It is difficult to maintain the pretense that your sovereignty is not negotiable when the President of the United States is very publicly negotiating your sovereignty. The Danish government has put on a stoic display over the last month, and maintained a dignified poise during what must have been a truly humiliating national experience.
Any European — including the British — can empathise with the Danes in this situation. We all have points of reference in our own histories when national independence was either compromised or completely trampled over, and in which the polite fictions of diplomacy were stripped away exposing the stark truth of functional impotence. The feeling is a visceral one — underneath it all is the most basic human anxiety that we might be incapable of protecting our families from a physical threat.
This is a position which Americans, even the most well-meaning, struggle to imagine themselves in; at least in their capacity as Americans. Even on the occasions when their personal background causes them to identify with a foreign nation, they still do so with the psychological baggage of coming from the world’s one overwhelming military and economic force. This can sometimes result in political recklessness on behalf of the country they identify with; be it Ireland, or Israel or Armenia; and an unwillingness to tolerate the unhappy compromises that are the smaller nation’s lot in this world. And while I’m reasonably confident talking about Americans generally here, this observation is true to a vastly more pronounced extent among Donald Trump’s supporters.
There is an additional point about the MAGA crowd — which has become very obvious in online interactions with them over the last few weeks, but can also be discerned in policy. This is that they are functionally incapable of perceiving distinctions within foreign nationalities. As far as they are concerned, every British person is Keir Starmer, and can be argued with as such, regardless of anything we say. Parties, factions, social classes and regional differences may as well not exist at all. If European right-wingers complain that Trump’s high-handedness is damaging their political position at home and jeopardising their chances of winning power and changing things, then well, they would say that, because they’re libtards, and they’re weak.
The MAGA crowd … think of us as a friend who has screwed his own life up
The extension is that individual Europeans — all of us — are in some way personally responsible for the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and for our current weakness. Getting pushed around and publicly humbled by the Trump Administration is the price we are paying for our foolishness, and we thoroughly deserve it. This is the only way, so their reasoning goes, that we will learn not to do it again. They think of us as a friend who has screwed his own life up, and they are showing us some tough love so that we get our act together — this hypothetical friend being an individual with singular agency, rather than a collectivity of millions of people with contested politics.
One interesting thing about this is that many of these people continue to think about international relations in intrinsically moral terms — in stark contrast to Donald Trump himself who thinks about it like a business activity. On Ukraine for example, Trump regards Ukraine’s sense of itself as a victim to whom wrong has been done and redress is due, as being a blockage to a negotiated settlement; as is Russia’s pride and lost face. Trump’s view is that both sides have more to gain at this point than they have to lose from stopping the war, and that therefore a deal is there to be done if both sides could just get over themselves. Trump’s critics often interpret this as him doubting Ukraine’s status as the victim, and sympathising with Putin’s narrative of events. In reality, Trump simply doesn’t care. Many of his supporters however, are unable to adopt this calculating approach, and instead find ways of demonising Zelensky in order to justify to themselves the aggressive and belittling way Trump sometimes talks about him. And they will do the same about any European country that attracts his umbrage.
This would be a trivial matter if it were just random MAGA accounts on Twitter, but this way of thinking is clearly influential on the Administration’s behavior. If nothing else, it means that treating a country like Denmark as imperiously as Trump has is near-enough cost free in terms of domestic political support. And I suspect this approach will become more extreme as the race for the Republican presidential nomination heats up this year. Trump’s complete disregard for the domestic fortunes of politicians and parties who are, for whatever reason, associated with him in the eyes of their home electorate, is becoming one of the most important dynamics in developed-world politics.
It’s important to note that the Trump effect doesn’t tend to make insurgent parties of the right any less popular in themselves — instead, it causes centrist and left-ish voters to coalesce behind a single established party, usually whichever one is currently in government, regardless of how exhausted or discredited they are. In Canada, the threat of punitive tariffs and the casual suggestion that the US would annex its northern neighbour locked Pierre Poillievre’s Conservatives out of power, despite an apparently insurmountable lead in the polls over the previous two years. Poillievre still managed to increase the CPC’s total haul of votes by what would normally be an election-winning margin, but the Liberals under Mark Carney collected the votes of nervous NDP voters in central and maritime provinces, even to the point that Poillievre himself lost his own seat in Ontario. A similar but less overt phenomenon occurred in the Australian elections, where it appears Green voters in urban areas coalesced behind Labor, giving the plodding Albanese government one of the largest majorities in recent Australian history.
What this demonstrates is the limitations of “The Art of the Deal” as a diplomatic strategy
In Denmark itself, Trump’s Greenland foray has bolstered the governing Social Democratic party in the polls, along with their Moderate allies, at the expense of the right-wing opposition. As with Mark Carney’s steely performance on stage at Davos, the image of prime minister Mette Frederiksen and foreign minister Lars Rasmussen smoking after a gruelling round of talks with the Americans turned them into rallying symbols of national unity. Like Carney, Frederiksen and Rasmussen are marinated in the stifling political consensus that has left the rest of the NATO countries unable to meet the US on anything like equal terms. But for voters — especially older voters — they are still a reassuring, comforting contrast to Trump’s unpredictable and threatening style. Trump’s White House is telling Canada and the nations of Europe that what they really need is the political and economic equivalent of open heart surgery — but in practice he has pushed those countries’ electorates toward politicians offering something closer to a nice, warm bath.
What this demonstrates is the limitations of “The Art of the Deal” as a diplomatic strategy, particularly with allied, democratic nations as the quarry. It was perfectly clear from the moment that Donald Trump started talking about annexing Greenland during the campaign that he was softening a target up to extract some sort of concession. But once he won office, rather than pursue this objective bilaterally, Trump remained in campaigning mode, and escalated his rhetoric. This suggests that sending a message to domestic audiences was the primary objective, over whatever he wanted to achieve from the Danes. The latest reporting suggests that the Administration is now considering a solution along the lines of Britain’s bases in Cyprus. This seems like it might be a reasonable-enough outcome, but it’s one that could probably have been attained privately in discussions with the Danish government behind closed doors, without all of the drama. Yet Trump’s offering to his supporters is as much about the entertainment as it is about the practical results.
Trump has demonstrated in the past that, when he wants to be, he is very good at leveraging American power to make foreign leaders who find themselves in a tight spot, offers they cannot refuse. Most recently he did this with the Israelis and the Iranians. But this type of strategy is most effective when it has as its subject an individual decision-maker, upon whom Trump can deploy his unsophisticated but very solid grasp of human psychology. Yet it does not work particularly well when it is used on whole countries, and especially not on parliamentary democracies. Trump may be the master of high-stakes negotiation, but the average European voter reading their regional newspaper in their dressing gown isn’t under that sort of pressure; it is far easier for them to say that Trump can stuff off, and to decide to vote for a status quo party as a personal rebuke to him.
The Americans, quite reasonably, have decided that they need European countries to pull their own weight in defence and security, in order to focus American power on containing China in the Pacific. This is in Europe’s economic and security interests too. To do this, Europe needs major reforms that its current political elites are not interested in, and would not be able to implement even if they were. There are, however, growing political forces across the continent who do understand this, and in order to attain their objectives, the Americans ought to be doing everything they can to get them into government. Currently they are doing the opposite. As far as many Americans are concerned, that is not their problem, and it is up to Europeans to clean house themselves. Again, this is a perfectly understandable view, but it is not a sustainable one for a country in the business of being a superpower. A superpower must learn to divide and rule, and to nurture clients across their informal empire. And no matter how much they protest to the contrary, that is very much what Trump’s supporters want America to be.
