MJ Akbar
NEW DELHI:
International indigestion rose sharply when Trump decided it was time to replace the United Nations (UN) with a Board of Peace, ruled by Trump as Paramount Power, with constitutional rights on the first and last word. Membership has been offered to Russia and China as well, just in case they were feeling left out, but there has been no discount suggested for any country which refused to pay a billion dollars for three years in Nirvana.
Peace is expensive. Belarus, an ally of Russia, has agreed to come aboard, but we must all wait with bated breath for the billion dollars. Client countries have learnt that ‘yes’ is the best immediate answer. Obdurate countries like Norway have said a flat no. Canada agreed, then decided that it was not going to pay up. Starmer kept quiet, the best option for someone who has been humiliated by his best friend. Macron said no, arguing that membership was incompatible with the UN. Perfectly right. That of course is precisely Trump’s point. Kill the UN, which has become a corpse in any case.
The piteous plea
To the shock of diplomats used to the clever nuances of diplomatese, Trump believes in the phrases he throws into the political dialectic. What could be more specific than the assertion, on the eve of Davos where Europe had gathered to discuss the crisis, that he would not retreat on Greenland? While Greenland was squeezing tears from NATO eyes, he described his Board of Peace as the “most consequential board ever” with a mandate to end every war possibly in time for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
Some Europeans were reduced to a piteous plea for ‘joint’ security but that rather misses the point. NATO is the joint force. And NATO has become irrelevant to Trump. Europe will take time to recover from such a brutal end to a long security coma. The only NATO country to remain largely indifferent to the Trump turmoil is Türkiye, which built up its defence assets outside the star-spangled NATO umbrella.
Has the good knight Don Trump been tilting at windmills while Prof Sancho Rubio makes copious notes? Search beyond the maverick language and there is a clear and definite design. Trump’s strategy is to make the incredible seem probable and then find out if it is possible. He does not respect the integrity of nations that interfere with America’s self-defined interests.
The UN had to go because its charter is inconvenient and its operational role ineffective. The UN charter made conquest illegal, ending the age of empires (the British Empire was immoral but not illegal). NATO is a relic that has become a parasite. Trump is ready to use America’s economic and military power to preserve and expand its wealth and dominance. This is his meaning of MAGA: Make America Great Again. If Russia’s expansion into Ukraine hurts Europe, then it is Europe’s problem. America can only have a secondary interest. He is more concerned about the challenge from China.
Logical consequences
There are logical consequences which are making the conventional world shiver. If America’s security takes precedence over sovereignty, Qatar is as vulnerable as Greenland. Qatar can be America’s Guam in West Asia, or the Middle East as Washington still insists on calling the region. Guam is about 8,000 miles from Washington; Qatar is only 7,000 miles away. Guam has an American naval base; so does Qatar. Guam has been American territory since 1899, a prize of victory in the war with Spain. Qatar might ask for a higher price than Greenland, but that is only a transfer of paper currency which will eventually be transferred back.
America purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, equivalent to $132 million today. America bought the US Virgin Islands from its friends in Denmark in 1917, so Denmark has done this deal before. President Harry Truman offered $100 million to Denmark for Greenland in 1946, after building its base in Narsarsuaq for use in World War II. The Defense of Greenland America Agreement signed in 1951 gives America the right to build and operate defence facilities – for as long as NATO exists. Another reason, therefore, why NATO is an obstacle to Trump’s vision of American power.
NATO was created to defend an America-led West from a communist Soviet Union. It lost its foundational nous in 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact became a memory. Western Europe preserved NATO as history’s premier milch cow, funded by a benevolent Uncle Sam.
Absence of reform
Trump’s contempt for the UN, created by the five victors of World War II, has some validity, given that absence of reform has made the UN impotent. The UN is more bankrupt, intellectually and politically, than the League of Nations was in 1930. America walked away in 1930 from that debris of failure. Both the UN and NATO might have died of old age. Trump decreed euthanasia.
Donald Trump will not be President forever but he has changed the balance of international relations beyond recognition. By the end of 2026 we shall know if the 20th century is finally over, and the 21st has begun.