Lawfare Daily: Trump, Greenland, and the International Order

[Intro]

John Drennan: Even though the worst of the crisis has passed, we have a rattled set of allies. And basically a lack of clarity for exactly what comes next. But I think the only thing that we can say for certain is that given the administration's general approach to Europe over the last year I wouldn't take a return to crisis at some point soon, whether that's weeks or months off the table,

Molly Roberts: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Molly Roberts, senior editor at Lawfare here with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Ariane Tabatabai, and visiting fellow at the Egmont Institute in Brussels, John Drennan.

Ariane Tabatabai: China also welcomes the United States being distracted elsewhere because it means that the more distracted the United States is fighting its own allies within NATO, doing things in Latin America, and so on so forth, the less it's going to be able to plan for and commit resources and assets to the Indo-Pacific. And that means that China essentially has this broad opening that it can use to increase its own influence and pursue its own goals.

Molly Roberts: Today we're talking about the Greenland crisis and the international order.

[Main Episode]

So first guys, I wanna talk a little bit about where we are and how we got here. John, can you give us some background on how the Greenland embroglio came to be? And I guess also how it has resolved seemingly for now.

John Drennan: Absolutely. And thanks so much for having me today. So we are now out of the acute phase of an intra-NATO crisis triggered by direct threats by the United States against the sovereignty of one of its NATO allies, Denmark.

It's the most dramatic episode in a series of growing U.S.-Europe tensions since Trump returned to the office that are straining the alliance. President Trump has long talked about wanting to acquire Greenland typically by via purchasing it from Denmark. This dates back to his first term at least.

He continued this pursuit in his second term. He cited things like security concerns stemming from Russia and China, the need for sites related to the Golden Dome Missile Defense System, as well as economic interests around rare earths, other strategic resources. So the discussion was, perhaps not for the Danes, but in general for the administration, more of a background issue over the past year and switched into a crisis starting in this January, earlier this month.

This is when the administration started saying that it wanted to annex Greenland and take control of the island. And stated that the use of force was on the table. NATO allies led by Denmark pushed back saying that any issues related to Arctic security and the island specifically could be solved among the allies in existing channels collectively.

And everything really started coming to a head in the middle of January in a series of escalating events that turned it into a full-blown crisis. So, in response to the statements by the administration earlier in the month, the Danish and Greenland foreign ministers came to Washington for talks where the outcome was basically that they agreed to establish a working group to then subsequently discuss Arctic security related issues.

But after that, Trump doubled down on his statement that the U.S. needs to control Greenland. And so subsequently the allies deployed a small number of troops to the island for exercises in response, then Trump threatened to impose tariffs on those countries that participated. And these were set starting February one and would escalate in June to a higher percentage if the allies didn't acquiesce.

And so then in response, the Europeans started talking about this as U.S. attempted economic coercion and considered counter tariffs and using the EU trade bazooka in response. And so we're at pretty serious crisis at this point. And you know, over this period we have polling that comes out that shows less than one fifth of the American public supported the administration's actions and rhetoric around Greenland.

We have even some Republicans on the hill came out and said this was a bad idea, ‘Why? Why are we doing this?’ And so all of this we're at the kind of very acute crisis phase at the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which Trump then walked everything back.

So he took the use of force off the table. He said he would not be applying tariffs. He agreed to a quote unquote framework agreement that he discussed with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. We don't know exactly what changed his mind. I suspect it's a combination of all those things, you know, and including in response to the tariff announcement, the market started to tumble a bit.

So I think there, there's a lot of negative responses churning that are probably affecting Trump's thinking around this. We also don't know exactly what the exact deal is. The president pointed—basically said that it fixed or addressed some of his security concerns, addressed some of his economic concerns. We don't know exactly what that looks like.

There's been reporting that there's gonna be new U.S. bases on Greenland, but all of that I think is premature as the final shape of the deal comes to form. So basically, as of recording today on January 27th, we have had several weeks of a largely self-inflicted crisis.

All of the administration's stated rationale for Greenland, either security or economic could have been solved through existing bilateral or multilateral alliance mechanisms. And so even though the worst of the crisis has passed, we have a rattled set of allies and basically a lack of clarity for exactly what comes next.

But I think the only thing that we can say for certain is that given the administration's general approach to Europe over the last year I wouldn't take a return to crisis at some point soon, whether that's weeks or months off the table.

Molly Roberts: Yeah, so that's exactly what I wanted to talk about next. It seemed like the tension was building and building, and then everybody breathed this huge sigh of relief after Trump backed down at Davos.

But was this a kind of classic TACO, “Trump Always Chickens Out” move and he'll chicken out and next time he makes a threat, even if he'll make a threat, is the crisis really over or can we expect more threats to come and maybe more threats that we should be taking seriously, given Trump's general approach to foreign policy?

Ari?

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, so, you know, I think everybody, even Republicans on the hill, as John mentioned, are really eager to move on from this. This is not good from a, the perspective of U.S. national security interest. It's not good from the perspective of kind of our standing internationally. And so I think everybody's hoping that this is now behind us and we're gonna move on and.

You know, given all the things that are going on in the world and at home you know, the various crises that the administration is juggling now that Republicans and Democrats on the hill are having to respond to, I think the idea is, ‘okay, this is just another thing that, you know, happens. We go through various new cycles in a given day so we can just kind of move on.’

I think it's important to understand that while we here in the U.S. are kind of used to that and you know, over the past 10 years of President Trump being in the public politics right and having kind of shaped politics and discourse and new cycles around his actions and his rhetoric—I think it's sticking a lot more in Europe.

And you know, you've seen now, it's both cumulative. The president has been going on about wanting to withdraw from alliances and from the world order for ever since he's been in the public eye and politics. It even goes back to before he started his campaign back in 2016. So this is something that he's really, that is pretty consistent in his worldview.

There's also the set of actions that John described that he's been taking the different things he's also said about allies. Just last week after the kind of initial phase of the crisis was over, the president then moved on to talk about how, you know, yeah, sure, allies did contribute to our war effort and Afghanistan, but maybe they weren't in the front lines like we were. Maybe they were kind of sitting behind. And that was taken very seriously in Europe, both by, you know, governments, but also by public opinion and was viewed as very insulting, which it was to allies who had committed forces and resources and seen, you know, hundreds of casualties in—to support the United States and the aftermath of 9/11.

So, you know, I think while in the U.S. were kind of, you know, we have a short attention span when it comes to news, I think that is a little different in Europe and from the perspective of other NATO allies. And then after that too, the president, you know, had this Truth Social post where he talked about Governor Carney, quote unquote, referring to Prime Minister Carney of Canada. So kind of bringing back and putting back on the table this notion of Canada as the 51st state.

So he's not fully moved on from undermining NATO and, even again, if this crisis is fully behind us, which I agree with John, we just don't know that this is not gonna pop up again, the Greenland piece specifically in a few weeks or a few months or in a few years. I, I think the damage is done.

I think the other thing that is important to understand is that Trump 1.0, so the first Trump administration, was really focused on kind of withdrawing from the international order. I think what we're seeing this time around in Trump 2.0 is actually the administration going a step further and taking President Trump's worldview to its logical end, which is not just about withdrawing from international institutions and agreements and so on and so forth.

It's actually actively dismantling those things to kind of create this new order and this new vision. And we're seeing that with all of the kind of various threats of use of force or actual use of force around, you know, Latin America with NATO and so on, so forth. So that's something that I think is going to continue shaping the way the administration approaches the world and in turn how allies see us.

The last piece, I think again, really important to highlight is that the trust that has underpinned NATO for decades now is being chipped out slowly but surely. And so, you know, for the first time, NATO has had to not just deal with kind of disagreements internally about how to approach a common threat. But it's had to deal with a threat from within.

And again, I think it's important, and we don't really appreciate that here in the U.S. that European allies and NATO allies more broadly are starting to move away from this view of the United States as their main security guarantor and moving more toward a view of the United States as not just kind of, you know, sometimes unreliable, sometimes kind of, you know, not an ideal partner, but kind of as an adversarial power at this point.

Then in the short term too, one of the things, and maybe John can talk about this later, is that, you know, the crisis itself, the self-inflicted crisis has had, has made allies at least divert their attention from what they should be focused on, which is those common threats including the Russian war in Ukraine to kind of deal with, you know, managing the relationship with the administration and President Trump specifically.

Molly Roberts: Yeah, and I definitely do wanna talk about the war in Ukraine and how this is affecting that later. But I guess first you mentioned the world order is changing, Trump is changing it. Europe is taking that seriously and seeing those changes happen.

So what are the Europeans doing and what are our other allies like Canada, Trump does keep calling the 51st state, doing in response to this—John?

John Drennan: Sure. So basically, as Ari said, the U.S. is moving from its—the European view is that the U.S. is moving from its typical role or historic role in Europe. And they're getting used to a crisis situation with the U.S. if not outright confrontation as we've seen. And I think the cumulative effect of all of this is that it's gonna be a net negative for both U.S. security and European security.

As Ari kind of mentioned as we talked earlier, the, this has been a year of tensions that have been spilling over in different ways between the U.S. and Europe, whether that's tensions over Ukraine policy and the administration basically coming in the first month and saying that Europe, you're now leading on Ukraine and we are taking a step back.

That's been over defense spending, which the outcome has been the allies have agreed to spend more. But I think the second and third order effects of the overall U.S. approach are gonna have—the U.S. is gonna have less say over what the allies are actually spending that money on. We've seen tensions around the administration's general, I dunno if you wanna call it normative or philosophical approach to Europe, which is both in the national security strategy, talking about civilizational erasure as a result of European social policies, basically. Or senior administration officials focusing, you know, as JD Vance, Vice President JD Vance did in the Munich Security Conference last year focusing on the threat from within as the major threat to Europe, not Russia, which is actively engaged in a war in Ukraine and threatening NATO allies regularly.

And this is also manifested in other areas outside of security and defense, like over tech policy and in trade policy. And so I think, you know, the optimistic take is that the Europeans have, are recognizing that at minimum they're not gonna have the same level of constructive engagement, but at worst, you know, we could be looking at ways that they hedge or seek alternates to certain pieces, at least of the U.S. relationship.

I think what they'll do about it in the near term, it's—there's frankly not much that is possible now in, in terms of security and defense. I think in other areas there's a lot more flexibility, but there's a built-in dependence on the U.S. for certain key capabilities within the NATO construct. The allies rely on us extended nuclear deterrence.

And so none of that is, is something that they can change right now overnight. I think those are where we're gonna see longer term shifts, whether that's. Taking the higher level of spending and the higher level of capacity in European defense industry and developing their own capabilities. Or we've also seen patterns of allies in Europe seeking other defense partners for weapons for equipment, for instance, the Poles have been for the past four or so years have been really cultivating relationship with South Korea. And so looking to those other partners outside the United States for key pieces of capability, I think it's another option.

There's been some rumbling around developing an independent European nuclear deterrent. And I think, again, that's not something that is happening now. It's probably more either signaling to the U.S. or some sort of contingency planning, whether that takes the form of the UK and France jointly expanding their deterrent to the rest of Europe.

You know that we've seen it not by governments talking specifically necessarily about starting their own nuclear programs, but I think the potential for proliferation at the bare minimum, and Ari can probably talk to this more than I can, but the potential for proliferation has increased, which is something that historically the U.S. has been opposed to.

So ultimately the allies are absorbing the shock, I think, in the short term because they still depend on the U.S. in so many ways, but they're seeking ways to hedge militarily, industrially, economically, because their baseline assumption is volatility in the relationship with the US as opposed to partnership in the past.

Ariane Tabatabai: I agree with everything John just said. I think one additional piece I would add is that, you know, what happens next is sort of dependent also on how far the president is able to push the envelope and whether any of the guardrails that were built into the U.S. system actually kick in and start working.

We mentioned that Congress has been taking an interest in this. Republicans, certainly Democrats, have been hoping that this will, this issue will go away and will resolve itself and, you know, we'll all move on to other things. But I do think that if this kind of pattern of behavior continues and if it seems like this is something that is going to stick and that there's going to be no other kind of no pushback internally from the, from within the United States, that it will certainly kind of crystallize all of the perceptions that John mentioned and lead allies to take the actions that, that John mentioned.

And then on the proliferation piece, I think we are already in an environment where a number of allies, partners, and of course traditional adversaries are looking at nuclear, at developing their own nuclear capabilities. And this is a little bit of a shift from before where obviously adversaries, you know, we've spent decades trying to prevent the DPRK from developing a nuclear weapon. That was, those efforts were not successful; similarly, decades preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Those efforts were largely successful.

But now what we're seeing is a shift in the way the allies are thinking about it. There are debates within European countries that do not actually have a nuclear capability, some of which stopped developing those nuclear capabilities largely because of U.S. security guarantees and assurances, now having to think about whether or not they would need their own capability to be able to keep themselves safe because they can't rely on a partner that shift its, you know, that has these mood swings apparently every four to eight years. That's not a way to kind of build your national security strategy and your defense strategy, right?

You need to kind of, be able to stand on your own two feet if you perceive your key allied that you've been looking at to support you to provide that deterrent to provide those security assurances, as you know, perceived as, as unpredictable and as unreliable.

Molly Roberts: Got it. So Mark Rutte gave a very self-effacing or alliance-effacing speech to the European Parliament this week, saying, if anyone here thinks that the European Union, or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the United States, quote unquote, keep dreaming. We need each other.

We've talked a little bit about what Europe is getting from NATO, but we haven't talked so much about what the United States is getting from NATO and from its partnership with Europe.

So what are we getting and what are the implications of tensions in the alliance, the Greenland crisis, but also just the broader tension for the United States.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, let me start and then John, you should jump in. You know, I think a lot of the conversation around what we get from NATO, in addition to being kind of framed around the idea of defense spending, as John mentioned, has been centered around Article 5 which is collective defense, and that's because that is the most visible piece of what we get from NATO.

The thing to know though is that, you know, NATO has been around since 1949 and. Article 5 has only been invoked once, and that was again in response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the U.S. decision to go and conduct a regime change operation in Afghanistan and NATO allies joined that operation, committed forces, assets, resources to do that.

But NATO's, not just Article 5. NATO does a lot more every single day that most people don't see because those things are just not super visible. They're not the things that pop up in the news very often. So just to give you a couple of examples of those we get access, spacing and over flight capabilities from NATO, we get intelligence sharing with NATO allies and partners. We get political support. John already mentioned this one, but we get—U.S. defense industry is able to sell billions of dollars’ worth of assets and weapons and equipment to NATO allies and all of those things, essentially, in combination allow us to detect threats.

So again, going back to intel sharing, right, like we get capabilities and collection capabilities from allies that allow us to detect threats easily and be able to respond to them. Access spacing and overflight allows us to have forward deployed forces that can go into different theaters of operation at a lower cost and much faster. So, you know, if you look at a lot of the events over the past couple of years in the Middle East, we've been able to kind of deploy assets and forces really quickly because we've had those kind of touch points and bases in, in Europe. Same thing for counterterrorism operations in Africa.

So those are really, really important in the day-to-day operations of the Department of Defense and how it's able to kind of prevent threats from emerging at home and to kind of contain them and tackle them elsewhere at a much lower cost.

And then the kind of core mission of NATO itself, we should also talk about, which is the is deterring Russia right. And we're much more able to do that because we have those relationships and those assets and facilities in Europe than we would be able to do here. And that's probably part of the reason why, you know, honestly a lot of Americans don't really think about Russia as a major threat to the United States today is because NATO is essentially a victim of its own success and has been extremely successful in kind of providing and meeting that core mission.

Of course, it's really hard to capture and qualify right when a threat doesn't happen. It is so much easier to know when it does happen, and that's part of the reason why I think a lot of folks are not necessarily tracking beyond Article 5, what it is that NATO and those alliances that are bilateral relationships that we have within that framework, why they matter.

John Drennan: The one thing I would add on that, about the Secretary General quote, you know, I think the Secretary General is beholden to the members of the Alliance because he doesn't have you know, his own independent power. He is not the head of state anymore. He was the former head of state of Netherlands, not anymore.

And so I think he, his approach has been to really lean into this, we need to keep the U.S. inside the tent at all costs, and I need to figure out ways to make sure that the U.S. does not ultimately lead the alliance or the problems that even if he recognizes personally that the U.S. is causing these problems within the alliance his major incentive is to keep the alliance together.

And I think you know, I'm not saying that as a, as an excuse for some of the more interesting terms of phrase he's had when speaking about the president specifically or seemingly apologizing for U.S. behavior. But I do think that his approach is running counter to some of the other countervailing approaches in Europe now.

So the, his comments that you referenced, I saw, got a direct response from the French government. The other allies are probably going to be starting to push back a little more on that approach going forward as a result of everything that we've been talking about here today.

Molly Roberts: So that covers us and our allies, but we've also mentioned many times our adversaries and specifically Russia.

How is Russia seeing the crisis? And as again, we've touched on a little bit here, what does this mean for the war in Ukraine and for Trump's efforts to end it?

John Drennan: So I think at its core, Russia is benefiting from everything that's been going on without even having to act. NATO's weakened cohesion is going to make it more difficult to achieve its objectives when it comes to both supporting Ukraine now, and as Ari already mentioned, deterring Russia going forward.

So I'll start with the Russia-specific piece. I think fundamentally Russia views NATO as a threat. It's come to that threat perception over the past 20 or so years. So anything that weakens NATO cohesion is going to be viewed as positive. One of the ways that has manifested it is particularly in driving a wedge between the United States and Europe.

But in this case, Moscow hasn't had to be the one to drive the wedge. It's the Trump administration itself that's doing that. And so the Russians have basically been able to sit back and watch.

I think one of the ways we've seen that is that Putin himself didn't make any public comments about the crisis until about a week ago, so when we were really in the depths of it, and it was basically to say that it's none of our business we're staying out of it. But other Russian officials have had commentary and it's taken several flavors that reinforce both their arguments around Ukraine and broader past comments that they've had around Western hypocrisy.

So, for instance, the Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said that ‘Crimea is no less important to the security of the Russian Federation than Greenland is to the United States.’ And here he's not necessarily trying to convince anybody of this fact, but rather is asserting an equivalence that normalizes this territorial revisionism approach by great powers.

Lavrov and other officials have also tried to place Russia as the defender of certain international law concepts, things like sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination. They've drawn a lot of parallels between the Greenlanders and the people in the regions they've claimed to annex in Ukraine and Crimea, in Ukraine proper, and the Donbas and in Crimea around self-determination.

But then at the same time, they've also tried to say that Denmark sovereignty needs to be respected. And then these comments have also had an anti-colonial flavor. They've often pointed to the long history of poor treatment by the Danes or the Norwegians before them of the Greenlanders. So the audience for these remarks is probably not the Europeans or even Americans, save maybe some of the more, EU-skeptic, pro-Russian engagement folks in Europe.

But it helps instead to spin a narrative at home where the government can reinforce its messages to the population around why it's fighting Ukraine and also to countries in the global south where it's helpful to point out Western hypocrisy, U.S. hegemony issues, related to U.S. hegemony specifically, as it's seeking to build partnerships there.

And so going forward, I would honestly expect more of the same—perhaps efforts to emphasize these narratives in the information space, but I don't think there's going to be any direct Russian action around this stuff. It's more watching the U.S. and the European territory that are apart.

There's been other small ways that I think the Russians have been trying to leverage this opening, and we've, so we've seen over the past few weeks, a few major European governments call for re-engaging with Russia, and I don't think that's re-engaging because we're going to seek normalization now. But rather the relationship has been so frozen over that the past few years that now makes sense to try to start talking to the Russians at least a little bit. And so the—Putin and the Russian government may see this as an opportunity to you know, and again, I don't think they're gonna conclude that they can do the maximalist, peel the Europeans away from the U.S. but rather interpret this as a window of opportunity to potentially exploit.

And so for European security, I think we've seen some short—or at least the shape of some short-, medium-, and long-term consequences. On the short-term around Ukraine, the crisis and potential future crises risk diverting both attention, government attention and potentially resources away from the goal of supporting Ukraine, which has been one of NATO’s primary goals since the Russian full-scale invasion.

So we've seen, for instance. Denmark announced a new rotational presence to Greenland that's going to last at least through the end of 2026 and potentially end into 2027. So those are troops that could be used say in a coalition of a willing-type arrangement that is deployed as part of a potential peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

We also saw there was supposed to be a major announcement of a post-war reconstruction package for Ukraine on the sidelines of the Davos summit and that got postponed directly because of the crisis. So there's definitely some, those types of short-term effects that I think we could see a lot more of that if more crises occur. In the medium-term, the effects on NATO cohesion that Ari highlighted, it makes it much more difficult for NATO to do collective decision making around Russia-Ukraine Policy.

And then in the longer term, it really remains to be seen how the crises within the alliance undermine NATO deterrence. So if we have allies who are worried about a threat from within, as Ari said, the threat of the U.S. against them. They will probably begin to question whether or not the U.S. is going to respect Article 5 or come to their aid in potential future external crises, and then at the same time, extended deterrence is about signaling credible threats to a potential adversary. And so if Russia doesn't believe that any NATO collective threats or NATO collective signals are credible, then that will also contribute to weakening of the alliance's deterrence.

Molly Roberts: Ari, anything to add either on Ukraine and how both our allies and Russia are having their actions influenced by the United States' approach or on our other adversaries, 'cause of course, Russia is not the only one.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, I think you can basically copy and paste everything John said to the Indo-Pacific and you know, just to take a few elements of that and apply them to, to China specifically.

And I think actually this one goes beyond just China, you know, for a lot of the adversaries—typically we think of the DPRK, Iran, China, Russia as the four kind of major ones that have been not in this national security strategy, but in prior national security strategies, kind of seen as the major four that we need to state adversaries that we need to think about and plan around—they've had this narrative that Trump is, I think now reinforcing for years about the United States not being reliable, about the United States being a hypocritical actor that kind of, you know, is not really here to advance the norms and values of the international order that it claims it is advancing, but really to just maximize its own interests.

And you know, it's, you can say arguably in about prior administrations, you've had actions that kind of enforced that too. But I think we're now seeing this happen on a whole other level. Because at least in the past we didn't have an administration that was consistently kind of going after allies in a way worse, treating allies worse than it is actually treating adversaries in a lot of instances.

And for I think all of these adversaries, a major goal for decades now has been to really push back against and try to drive a wedge between, among NATO, between the United States and its allies because they have seen that allied unity as a major obstacle to them achieving their own objectives.

So then to zero in on China a little bit, I think, you know, when the PRC decides to go after Taiwan, we are likely to see some of the talking points that we've seen coming out of the Trump administration about Greenland in that case as well. I think they will use some of that narrative and they're already kind of, there's already some of that happening, and so it's going to be a lot harder for the United States to object to China going after Taiwan, especially if it happens, including if it happens militarily, if, given what we've just seen over the past few days, but also cumulatively over the past, kind of like decade of this back and forth in U.S. foreign policy.

I think you are also going to see adversaries use the narratives that John was ascribing to deter other allies. I'm thinking here of Japan or South Korea, for example, from joining forces with the United States from becoming more kind of interoperable with the United States and conducting joint operations. Because, you know, it can point to the fact that if this is how the U.S. treats allies, that in some cases have had a history of going back centuries with the United States, why would it not, why would it be a reliable force and a reliable partner for allies in the Indo-Pacific, especially at a time when we're saying that apparently we're not, the Indo-Pacific is no longer the kind of like priority here after we've been saying for the past decade that we wanna pivot to the Indo-Pacific, we wanna compete with China, we wanna compete in the Indo-Pacific. And now we're kind of shifting that.

So again, you can't really plan these things in four- to eight-year terms. You have to have a bit more of a long, the longer view. And we're clearly not able to do that from administration to administration in a way that we were in the past. And then the last pieces, again, echoing what John said on distraction, I think China also welcomes the United States being distracted elsewhere because it means that the more distracted the United States is, fighting its own allies within NATO, doing things in Latin America and so on so forth, the less it's going to be able to plan for and commit resources and assets to the Indo-Pacific. And that means that China essentially has this broad opening that it can use to increase its own influence and pursue its own goals.

And then the last thing I'll say on again, the China piece is there's clearly some frustration within the administration with regard to allies trying to increase their own cooperation with China. And I think, you know, this is one of those cases where you can't have it both ways. You can't, on the one hand keep undercutting allies and imposing tariffs on them, and also trying to take over their territories and, you know, threaten their sovereignty. And at the same time, say, by the way though, you can't cooperate with our competitor.

So the president was frustrated in the tweet we mentioned earlier, or the Truth Social post we mentioned earlier where he referred to Governor Carney, it had to do with China and the Canada-China relationship, and, you know, you're seeing increased kind of interest from allies. You're seeing that in France as well. I wrote a piece about that in Lawfare a while ago, where you're seeing allies that are turning more toward China and taking U.S. concerns about those relationships a lot less seriously. In part because again, going back to John's point, they need to diversify their own kind of relationships if they can't really quite rely on the United States.

And also partially, I think the kind of warnings and concerns fall on deaf ear when, you know, the United States appears to kind of, you know, shoot from the hip every and kind of go after different actors at different points. It's a lot more difficult to be taken seriously if one day your kind of chief adversary is China the next, it's Greenland than it is if you're pretty consistent in the narrative that you're advancing.

And I think we have moved from far away from that consistency in the past year.

Molly Roberts: So I guess this is sort of an impossibly big question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Is this the end of the world order as we know it? Is there any coming back from this, I mean, first of all, you know, where are we gonna be at the end of this administration, but then if the next administration is friendlier toward Europe, our allies, if the next administration wanted to take kind of a restoration approach to those alliances to, yeah, the international order as we've grown accustomed to it over the past several decades, would that be possible? Or if things just shifted and it's different now?

John Drennan: You're right. That is a difficult one. And I will try to give a couple ideas. You know, I don't think I ultimately will know the answer of course, but I think Ari's absolutely right, that the copy and paste method is here.

And if there's one thing consistent about Trump's approach to allies specifically, it's that they can and will be subject to U.S. coercion as the president sees fit, and in the same way that you would expect adversaries to be treated. And so I think, you know, as we've been saying, this is gonna have long-term consequences.

You know, trust feels like a kind of squishy idea and—but the way it manifests in alliances is all the things that a, was saying, all the benefits that we get from it that aren't necessarily these flashy headline grabbing things like signing a base agreement for a small logistics base somewhere that—but that logistics base has bigger effects on the U.S. ability to project power around the world. And so those things are gonna be much more challenging to do going forward.

I don't think that we will, let's say in the next presidential administration, in a peaceful transfer of power, a Democrat comes to office if they come in expecting to return to the, either the Biden years or even the before Trump times. I think that is fundamentally not going to be possible. And so hopefully the relationships have not been destroyed to the point where a new type of arrangement can be achieved. But I think we're definitely on the path where the cumulative effects of this approach to allies is gonna require some fundamental rethinking for whoever comes to power after President Trump.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah I fully agree with everything John said. Maybe putting something he said a little differently, there's a spectrum of things that can happen when it comes to the NATO alliance and what actions allies can take. We might not be at the tail end of said spectrum, which is kind of like we, where we would see NATO completely fall apart.

But there are a number of steps that lead to that. And unless we are able to kind of walk some of those back, I think we will be on a trajectory where before we know it, and before the end of this term, we will have a much more fundamental damage to the alliance.

You know, I think President Biden really tried to kind of roll back the clock to 2016, where he really tried to kind of put allies and partners at the center of his foreign policy, and that wasn't as successful as I think he would have hoped. And part of it is because already after the first Trump administration allies were looking at the United States and thinking, you know, we're, we can't rely on an America that goes from 2016 to 2020 and then 2024 that fluctuates this massively in the core kind of values and beliefs and interests that it's kind of pursuing right.

And I think this is something that, to John's point, whether it's a future Democratic administration or a future Republican administration that tries to bring us back to a more traditional U.S. foreign policy is going to have to grapple with. And if the hope is that we can just kind of go back to what President Biden was doing in terms of trying to kind of bring us back to a time that is no longer here. I think we would be missing the boat and we won't be able to fix the damage that's been done. We'll have to do a lot more really substantial rethinking here, than I think is actually still even appreciated in our foreign policy circles.

Molly Roberts: Well, I feel like that's as good or bad, a place to end it as any. Thank you, guys, for answering even my impossible question very thoroughly and cogently. It's been great talking to you.

Ariane Tabatabai: Thanks, Molly. Thanks, John.

John Drennan: Thank you so much for having me.

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