Lyse DoucetChief international correspondent
On day one, he put the world on notice.
“Nothing will stand in our way,” President Donald Trump declared, to thunderous applause, as he ended his inauguration speech in a cold Washington winter on this day last year, at the start of his second term.
Did the world fail to take enough notice?
Tucked into his speech was a mention of the 19th Century doctrine of “manifest destiny” – the idea that the US was divinely ordained to expand its territory across the continent, spreading American ideals.
At that moment, the Panama Canal was in his sights. “We’re taking it back,” Trump announced.
Now that same declaration, expressed with absolute resolve, is directed at Greenland.
“We have to have it,” is the new mantra. It’s a rude awakening in a moment fraught with grave risk.
US history is littered with consequential and controversial American invasions, occupations, and covert operations to topple rulers and regimes. But, in the past century, no American president has threatened to seize the land of a longtime ally and rule it against their people’s will.
No US leader has so brutally broken political norms and threatened long-standing alliances which have underpinned the world order since the end of World War Two.
There’s little doubt that old rules are being broken, with impunity.
Trump is now being described as possibly the US’s most “transformative” president – cheered by supporters at home and abroad, alarm among others in capitals the world over, and a watchful silence in Moscow and Beijing.
“It’s a shift toward a world without rules, where international law is trampled underfoot, and where the only law which seems to matter is the strongest with imperial ambitions resurfacing,” was French President Emmanuel Macron’s stark warning on the stage at the Davos Economic Forum, without directly mentioning Trump by name.
There is mounting concern over a possible painful trade war, even worry in some circles that the 76-year-old Nato military alliance could now be at risk if, in the worst case scenario, the US commander-in-chief tries to take Greenland by force.
Trump’s defenders are doubling down in support of his “America First” agenda, against the post-war multilateral order.
When asked on BBC Newshour whether seizing Greenland would violate the UN charter, Republican congressman Randy Fine said: “I think the United Nations has abjectly failed in being an entity that supports peace in the world and, frankly, whatever they think, probably doing the opposite’s the right thing.”
Fine introduced a bill called “Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act” in Congress last week.
How do America’s anxious allies respond, when it seems nothing will stand in Trump’s way?
Many phrases have peppered this past year of diplomatic contortions over how best to deal with the US’s unpredictable president and commander-in-chief.
“We need to take him seriously but not literally,” comes from those who insist this can all be sorted out through dialogue.
It’s worked, but only to a point, on trying to forge a united response with Europe to Russia’s blistering war in Ukraine.
Trump often veers, from one week to the next, from espousing positions close to Russia’s, then tilting towards Ukraine, then bolting back into Russia’s orbit again.
“He’s a real estate mogul,” says those who see in Trump’s maximalist positions his deal-making tactics from his New York property days.
There’s an echo of that in his repeated threats of military action against Iran – although it’s clear military options are still on his now crowded table.
He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician,” explains his top diplomat, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he is repeatedly questioned about Trump’s tactics. “He says and then he does,” is his highest praise for his president against what he derides as the dismal record of previous incumbents.
Rubio has been one of the principal voices trying to backpedal Trump’s threats on Greenland, underlining that he wants to buy this vast strategic ice sheet, not invade it.
He pointed out that Trump has been exploring options to purchase the world’s largest island, to counter threats from China and Russia, since his first term in office.
But there is no denying Trump’s bully tactics, his contempt for collective action, his belief that might is right.
“He is a man of transactions and brute power, mafia style power,” says Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist magazine.
“He doesn’t see the benefit of alliances, he doesn’t see the idea of America as an idea, a set of values; he doesn’t give two hoots about that.”
And he doesn’t hide it.
“Nato is not feared by Russia or China at all. Not even a little bit,” Trump told the New York Times in a wide-ranging interview earlier this month. “We’re tremendously feared.”
If security was the issue, the US already has forces on the ground in Greenland and under a 1951 agreement could send in more troops and open more bases.
“I need to own it,” is how Trump flatly puts it.
And he often makes it clear, “I like to win.” There’s a growing body of proof that’s what it is about.
His policy back flips in the past year have been baffling.
In the Saudi capital Riyadh in May, we watched how his major speech on his first foreign trip of his second term met a rapturous reception.
Trump took aim at the American “interventionists” whom he excoriated for having “wrecked far more nations than they built… in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
In June when Israel attacked Iran, Trump reportedly warned Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to put his diplomacy at risk with his military threats against Tehran.
By the end of the week, when he saw Israel’s success in assassinating top nuclear scientists and security chiefs, Trump exclaimed: “I think it’s been excellent.”
“Sane-washing” was the phrase coined months ago by Edward Luce of the Financial Times to describe the world’s polite portrayals of Trump, the succession of leaders landing at his door with glittering gifts and gilded praise to try to win him over to their side.
“Trump’s apologists – a more numerous crowd than true believers – work round the clock to sane-wash his policies into something coherent,” Luce wrote in his latest column.
It was on full display last October when leaders the world over were summoned to join him at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh to celebrate his ringing declaration that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East” for the first time in “3,000 years.”
The first significant phase of his peace plan had brought about a desperately needed ceasefire in Gaza and the urgent release of Israeli hostages.
It was Trump’s muscular diplomacy that forced Netanyahu, as well as Hamas, to agree to it. It was a major breakthrough only Trump could achieve.
But it wasn’t – sadly – the dawn of peace. No-one there said the quiet part out loud.
Last year Trump’s approach was framed as manifest destiny. This year it’s the early 19th Century Monroe Doctrine now updated, since the Venezuela invasion, as the “Donroe Doctrine.”
President Trump now owns it, bolstered by his fervent backers on his team, with his belief that America can act at will in its backyard, and beyond, to protect American interests.
Sometimes he is called an isolationist, sometimes an interventionist. But there’s always that slogan which returned him to power – Make America Great Again.
And his letter to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre highlighted his obsessive pique over not winning this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump informed Støre: “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”
“It’s a good day to have a Nordic temperament,” Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide diplomatically remarked to me when I asked about this moment.
Norway has been calm, with ice-hard firmness, in its defence of Greenland and Denmark and collective security in the Arctic.
European responses still stretch across this slippery political ice.
Macron has vowed to launch the EU’s “trade bazooka” of counter-tariffs and restricting access to the EU’s lucrative market.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one of the American president’s closest European allies, has vaguely spoken of a “problem of understanding and miscommunication.”
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has strongly and publicly defended Greenland’s territorial integrity but wants to protect the strong personal bond he’s built over the past year by avoiding retaliatory tariffs.
The gloves are off for Trump as he posts the private messages he’s receiving from leaders using the old tools of statecraft to try to keep him on side.
“Let us have a dinner in Paris together on Thursday before you go back to the US,” suggested the French president who also queried, in the midst of praise for other foreign policy successes, “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland”.
“Can’t wait to see you”, wrote Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, who once called Trump “daddy” for his forceful handling of the Iran-Israel 12-day war last year.
Rutte, and others, have credited Trump’s blunt threats for forcing Nato members to significantly increase their defence spending in recent years.
Trump’s warnings, going back to his first term, accelerated a trend called for by previous US presidents and started by Nato members themselves in the shadow of Russian threats.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the country which has long lived in America’s shadow has been trying to forge a different path forward, albeit with challenges of their own.
“We have to take the world as it is, not the way we want it to be,” was the candid reflection of Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney on his trip to China last week.
It was the first visit by a Canadian leader to Beijing since 2017, after years of sharp tension, and it sent a clear signal of this fast changing world.
Trump’s astonishing threat to annex his neighbour to the north surfaced again this week in a post on social media which showed the western hemisphere, including Canada and Greenland, covered in stars and stripes.
Canadians know there’s still a risk they could be next.
Carney, the former central banker, rose to Canada’s highest office last year buoyed by Canadians’ belief he was the best prepared to take on Trump.
He responded “dollar for dollar” from the start, imposing retaliatory tariffs – until it became too painful for the much smaller Canadian economy, which sends more than 70% of its trade south of its border.
When Carney took to the stage at Davos on Tuesday, he also focused on this jarring juncture.
“American hegemony in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” he said, adding bluntly: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
On Wednesday Trump will speak from that same podium with the world watching.
Asked by the New York Times this month what could stop him, Trump replied: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That’s what lies behind an armada of allies now seeking to persuade, flatter, force him – to change his mind.
This time, it’s not certain they will succeed.
