Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
And all this has prompted at least one medical specialist to sound the alarm. That notion in turn was amplified by a Danish politician who called Trump “mad and erratic.” Which got us thinking about how all this madness must be getting perceived by the rest of the world. So we’re talking about this to Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist who specializes in international relations and has a great new piece for Foreign Affairs magazine arguing that Trump is leading us into a future of primitive anarchy. Elizabeth, nice to have you on.
Sargent: So Trump has been talking about taking over Greenland, and everybody has already seen the text that he sent to Norway’s prime minister. I’ll read the key part:
Elizabeth, the idea that Trump stopped eight wars is pure fiction, but from an international affairs perspective, what does it mean that Donald Trump is talking this way to the leader of another sovereign country?
But I think this is the level of pettiness, and the accusation that Norway is somehow responsible for him not getting the Nobel Prize and that that should matter in the matter of Greenland’s sovereignty, is kind of beyond anything I think any of us have seen or even can speak about in history.
Saunders: I try not to predict with too much confidence what’s going on in Donald Trump’s mind. I do think he just has no love for the Europeans, and his National Security Strategy talks about making Europe’s civilization great again in so many words. And I think that every time Europe talks about the rules-based order, it must drive him crazy. So maybe he thinks it’s a world-historical injustice; that’s entirely plausible. Maybe he’s just petty.
And he’s essentially saying: I am going to violate the very most fundamental norm of the post-1945 order, the one Putin violated in 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine. I’m going to take Greenland away from an ally. And that is something that I think is shocking to most analysts who... I mean, speaking only for myself, hardly anything shocks me anymore.
But first, let’s listen to Trump bring this up one more time with reporters. Here’s him talking about it. The “Maria” he refers to here is María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan leader who gave her Nobel to Trump.
Sargent: So again, what he’s primarily preoccupied with here is whether Norway denied him the Nobel. And also, I think Trump appears a bit confused about how prizes work, but it’s a little hard for me to avoid noticing that he’s sticking with this line. He’s got to think on some level, somewhere, that this makes strategic sense.
Carney’s in particular essentially declared the rules-based international order dead, which many of us have already done. But for the Canadian prime minister to say it out loud on television at an international forum on television is really crossing a Rubicon, I think.
I have been wondering, like, what would even a peaceful U.S. annexation—leaving aside all the reasons why that’s not going to happen, for argument’s sake—what does it look like for the United States to “acquire” Greenland?
There is no reason strategically why this should happen. We have an ally. Their interests and our interests should align and have aligned for 80 years. And they do all those things.
Sargent: Well, maybe you could clarify for listeners what the current arrangement is, because we actually have access to Greenland in many ways, and pretty much everything Trump wants, presumably, he could have right now. Can you talk about that?
And so that’s what the risk is in Venezuela. The Venezuelan government, the Delcy Rodríguez government, is only going to promise to give Trump what he wants while there’s U.S. military pressure offshore. The minute that goes away, they go back to running the illicit economy and so forth.
The opposite is true in Greenland. It is the rare case where acting through an agent is actually far more efficient because their interests are complete—or were until last week—completely aligned. There is no reason why you can’t act through Denmark and get what you want—and if you want to be crass about it, at lower cost.
Saunders: Yes. I mean, it is. What I’m suggesting is the reason you hire an agent to do stuff, right? To run your factory or to… this is part of life. It’s a term that comes from economics, right? You do it because maybe they have expertise that you don’t have, or maybe it’s just more time-efficient or cost-efficient to delegate a task to an agent, right?
Right. Who among us has not had the like, Oh, I’ll just do it myself.
Most world leaders, most American presidents can only dream of that kind of access. And so it will be far more costly. The biggest reason why—and the lesson that we learned in Iraq, and we’ve learned it over and over and over again in interventions going back a century—is that we would be essentially occupying territory where we... where the people don’t want us. That’s also happening in Minneapolis, by the way.
Lars-Christian Brask: You know, if I could come with some advice, it would be for the Senate and the House to start to take control of the political power in America, because with this mad and erratic behavior, you know, you have to ask the question, is the president capable of running the United States?
Saunders: Yes. I think I’ve been asked this question by international journalists as well. And I think you have to hear, you have to understand the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2.
Presidential advisors are a very important check on the president’s ability to use military force and an important political constraint. They are political actors in their own right. And it’s the subject of my most recent book, The Insiders’ Game.
I wrote in Foreign Affairs in June that we have “the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship.” So I think Trump is Trump and has always been Trump. He’s always disliked NATO and alliances and multilateral trade. [He] may have wanted Greenland for longer than, you know, long before 2019.
Sargent: One Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, has been basically making that point. He’s been forcefully criticizing Trump. He told Punchbowl News in a new interview that he’s considering using his power to try to slow down this madness from Trump on Greenland, including trying to block nominees in committee and slow the Senate down in other ways.
Elizabeth, isn’t it incredible that we don’t hear more Republicans talking like this? I mean, the Republican Party has a whole lot of people who have a genuine interest in foreign relations. Maybe we don’t agree with them on a lot of things, but they’re not completely crazy or complete lightweights either. And yet they just let all this stuff slide without a word.
And it got worse after 9/11, I think, because of the delegation to presidential power. And so Trump isn’t entirely responsible for the trend, but I think he has... he has been the one who has seized it.
“This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Saunders: Well, I mean, I’m not a doctor, so I defer to those who are. I think it’s hard to disentangle the permissive environment of Trump 2.0 from the obvious signs of aging. Trump is Trump. Obviously, Biden had issues of his declining health.
The other vehicle for really constraining him that would maybe stop him in his tracks is if the Republicans went after him for his attacks on Jerome Powell, right? Because that is an existential threat to the Fed’s independence. And that affects the whole economy.
But if the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was not invoked on January 6, I don’t see how it could be invoked over Greenland. Even though annexing Greenland is such a historic breach of trust with our allies, [it] makes no strategic sense at all and is just clearly a fiasco waiting to happen.
Saunders: Yes. I mean, there are those who would point out that the United States violates borders all the time. It did in Iraq. It has done so in Latin America repeatedly over a century. So I mean, the rules-based order has always been... I like to say it was the liberal international order—was never fully liberal, never fully international, and never fully orderly.
The fact that he’s not even rhetorically defending the principle of territorial order is different, right? You can accuse previous presidents of hypocrisy because they were trying to uphold the principle while violating it. He’s not even trying to uphold it. He’s essentially siding with the Putins of the world who feel it can be violated and shouldn’t ever really exist.
Sargent: So what’s going to happen, Elizabeth?
That said, absolutely nothing would surprise me. And I do think that for the Europeans and for Canada, this is a real—if the Munich Security Conference was a shock wake-up call, this is the turning point.
Saunders: Thank you for having me.
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