A Danish military frigate is docked in the port of Nuuk, Greenland, on Feb. 26, 2026. A 1951 treaty allowed the U.S. to establish defence areas in Greenland while formally acknowledging Denmark’s sovereignty over the territory.FLORENT VERGNES/AFP/Getty Images
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also the author of Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, which is shortlisted for the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
At the 2026 World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a remarkable speech where he proclaimed that the international rules-based order constructed after the Second World War was “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” This pronouncement was motivated by a variety of factors, but perhaps none more than U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. The general sense was that Mr. Trump was setting fire to over eight decades of shared values and interests that had bonded the Western alliance.
Mr. Carney may have been unaware of a tense meeting that took places 80 years earlier. Gustav Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister at the time, was in New York for the second-ever regular session of the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 1947, and he had an important task: to convince the United States to terminate the controversial 1941 agreement that gave them control over Greenland. The foreign minister had been forced to respond to press reports that “the United States was attempting to buy Greenland.”
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George Marshall, the legendary chief of staff of the U.S. Armed Forces who had become secretary of state earlier that year, was unmoved. Marshall “forcefully and at some length” emphasized “the importance of Greenland as a vital and vulnerable link in the defence of the Western Hemisphere as a whole,” and that the U.S. “could not afford to have it undefended.” The 1941 agreement remained in place until 1951, when a new treaty, while formally acknowledging Denmark’s sovereignty, gave the U.S. enormous latitude to establish, operate and control a range of defence areas.
Such historical awareness was missing from the 2026 Munich Security Conference, where various European analysts and leaders declared the long, deep transatlantic partnership with the U.S. definitively over. These speakers may have been shocked to learn that at the height of the Cold War, president Dwight D. Eisenhower – the liberator of Europe – expressed sentiments similar to Mr. Trump, wanting a European to become the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, viewing American troops on the continent as a temporary “stopgap,” while believing the “British, the Germans, and others are taking advantage of us.” He regretted that for eight years the United States “had been too easy with Europe.” His successor, president John F. Kennedy, was even more blunt in 1963, arguing that the U.S. “cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share and living off the ‘fat of the land.’”
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Historical sensibility reminds us that the problems we face today may not be as novel as we think. Read the documents and you soon realize that the transatlantic relationship and world order has been in crisis every year since 1945, marked by similar fears of “rupture” after the 1956 Suez debacle, disagreements over the Vietnam War, the Euromissile crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We too easily forget, for example, that America’s relations with Canada were dreadful during the Kennedy presidency, as JFK deeply disliked prime minister John Diefenbaker.
Greater historical awareness helps us put the disorienting, often erratic Trump era in context. Franklin D. Roosevelt – one of America’s greatest presidents – ran not just for three but four terms, flooded the political landscape with a myriad of contradictory and incoherent policy proposals, pursued economic nationalism and isolationism in his first two terms, castigated traditional allies while overlooking the sins of authoritarians, tried to pack the Supreme Court, often misled the public, and relied on executive orders to govern. Mr. Trump is no FDR, to be sure. But the history of the U.S. presidency has long been marked by the country’s rough-and-tumble, risk-tolerant nature, and polarizing politics, for both good and ill.
History also reminds us that the past offers few off-the-shelf storybook lessons. The same American officials in the Johnson administration who developed military escalation in Vietnam, arguably America’s most catastrophic grand strategic choice in the modern era, also concurrently developed arguably its wisest: a radical nuclear non-proliferation policy that, against all expectations, has helped ensure the bomb has not been used in battle and is in the hands of fewer than 10 states. During the 2003 State of the Union speech, where president George W. Bush laid out the case for the disastrous invasion of Iraq, he also announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which some estimate has saved more than 20 million lives. History is full of ironies, complexities, and unexpected connections. Our current world is no different.
Thinking historically should not rationalize bad behaviour or lull us into thinking that things will work out fine. Just because the U.S. expressed an interest in purchasing Greenland as long ago as 1910 in no way justifies Mr. Trump’s desires or his manner of pursuing them. Surfacing this historical depth does, however, remind us that the world is a far messier story than simple binaries of good or bad, of continuity or rupture. It also provides much needed context, humility, and understanding desperately needed to navigate this complex, confusing era.