Fiona Hill

And so from his point of view, if you look at it, it now looks like we are in a world where sphere of influences and strongmen and transactional relationships are shaping the environment.

It's enormous.

And the posited reasoning for the United States of wanting to acquire Greenland.

And again, this does actually go back again to the first Trump administration in 2019.

But the posited reasoning is some kind of pressure from really acute pressure from Russia and China.

We've also had President Xi Jinping of China saying, we're not interested in Greenland, not on us.

And Putin also having never actually made any kind of claims against Greenland.

So this is really something that is a fairly absurd development from everybody's point of view.

But for Putin, obviously, this is potentially a bonanza.

But this is where kind of a flip side of uncertainty might come into this.

Because as you're saying, who are the troops?

I mean, perhaps not in the large enough numbers.

I mean, actually, if I was the Europeans, I'd be sending even more in.

What we're seeing here is Europeans having to stake out their interests in the name of their security, but it's in reaction to the United States, not just in reaction to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

And that brings, I would say, a bit more uncertainty for Putin, just along the lines of the blows that he's already had in Iran and Venezuela.

I mean, that's absolutely right.

And this is where Trump's return to the White House has been a real boon for Vladimir Putin, because he is now operating in a world which is, for Putin, a very easy one to navigate in the sense of you've got global leaders, and he only really counts as global leaders, Xi and Trump, who have the same sort of mindset of wanting to return to that 19th

century or even 18th century, certainly early 20th century view of transactional relationships among the big powers with everything defined really by politics at the top, not this kind of mass politics that came in much later.

So Putin's very comfortable in that environment.

But as you've pointed out,