A plane carrying Donald Trump Jr., the son of President-elect Donald Trump, arrives in Nuuk, Greenland, on Tuesday. The private visit to the Danish autonomous territory comes amid stepped up rhetoric from the president-elect that he wants to incorporate Greenland into the U.S.
Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Imaages
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Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Imaages
President-elect Donald Trump, who is days away from taking office, has wasted no time in returning to center stage in U.S. foreign policy, reprising his hallmark blend of bombastic rhetoric and threats that keep both friend and foe guessing.
His undiplomatic talk in recent days of reclaiming the Panama Canal — and annexing Greenland and even Canada — have left world leaders scrambling to respond. Panama’s foreign minister has insisted that the sovereignty of its vital canal, which the U.S. handed over a quarter-century ago, is “not negotiable.” The prime minister of Denmark, a NATO member that oversees the autonomous territory of Greenland, has insisted that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders.” And, Canada’s outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has quipped that there isn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” of a merger with the United States.
Here are four things to know about Trump’s recent remarks.
Most experts agree that Trump is unlikely to use military force
Trump, at a news conference earlier this week, declined to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to gain control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, arguing they are both necessary for U.S. security.
But the president-elect’s remarks resemble a negotiating tactic more than a genuine threat, according to Dan Hamilton, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution.
“A lot of this is bombast and bluster,” Hamilton says. “It’s also a tried and true tactic of Donald Trump — to sort of disorient your negotiating partner, put them on the back foot because you want to get a better deal for the real goals that you have.”
In the case of Greenland and Panama, those “real goals” include keeping China and other potential adversaries at bay — a sort of throwback to the Monroe Doctrine, a policy first espoused by President James Monroe more than two centuries ago as a warning to European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere, which the U.S. viewed as its sole purview.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” Trump said at Tuesday’s news conference. “I’m talking about protecting the free world. You look at — you don’t even need binoculars — you look outside. You have Chinese ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen. We’re not letting it happen.”
Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says Greenland could become increasingly important “if shipping becomes viable through that route as Arctic weather gets warmer and ice caps shrink.”
“Geography really matters, and Greenland’s geography is extremely strategic,” Sadler, a retired U.S. Navy captain, says. “We don’t want a Chinese economic or military presence right there at a very critical pathway for an attack against the United States.”
In the case of Greenland, Trump likely wants to maintain and possibly deepen the U.S. military presence there, and ensure “better access for the United States to critical minerals and materials,” Hamilton says.
The Arctic territory, whose leader is pushing for independence from Denmark, was an important Cold War outpost for the U.S., which still maintains Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) in Greenland. Meanwhile, China has increasingly sought joint ventures to tap into Greenland’s rich “rare-earth” minerals with exotic names such as neodymium, cerium and lanthanum, that are vital to the modern tech industry.
China is also one of the main concerns in Panama, because Chinese companies “operate ports at both ends of the canal,” the Atlantic Council’s Gregg Curley writes.
Whatever Trump’s intentions, Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at Brookings, believes it’s important not to underestimate him. O’Hanlon calls Trump’s rhetoric concerning the use of military force “crazy talk,” but cautions: “I think you have to err on the side of taking any president or president-elect at his or her word and believing that this could often be the forewarning of something that really may happen.”
World leaders are still figuring out how to respond to Trump 2.0
During his first term, Trump berated NATO and even threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the trans-Atlantic security treaty, based on false claims that member nations “owe [the U.S.] a tremendous amount of money.”
Douglas Lute, who was a U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration, says that during his first term, alliance leaders viewed Trump as “unpredictable, unsettling, edging toward chaotic.”
But they also understand that “His style is such that he will say things publicly, especially speaking to his domestic political base, that at the end of the day don’t have a major impact on serious policy,” Lute says.
“Trump is good at taking people and moving them into the hysterical mode,” says Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and the Americas program at London-based Chatham House. She wonders “how quickly do Europeans start to think strategically about this?”
“It’s early days, but we’re not yet hearing … what could be strategically at stake here? What can we seek to work on behind the scenes with the incoming Trump administration?” she says. “If this is about sea lanes and critical minerals and geopolitical competition, then … what do we need to be doing? Right now, it really is just sort of fury, anger, admonishment” on the part of world leaders.
Trump’s talk about Greenland, in particular, crosses a line for NATO, according to O’Hanlon from Brookings. He says that the no matter how unlikely, the actual use of military force would demand a hard look at the mutual defense clause in NATO’s charter.
“If [the U.S.] attacked Denmark … every other NATO country is going to have an obligation to decide whether to come to Denmark’s defense,” he says. “I’m not suggesting we’re going to have a civil war within NATO, but things could get pretty testy.”
Some see Trump’s tactics as a contemporary version of Nixon’s “Madman Theory”
Former President Richard Nixon frequently gets the credit for a strategy aimed at making adversaries believe in a leader’s capacity for madness as a way to instill fear and gain the upper hand in international relations.
Roseanne McManus, an associate professor of political science at Penn State University, says the modern version of the so-called “Madman Theory” or “Madman Strategy” was outlined in the late 1950s, although there are allusions to it centuries before. In 1517, for example, Niccolo Machiavelli said that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.”
Nixon tried to use the Madman Theory to confuse the Soviet leadership and bring North Vietnam to the bargaining table to end the war there. Among other things, Nixon’s strategy included “veiled nuclear threats intended to intimidate Hanoi and its patrons in Moscow” and “approving a secret alert of U.S. nuclear forces around the world to project the idea that [Nixon] was ‘crazy’ and force adversaries to back down,” according to the National Security Archive.
McManus says there is reason to believe that “Trump is deliberately employing the Madman Theory and trying to make people think he’s a little bit crazy to get a bargaining advantage.”
Although Trump appearing erratic is nothing new for world leaders who dealt with him during his first term as president, traditionally, “for a lot of NATO countries, they’re used to a very predictable U.S. commitment. And so this unpredictability … will make them a lot less comfortable,” she says.
The president-elect wants to disorient U.S. allies, hoping that “if both partners want good relations with the United States, they’ll have to ante up,” Hamilton says.
Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, whose essay in Foreign Policy this week asked the question “Does the Madman Theory Actually Work?” thinks there’s a distinct difference between the Nixonian and Trumpian version of the strategy. “With Trump, it’s more that he’s just legitimately unpredictable,” he says. “He can wildly swing from threatening fire and fury to talking about love letters,” he says in a reference to Trump’s first-term dealings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump’s rhetoric could backfire
Drezner says that for coercion to work Trump would need “to credibly commit to actually doing the crazy thing you’re threatening,” adding that you then have to credibly promise to back down if your terms are met.
He says Trump has overestimated his bargaining strategy. “The strong conceptual mistake that Trump made in his first term and he’s going to make in his second term is his belief that because he can bully allies, he will be able to extract similar concessions from the Chinas and Russias of the world,” Drezner says.
If Trump’s strategy does amount to a “madman” approach, it’s likely to reach a point of diminishing returns, Penn State’s McManus says. “If you act irrational all the time, then no one will trust you and no one will want to make agreements with you,” she says. “It’s harder for them to make credible promises or credible commitments or credible assurances.”
Lute, the former ambassador to NATO, calls it the “cry wolf” scenario. Not only does it destroy credibility, he says, but there is “an opportunity cost.”
“Eventually you lose credibility and people spend time worrying about something that’s not going to happen,” he says. “It consumes time and energy … that would be better spent in other ways, such as helping Ukraine.”
