Trump’s Casual Indifference to NATO’s Future Is Spooking the Western World

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Even the Canadians are drawing up plans for how they might respond to a U.S. invasion. That’s how spooked global leaders are right now about an unhinged flare of contempt from their typically allied counterpart in the United States. “You’ll find out,” Trump said Tuesday when asked how far he was willing to go to control Greenland, the semi-autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark that Trump seems intent on annexing.  The surreal moment has created the impression that NATO is living on borrowed time. Denmark is a founding member of NATO, thus meaning its security pact provides cover for Greenland. Put simply: any U.S. military action to take Greenland would trigger every other NATO nation, with each of them forced to choose between defending its neighbors against a member nation, or admitting that Trump was correct when he said the whole alliance hinges on American power. Asked repeatedly at a press conference to mark the one-year anniversary of his return to Washington about the future of Greenland and NATO, Trump did not provide a direct answer, instead opting to take a roundabout path to hint, at best, at indifference. “I think that we will work something out where NATO’s going to be very happy and where we’re going to be very happy,” he said. That binary choice is one that could spell the doom of the astonishingly successful mutual defense agreement that was founded in 1949 and shepherded wealth and stability across North America and Europe in the post-World War II era. While Trump says he must control Greenland for national security purposes—presumably to protect against Russian or Chinese aggression—the precipitous collapse of an alliance as critical as NATO would only embolden foes of the Western alliance.   In blunt terms? The belligerence coming from Washington right now makes the post-9/11 noise from the Bush 43 crowd come off as restrained. Unlike that stretch of norm testing, Washington is not leaning on the decades-old alliance of NATO but rather seems intent on destroying it from within. The world has noticed. London has dispatched its Prime Minister to deescalate the bellicosity. The Germans are on the move to retaliate against threatened tariffs aimed at nations that don’t bend to Trump’s takeover. The French are offering to host an emergency G7 summit; Trump declined, saying “there’s no longevity there.” Other nations were readying a so-called trade “bazooka” that could cut off major U.S. companies from the European market in the first use of this anti-coercision provision. Small clusters of troops from Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands are massing for joint military exercises with Denmark. Speaking Tuesday in Switzerland hours before Trump was due to head there, Macron said the world’s economic powers have to reject “the law of the strongest,” a clear swipe at Trump and Trumpism. “We do prefer respect to bullies,” Macron said. All the while, Trump is doubling down, announcing new tariffs on some of the oldest U.S. allies, as well as posting private messages from world leaders, publishing A.I.-made memes depicting U.S. control over other nations, and heckling his counterparts hours before he was heading to their turf for an economic summit in Switzerland. The Washington Post reports that Trump plans to sunset U.S. troops’ involvement in some NATO activities, letting the posts go vacant rather than replace bodies when those assignments end. At the White House on Tuesday, Trump leaned into his burn-it-down ethos over, of all things, not winning a Nobel Peace Prize. “Don’t let anyone to tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, OK? It’s in Norway!” Trump said in a rambling address. Trump has long relished in defying norms, be it through petty moves like insulting female reporters’ appearances or seismic ones like demolishing the White House’s East Wing. The President seems most engaged when he is flashing his contempt for a system he now leads.  In the last three weeks, Trump has captured Venezuela’s leader, threatened new tariffs on countries that do business with Iran, defended federal officers who shot and killed a protestor against immigration raids in Minnesota, and sent nations scrambling as he has mulled regime change operations in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and even Canada. The day after his Wednesday speech in Davos, Trump has scheduled a charter-signing ceremony for his Board of Peace—a body that was originally supposed to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction, but which Trump has now suggested “might” replace the United Nations.  Asked Tuesday if he was still mulling ways to take control of the Panama Canal, Trump trolled. “Sort of. I must say. Sort of. That’s sort of on the table,” he said. Such casual chatter about seizing sovereign foreign assets used to elicit alarm, then downshifted to a knowing eye roll. Now, we’re back to alarm. It’s why the defense teams in Ottawa are checking their maps for a potential invasion across Niagara Falls. Given how quickly Trump has been moving of late, it’s probably just prudent. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.