It’s easy to excuse the global sighs of relief after an apparently successful easing of the Greenland crisis — a crisis entirely of President Trump’s making. But, as Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada declared in Davos, Switzerland, last week, “We are in the midst of a rupture.”
This was true even before the Greenland debacle. A flimsy, status-quo-preserving framework on Greenland cannot erase a year of close calls and 11th-hour diplomatic consultations that have eroded our precious global relationships — connections we can’t rebuild as easily as Mr. Trump has dissolved them.
But we must reconstruct them. Americans need to know why even the most powerful nation on Earth is strongest when it has many like-minded friends.
The case begins with identifying what Mr. Trump is risking, and for nothing. The president threatened allies over an Arctic island that Greenlanders made clear was never for sale, and he came away empty-handed.
Mr. Trump argues that maintaining America’s friendships in a broad, rules-based international order unfairly taxes the United States. Yet NATO has been a 76-year-old boon for American military manufacturers, including those who build the F-35 fighter jets that about 15 NATO countries use or plan to use, along with patriot missiles, drones, helicopters and radar systems. European countries buy about 35 percent of America’s global arms exports, making Europe our commercial military enterprises’ largest regional customer.
Even as the markets exhaled when Mr. Trump left Davos with his participation trophy of a Greenland framework in hand, we should remember why last week’s convulsions sent financial markets reeling. Europe is America’s largest trade and investment partner, responsible for some $2 trillion in annual trade, more than $5 trillion in mutual investment and millions of jobs straddling the Atlantic Ocean. What rational person would engage in a game of geopolitical chicken that alienates the largest foreign investor in our country?
Obliterating long-revered relationships — confusing friends for foes and vice versa — isolates us, not our adversaries. One year after Mr. Trump insulted Canada and announced that he would bury the country in tariffs, our neighbor to the north has inked a deal to open its market to China’s electric vehicles, an agreement likely worth billions of dollars to Beijing, not Detroit.
Even if the economic case for preserving our trans-Atlantic relationships were less compelling, history shows why it is dangerous to return to a 19th-century-style system of spheres of influence. Territorial disputes among major powers grasping for empire led to some 20 million people being killed in World War I. Another 60 to 70 million lives were lost — 3 percent of the world’s population — in World War II.
Nothing remotely similar has happened since. Hatred, rivalries, greed and extremism didn’t disappear. But postwar institutions and alliances, led by a United States committed to a cooperative international order, restrained those malign instincts. America built the greatest national security insurance in the history of humanity.
A world in which major powers revise maps without cause and subjugate local peoples is more perilous. Every time an American president implies borders and sovereignty are outmoded conventions to be erased at will, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China gain moral latitude. We can easily imagine them invoking the language of our president to justify the pursuit of their long-sought trophies in Kyiv and Taipei.
America needs relationships to tackle a wide range of big global issues, too. Artificial intelligence has enormous potential but needs international guardrails so madmen do not use it for malign purposes. Individual nations going it alone cannot address challenges such as disease, climate change, energy security, critical mineral supply, migration flows or Russian and Chinese expansionism.
Republican and Democratic presidents have worked hard over the post-World War II decades to shed the image of an imperialist power. Now America is sending messages about seeking a 21st-century empire that stretches from Greenland to South America.
Previous presidents were right, and Mr. Trump is wrong. Members of the House and Senate — indeed, all leaders who value alliances and peace — should not let the lessons of the Greenland fracas pass unheeded. We must stand up for a world that needs a renewed multilateral moment. Otherwise we will by default accept a world in which our friends move on as best they can without us. America alone is not America first.
John F. Kerry was the U.S. secretary of state from 2013 to 2017.
Source photograph by Igor Kutyaev/Getty Images
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