Playground-level diplomacy

The OAFPOTUS has claimed credit for a "new" "deal" with Greenland (really Denmark, remember) that essentially leaves the existing Defense of Greenland Agreement that we signed in April 1951 unchanged. This is the playground-bully personality of the administration in action: threaten to break something and then claim credit for not actually breaking it.

Anne Applebaum rolls her eyes:

The US-Danish Greenland treaty itself was public, and it enjoyed widespread approval. Indeed, it was a source of pride in Denmark, which has been a loyal American ally ever since.

Starting even before the inauguration, Trump (and Stephen Miller) spent months threatening Greenland, posting memes and making aggressive statements. Finally, in January 2026, after the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, he backed off, giving a long, rambling speech in which he confused Greenland and Iceland several times (creating a crisis in Reykjavik too) but seemed to say he would not invade.

A series of negotiations followed. These were accompanied by a semi-covert influence campaign, conducted mostly by private companies, that I described in Empire of Grift, the Atlantic cover story published this week.

After all that, new “deal” is a damp squib. As of this writing, no text of the agreement has been released, but background briefings have been provided to media. The BBC reports that the agreement states that hostile powers, meaning Russia and China, cannot build bases on Greenland, which the Danes would never have allowed anyway. It rules out major investments from those countries too, which weren’t a serious prospect either. The government of Greenland is explicitly included, which is also new. But, at least in the reporting so far, nothing else really changes.

We're 45 days from an election that won't stop this bullshit from happening, but will likely make it much, much more difficult to conceal. It's overdue.