‘We Are Learning to Bully Back’

By Isaac Stanley-Becker & Jonathan Lemire

Friday, January 23, 2026

 

The meeting, by the time it convened, seemed pointless. Some joked that it could have been an email.

 

When European Union leaders agreed to gather yesterday, the plan was to ready their response to President Trump’s tariff threat, an outgrowth of his insistence that the United States take over the territory of one of their members. But the day before they met, Trump backed down, spectacularly. He swore off further tariffs and embraced terms for negotiations about Greenland, the Arctic territory he covets, that bear little resemblance to his maximalist demands for ownership. Instead, he accepted options that he likely could have secured months ago, without threatening war against a NATO ally.

 

So the European summit in Brussels was anticlimactic. The worst had already been avoided. “We began the week with a form of escalation—threats, invasion threats and tariff threats—and we have returned to a situation that seems much more acceptable,” French President Emmanuel Macron remarked as he arrived yesterday evening at the Europa building, the seat of the European Council.

 

The sense of relief, however, belied a new reality. After years of insults and ultimatums aimed by Trump at Europe, the fiasco arising from his far-fetched campaign to acquire Greenland has undermined America’s relationships with some of its richest and most powerful allies—perhaps permanently. One senior European diplomat told us about a “significant and probably irreversible rupture” between Europe and the United States. Another official said that European countries are continuing to compile lists of sectors in which they could create leverage and “hit the Americans if they try something like this again.” Several officials told us there was renewed talk of strengthening Europe’s nuclear arsenal, currently maintained by only France and Britain, to guarantee protection outside the U.S. umbrella. These people, like others we interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to address matters candidly.

 

This is the outcome of Trump’s monthslong pursuit of Greenland—distrust and a deepening dedication to European independence. The mercurial way in which the president retreated served only to harden European attitudes. His about-face was so abrupt, and so unaccounted for, that senior officials in Europe are scratching their heads about what, exactly, changed his mind. They’re speculating about criticism on Capitol Hill, caution from his military advisers, and chaos in the stock market.

 

In the absence of meaningful insight, many are converging on an explanation that emphasizes their own role. “We are learning to bully back,” the second European official said. “We’ve been too shy over the past years to apply counterpressure. There is a sense this stops now.”

 

***

 

Trump felt emboldened to pursue his territorial designs on Greenland after the successful U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, on January 3. But he didn’t wake up on January 4 and decide that he wanted to extend U.S. influence in the high north. He expressed interest in buying Greenland during his first term, in 2019. And when he returned to office last year, his aides began developing options for him, according to former U.S. officials.

 

Different ideas were discussed, including sending everyone in Greenland a check as a way to buy their allegiance. Officials at the National Security Council came to see the creation of a sovereign wealth fund for Greenland as a preferable alternative. Before he was dismissed as national security adviser, Michael Waltz chaired at least one White House meeting in which Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, presented various parts of the picture. The intelligence angle involved public opinion on Greenland and how its residents might be moved to vote for independence from Denmark in a referendum.

 

But the Trump administration had done itself no favors when its emissaries arrived in Greenland, even before his second inauguration, for a slapdash visit that sparked resentment. Officials in Copenhagen were equally put off by signals from Washington. “Greenland is today a part of the kingdom of Denmark,” the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in February. “It is part of our territory, and it’s not for sale.” In April, she warned, “You cannot annex another country.”

 

By this time, European leaders had become grimly familiar with friendly fire from their American ally. In 2018, Trump tried to undermine Angela Merkel, then Germany’s chancellor, saying that “the people of Germany are turning against their leadership.” The attacks didn’t remain strictly rhetorical. He put tariffs on a wide range of EU products, most notably import duties on steel and aluminum, citing national-security concerns. Retaliatory tariffs from the European Union focused on American products, including motorcycles, bourbon, and jeans. Former U.S. officials told us that trade—Trump’s belief that Europe is getting the better of the United States—underpins his broader resentment against the continent.

 

The depths of that resentment became clear when he began to tease the use of military force, arguing that the United States needs Greenland for unexplained reasons of national security and insisting that Denmark can’t defend the giant swath of polar land. When our colleague Michael Scherer asked the president if the strike in Venezuela had changed his calculus about using force to take Greenland, he didn’t rule it out. Aides and allies proceeded to threaten Denmark with force, using the kind of online hyperbole that is Trump’s stock-in-trade. The White House repeatedly maintained that nothing was off the table.

 

***

 

Danish officials, told that they couldn’t defend Greenland, took steps to defend it.

 

Last week, the government in Copenhagen dispatched more soldiers and military equipment to the island. On the same day, foreign ministers from Denmark and Greenland traveled to the White House. Both sides appeared dug in, but they agreed to form a working group to address the president’s concerns. Five other European Union member states, along with Britain and Norway, also sent small numbers of troops to Greenland, as part of a reconnaissance mission to plan for future deployments and signal that Arctic security was a priority.

 

The mobilization rattled Trump, according to European officials, who said he interpreted it as a move against the United States. He threatened to impose a 10 percent import tax on goods from the eight European countries, beginning in February. He also addressed an angry letter to Norway’s prime minister, in which he complained about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and warned that peace would no longer be his sole objective.

 

The European Union responded swiftly, reviving plans to enact nearly €100 billion in tariffs prepared last year but suspended until February. France also pushed for an extraordinary measure that would have limited U.S. access to Europe’s internal market. Germany, the bloc’s biggest economy, signaled that it was open to the so-called trade bazooka. In diplomatic cables, member states warned that the sovereignty of the EU was at stake. There was initially fear that Italy, where senior officials had derided the move to send soldiers to Greenland, might be a holdout. But European diplomats told us that timely statements from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen underscored that the bloc would respond as a whole. They also said that simultaneous European coordination about how to respond to Trump’s invitation to his Board of Peace—a minuscule number of EU members signed up—reinforced solidarity.

 

Trump arrived at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. In a rambling speech that European officials could not believe was coming from the lips of an American president, he repeated his demand for U.S. ownership of Greenland while also seeming to acknowledge reality. “Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland,” he said, confusing the Nordic nation for Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, another Nordic nation.

 

Away from the lectern, the stock-market plunge—as well as concerns about the bond market and Treasury yields—had unnerved some of the president’s top aides, a White House official and a close outside adviser told us. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were among those who alerted the president, who was making his own round of calls to gauge Wall Street’s reaction. Trump’s aggressive use of executive power in his second term has largely gone unchecked, but his most significant other climbdown—rolling back some tariffs not long after his so-called Liberation Day—also came after a severe market reaction.

 

“For him, the economy is the markets, and he still begrudgingly listens,” the outside adviser, who is in regular contact with the president, told us.

 

***

 

The Europeans made NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, the point person to negotiate with Trump. “Rutte explained to him that he had a way out,” a European official told us. “He immediately cashed in on that.”

 

Trump walked back his tariff threat and declared victory. “Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region,” he wrote on Truth Social. A senior U.S. official told us Rutte had mastered Trump’s dealmaking approach to diplomacy, saying the secretary-general “went big” by suggesting that he could greatly enhance the U.S. security presence. “He understands how to talk to the president,” this person said.

 

Virtually nothing was committed to paper, and the framework is still vague. It envisions bilateral discussions between the United States and Denmark to ensure that the U.S. military can operate adequately on Greenland, as well as broader NATO efforts to defend the high north. Possible outcomes include updating the 1951 defense agreement, erecting barriers to Chinese and Russian investments on the island, and granting U.S. access to natural resources buried deep beneath the ice. These topics will likely preoccupy the working group established last week, and they reflect objectives that Danish leaders had, for months, indicated they would endorse, if Washington would only ask. At a NATO meeting the same day, military officials discussed ways of granting U.S. sovereignty over small parts of land in Greenland to fortify its position, akin to British bases in Cyprus. But Danish leaders immediately pushed back on the idea of ceding any sovereign territory.

 

The White House didn’t respond to specific questions, but Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, issued a statement saying, “As President Trump has repeatedly stated, the details of the Greenland deal will be finalized and released in due time. When this deal is signed, it will achieve America’s long-held strategic goals in the Arctic Region, at very little cost, forever.”

 

People in Trump’s orbit were surprised that European leaders stood up to the president as forcefully as they did; the White House had been counting on the continent folding out of fear of a trade war, or of a further U.S. drawdown of support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, Pentagon officials had never devoted meaningful attention to drafting plans for an invasion of Greenland, according to U.S. officials.

 

“I do not think there was really a military plan to take Greenland,” one of the officials told us. “I don’t think the people of Greenland needed to start filling sandbags.”

 

That such a scenario was ever remotely conceivable has alienated Europe in ways that Washington won’t soon be able to repair, European officials said. For the foreseeable future, these countries will continue to depend on the United States in varied ways, above all for security, defense, and intelligence. But their leaders are already pledging to accelerate their efforts to stand on their own, and to work together to counterbalance bigger powers, including not just Russia and China but also now the United States. That’s why Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, was so well received in Davos, delivering a frank acknowledgment that the international order maintained by American power was over.

 

Less tangibly, the disgust in Europe for Trump’s way of doing business—his swaggering, swindling, scornful style—can’t be erased. It extends even to Europe’s far-right parties, which might otherwise find common cause with Trump.

 

The American president gave Europeans reason for renewed outrage even after he agreed to disarmament over Greenland, disparaging the sacrifice of soldiers from NATO allies in the American-led war in Afghanistan. “They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business. About a thousand soldiers from U.S. allies were killed in combat. They tell a different story.