Western parts of the world.
Yes, Trump was provocative. Yes, he mocked Denmark as “ungrateful”, joked about Switzerland being “only good because of us”, and delivered the memorable line that without America, “You’d all be speaking German and maybe a little bit of Japanese”. Given the fact that he said this in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, this was a bit like a Frenchman telling an American audience that without French support during the Revolutionary War “everybody in the US would be speaking English”. Also, his constant ignorance of the sacrifices made by European soldiers who were sent to fight with their American allies in Iraq and Afghanistan is more than annoying. Relative to population size, Denmark lost as many soldiers in Afghanistan as the US.
These statements were crude, reductive, and designed for maximum theatrical effect. But this is how negotiations work in the Trump lexicon: He opens with maximum pressure, maximum visibility, maximum affront to ego. It is not subtle diplomacy. It is not the language of Metternich. It is the language of a deal-maker who believes that showing strength and demanding gratitude is the path to favourable outcomes.
Yet beneath this performance lay something more serious. Trump’s criticism was not really of Europe writ large, but of European elites—the class of managers, bureaucrats, and politicians who have, in Trump’s view, presided over catastrophic policy decisions while taking American security for granted. And here we must admit: He had a point.
When Trump criticized European energy policy, he was identifying a genuine catastrophe. Germany produced more electricity in 2017 than it does today—a fact that should be shocking to any observer of European affairs. The so-called Energiewende has left Europe dependent on expensive energy, uncompetitive manufacturing, and increasingly subject to the whims of geopolitical actors like Russia and the Middle East. Trump was well-informed enough to cite this fact at the summit. When was the last time an American president demonstrated such granular knowledge of European economic policy?
His critique of migration policy, too, had substance beneath the rhetoric. European capitals have lost control of their borders and cultural composition in ways that would be unthinkable in previous generations. Whether one agrees with his policy prescriptions or not, Trump correctly identified that something fundamental has shifted in Europe’s relationship with its own identity and future. The rise of nationalist movements across the continent—in Hungary, Poland, Denmark, Austria, and beyond—suggests that millions of Europeans share Trump’s diagnosis, even if they recoil from his prescription.
The Greenland question requires careful analysis. Was Trump serious about acquiring Greenland? The more important question is: does it matter? Trump’s willingness to entertain publicly the idea serves several purposes. It signals American interest in Arctic resources and security. It tests allied responses. It demonstrates that no issue is sacred in Trump’s renegotiation of American commitments. Most significantly, it allows Trump to subsequently appear moderate by backing down from military options and announcing a “framework for a future deal”—a move that positions him as reasonable while still maintaining maximum leverage over Denmark, NATO, and the entire transatlantic framework.
This is realpolitik of the nineteenth-century variety, and those who dismiss it as mere buffoonery miss the strategic calculation beneath it. It is often forgotten that 40 per cent of current US territory was acquired through purchase (and not always with a voluntary counterparty): The Louisiana Purchase, Alaska, the American Virgin Islands from Denmark itself in 1917. There is precedent. There is historical logic. Democrats celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase as a triumph of American statesmanship. Why should twenty-first-century acquisitions be treated differently?
Here lies the real issue for Europe: Trump’s diagnosis of European weakness may be accurate, but his proposed cure—Europe must either strengthen itself independently or accept subordination—is unpalatable to European elites precisely because it requires them to act in the interest of their own peoples rather than in pursuit of global abstractions.
This is what frustrated me most in his speech. Trump said, correctly, that America would prefer a strong Europe as a partner. But he also said, logically, that until Europe becomes stronger, Europe must accept American leadership. The response from European officials was predictable: Platitudes about defending the “rules-based international order” and the “Western alliance”. But these are the same officials who have overseen Europe’s industrial decline, energy vulnerability, and demographic transformation.
Trump’s implicit message was clearer: Europe chooses. You can become strong—invest in defence, restore energy independence, protect your borders, reassert control over your demographic future. Or you can watch as American power retreats and you face the consequences alone. This is not “America alone.” This is “America first, but Europe welcome if you strengthen yourselves.”
The real damage from Davos was not Trump’s rhetoric but the realisation it forced upon those paying attention: The European Right, ideologically aligned with Trump’s diagnosis of the continent’s problems, now finds itself in a political bind. In Denmark, nationalist parties who should be celebrating Trump’s message instead saw their polling decline because his Greenland gambit was seen as an affront to sovereignty. This is the paradox: Trump is right about European problems, but wrong about how to communicate with Europeans who might otherwise be his natural allies.
What comes next requires clarity about what Trump actually wants. Not Greenland—that was a negotiating tactic. What Trump wants is for Europe to wake up. To become strong. To defend itself. To control its borders. To restore its energy independence. To stand as an actual partner rather than a dependent.
Whether Europe rises to this challenge remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: The era of American security guarantees without expectation of European reciprocity has ended. Trump has made that unmistakably clear.
The question now is whether European leaders will accept this reality and act accordingly, or whether they will retreat into the comfortable illusions that have guided them for the past two decades—with predictably disastrous results.
Vanishing civilisation: A nation has its own children or a nation disappears