Like it or not, the rules-based order is no more

Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s Across the Pond column.

A few weeks ago, when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen spoke with soon-to-be U.S. President Donald Trump about his insistence on making Greenland part of America, the phone call didn’t go well.

She understood America’s defense concerns, but Greenland wasn’t for sale, she said. Trump was having none of it.

The call between these two equally obdurate leaders not only revealed a clash of interests but a clash of realities: Frederiksen’s reality is the rules-based order, a world where nations are expected to abide by treaties, rules and norms. Whereas Trump’s reality is the world of power politics, where the strong do as they will and the weak — even allied nations — do as they must.

Until that phone call, most had dismissed Trump’s musings about Greenland (and the Panama Canal) as bluster and tough talk meant to set the stage for negotiations. No one took the idea of the U.S. seizing the territory of an ally by force seriously.

But that was a big mistake. This time around, Trump is serious, and he’s no longer surrounded by his former aides whose job it was to steer him away from crazy ideas. Rather, his current cadre is a team of loyalists, who see it as their job to implement whatever their leader wants — and what he wants is Greenland.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Trump wrote last December, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” And unlike his first term, he’ll stop at nothing to get it. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said when asked if he’d rule out using force. “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”

His new aides have gotten the message too. “This is not a joke,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week. “This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest.”

Even John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor who worked to deflect the president when he first raised the idea of buying Greenland in 2019, now agrees. Pointing to China’s interest in becoming an Arctic power and the Northwest passage becoming a viable shipping route because of climate change, “Greenland is intimately connected with our security,” he told the Free Press. “So given Greenland’s geographic proximity to the United States, it’s obviously a strategic interest.”

The Danish government doesn’t disagree. Frederiksen acknowledged that the U.S. has a “big interest” in Greenland and offered “a very, very close cooperation with the U.S.” The country then announced a major increase in defense spending to protect Western interest on the island, and was open to discussing other ways of cooperation to promote joint security.

The Danish government has essentially approached the issue from the perspective of a staunch American ally — one that has significantly increased defense spending, lost more troops per capita in Afghanistan than any other country, and contributed more to Ukraine’s defense as a percentage of GDP than all but one other country.

It’s an approach that assumes countries, especially allies, play by agreed rules and standards, abide by existing treaties and are friendly. In this view, borders are inviolable and can’t be changed by force, and disagreements are settled through diplomacy.

But while this may be Denmark’s version of reality, it certainly isn’t Trump’s.

Trump doesn’t see laws, rules and norms as constraints on behavior. This is a man who has spent most of his life battling people in court, and he sees life as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. He’s a former president who refused to accept he lost a free and fair election, and called every effort to bring him to account a “witch hunt.”

Today, he is a president who signed a plethora of executive orders in his first two weeks, intending to upend not just existing laws and regulations but core constitutional principles — principles like Congress’s power of the purse, the president’s obligation to faithfully execute laws and even the traditional basis of U.S. citizenship.

In Trump’s world, treaties and norms are simply irrelevant. He’ll break trade agreements to impose tariffs on neighboring states, take back a canal in Panama that was built and formerly operated by the U.S., and likely ignore security commitments enshrined in treaties for 75 years or more. He’ll also make sure the U.S. gets Greenland.

The only language Trump understands is that of power. It does little good to use the language of rules or laws in his world. And for Denmark or others to get their way, they’ll have to speak the language of power.

The return of power politics thus requires Denmark and other European allies to reduce their reliance on the U.S. and increase the cost of unacceptable behavior. Greenland may be hard to defend if Trump is willing to use military force, but deploying troops and bringing in allies would force the White House to think twice. The same is true in response to tariffs and other trade measures the U.S. president has threatened too.

Like it or not, with Trump in office, the rules-based order is no more.