Donald Trump’s comments about Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada have once again highlighted that he views alliances, including transatlantic ones, as transactional. His former national security advisor, General HR McMaster, put it neatly when he addressed the Council on Foreign Relations on 8 January, telling them his old boss sees the European Union ‘mainly as an economic competitor’.

There’s little room for diplomatic niceties in this worldview. That was apparent in the bizarre trip the president’s son, Don Jr, made to Greenland, where he was allegedly welcomed by homeless people in MAGA caps, recruited with the promise of a hot meal. It was also clear from Trump’s dispatch, immediately after his inauguration, of his old associate Steven Witkoff – a billionaire New York real estate investor with no experience in foreign affairs – to oversee the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

His first cabinet nominations have followed the same logic of disruption, picking figures in his own image, who are divisive and lack government experience, among those appointed to handle international relations. Unlike Trump’s first term, when Congress rejected several of his choices, this time round the confirmation process has gone smoothly, with senators approving all the president’s nominees almost unanimously.

One detail in Trump’s comments about Greenland and Panama caught commentators’ attention in particular: he justified his threats of trade tariffs in the name of ‘national security’. This is not the first time national security has been invoked in a context that has apparently more to do with foreign trade than defence. From 2017 first Trump and then Joe Biden used it to justify the shift to protectionism towards the US economy, relying on a little-used clause in the former General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – the precursor to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – which allows a member state to take ‘any action which it considers (…)

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(2) Pieter D Wezeman et al, ‘Trends in international arms transfers, 2023’, SIPRI, Stockholm, March 2024.