David Rennie

We're sort of trying to guess what was said in a room between the Secretary General of NATO and the President of the United States.

But at least there, the ideas seem to be actually...

pretty unobjectionable ideas about a new enhanced security presence for NATO with American command, but other NATO members rolling in to do more to protect the Arctic.

Perhaps more guarantees that America gets first dibs, to use the technical term, on rare earths and minerals that are lying under the kind of permafrost in Greenland.

But the tragedy, if you're Denmark or any other European government right now, is that Donald Trump could have had all of those perfectly sensible things before he started threatening to take Greenland, before he started posting social media pictures of him looking at Greenland with the stars and stripes on the map.

He doesn't need to own, let alone invade Greenland anymore.

to have a bigger American force on the island and to get American companies to sign deals to extract the minerals.

That's what, to Europeans, is just so baffling and worrying and ultimately depressing about this whole utterly unnecessary crisis.

And so even if it's now being unwound, what was it all for?

At the end of World War II, the Americans basically occupied Greenland.

It became incredibly strategically important during the Cold War because basically Greenland is the thing that Soviet missiles would have flown over had they ever been launched at the continental US.

As a result, during the Cold War, the US had 17 bases on Greenland and up to 10,000 troops and radar stations and airplanes.

And all of that was entirely covered by a treaty between the US and Denmark goes back to 1951, just after the end of World War II, updated in the early 2000s to give

the US even greater liberty to put whatever it wanted in the one base that still remains.

Denmark was basically totally happy to let the Americans do whatever they wanted on Greenland for America's security.

There was no need to pick this fight.

So no, I think they are congratulating themselves on having raised the costs and hoping that that is why he climbed down.

I think there is now immediately concern that European unity, which was reasonably solid at the beginning of the week when Trump was threatening to put tariffs on those countries that had sent a few troops to Greenland recently to show solidarity with the Danes and show that NATO was taking Greenland security seriously, that led to quite a lot of unity.

Now that Donald Trump has said he's not going to impose those tariffs, Europe still needs to decide what it's going to do about a big trade deal agreed months ago with the US, which is frankly pretty one-sided.

Back a week ago, five days ago, when there was European unity in the face of the latest Trump threats, it looked as if