In 1978, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident, and future President, wrote an essay, distributed clandestinely, that tells of a greengrocer who hangs a sign in his shopwindow reading “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t actually believe in this hollow slogan, nor do his customers—rather, they are all engaged in a performative ritual, a paean to a Communist system, which, through their act, they help perpetuate.
On January 20th, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, recalled Havel’s essay at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, during a speech that, for one delivered by a world leader, offered a rare degree of intellectual, even emotional, candor. Carney applied the condition of Havel’s greengrocer to the rules-based international order that came into being after the Second World War, much of it backstopped by the United States and wielded to its benefit. Even as powerful countries regularly acted as they pleased and international laws and regulations were applied with “varying rigor,” a nominal allegiance to a world of norms and to win-win coöperation endured.
“American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea-lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney said. And it undergirded NATO, an alliance that had allowed for an unprecedented near-century of peace. That order, however imperfect, had more benefit than downside. So, Carney said of Canada and its European allies, “we placed the sign in the window.”
But the first year of Donald Trump’s second term has made the downside impossible to ignore. Last April, on “Liberation Day,” Trump announced a twenty-per-cent tariff on E.U. members. (“They rip us off,” he said.) His attempts to end the war in Ukraine featured an unmistakable sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while indicating that the war is really Europe’s problem, anyway, and that it shouldn’t count on the U.S. for significant military or financial support. Just after New Year’s, when Trump sent U.S. troops to Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro, he suggested that more such actions would follow, telling the Times, “I don’t need international law.”
Yet nothing has thrown the diverging paths of the U.S. and Europe into plain view more than the crisis over Greenland, an autonomous Arctic territory that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. For the past year, Trump has said that he intended to take possession of the island, with its militarily strategic location and its abundant, if difficult-to-access, rare earths. Only the U.S. can defend Greenland from the likes of Russia and China, he argued, telling Congress, “We’re going to get it one way or the other.” That is, the signal member of NATO, a collective-security body based on the principles of mutual self-defense, was threatening to seize the territory of another member.
For a time, Denmark and other NATO members seemed to think that they could placate Trump with promises to devote more resources to the Arctic. (An agreement from 1951 allowed the U.S. to maintain military installations in Greenland during the Cold War—it now operates only one—with an option to add other facilities.) For the past year, in fact, Europe has shown a willingness to engage in flattery and transactional dealmaking—a proven formula with Trump. At a NATO summit in June, in The Hague, it largely worked; the main goal was to keep the U.S. in NATO, preserving its role and its capabilities. States pledged to spend five per cent of G.D.P. on defense, and Trump deemed the summit “tremendous.” But, on Greenland, he appeared to be operating in another realm. “You defend ownership,” Trump said in early January. “You don’t defend leases.”
Later in the month, Denmark and several other European countries sent troops to Greenland for military exercises—ostensibly to prove that they are serious about safeguarding it from adversaries like Russia and China, though clearly also to send a message to Trump. “The fact that Europe felt it had to deploy a trip-wire force against the one power that, for generations, was seen as providing the ultimate trip-wire force for Europe’s defense is a complete reversal of our entire understanding of the world,” Fabrice Pothier, a former director of policy planning at NATO, said. Trump responded by announcing additional tariffs—rising to twenty-five per cent—which would remain in force until a U.S. acquisition of Greenland was finalized.
Nonetheless, at Davos, speaking a day after Carney, Trump appeared to walk back his more dramatic threats, saying that the U.S. would not use force to take Greenland and tabling the tariffs. Perhaps the European troop exercises made an impression on him, or maybe an adviser explained the potential effect of the so-called E.U. trade bazooka—a set of wide-ranging countermeasures that European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, were advocating—which could inflict a hundred billion dollars of losses on the U.S. economy.
That same day, Trump announced the “framework” of a deal brokered by the NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte. Details were scarce, but it appears that the U.S. and Denmark will revisit the 1951 agreement, and may add more U.S. bases or missile-defense stations as part of what Trump calls his Golden Dome. An additional clause could keep adversarial powers from investing in or profiting from Greenland’s resources. In other words, Trump caused a crisis in NATO to end up with basically the same set of options that existed months ago.
If that deal sticks, Europe may be tempted to see Trump’s walk back as the ultimate geopolitical TACO move—the land grab that wasn’t. The larger problem, though, isn’t so much Trump’s proposed actions as the logic guiding them. As Ivo Daalder, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013, said, “Trump has made clear he’s willing to defend territory he owns, and less than willing if he doesn’t.” That “sends a rather existential message to the rest of NATO about the notion that the security of one is indivisible from the security of all.”
No matter the ultimate resolution, the crisis will accelerate Europe’s efforts to decouple its security from the U.S. That is neither an easy nor a quick proposition: for example, Europe has no equivalent to the U.S.-made Patriot air-defense platform that it can produce at scale. Moreover, Europe itself is divided: it couldn’t agree on a response to Trump’s tariff threats, nor is there consensus on which nation should take the lead, if not the U.S.
Still, the dissolution of a decades-old order may be inevitable. “We are taking the sign out of the window,” Carney said, echoing Havel again, at Davos. The U.S. may be powerful and mighty, but its longtime allies “have something, too—the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality.” ♦
An earlier version of this article mischaraterized Mark Carney’s position.