Finnish President Alexander Stubb has revealed his private concerns about President Donald Trump after the two bonded over golf last year.
In his new book, The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order, Stubb voiced reservations about the impact of Trump’s unpredictability.
The Finnish leader established a private backchannel with the MAGA president after gaining Trump’s ear partly due to his love of golf. The 57-year-old even played at Trump International Golf Club in Florida with the president last March.
“I used to be a collegiate golfer, though I’m rusty,” he wrote of the fairway diplomacy.
“Over seven hours, President Trump and I discuss an array of world issues. I tell him what I know about Lavrov and Putin and explain why Ukraine needs to win the war,” he added of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his hawkish top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov.
The discussion is said to have come just a month after Trump and Vice President JD Vance ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly berating him for not being thankful enough to their liking for U.S. support.
Stubb, a center-right conservative, spent summers in the U.S. and Canada as a young man and studied at Furman University in South Carolina, with aspirations of becoming a professional golfer.
He became so close to Trump over the sport that he fielded frequent late-night calls and texts from the president, according to The Wall Street Journal. They would reportedly talk about Russia, which shares a massive land border with Finland, and also discuss chipping, driving, and putting.
In his book, Stubb argued that “internal differences” among Western leaders “may be amplified by Trump’s presidency,” and that “Trump’s reelection undoubtedly affects the West’s potential to influence a new world order.”
He singled out tariffs and Trump’s frequent threats of land grabs as two factors that risk fueling instability.
“The challenge for a new world order will be Trump’s reservations about international institutions and his affinity for tariffs, which ultimately harm not only their target countries but the U.S. and everyone else,” Stubb wrote.
“His early language on territorial acquisition also throws the reliability of sovereignty into question. World leaders should not necessarily take him literally on this, but we should take him seriously,” he added.
In the weeks leading up to the book’s publication, Trump repeatedly mused about acquiring Greenland, a Danish territory, and several of his top officials have publicly refused to rule out the use of force. (Stubb issued a statement saying “no one decides” the future of Denmark and Greenland but Denmark and Greenland.)
Hold your horses…Finnish National Golf Team around 1989…Those were the days…And yes, at the time it was a bit like being in the English Ice-Hockey squad…Both have moved on since. #nostalgia pic.twitter.com/DrV5PFZ0kX
— Alexander Stubb (@alexstubb) June 24, 2020
The book also comes on the heels of a shock U.S. operation in Venezuela that saw Nicolas Maduro captured and transported to New York to face drug trafficking charges.
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