The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump faces off with NATO allies over Greenland

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

To listen to the full episode consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $50 annually, or $1.00 per episode. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. President Trump refuses to rule out invading Greenland following revelations that his aggression towards the self-governing territory is a response to being denied the Nobel Peace Prize by Norway. We are now facing the very real possibility that the US will attack a NATO ally, putting everyone in a unique and untenable situation. Should the EU send troops to Greenland? As both a NATO member and a US neighbour Canada is faced with a serious dilemma. Andrew argues that we have to be an ally, and that means drawing a land in the snow and showing up for Greenland. It is now clear that NATO is hanging by a thread. What will be its successor? And what should we make of Trump's new 'Board of Peace' which critics believe is his attempt to undermine the United Nations? Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're now dealing with the possibility of the United States of America attacking a NATO ally. Again, there's just no way to describe that in any terms other than just completely unhinged. It puts everybody, obviously, in an extremely difficult position. But it has to be brought home, if not to Mr. Trump, then to the people around him, the consequences if they were so foolish as to do this. President Donald Trump today was asked if he would invade Greenland. His remark to reporters, quote, no comment, quos, quote. What does it all mean?

What could happen next? How should Canada position itself in this increasingly destabilized situation to help break it all down? Forchate to have on Monk Dialogues, our regular contributor, Globe and Mail journalist, Andrew Coyne. Andrew, what a day. Yeah, you leave the news for even an hour now and world chattering of the news. events happen. Yeah. What is your sense, Andrew, of what's going on here? We have a letter. We'll show it to our listeners and viewers later in the program, seeming to indicate that the president was irked. The Nobel Committee pointed out the obvious that the fact that Nobel laureate Machado,

giving him the physical award, did not actually confer the honor on him. Often you've decided to analyze Trump using Occam's Razor. In this case, is the shortest, most concise answer, the root of this now spiraling crisis between the United States, Europe, and NATO members. Yeah, or Occam's kazoo. Look, the long and the short of it is, the president is a lunatic. I don't think there can be any way of sugarcoating that anymore. He is increasingly erratic, increasingly given to making insane statements, writing a letter to the Prime Minister of Norway saying that because you haven't, you haven't given me the Nobel Peace Prize, then I'm no longer bound to try to work for peaceful solutions. There just isn't any way to

interpret that except that he's come completely unglued. The people around him are fanatics. they are lunatics of a different type, not clinically, but people with no connection with reality who have found in him a useful instrument to advance their varying lunatic worldviews. And so one consequence of this is we're now dealing with the possibility of the United States of America attacking a NATO ally. Again, there's just no way to describe that in any terms other than just completely. completely unhinged. It puts everybody, obviously, in an extremely difficult position, but it has to be brought home, if not to Mr. Trump, then to the people around him,

the consequences, if they were so foolish as to do this. Foolish isn't even the word. The consequences, that is why, for example, European companies are rushing, countries are rushing troops to Greenland. It's not a large force at this point. It's meant to be a tripwire. That is to say that if the United States, send soldiers in, there will be bloodshed. And bloodshed obliges countries to escalate, and God knows where that goes. Short of that, it would mean that the minute, as others have said, the minute U.S. soldiers touched foot on Greenland, it means not just the end of NATO, but the end of any European-American

cooperation. It means it would mean the shutting of U.S. military bases across Europe. It would mean the expulsion of those U.S. soldiers. It would mean the closing of European aerospace, airspace to American military operations and naval space, I would imagine, as well. It would mean economic sanctions, the likes of which we have not seen. This would not be some mere infringement or spat or, you know, argument. This would be America attacking European soil. And the consequences, as I say, if not a shooting war, and let us hope, it certainly would mean just an absolutely disastrous economic and military fallout with Canada caught in the middle.

But there's just no way we can get around that. So people are saying what should Canada do? Well, the first question is, should anybody be sending troops to Greenland? I think the answer to that has to be yes. The Europeans have to draw a line in the snow here. all the other tactics that they've tried of flattery and appeasement and bribery have not succeeded. He is, again, out of control. The only thing that can possibly succeed with the people around them, at least, is firmness and force.

So if the Europeans are going, then I think Canada has to go. We are in a position of perhaps unparalleled exposure here, because we are now wedged in between, two expansionist dictatorships. I mean, Trump's not all the way to dictatorship yet, but he's certainly trying to get there. And whatever craziness he's fomenting abroad is equally matched by what he's doing domestically. So we're wedged in between the United States and Russia. And it's a very uncomfortable place to be. And we're going to have to do a lot of things in a hurry. But one of the things we're going to have to do is make some friends and make some allies. And if we're going to have allies, we're going to have to be an ally. So that means showing up.

Yeah, Andrew, I'm so glad you went there because my thoughts exactly that, you know, if we want the Europeans to credibly extend and share defense and security obligations with us, then there has to be something reciprocal. It has to be more than just rhetoric about, you know, the responsibility of respecting borders and the sovereignty of other countries. And Andrew, you know, we like to think of ourselves. We're not necessarily there yet, but we like to think of ourselves as an Arctic power. We like to think of this as a zone of sovereignty where we have competency and capacity. But we're not hearing anything yet from the Canadian government on exactly what you said, which is showing up being there in Greenland with some kind of Canadian troop deployment, some participation in, as you said, drawing a line in the snow.

Because what I worry about Andrew is this president has also been musing over the last few days about America's supposed insecurity in North America in the North American Arctic. It sounds eerily similar to, you know, this whole fever dream about Greenland and how that originally got started as a national security crisis that America supposedly faces vis-a-vis not occupying Greenland. And if we want any hope, Andrew, I think of asserting our sovereignty, of creating pain points for this president, let's say in transiting the Northwest Passage this summer,

in a so-called Freedom of Navigation Patrol, we're going to need European friends, will we not, Andrew? We're going to need allies, and that may mean doing something right now to show real support for the sovereignty and independence of Denmark and Greenland. Yeah, I mean, all of us, everybody, should have been drawing lines a lot sooner than this. Point one. Point two, the way that Trump has succeeded to date has been by keeping people separate from each other

and dividing and conquering and playing them off against each other. That's true domestically in terms of the people in the United States in their government who might otherwise have opposed them in the Republican Party, for example, in the Congress. But it's also true internationally. And the lesson of this is Ben Franklin's old line of hang together or you shall surely hang separately. We've got to move in a coordinated fashion. I think the other members of NATO must surely realize that NATO is hanging by a thread here. If it's not already dead, it's pretty close to it.

And that means people have got to be thinking about some kind of replacement or successor for it. I mean, people often talk about having to build the plane while you're flying it. Well, the other members of NATO have got to build another plane while they're flying the NATO one and keeping it aloft as long as they can until they can jump to this other vehicle. I think that's the stage we're at right now, where the European powers certainly are going to have to band together in some way that is outside of an apart of NATO, because NATO obviously was never contemplated to defend against a NATO partner. Yeah, let alone the United States.

So they've got to be thinking about it. And if they're thinking about it, then Canada have got to be thinking about it. I think we need to think much more broadly of an alliance of the democracies. So that would include Japan and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand, maybe some of the South American democracies.

But I think the democracies have got to come to grips with the fact that, at least for the time being, the United States is no longer on their side. if it's even a democracy. So some kind of successor state, the body, I think, is really on the table now, regardless of how this is resolved. I mean, maybe they can resolve it in some way that allows Trump to save face. It doesn't involve surrendering Greenmark to the United States, but I wouldn't count on it.

He's, again, out of control. The good news is, each time he escalates. So he got away with Venezuela because, A, because Majuro was so universally reviled in Venezuela and across South America and among the democracies. And he got away with it because it was basically a one-day operation. It was, you know, good TV, no visible American casualties, you know, in and out. Well, he's not going to be able to do that in Greenland. So Greenland is another step of the crazy scale, and you're seeing Republicans saying, as they should have said long ago, that Greenland is the mark where they impeach it. Whether there's enough, I don't know.

But it's clearly alarmed a lot of people in the United States as much as it has outside of the United States. Anything beyond Greenland, talking about the Canadian North is another order of magnitude of crazy. So the good news is the crazier gets, the more alarm people get, the more unified. I think they start to become. So sometimes you need these crises to get people to wake up and more importantly to act. And we may be at or near that point now. Andrew, just to play devil's advocate for a moment because you're good at that game. What about the argument that this is all just a bluff?

This is the art of the deal. He's putting out these maximal positions and maximal threats because he wants a new set of terms for Greenland. And those set of terms are going to be something well short of sovereign ownership by the government of the United States. It might include his interest across Ukraine, Venezuela, and elsewhere, all kinds of resource extraction rights, I don't know, increased security commitments from NATO members to deploy troops onto Greenland, Who knows, to pay the United States to send troops to Greenland to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. I guess what I'm wondering here, Andrew, is should we be cautious about getting ahead of ourselves on this

and the extent to which this just may be the president being the president? Well, so he's not a mad bomber. He's just an extortionist. I'm not sure it makes much difference. If he's prepared to use these kind of tactics against NATO allies, then we're all you've already half killed NATO if not completely killed it. Allies don't make those kinds of threats against each other, whether they're sincere or not.

So your best case scenario, I don't think, is particularly comforting. And it still involves the people he's trying to extort cannot allow themselves to be extorted, because for the same logic as any other case, if he succeeds in this, he will draw the appropriate lessons and we'll do it again. He's been allowed to succeed in far too many either extortion attempts or just, you know, flat-out crazy behavior. And at some point, people have to draw the line and prevent him from doing it.

So it really doesn't matter in a sense whether he sincerely and actually is planning to invade Greenlander is just using it as a giant bluff. The bluff itself is an infamous betrayal of military allies in debt. Denmark's case, people who have gone and died defending America and American interests in Afghanistan. So I don't think your what if it's all just a bluff is terribly comforting. Yeah. Let's talk about the European reaction, because once again, we're seeing some divisions in Europe. There consistently seems to be, Andrew, a cohort of leaders who want to kick the camp. And today there were some remarks from some European leaders in a sense saying, you know, we want to try to resolve this.

We're trying to open up lines of communication. We're not going to move forward immediately with tariffing. We're threatening that we will institute tariffs if tariffs are imposed. I note just before we came on air together, the president has reiterated that he will be proceeding with 25% tariffs. on February 1st, if some kind of agreement is not made over the fate and future. What do you make of this? Because you and I have discussed this before, this tendency of leaders, including Canada, and I'm not just saying the Prime Minister, it's leaders across Canada of all stripes, to just, I would say, close their eyes and hope that this all goes away, to not understand that

who we're dealing with and the dynamics that are at play. And if I go back, Andrew, the one time that this president did seem to really reverse himself, to do a 160, was that 360, was that first big taco on his tariffs last April when the S&P, you know, fell 10, 15, heading towards 20%. Isn't that, Andrew, what has to happen? There has to be a kind of Newtonian set of laws that come into play for this president where there are equal but opposite reactions that cause real consequences for the United States because it's then and only then does he change course, does he in a sense back off? And we're just, we're still not seeing that even today after all the outrages of the last seven days. Well, you're right that the financial markets are one of the sort of

Praetorian guards that he actually can't fight against. That when the financial markets move against him, assuming he's not reached the point which he may have and may soon reach where he just doesn't care because he's, again, so far out of line with reality that, I mean, there's some theories of him that he is deliberately trying to drive the states into the turf. And I would not rule that out. But he certainly doesn't seem particularly concerned.

at the damage he can do to the United States. So even the financial markets at some point may not have the effect on them that they've had in the past. The difficulty with the financial markets is that they also price in the likelihood of Trump caving. We've seen that with the tariffs. We've seen where, with the Jerome Powell threatening the Federal Reserve Chairman,

the markets were very alarmed at first, but they priced in the idea that he was, won't be able to get away with it. Well, okay, that's smart until you miscalculate and he actually does do something and does get away with it, at which point you will definitely get a massive, anytime there's a surprise to the financial markets, you can get a huge recoil effect. And the things that he's playing with are so kind of astrophic. I mean, if the Europeans, for example, not just the military alliance consequences in terms of sending home U.S. bases, et cetera, But if they start, if things really escalate on the financial and economic measures, you know, for example, the Europeans hold hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. bonds and at a certain point may decide that that's a weapon they need to play with.

Well, you know, the consequences for everybody are just enormous if that happens. So financial markets are to some extent our friends because they crave order and they crave all the stuff that the American government is currently trying to dismantle. but I don't necessarily think we can count in it operating exactly the way we would we would like them to operate. But certainly, just go back to Canada for a second, but like the Europeans, the time for nicely nicely has passed. You can always phrase your language in measured terms. And there's certainly room for strategic ambiguity.

and how you would respond. And certainly you want to give Trump a way to come in off of the tree that he's the limb that he's put himself out on. You always want to do that when you're dealing with any person, any madman particularly. But you can't, again, can't always be guaranteed that he'll take that opportunity. But you do prudently want to give him those opportunities to climb down. What you do not want to do is reward him for this behavior. And so you've got to make it clear, again, in Canada's case, that we have options, first of all. That would be the point of the Prime Minister's China trip to show that we have other trading partners we can work with, along with the Europeans, along with anybody else that we can sign trade deals with. And we can

discuss how far you want to go in that direction, but you want to show you've got options. You want to show you've got allies. So that's the point of making solidarity with the Europeans. And you want to show that you are yourself a pretty bristly hedgehog that if you're going to try and play around with Canada, you're going to get stung. And so that's the point of building up our military, building up our economy so that we can withstand American measures and maybe impose some countermeasures of our own. You know, we're certainly going to need some very adroit state craft in the years, months and years to come. A lot of this is not, there's not some box of policy you can pull off the shelf about how you respond in these situations. It's going to take a lot of judgment calls about

how much is too much and how much is too little. So you need a lot of adroit statecraft and diplomacy and decisions about how defiant you should be and how cooperative you should be. But you also need to improve your bargaining position and the strength of your position. So you need economic strength, You need military strength. You need diplomatic strength. And these have all got to be the absolute focus of Canadian public policy in the months and year they have. Thank you for listening to the first half of Andrew Coins' Monk Dialogue. If you'd like to get the full program, consider becoming a monk donor.

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and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening. Thank you.