Davos this week offered a neat snapshot of where we are headed. President Trump walked back his most escalatory language on Greenland, ruled out using force, and stood down threatened tariffs after claiming a “framework” had been reached following discussions with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. The immediate temperature dropped. The underlying problem did not. 

The problem is not that America has interests in the Arctic. It does, and they are legitimate. The problem is the method. When alliance management is conducted as public leverage, with threats first and diplomacy second, the West ends up weaker even when a climb-down follows. Allies are forced into defensive postures. Domestic audiences are trained to expect brinkmanship. Adversaries learn to exploit uncertainty. That is not strength. It is volatility.

Greenland matters strategically. Anyone pretending otherwise is not paying attention. The Arctic is no longer a frozen backwater. It is a theatre of competition, surveillance, basing, undersea infrastructure, and resource access. Russia has been expanding its posture across the High North for years. China is financing, probing, and looking for influence where it can buy it. The United States has every right to want stronger basing arrangements, expanded radar coverage, maritime patrol cooperation, and an enhanced Arctic posture. In practice, Denmark and Greenland would likely be willing to discuss much of this, because they can read the same map as Washington.

So why turn it into a spectacle.

This is where Davos matters. It illustrated the cycle. Escalate publicly, threaten partners, dominate the news agenda, then dial the temperature down and sell the de-escalation as dealmaking. The climb-down is welcome in the narrow sense, because force and tariffs against allies are plainly the wrong tools. But the habit of manufacturing pressure on friends corrodes credibility over time. It teaches everyone that American commitments can be converted into bargaining chips, and that today’s ally may be tomorrow’s punchbag if it plays well on domestic television. 

Denmark is not a freeloading bystander. It is a serious NATO ally with a record of deploying alongside Americans and Britons. In Afghanistan, Denmark suffered 43 fatalities and was widely noted as having among the highest per-capita fatality rates among coalition partners. That is what commitment looks like when you are a small country doing its share in a very big war. 

That context matters because it exposes the moral and strategic inversion at the heart of Trump’s approach. You do not “manage” alliances by humiliating the allies who have bled with you. You manage them by setting expectations and enforcing delivery, firmly and consistently, inside the framework that exists for exactly this purpose, NATO.

Europe, of course, is not innocent. For too long, too many European capitals have treated defence spending as optional and American patience as infinite. The habit of talking about “strategic autonomy” while outsourcing hard security to the United States has been complacent at best and reckless at worst. Europe has not earned America’s respect in this regard. It has consumed it. When Americans ask why they should keep paying, they are not wrong to ask the question.

But there is a difference between pressing allies to step up and trying to break them down. The right approach is boring, disciplined, and effective. Set clear capability targets. Demand measurable outputs. Tie spending to deployable mass rather than political theatre. Reform procurement so money becomes hardware and readiness, not press releases. Do it through NATO planning, not by lobbing threats over the fence like a delinquent neighbour.

The deeper risk is the signal it sends to adversaries. When the United States publicly coerces allies, it does not look formidable. It looks erratic. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping do not fear America less because of this, they simply learn they can plan around America less. That is dangerous. Uncertainty is an accelerant for opportunists. It creates space for miscalculation, brinkmanship, and the slow corrosion of deterrence.

It also hands Europe’s worst instincts exactly the fuel they need. The continent has no shortage of fashionable anti-Americanism, dressed up as sophistication and “independence”. Give it enough public humiliation from Washington and you will find European politicians reaching for grandstanding and hedging instead of capability and delivery. That would be catastrophic for Western security, because a Europe that postures against America while remaining militarily thin is not autonomous. It is exposed.

Britain should be the adult in the room here, and at present it is not clear we are. Starmer’s instincts lean toward comms and choreography, and Labour has plenty of colleagues who would happily trade hard-headed statecraft for a performative anti-American flourish if the internal politics turned. Britain’s national interest is straightforward. We need America engaged. We need Europe rearming. We need NATO treated as the core organising framework for deterrence, not as a convenience to be used when it suits and ignored when it does not.

That means holding two ideas at once, without flinching. Europe must stop freeloading and start delivering. America must remain the anchor of the alliance, because a divided West is a weaker West. But America also has to behave like an anchor, not the demolition crew.

Trump’s defenders will argue that bluntness forces action. Sometimes it does. The trouble is that there is a line between bluntness and self-harm. Threatening friends and legitimising coercion inside the alliance is not forcing unity. It is eroding the very thing that makes the West formidable. Trust. Predictability. The shared assumption that your allies are not your targets.

If the United States wants deeper access and a stronger Arctic posture, there is a grown-up way to get it. Ask. Negotiate. Build a package that meets both sides’ interests and is politically sustainable in Copenhagen and Nuuk as well as in Washington. A “framework” that follows threats may still produce practical cooperation, but it leaves a stain. It trains allies to assume the next demand is coming, and it trains adversaries to assume the West can be rattled.

Stand up NATO and protect America. That is the correct strategic direction. It requires Europe to rebuild credible military mass and stop treating defence as a discretionary spend. It also requires the United States to act like the leader of a serious alliance, not like a reality show host chasing the next confrontation. Davos may have delivered a temporary cooling of the Greenland drama. The wider question is whether the West learns discipline before its opponents exploit our lack of it.