In Davos speech, Trump speaks to allies in language once reserved for adversaries

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Over the centuries, American presidents have courted, explained, nudged, implored, occasionally cajoled. Never have world leaders been lectured, hectored, even censured and condemned by a U.S. leader the way Donald Trump did at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

In remarks that demanded “a piece of ice for world protection” but warned that he would jeopardize decades-old alliances to acquire Greenland, Mr. Trump spoke to America’s friends the way Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan spoke to the country’s Second World War and Cold War opponents.

Though disparaged and discredited, NATO countries produced a vague agreement that Mr. Trump described a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.”

But in the long arc of history, the way the President spoke to his allies, and the fact that his insults and provocations apparently prompted a tentative resolution, may be more important than however the Greenland crisis is resolved.

Though in his remarks Mr. Trump foreswore the use of force, along the way he swiped at Canada, France and Denmark and their leaders in terms that he did not apply to Russia and China, the two countries whose potential threats the proposed American acquisition of Greenland is intended to prevent.

When George H. W. Bush warned Saddam Hussein in 1990 by saying “This will not stand,” he was addressing an American enemy. When Mr. Trump said to Denmark and NATO that “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative or you can say no and we will remember,” he was addressing the most loyal allies the United States has had in its 250-year history.

While Americans once spoke of a “coalition of the willing” in the depths of the Cold War, during the second Gulf War and in the Ukraine war, Mr. Trump all but said that the group of traditional American allies had reacted to his Greenland demands as a coterie of the unwilling, the unconvinced and – he employed this term – the ungrateful.

The theme of gratitude, a major theme of his bitter White House exchange last winter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was repeated in his Davos remarks. He took special aim at NATO (“We give so much and we get so little in return.”) and Canada (“Canada gets a lot of freebies,” he said, adding, acidly, to Prime Minister Mark Carney: “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”)

Mr. Trump has presided over several transformations and dozens of departures from custom and convention, but few greater than this.

His Davos remarks were a retreat from the way American presidents once worked to win concurrence rather than impose their will. Mr. Trump declared consensus earlier this week from his keyboard in the White House: “Greenland is imperative for National and World Security," he wrote on his Truth Social platform “There can be no going back – On that, everyone agrees!”

But because everyone did not in fact agree, he pressed his case before world leaders, entrepreneurs, bankers and business leaders. It was less to persuade them of the virtue of his argument than to inform them that his desires must be sated, or, as Mr. Carney said Tuesday in invoking a time-honoured aphorism of Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian regarded as the father of political realism, “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

Hours later came word of the framework and that Mr. Trump had dropped the threat of tariffs against several European allies.

In his Davos remarks, Mr. Trump shattered scores of guidelines of comportment adopted by his presidential predecessors, none more than two of George H. W. Bush’s signature admonitions, delivered in a 2003 letter to Henry Dormann, founder of the Library of Presidential Papers. One was “Don’t brag about yourself. Let others point out your virtues, your strong points.” The other was: “Nobody likes an overbearing big shot.”

It was Mr. Bush who, after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, began the construction of a coalition to battle Saddam Hussein by making an early blizzard of 60 phone calls, speaking immediately on the telephone with leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Turkey. He followed that up with Turkish leader Turgut Ozal to see if he had spoken with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria. In the end, 28 countries joined the American-led force.

That was a reprise of the effort by Harry Truman to win support to fight the 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea. Canada was recruited after multiple meetings in New York and Washington.

The President’s remarks were a startling contrast with his earlier speeches at Davos.

In 2018, he affirmed the “friendship and partnership in building a better world” and thanked “those nations represented here today that have joined in” efforts in Afghanistan and in the struggle against the Islamic State. Two years later, he spoke of global co-operation, saying, “Together, we will make our nations stronger, our countries safer, our culture richer, our people freer, and the world more beautiful than ever before.”

This year’s remarks did nothing so much as affirm Mr. Carney’s critique that there was a “rupture in the world order” and to issue a counterpoint to French President Emmanuel Macron’s contention that France, and Europe, will not “passively accept the law of the strongest” and thus lead to the “vassals action” of Europe’s sovereign states.

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The President’s argument that the United States needed – and deserved – the “big beautiful piece of ice” because it was situated in North America was the second affirmation, after Venezuela, of his Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The 1823 declaration, written by secretary of state John Quincy Adams for then-president James Monroe, is a statement of intention that has no legal basis but substantial practical application.

However, it was aimed at preventing European colonization in the Western Hemisphere rather than condoning American colonization in the region, even for the “strategic national security and international security” that Mr. Trump spoke for in his remarks, which included the contention, “That’s our territory.”

Before the NATO framework was announced, Mr. Trump said that it was “the United States alone that can protect this giant piece of land” from Chinese and Russian aggression. His argument that this “vast, almost entirely uninhabited and undeveloped territory” that was “undefended in a key strategic location” had the air of the kind of real estate prospectus he might have issued in his earlier career as a developer of hotels, casinos and resorts.