Whither the transatlantic alliance?

Posted: 22nd January 2026

Whither the transatlantic alliance?

Donald Trump has gone nuclear over Greenland.

On Monday, the US president announced tariffs of 10% on imports from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and the United Kingdom until the “complete and total purchase of Greenland” had been achieved.

Greenland, the world’s largest island in the Arctic, has large reserves of untapped minerals such as lithium and cobalt and is seen by Trump as a national security asset due to its geostrategic location.

It is also a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark, which is a member of NATO and the European Union.

Trump’s threats against Greenland provoked a major fissure between the US and Europe. French president Emmanuel Macron was among the most outspoken, saying he preferred “respect to bullies” and the “rule of law to brutality”.

UK prime minister Keir Starmer even dared to raise his head above the parapet to criticise Trump, saying it would be “wrong” to apply tariffs on allies.

Trump’s initial response was to double down, saying there was “no going back”.

On Tuesday, he even published private messages from Macron which said “we are totally in line on Syria” and “can do great things on Iran”. But, the French president added, “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland”.

Trump also swung for Starmer, writing on social media that the UK was “planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia”, a US-UK military base on the Chagos Islands, in an act of “great stupidity”.

But backroom negotiations in Davos, Switzerland, appear to have softened Trump’s stance. He said on Wednesday that the “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” had been reached.

What that deal will look like remains unclear, but reports suggest Trump still wants access to Greenland’s resources and to be granted sovereignty over US military bases there similar to Britain’s bases in Cyprus, which are regarded as UK sovereign territory.

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Like the Cypriots, the Greenlanders appear to have been given no say on this.

In the longer term, the fiasco has highlighted how Britain has spent decades pretending US-UK economic and defence “integration” was not in fact breedingdependency and subjugation.

Starmer inadvertently let the cat out of the bag earlier this week, saying “our nuclear deterrent [Trident] is our foremost weapon… and that requires us to have a good relationship with the US”.

Britain’s missiles are “leased from the USA” and Trident submarines “must regularly visit the US… to return their missiles… for maintenance and replace them with others”, according to parliament’s select committee on defence.

There are also around 11,000 US military personnel stationed on bases across Britain, and the US Department of Defence legally owns all of the spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, which the UK government says is crucial for national security.

Now that the chickens are coming home to roost, are Western leaders starting to acknowledge that their participation in the façade of the US-led “rules-based international order” was little more than a ruse to maintain power and privilege?

Take the words of Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, who declared on Tuesday: “We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false… This fiction was useful… and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality”.

Indeed, where was the outrage over the genocide in Gaza, the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, or the recent illegal bombing raids on Iran?

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