Why Trump retreated on Greenland: When small states deter larger ones

In this video, I discuss the preliminary resolution of the Greenland crisis and why Trump decided to step back from his maximalist demands of owning Greenland. This crisis serves as a good example of how even small states can apply military force to deter great powers from aggression.

Watch the video here or read the transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

Hi. It looks like the Greenland Crisis is over. I've been thinking about how I should cover it, because I made a YouTube video on the Greenland Crisis, and it got quite a lot of attention, and I think many people would be curious to hear my take on how we ended up where we did.

But I think my next video on YouTube is going to be about something else. So what I'm going to do that is I'm going to put this video out here on my website, and I'm going to do it without the paywall. That way people can watch it who don't usually subscribe, and maybe people can also get an idea about what it is I'm talking about, when I say that you can get access to bonus videos by subscribing here on logicofwar.com.

But I think what happened was quite clearly that Donald Trump gave up. In the case of Greenland, he climbed down the tree and he found a way out of this crisis. There is now a lot of talk about how there are negotiations and Donald Trump got some kind of diplomatic victory by getting some concessions from NATO and from Denmark. I don't really see that. I mean, there is no deal right now, and it's quite unclear exactly what the talks with Rutte actually meant, aside from them agreeing that there will be talks. So, the agreement is essentially that there will be talks about a potential future agreement.

What it looks like now is that the agreement between Denmark and the United States from 1951, which gave the United States very, very extensive access to Greenland, might be reopened and there might be room for some adjustments to it. But at the same time, it's also clear that we're not at all at the point where the United States is going to own Greenland or anything like it. And it's quite difficult to see actually how much more they could get than what is already in the existing agreement.

So, I think it looks like Donald Trump is doing his best to sell the status quo as a victory. The art of the deal!

And how did we end up there? The way I see it, Denmark and the European countries did a couple of things. First, all the time during this, they kept the diplomatic track open. We saw that first with the Danish and the Greenlandic foreign ministers going to Washington, D.C. for negotiations with Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, and them agreeing to set down this high-level working group that would be working to see if they could find solutions to these things. That is actually the working group, which ended up being sort of the final agreement, namely that this working group will continue to work to figure out if there are ways out

And also by keeping Mark Rutte in the loop and giving him this position as a kind of broker between Denmark and the United States. It was quite clear that he was supposed to be in Davos and do the talks with Donald Trump on behalf of the Danish government. The Danish government deliberately chose not to be present in Davos in any way, shape, or form to give Rutte room for diplomatic maneuver. So, the diplomatic track was kept open.

But at the same time, we also saw the Danes and the European countries, broadly speaking, but especially, of course, Denmark, actually demonstrating how military deterrence works when you are a small state that wants to deter a bigger state from doing something.

The way you do that is that you make sure that to achieve the military goals, the great power would have to use more resources or political capital than they are willing to invest in the project. So it's going to be more complicated than the benefit of going through with this military intervention. Donald Trump was threatening military invasion. That was quite clear. He was talking about it, and said "we can't rule it out." It came in the context of what happened in Venezuela.

Denmark showed that they would be ready to fight this out. It's afterwards come out that the Danish soldiers in Greenland actually did have orders to use lethal force against an American invasion. That's the level we were at. They had the ammunition and were prepared for any such things. It was not considered likely that this would happen. But if it did, the orders were there about how they should behave.

What this did was that it propelled this discussion about a military invasion of Greenland to the top of the agenda in the United States. And since this was a very unpopular idea in the United States, what happened was that this created a political pressure on Donald Trump to take the idea of a military invasion off the table. It seems quite clear that different politicians in the United States, probably spearheaded by J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, pushed on Donald Trump to take this off the table, to say, "we can't do this. The political consequences of going through with an invasion of Greenland will just be too massive."

One of the mistakes people often make when they consider powerful figures such as Donald Trump or Putin, for that matter, is they assume that these people are omnipotent. They can do whatever they want without any checks and balances. And that's just not true. It's not true for Donald Trump. It's also not true for Putin. There are many things Putin cannot do because he has to maintain political legitimacy. And if he does certain things that will undermine his legitimacy, and it will be politically dangerous for him.

They have a certain amount of political capital that they can invest in things that might be unpopular, and they can sway public opinion or do unpopular things. But they also rely on being seen as the force that actually has the political legitimacy to make decisions.

Especially Donald Trump is in a position right now where he is facing elections. There are the midterm elections coming up. He's facing increasing political opposition inside the United States, and he has to think carefully about how he uses the political capital he has to make sure that he can achieve the goals and not to spend that capital on unpopular things that don't really bring him closer to the bigger political goals he has for the United States.

It's clear that invading Greenland would just be stupid use of political capital. And that's why we saw him ultimately give up on this idea of a military invasion. I think that's when he came out with tariff threats. At least that's how I interpreted it when I saw him coming out on social media with these ideas about a big tariffs on those countries that had sent soldiers to Greenland. It seemed clear that, OK, we are at a point now where we are probably no longer talking about a military invasion, and that now we are talking about a trade war. Because this is this is a tool that probably still Donald Trump had at his disposal.

But the reaction from Europe, when especially the Germans and the French started talking about what they call the economic bazooka, which is basically the European Union's anti-coercion instrument, that opens a toolbox of all kinds of things that the European Union can do in response to economic coercion, and when it became clear that this would be the response, then that triggered a reaction on the stock markets. We saw red numbers everywhere on the stock market. And it just became clear to Donald Trump that also the economic consequences of doing this would be too big and that the European countries are not going to be bullied on this question.

And again, the issue of Greenland was just not worth the political and in this case also monetary capital that would have to be spent on a trade war with the entirety of the European Union.

So, we saw Trump stepping down, giving up on his threats, just as he has done in other cases with China, with Brazil, and other countries that actually stand up to him and don't submit to the threats, but actually say, okay, we're fine. Let's do a trade war, if that's what you want. In those cases he actually tends to stand down.

And that's what he did here as well. He found an off-ramp. That off-ramp was that he said, okay, let's go along with this negotiation where it's very unclear that the United States is going to get anything that they did not already have, but he can sell it to the media as saying that "it's the art of the deal. I'm a genius because now I got the Danes to finally look at these things" or what have you. He's clearly just trying to sell the status quo as a victory.

But I think the most interesting thing of all this is that it shows how small states can use military deterrence to deter great powers from military action. I think it's a textbook example of that: That those Danes sent to Greenland actually were enough to trigger the political reaction inside the United States that made it clear that the political consequences of this were just bigger than the advantage of going forward.

So those were my thoughts on Greenland. And I really hope that this is going to be the end of this because, as I said, it's a stupid crisis. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is famous for changing his mind sometimes. But I hope that this was it with Greenland and that now something will come out of this working group so we won't have to deal with this again for the rest of his presidency.

All right, enough for now. See you next time. Bye.