Today, Explained - Is Greenland free?

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

President Trump has given up trying to buy Greenland — at least for now. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Dustin DeSoto, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. President Trump on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump spoke for about 90 minutes at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland yesterday. Everyone was on edge waiting to see what he'd say about Greenland after days of making threats about Greenland. He sort of got there. I'm helping NATO. And until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy. I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money.

Back to Greenland. No, the big surprise was that. at Davos, Trump made no threats. He didn't threaten tariffs. He didn't threaten troops or force. He just said, again, All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland. Then, later in the day, he made noise on truth social about a framework that was sort of giving concepts of a plan. What brought Trump back from the brink? That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Vanta. Vanta uses AI and automation to get you compliant fast.

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This is today explained. David Rennie, geopolitics editor at The Economist. So you were watching as Donald Trump spoke at Davos yesterday. You know that he'd said he would levy tariffs on eight European countries if they opposed his bid for Greenland. But then, yesterday, he didn't mention the tariffs. Not only did he not mention tariffs hours later, you know, when people came out of that speech saying, okay, optimistic view is he didn't mention tariffs, no use of force, pessimistic view where, you know, we're still particularly. potentially facing anything up to invasion. And then he goes and meets the Secretary General of NATO,

Mark Rutter, a man who has sacrificed his own reputation by kind of calling him daddy and constantly praising him. Daddy has to sometimes do strong language to get to stuff. But I think he, I think, genuinely, Mark Ritter, who's a very, very smart experienced former Dutch prime minister, I think he thinks he's taking one for the team and he's doing his best to keep Donald Trump on side. and they do this provisional deal that then Trump is calling a concept of a deal,

whatever that means, that does appear to stop a long way short of owning Greenland. And so if you are the Europeans and you are optimists, and that's not a lot of optimists in European capitals right now, you would say that, I don't know people are saying this as a taco, you know, was Trump chickening out? But certainly it was not irrelevant. People suspect that the markets were in. fell sharply the day before.

That tends to get, you know, Trump's billionaire finance friends on the phone saying, you know, this is not great. And the very first flickers of, I don't know if it's twitching of the corpse. I'm referring to the willingness of the U.S. Congress to stand up to the president. There's no emergency with Greenland.

That's ridiculous. There's no threat in Greenland. To invade Greenland would be weapons-grade stupid. So I guess for Europeans, the lesson is that provoking Donald Trump head-on seems to be a pretty bad idea, certainly very risky, but raising the costs and making him realize that there is going to be resistance to his latest piece of bullying can sometimes work. And so there is a certain degree of confidence that the worst has been avoided for now.

But the big, big picture is that trust is being shredded and destroyed in ways that are not coming back as long as Donald Trump is in the Oval Office. Do we know, David, what is in this framework, this provisional deal, what it actually sets out? There are leaks to various news and organizations. The Danish government, let alone the Greenlandic government, have not been involved in formal negotiations on this. And so it's like a kind of game of telephone, right? We're sort of trying to guess what was said in a room between the Secretary General of NATO and the President of the United States. But at least there, the ideas seem to be actually

pretty unobjectionable ideas about a new enhanced security presence for NATO with an American command, but other NATO members rolling in to do more to protect the Arctic, perhaps more guarantees that America gets first dibs, to use the technical term on rare earths and minerals that are lying under the kind of permafrost in Greenland. But the trend, but the trend. The tragedy, if you're Denmark or any other European government right now, is that Donald Trump could have had all of those perfectly sensible things before he started threatening to take Greenland, before he started posting social media pictures of him looking at Greenland with the stars and stripes on the map. He doesn't need to own, let alone invade Greenland, to have a bigger American force on the island and to get American companies to sign deals to extract the minerals. That's what to Europeans is just so. baffling and worrying and ultimately depressing about this whole utterly unnecessary crisis. And so even if it's now being unwound, what was it all for? Explain if you would why Trump didn't need to do this. There was a treaty in place here already, right? At the end of World War II, the Americans

basically occupied Greenland. It became incredibly strategically important during the Cold War because basically Greenland is the thing that Soviet missiles would have flown over had they ever been launched at the continental US. As a result, during the Cold War, the US had 17 bases on Greenland and up to 10,000 troops and radar stations and airplanes. And all of that was entirely covered by a treaty between the US and Denmark goes back to, I think, 1951 just after the end of World War, to updated in the early 2000s to give the U.S. even greater liberty to put whatever it wanted in the one base that still remains. Denmark was basically totally happy to let the Americans do whatever they wanted on Greenland for America's security. There was no need to pick this fight.

How did European leaders act yesterday when Trump announces there's a framework? Did they say, you know, yeah, he did the art of the deal on us? So no, I think they are congratulating themselves on having raised the costs and hoping that that is why he climbed down. I think there is now immediately concern that European unity, which was reasonably solid at the beginning of the week when Trump was threatening to put tariffs on those countries that had sent a few troops to Green and recently to show solidarity with the Danes and show that NATO was taking Greenland security seriously. that led to quite a lot of unity. Now that Donald Trump has said he's not going to impose those tariffs, Europe still needs to decide what it's going to do about a big trade deal agreed months ago with the US, which is frankly pretty one-sided.

Back a week ago, five days ago, when there was European unity in the face of the latest Trump threats, it looked as if the whole EU-US trade deal was probably on ice and there was going to be quite a unified pushback. And so as ever, because nothing is neat and tidy in the kind of the universe that we now live in, Trump has climbed down. That's a huge relief for Denmark. But actually Europe now has a problem in terms of unity because there will undoubtedly be European countries going, okay, crisis over. Let's not pick a trade war with this guy. He's not going to tariff a group of us. So do we really want to pick a larger fight about the trade deal that was struck with him last year? And so there is, you know, No, when the pressure goes off, the unity tends to crumble. So there's always a cloud to every silver lining in Trump world, right? There's been this question in the U.S. in the last week or so among people who do not like Donald Trump in the way he conducts himself on the world stage, which is, will Europe grow a spine?

Will Europe push back? You said Europe is asking itself, did it successfully raise the cost here? If it did, how did it raise the cost? What was the threat from Europe that may have put Trump in his place? So if it turns out to be, you know, we open the papers the next two days and we see kind of TikToks where people are saying, you know, it was the markets crashing, people made phone calls. Then maybe that European threat to start hitting Trump tariffs with counter tariffs from Europe, you know, $93 billion, more or less of retaliatory tariffs, maybe that did the trick. But not just because I'm sitting in London and I'm a Brit and therefore in my heart. part of Europe, even if we left, I have a lot of sympathy for European leaders. And actually,

I have sympathy for the British government too, because it's all very well to say, you know, we should just tell Donald Trump where to get off. And I can tell you, there are plenty of ordinary British people I speak to who know what I do for a living. And when, you know, when we talk about Trump, they're like, why don't we just tell the guy to back off and, you know, just get stuffed and to use the kind of technical term. The problem is that Britain, along with several other European countries. Our defence is absolutely dependent on the United States for years to come. And we saw the British Prime Minister on Monday this week give a press briefing about Greenland, where he was pretty tough on Greenland. Any decision about the future status of Greenland

belongs to the people of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark alone. But then he said, and his face betrayed his kind of deep, deep, deep, kind of anxiety. He said, I need to remind people, we need a good relationship with America to look after our defence. Under President Trump, as under previous prevalence, we're determined to keep that relationship strong, constructive and focused on results. And that approach is delivering. Through sustained engagement, our cooperation on defence, nuclear capability and intelligence, remains as close and effective as anywhere in the world, keeping Britain safe in an increasingly dangerous environment.

We're now into a totally, totally new and really frightening world for Europe. So for sure, Europe can be a bit kind of Euroweeney, but our dilemmas are real and painful. David Rennie of Leading Magazine The Economist. Coming up, how did Europe raise the cost? David's words for Donald Trump. It's the golden moment. Triumph on the podium, golden hand.

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All right. So the question is, why did President Trump climb down yesterday instead of dancing one step closer to World War III? Did Europe do something or have something to deter him? We called up Henry Farrell. He's a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins. And in the hours before Trump pulled back on his threats, Professor Farrell wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called, Europe has a book.

bazooka time to use it. It's about deterrence strategy. Professor Farrell, let's start this way. It's been roughly 80 years since the last World War, which means we've been doing something right, all of us. How do big powers deter attacks from other big powers? So I think that you really want to start with the nuclear age and the nuclear era, and you even want to start with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a moment when the United States and the USSR scared the hell out of each other, because it was very, very close to a situation in which we would have actually had a nuclear war and possibly the extinction of humanity. So missiles are 1,500 miles range and more. We're pointing at American cities.

We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the course of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth. So after that, we began to see the development of a set of concepts, a set of ideas, which really try to figure out how can you work through the situation of nuclear crisis, the risk of nuclear Armageddon, the fact that the United States and the USSR have fundamentally different political interests, and how can you actually get to a place of stability? First of all, I think you want to avoid a nuclear Armageddon by treating the fact that these weapons actually exist as incredibly important, nuclear weapons that is, but at the same time trying to avoid using them.

So in a certain sense, what you're doing is you're bargaining and you're debating in the shadow of this possibility of Armageddon and the shadow of the possibility of using these kinds of weapons. So you begin to get the development of all of these ideas by people such as Thomas Schelling, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics, he's a game theorist, who begins to work out, how do you deter? How do you, in a sense, use the fact that you have nuclear weapons, is something that people will pay attention to without ever actually having to use them. The name comes from games like chess,

but most game theory went well beyond what they call zero-sum games, which are games of pure opposition, and became situations in which there is both conflict and a need for cooperation to avoid disastrous outcomes. And then on top of that, there is a second set of questions which involve, if you actually get into a nuclear confrontation, How do you deal with this? How do you figure out ways that you can not have sort of marched straight up the ladder to outright Armageddon, but perhaps figure out ways to diffuse, to step back and to create a situation in which you step back from the brink of the precipice?

And so the key example, which I think shows some of the brutality in a certain sense of this way of thinking, that Schelling offers is troops in West Berlin during the Cold War. The idea behind this was that, as Schelling describes these people, these soldiers, their job in a certain sense was to, as he said it, bluntly, their job is to die. How can 12,000 Western troops or 7,000 Americans defend Berlin? What they're really doing is they're threatening to die. And what he meant by that was something like the following, that the United States did not want the USSR and Eastern Germany to take over West. Berlin. It would have been super duper easy for them to do that in conventional military terms because West Berlin is about a hundred miles inside East Germany's national territory. And so what the calculus is, is that if you have these soldiers there, these soldiers are in a sense, they're not

going to be able to defend the city particularly well, but they will die or be captured if the city is in fact attacked by the Soviet Union. And if that happens, then any president is not going to want to be able to stand over the fact that thousands of troops have been captured and killed. This is likely to lead further escalation. And so Schelling's argument is that this risk of further escalation and the possibility, maybe a 10% possibility that this might actually lead to nuclear war, that this is sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from attacking. Part of the effectiveness of those troops in Berlin was

the Soviets couldn't really perceive what might happen and they couldn't be sure that a U.S. president wouldn't do something foolhardy like starting a third world war. Okay, so all of this history is on your mind when you write an op-ed for the New York Times that ends up being titled, Europe has a bazooka. It's time to use it. So explain to me how from the Cold War and those incidents decades ago, you map this onto the present day, where, yes, the U.S. and Europe have different interests here. is threatening anybody with a nuclear weapon, but Donald Trump is making some statements that very clearly make Europe very nervous. Where do we see deterrence theory operating now today?

So I think we see it in two ways. First of all, we see these eight European countries who send a small military force for a brief period of exercises to Greenland. Europe is pushing back on President Trump's push to acquire Greenland with troops from several European countries now arriving there. NATO forces are on exercise in Greenland at a time when American designs on the island threaten the alliance's very existence. And so what they are doing here is they are setting up a tripwire, which is like a less powerful version of what the United States did with West Berlin.

So really what they're doing here is they are saying, effectively, they are communicating to Trump. They deny that they're doing this, but it's very clearly the message that they are trying to send. They're communicating to Trump that if Trump actually goes ahead and invades Greenland, that there are going to be eight other NATO allies who are willing to be on Greenland and Denmark side if this happens. And so the implicit message there pretty clearly is you invade Greenland, you're going to get rid of NATO. You don't want to get rid of NATO. And that message is received loud and clear.

And that is one of the reasons plausibly why Trump initially, he goes from these saber-rattling threats. where he suggests that he is indeed going to invade Greenland, very possibly. He moves instead to economic measures of one sort or another, in particular these tariffs. He imposes tariffs against these eight European countries in order to punish them for what they do. And then that leaves a second set of questions for Europe, which is how did they respond to that? And they have this very weird, very complicated, very awkward legislative mechanism called the anti-coercion instrument, which possibly sort of.

serves as a very imperfect tripwire, and that is more or less where the argument goes. How does that serve as an economic tripwire? Explain that, if you would. Okay, so the idea behind the anti-coercion mechanism, this is a legal instrument that the European Union brought into being, which allows them to retaliate in a wide variety of ways. It's one of these very vague-seeming instruments, which allows the EU legally to retaliate against economic coercion, by, for example, blocking investments, by taking away intellectual property, by by sort of imposing import or export restrictions. It's very, very open-ended. The French leader called on the EU to be ready to activate its powerful anti-coercion mechanism

colloquially called the trade bazooka. And we have to use them when we are not respected. The anti-coercion mechanism is a powerful instruments, and we should not hesitate to deploy it in today's tough environment. But the interesting feature about it is that once you start using the coercion instrument, it becomes at least somewhat difficult to stop using it. So what happens is that the member states of the European Union, they ask the European Commission, which is a separate, somewhat independent body, to prepare a set of proposals for what kinds of punishments should happen.

and then they have an opportunity to vote on those proposals. But in order to stop those proposals from going through, you have to have at least four of the member states of the European Union agreeing. So in a certain sense, it's a train which starts to rumble out of the station. It's possible for member states to stop that train from rumbling out of the station, but it is not entirely straightforward for them to do this. Okay, so here's where it gets interesting, because we are speaking on Wednesday afternoon,

at which point President Trump says he had a productive meeting, his words, with Mark Ruta, the head of NATO, and that, quote, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic region. And then he goes on to say

that I will not be imposing the tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st, which makes it seem like Europe did not have to push the economic tripwire. It did not have to use the economic bazooka, Trump back down anyway? Or am I missing something? So I don't think you are

missing something completely, but I do think that there's probably some interesting story to be told, which we haven't yet seen. As you say, this is all brand new, and I am really waiting for good journalism to provide a kind of TikTok or a detailed explanation of what happened when. But here's some interesting clues as to what is happening, which come from some of the statements of the people who are at Davos representing Trump before he got there. So that's the Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and Lutnik, who is the Commerce Secretary. And so you see over a period of two days a huge difference in the ways that they are talking about the problem.

So it begins with Besant being quite insulting to Europe, more or less saying, well, yeah, so they're just going to mount some kind of a committee of inquiry or words that affect. and sort of let's see how far that gets. Well, having worked with the Europeans, my guess is their next move will be to form a working group. The dreaded European working group. So in other words, completely dismissing the possibility that Europe can do anything which is effective. And then a few hours later, he is saying that Europeans really shouldn't escalate. We really don't want you to escalate.

Please don't escalate. Don't escalate. don't escalate, don't escalate. Everyone, take a deep breath. Do not escalate. Do not escalate. And President Trump has a strategy here. Hear him out.

And then everything will be fine. And so that suggests that he has been having conversations in between the first statement and the second, where clearly there has been some real sense that there is a coalition which is engaging against this measure. and that coalition is sufficiently credible that the United States has something to worry about. And so it really does look like a climb down disguised

as a declaration of enormous victory. The fact that this is happening through Ruta and through NATO, rather than, for example, through direct negotiations with Denmark, suggests that what is going to happen is that we're going to get some kind of an agreement on security in the Arctic region, which everybody is more or less on the same page on, and Trump will declare this a glorious victory over Greenland and then move on.

He's Professor Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins. He was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Miles Brian did the A. Amina El Sadi is our editor. Andrea Lopez-Crisado checks the facts. And David Tadishore is our engineer today. Amna Will King, it's today explained.