Let’s stop normalising the abnormal

Time to stop acting like rabbits in the headlights with Trump

On Tuesday the 8^th of January 2025, the future leader of the world’s most powerful country threatened to potentially use military force to annex a small near-neighbour and part of the territory of an allied country with which it has a mutual defence pact. At the same time, he threatened to use economic force in order to absorb his direct neighbour, with which the US also has a mutual defence pact.

Ponder that.

Consider the various UN Charters, international treaties and laws etc it breaches in order to highlight the sheer unacceptability and outrageous nature of such a series of threats.

Yet, what has been our reaction? Not ignored, definitely not, but the tenor of much of it alarms me. Some are beginning to absorb the sheer enormity of it, but not yet enough.

To recap, Trump, having said the US should take over the Panama Canal and annex Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, twice refused to rule out using military and/or economic force to achieve this. Having said (again) Canada should become the 51^st state of the United States, he was asked if he would use military and/or economic force to absorb Canada. He said he wouldn’t use military force – which was nice of him – but would use economic force. Given Canada is the US’s 2nd largest trading partner, this is no casual statement.

His rationale was not that he wanted to bring democracy to Canada, Greenland or Panama. Canada and Denmark score 97/100 on the Freedom House democracy index, while Panama scores 83/100, which is, funnily enough, the same as the US, which is also 83/100.

No, it’s nothing to do with democracy. With Panama and Greenland, it’s that annexing them is supposedly vital for US economic and national security. What they want is neither here nor there – big boy’s rules. When it comes to Canada, he thinks the US is at an economic disadvantage and subsidising their security. Again, what Canada, like Denmark a fellow NATO member, wants is neither here nor there.

Yet the coverage is so often missing the mark. ‘Does he actually mean it’ is one main theme of coverage, alongside whether ‘he is just using the threat as some kind of leverage’ for concessions.

Frankly, both are very much secondary. The very fact a US President (as he will soon be) should even say it is extraordinary and appalling. This is imperialism pure and simple.

The post-WW2 aspiration and the UN Charter was that countries’ borders should not be changed by force, and it was further reinforced after the end of the Cold War in a variety of treaties and agreements.

It’s worth quoting just one of many the US signed, the seminal Helsinki Final Act of 1975:

- (Signatories) will refrain from any manifestation of force for the purpose of inducing another participating State to renounce the full exercise of its sovereign rights…No such threat or use of force will be employed as a means of settling disputes, or questions likely to give rise to disputes, between them.

- The participating States regard as inviolable all one another's frontiers…Accordingly, they will also refrain from any demand for, or act of, seizure and usurpation of part or all of the territory of any participating State.

We mustn’t play down that (so far) it is just words from Trump. The very fact he made such a threat is a massive breach in itself, and an indication of his world view and a violation of the principles the United States is meant to stand for.

Moreover, the fact he is bullying and threatening friendly nations further undermines an already shaky international security environment. It may be true that Denmark and Canada should spend more on defence, but it is equally true that Canadians and Danes have fought alongside Americans following 9/11 and in multiple conflicts over the last 75 years.

So, we should be shocked, yet somehow we are not as shocked as we should be.

Why? Because we have normalised Trump’s constant breaking of norms, and the result is the boundaries of acceptable behaviour are moving. When people say ‘it’s just Trump being Trump’ they are missing the point that Trump being Trump is the problem.

Our problem now is what we do. In his first presidency it was said that the problem with his opponents was that they took him literally but not seriously while his supporters took him seriously but not literally. In his second presidency then we need to take him literally as well as seriously.

So, when he says he wants Greenland, the Panama Canal assume that is what he is going to try to do. When he says he wants Canada, that may be a bit of a stretch, but assume he is going to try to bend it to his will, not treat it as a favoured ally. When he says ‘America First’ he means a bully boy America that dictates not debates.

And right now, he’s pretty happy with how it’s going. Internally he’s seeing all his enemies ‘bending the knee’ in anticipation of otherwise feeling his wrath. For people like Mark Zuckerberg this might protect his wealth, albeit at the price of what once passed for his principles. This also makes Trump more powerful as they become his creatures and wield their power on his behalf.

So, Zuckerberg, in making his craven oath of loyalty to his master, said, ‘Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more…. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.’

Caving in like Zuckerberg is less of an option for nations, and it starts with recognising Trump’s America no longer sees itself as a player within a values-based system. The arch-apostle of real politic, Henry Kissinger, once said, 'America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.'

In fact, such a cynical world view was not necessarily right. It reflected one common view of international relations, the so-called ‘realists’ school, which regards international relations as enduring competition between self-interested states, and with that self-interest narrowly defined. It could perhaps be summed up as a zero-sum approach. I win, you lose.

But there are also alternative approaches, that take a broader view of interests involving values, norms and ideas that, when shared, lead to nations working together on the basis of enlightened self-interest. More of a win:win approach.

What we have seen in Europe for much of the post-war period – and largely led by the United States – was a dominance of that latter approach. For instance, NATO is a values-based defensive organisation where the big guys protect the little ones, not just to be nice, but to the benefit of all.

That approach, reflected in the UN Charter, carries the uninspiring title of the Rules Based International Order (RBIO), but basically means that all nations, big and small have the right to decide their own future. That’s not to say that the US as a big power had become saintly, but rather that the US recognised such an approach was much more in its interest than the alternative of an anarchic world of dog eat dog.

In Europe at least this had its finest hour after the end of the Cold War. Putin, who openly states his ambition to restore a Russian Empire, hates it, as does China’s Xi. It’s fair to say that the RBIO is under huge strain from a resurgence of those who prefer a Realist approach – Big Boys Rules. Unsurprisingly, it’s the big nations more inclined to this view.

I somehow doubt Trump has ever been a student of international relations theory, but we do know from his history that he has a brutally simple view of winning. For him a great deal involves him winning and others losing. He’s a zero-sum kind of guy.

As is Putin. Already some of those thinking more deeply about Trump’s threats are saying it will embolden Putin and others like him as they make similar justifications for their own imperialism. When Trump says, “We need Greenland for national security purposes,” that is exactly what Putin says about Ukraine.

So, for the next four years at least, we have to recognise something fundamental has changed. The USA that regarded itself as first among equals, the biggest voice, but with shared values and goals, has gone. Trump’s also a bully, and once you bend the knee he will expect that to continue, and use whatever he wins as leverage for the next win. He respects power but has a narrow view of what it looks like. To him, playing nice can easily look like weakness – and he has an instinct for exploiting that.

As with China on trade, we can’t do without the US, but on a far wider range of issues, notably defence. We are going to have to take some tough decisions. There is now a very real risk of a major rift between Europe and the US, and a very real risk to NATO’s future. Britain stuck between the EU and the US is in a very uncomfortable place.

Trump is right that we have relied too much on the US to carry our water on defence, and we need to spend more, not so much to placate him but so as to wean ourselves off dependence on at best an unreliable partner.

I believe that ultimately Trump’s America First will be as bad for America as us, because no country is so mighty it doesn’t need friends. In the end NATO survived because America saw itself as leader of a team, while the Warsaw Pact collapsed because the then Soviet Union dictated not led, and offered no good reason for others to stay as allies. It became Russia alone.

Trump’s version of America First risks creating America Alone. This is a truly dreadful time for the US to be pulling away as the crises crowd in, but we have to face up to that reality. What we saw this week needs to be taken both literally and seriously.