Mark Landler

You just put your finger on it right there.

When the largest, the central, the linchpin member of the alliance now poses a direct threat to another member of the alliance, that fundamentally makes NATO no longer tenable.

And so I think you're right in saying that even the fact that we're having this conversation and that it's a serious conversation and that leaders in Europe are having to make decisions based on the potential of an American takeover of Greenland, that is already deeply, deeply damaging to the underlying principles of NATO.

And so while we've had this deal today that perhaps postpones the moment of reckoning, that gives NATO a sense of preservation, it doesn't resolve or change the underlying reality of what happened here, which is that the animating theories behind NATO have been unraveled through this process.

I mean, in a sense, what he's done is driven these countries into the arms of China.

Because one thing that all of these European and other middle power countries are going to have to reckon with is if they can't rely on the United States, if you can't rely on being a member of the American camp,

you, in a sense, have to balance between the great powers.

And the great commercial power, the great economic power of the future, is China.

So one of the things that I think you will see much more of is Europeans, Canadians, and others going to China, fashioning deeper ties with China, being more open to China.

And as you pointed out, that is precisely what Trump set out to avoid.

And that's what...

Successive American administrations have always set as a priority, which is to use our great alliances, not just militarily, but economically, and build this great coalition that would be a proper...

competitor for China.

Now you're going to see countries, instead of saying, we're with the United States, they're going to say, well, we're going to balance our interests.

We're going to hedge against this uncertainty that we now perceive in the United States, and we're going to do it by drawing closer to China.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

I think that in Trump's world, it's the great powers that set the tone for everybody else.

I mean, there's a really interesting saying by a Greek historian, Thucydides, it's making the rounds a lot these days.

And it kind of encapsulates Trump's philosophy.

And it goes, the strong do what they can,