Initially it was a rescue, and then a romance. But then Sam seemed to undergo a personality change. He became abusive when Europa ignored his demands and even threatened violence. After 80 years, Europa had had enough. They would keep the marriage together for form’s sake, but it was effectively over. At least she got to keep Greenland.
This is more or less the story one hears in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s disgraceful, absurd, and failed attempt to grab Greenland by economic coercion and the menace of lethal force. There may have been grains of truth in his complaints—Denmark’s neglect of the island, America’s long-standing interest in acquiring it, the implications of new sea lanes as its ice melts, the rising importance of security in the Arctic—but nothing excuses Trump’s behavior or language. Nor that of his lieutenants, including the normally buttoned-down Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who have been almost as loutish as their boss.
But as a story, it leaves too much out, is too present-oriented, and is too obsessed with the outsize personality of the aged and erratic narcissist who is the 47th president of the United States. It is also misleading. Europa’s claim—You’re not the person I always thought you were!—is shaky. The relationship between the New World and the Old has always been fraught, and necessarily so. Americans are, after all, the people who left the Old World, many with stars in our eyes but chips on our shoulders and the cry “good riddance” echoing in our ears. In 1944, we returned—represented by GIs who read comics and chewed gum, were baffled by foreign languages, and ate C-rations that included cheese like yellow wax—to rescue those who had stayed behind.
During World War II, even our closest allies, the British, mistrusted us, correctly believing that the Americans wanted to use the war to subvert their empire and everyone else’s. Winston Churchill’s memoirs smoothed these memories over, and this still misleads us. Charles de Gaulle’s justified resentment of the way he had been handled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt poisoned Franco-American relations through the early 1960s.
[From the March 2026 issue: Donald Trump vs. the world]
The heroic generosity of the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan made a generation of Europeans grateful to the U.S., but any happily married person knows that gratitude alone is no basis for a long-term relationship. And besides, the problems had begun much earlier. The historian Henry Adams put it well at the turn of the 20th century: “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” There was ever on both sides admiration and suspicion. American elites aped European fashions, art, and manners, and Europeans admired American energy and efficiency. Still, when the historian Philippe Roger wrote a marvelous book on the history of French hostility to America, The American Enemy, he began with the 18th-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who had insisted that in North America, the women were more barren, the men shorter, and all of the animals smaller than those in Europe. An irritated Thomas Jefferson (who towered over him) finally imported a stuffed moose to convince the eminent philosopher. Buffon remained unshaken.
From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, we pestered the Europeans about decolonization. We coerced them during the Suez Crisis in 1956, seemed war-mad in Vietnam (after having appeared trigger-happy about the use of nuclear weapons in Korea), unnerved Europe no less than the Soviets by seeking to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles there, were suspicious of openings to the Soviet Union, became in their eyes crazily aggressive in Iraq (2003) and Iran (2025), and remained ideologically driven regarding Cuba (sanctioning the Communists rather than subverting them by patronizing their beach resorts). The European answer to the question underlying extended nuclear deterrence—“Would the Americans sacrifice New York for Hamburg?”—was usually no. More broadly, Europeans and Americans do, in fact, disagree on some fundamental matters, including which free-speech rights should be protected. These differences are not trivial.
Trump unquestionably makes everything unnecessarily worse. He has damaged America’s good name, sullied its honor, and violated its principles. But he is far from being the only or even the most important source of tension between Europe and the United States.
More than 40 years ago, I observed:
The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.
To this very day, Europe, home to the third-largest economy in the world (albeit very nearly the size of China’s), depends on the United States to protect it against a predatory Russia, which has a GDP the size of Italy’s. In 2014, Europe received a wake-up call in the form of Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its war in the Donbas. That it struggles even today to build an independent arms industry, to conscript its young men and women for military service, and to build the kind of military with which it can defend itself is feckless and appalling.
For some, the current crisis with Greenland results from the collapsing self-confidence of a declining hegemon, the United States. There is an element of truth in this, but not much. The American economy is anything but sclerotic, and although the Trump administration has battered the country’s intellectual institutions, they remain incubators of invention. What has changed is the rise of China, which is now a far more formidable opponent to the United States than the Soviet Union ever was. It is neither surprising nor a misjudgment for Americans to turn their strategic attention elsewhere.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos deserved the attention that it got, but not all parts were heeded equally. In so many words, he admitted that the “rules-based international order” has always been a fiction, that it had always been an American-based international order—partial, inconsistent, and lopsided, but generally beneficent. He insisted that going forward, the middle powers need to stand their ground.
[Read: What the Greenland crisis teaches Europe about Trump]
This is possible, as Australia showed in its trade standoff with China a few years ago. But it would require pluck, willingness to sacrifice, and acceptance that, in the economist Adam Smith’s ringing words, “defense is of greater importance than opulence.” Some European states have these qualities, and indeed Trump may have backed off his Greenland grab not only because the U.S. stock market fell but because he sensed that, this time, the European nations might retaliate economically, and some might even send forces to defend Danish territory from American paratroopers. As an American, I find it painful to admit that they would have been entirely right to do so.
We are entering a nastier world. But this will remain a world in which the United States and Europe are linked, because our interests and fundamental values remain aligned. Trump does not care about the latter, but most Americans do, and his successors probably will as well.
The reputational loss that the United States has suffered is consequential, and possibly irreparable in the next decade or so. But it is not true that a United States once viewed with innocent reverence and childlike trust on the part of the Europeans has been replaced by something monstrous and predatory with which they can never partner again. Both the perception and the reality are considerably more complicated.
A more adult kind of relationship between the New and Old Worlds is possible and desirable. Providing that affection and mutual respect persist, unillusioned marriages are often the most durable ones.
