In Donald Trump’s America, foreign diplomats must be able to distinguish between a joke and an attempt to annex a fellow Nato member’s territory – an unenviable job. When Trump first said he wanted to acquire Greenland in 2019, it was treated as cross-continental trolling. (He had posted a meme of a glitzy Trump Tower superimposed onto Greenland’s landscape.) The Wall Street Journal headline “President Trump eyes a new real-estate purchase: Greenland” was typical of the view that this was about Trump’s personal vanity, and not a serious plan to protect American national security.
No longer. When he raised Greenland again in December 2024, the response was different. Trump’s political resurrection has altered the way Washington, and foreign capitals, view what was once seen as pantomime. He is in a stronger position to enact his desires than he was eight years ago. The Democrats are, for now, bemused about why they lost and unable to muster an alternative to Trump’s political hegemony. At the same time, there has been no attempt to delegitimise his win as there was with Russiagate in 2016. As for his own party, Trump commands loyalty from erstwhile opponents. Figures such as the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and the former national security advisers John Bolton and HR McMaster, who once restrained Trump’s impulses, have been replaced by a cadre of loyalists nominated for key roles. Or, as Bolton, who is a critic of Trump, told me, “The theme that runs through the nominees that he has announced so far is not a theme of loyalty – it’s fealty”.
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