A couple of months into Donald Trump’s second term, the White House dispatched an uninvited delegation to Greenland as part of an apparent charm offensive. Vice President JD Vance, his wife and his colleagues hoped their visit would make a good opening impression with locals — and advance Trump’s broader goal to somehow acquire the arctic island.
That did not work, and officials in Greenland (and much of the public) made a number of efforts to demonstrate that they did not want the U.S. delegation there.
Trump nevertheless declared soon after, “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%.”
The Republican added that there was a “good possibility that we could do it without military force,” but he went on to say that he wasn’t going to “take anything off the table.” Around the same time, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, made the case to CNN that the United States is entitled to Greenland.
Indeed, the idea of ownership was central to the administration’s vision. “That’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump said earlier this year. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Nine months later, he just signed a document. The New York Times reported:
On Tuesday, he signed a document that paves the way to expanding the U.S. military presence on the island, opening new bases. But it explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one — especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space — wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as “tremendous for Europe and for the United States.”
For Mr. Trump, it was a major retreat. He first raised the possibility of buying Greenland during his first term and never let go of the idea.
Despite his “100%” guarantee last year that the U.S. would acquire the arctic island, the Republican ultimately accepted an agreement that didn’t change a whole lot. The administration can now claim it will have an expanded military presence in Greenland, but by and large, the administration already had that.
A Politico report summarized, “This new agreement, which still needs ratification by Danish and Greenlandic lawmakers, is not, in fact, completely new. Instead, it sets out to ‘amend and supplement’ an earlier deal between the U.S. and Denmark dating back to 1951. Many experts have been saying for months that this earlier agreement gave Trump most of what he said he wanted in terms of more or less unfettered freedom to set up military bases and police the region’s security.”
In other words, what we’re left with is a foreign policy dynamic in which Trump did significant harm to U.S. relations with longstanding allies, while making bold promises to the public that he was forced to abandon in the end, all in exchange for a new agreement that largely gave the Republican what he already had.
Joe Cirincione, the vice chair of the Center for International Policy and a longtime expert on nuclear policy, described the deal as a “complete farce” designed to do little more than “soothe Trump’s unstable ego.”
When making a list of the incumbent president’s biggest foreign policy fiascoes, this one will rank near the top.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Trump got a Greenland deal, but it’s not the one he wanted or vowed to get appeared first on MS NOW.
