Abandon your foolish Greenland fantasies, Mr President, and remember Ukraine

In any case, the president found time in his lengthy address to mention the war in Ukraine – a real and bloody conflict, in sharp contrast to the improbable one in Greenland. Specifically, the president made reference to the tens of thousands of soldiers who are still being slaughtered every week as Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” approaches the end of its fourth year.

There has certainly been no let-up in Russia’s missile and drone attacks on civilians, now targeting Kyiv and electricity generation as temperatures drop well below freezing. A lack of power affects everything – lighting, water supplies, industry and transport as well as heating.

It is nothing less than state terrorism, orchestrated by the Kremlin because progress by the undertrained and badly equipped troops on the battlefield remains pitifully slow. The most serious interstate conflict in Europe since the Second World War grinds on, as cruel as ever. It doesn’t make for an ideal background to a renewed peace effort by the White House.

Mr Trump said that he hoped to meet Volodymyr Zelensky for talks, even though the Ukrainian leader had left Davos to return to Kyiv earlier in the week, disillusioned by the latest developments in US foreign policy. Mr Zelensky was, and is, right to be sceptical.

Despite Ukraine having agreed to the US proposal for a ceasefire last March, President Putin has found every reason to keep the fighting going, and to reject any peace settlement that doesn’t reward Russia with huge swathes of Ukrainian territory that it hasn’t yet conquered – even one that was approved by the White House. Yet Mr Trump seems to persist in thinking that neither side is serious about ending the fighting, and that they are taking it in turns to reject a ceasefire, which is simply untrue.

For Putin, there has always been some excuse to reject a deal, often involving a lengthy discourse on why Ukraine isn’t even a real nation with its own culture. The Russians think Ukraine should be theirs, with almost the same fervour that Mr Trump thinks Greenland belongs to America. It feels unlikely that anything Mr Trump has said or done in recent days has changed that stance.

Nonetheless, President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are off to Moscow for yet more discussions about moving the US peace plan forward, but with no great expectation of any sudden breakthrough.

After all, it did not come at the Alaska summit last August, when Mr Trump might have expected some reward for so publicly and lavishly bringing President Putin in from the cold. President Trump, testing the outer limits of satire, has even invited Putin, indicted as a war criminal, to join the Gaza board of peace, a Trump vanity project. To be fair, he also asked President Zelensky to join the new body, but Mr Zelensky declined, no doubt finding it a depressing sign of how gullible and out of touch Mr Trump can be about the Kremlin.

President Trump says that Ukraine and Russia would be “stupid” not to sign up to his peace deal. Yet he doesn’t register how much more positive and accommodating the Ukrainian side has been, and, more grievously still, how exerting more pressure on President Putin would push him to end the war he started. Instead, Putin is constantly rewarded for his obduracy, even if Mr Trump occasionally voices some exasperation with him.

As things stand, and without trying very hard, Putin is succeeding where every previous Russian and Soviet leader has failed, and is watching Nato unravel in a manner and at a speed that is scarcely believable.

The US National Security Strategy, published in November, painted Europe as a bigger threat than Russia to US interests, and the theme of “civilisational erasure” was picked up by Mr Trump again in Davos. While Nato managed to stick together under the strain of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and through decades of the Cold War, Mr Trump has casually broken it apart.

If he had time to watch President Trump’s speech, Putin will surely have been delighted to hear an American president say that Nato hasn’t done anything for the US, and that he doesn’t believe the Europeans and Canadians would back the US if it asked for assistance (contrary, of course, to painful experience after 9/11).

The late U-turn is as welcome as it is abrupt, but Mr Trump has nevertheless shown he is willing to shake this Western alliance to its foundations. Quite the legacy for an American president, that.