Is Greenland Donald Trump’s 25th-amendment moment? Last time around, this was when the Washington “grownups” debated his capacity to be president, notably in the final fortnight of his presidency, after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Under the constitution, a president can be replaced should the vice-president and a cabinet majority decide their leader is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. The trouble today is that there are no grownups.
The US president’s designs on Greenland are clearly mad. He claims Russia and China are scheming to seize the island and that Denmark should be forced urgently to transfer its sovereignty. Denmark had long allowed the US extended military access to Greenland, but Trump seems to want to own it. None of his staff has been able to say why.
Until now it would have seemed a comic satire for Norway, Sweden, France and Germany to be sending troops to Greenland, pending a possible US attack. Yet that is the absurd prospect happening this week. Britain even sent a military officer. This has come within weeks of Trump’s leadership putsch in Venezuela, and within days of his threatened military assault on Iran. In the latter he appeared to claim victory, saying Iran had stopped using its armed troops to suppress street protests. It happens that Trump has effectively been doing the same in Minnesota. He has had a hectic fortnight.
There is no justification for Trump’s attempted grab of Greenland. Under the Nato alliance there is full defence cooperation between the US and Denmark, as with Canada, which he has also threatened. Trump appears to be like a shoplifting addict who cannot resist a quick grab – an oilfield here, a critical minerals mine there. It is hard to believe he will not back off, but when?
Wise leaders have advisers. Reckless ones have sycophants. Most American presidents claim to be non-interventionists, but when dressed in the robes of military might they find it hard to resist flaunting them. As with George W Bush in Iraq, Trump’s “mission accomplished” press conference after Venezuela two weeks ago clearly exhilarated him. His army had just reportedly killed more than 100 people in Caracas, but he looked as if he had won the lottery.
When the US decides to set the world to rights, no one but the US can stop it. But the rights seldom emerge as such. They more often end as a vast expenditure of blood and money, justified by senseless talk of freedom and national security. This is despite the fact that, of all countries, the US must be the most unthreatened.
Sooner or later the US’s antique but resilient constitution will exert itself. Its central curb on presidential power remains the term limit. In three years, Trump will be gone. Before then, this year’s midterm elections seem certain to bring Congress some revival of confidence and thus balance of power. Assuming no 25th-amendment moment, Trump’s remaining years are likely to be dominated by an ever more eccentric vanity and growing domestic antipathy.
Meanwhile, what allies should not do is fall into Trump’s own trap, relying on the vacuities of national security to seal every argument and jeer every opponent. China and Russia may persist in their neurotic “grey-zone” aggressions, but the glee with which western defence lobbies use them to talk up the prospect of a “third world war” merely raises the temperature and generates fear.
China does not pose an existential threat to Britain. It never has and I cannot believe it ever will. Meanwhile, Russia’s borderlands have always been unstable. Before the current war, Russia had attacked Georgia and Ukraine in the past 20 years, without the west reacting militarily. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was outrageous and the west was right to help it defend itself. But that is quite different from declaring Russia a threat to Britain’s territorial security.
As Henry Kissinger and many Kremlinologists warned, Nato’s decision to advance its umbrella to Russia’s borders after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a severe test of Russian paranoia. Yet Russia has never responded by invading a Nato country, despite the incessant warnings of the defence lobby that it still might. The efforts of the former British army chief, Lord Dannatt, and others to portray Ukraine as just an overture to a third world war merely adds to Russia’s belligerence. I sometimes feel the military establishment craves war.
This is why Greenland matters. Clearly east-west relations – or rather emotions – are at an alarmingly tender stage. But portraying Russian tanks as about to race across Europe will hardly reduce the tension. A dispute over Greenland could split Nato and severely weaken it. If ever a crisis merited stalling and slow diplomacy, this is it. When tub-thumping generals and politicians seize the microphone from diplomats and peacemakers, all sanity vanishes.
In the past four years Ukraine has turned its border with Russia into a global battlefield between tyranny and freedom. But its dispute with Russia need have nothing to do with Nato. Of course Britons may want to assist other countries when fate or geography leads them into harm. But this has nothing to do with Britain’s national security. Defence is so expensive it should at least mean what it says on the tin.
Keir Starmer has promised to divert billions of pounds from his domestic budget into hiring soldiers and buying weapons. This is in order to send soldiers to Ukraine (and possibly even Greenland) so he can look good on his next foreign trip. He should not do so. They have nothing to do with the defence of Britain.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and the author of A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump
