Red White and Blueland

This is about the significance of Greenland, especially in light of a rising interest in great power politics, and, below, I shall comment on Mark Carney’s speech yesterday at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

Power politics is back. I should read my copy of Martin Wight’s little Pelican Power Politics, especially now I have found in the last month or so – on other subjects – that he was a good writer. And, continuing the theme of books I have not read, do any of you remember the colossus that was Paul Kennedy of Yale’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, first published in 1988? I see that Williams Collins published a reprint as recently as 2017. I have the original here, unmarked, and looked for it after I discovered that Brendan Simms of Peterhouse’s The Return of the Great Powers will be published this summer by Basic Books. Kennedy’s Rise and Fall is 928 pages, Simm’s return is a mere 464 pages. Still, around 450 pages for each of “rise”, “fall” and “return”. The cover of Simms’s book is very cheering as it features a composite flag divided into four quarters. Top left: China. Bottom left: the Stars and Stripes. Bottom right: Russia. And top right: why, it is the Union Jack. Yes, indeed, Simms, though he often has claimed in his histories that European history is all about Germany, and though he is, or was, a Remainer, apparently thinks that when we turn from Europe to World then Germany ist nicht so gut in Weltpolitik, and old Blighty comes up a strong fourth behind Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, so to speak: a veritable plucky Murray. In fact, Robert Tombs tells us:

Our global role has been assessed by Professor Brendan Simms, the Cambridge international relations specialist, as “probably in third place after the United States and China, and certainly among the top four or five actors in the global system”.

Third place. Well, well, well. If that is so, then just as the USA looks at Greenland, and China looks at Taiwan, I wonder what the UK should conquer? Ha, ha, ha – the Chagos Islands?

No, Simms. The UK is not a great power because, unlike in America, where power politics is kept entirely separate from protest politics, in England they are tangled up together. Consider, Starmer, Khan etc. Consider the words ‘International Law’, uttered in a strangulated Late Enlightenment accent. Until Dominic Cummings gets the keys to the state cupboard and can sack everyone in the Civil Service, the UK will remain, psychologically, a fifth-rate power: more or less dancing to the tune of Zack Polanski and Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action.

Last year, in February, I wrote for the Daily Sceptic about Trump’s mentioning that he might like to add Greenland to the United States:

This is the sort of thing we are not used to nowadays but was common in previous centuries. Jefferson paid Napoleon $15 million for the purchase of Louisiana. Alaska was bought for $7.2 million under Johnson in 1867. It was very amusing, and flattering to Westminster, when a Danish former minister for the autonomous territory of Greenland, Tom Høyem, who served in the 1980s, and is now 83, claimed that the UK had the right of first refusal if Greenland were to be put up for sale. Some journalists asked the Foreign Office and British Library about this, but, as far as I know, they did not get a reply. Too busy getting rid of the Chagos Islands, possibly. Well, the USA could afford Greenland, the UK could not. The story annoyed the Prime Minister of Greenland, Múte Egede, who has been using the full force of decolonising language to suggest that Greenland should become a mighty state on its own account. Denmark was guilty of genocide, etc. It is “now time to take the next step for our country” to remove the “shackles of the colonial era and move on”, etc. The Americans would like nothing better to get Greenland to move on. An amusing US Representative Buddy Carter has even introduced a bill in Congress to rename Greenland “Red White and Blueland”.

Alas, I took the story unseriously, and whimsically commented that the USA might instead consider buying the UK, or annexing it. Well, if in 2025 the news was something to be ridiculed, now, in 2026, the news is to be taken seriously; or, at least, the press and politicians are taking it all a lot more seriously. The Guardian has one headline:

Europe condemns Trump’s “new colonialism” as Greenland crisis grows

The Spectator has another headline:

This is NATO’s Suez Moment

There is a two-stroke engine here. On the one hand, the idealist Guardian says that we should beware as America is becoming a Big Bad Wolf. On the other hand, the realist Spectator says that we should beware that America is no longer willing to be the Hunter that comes in at the end and shoots the Big Bad Wolf. On the one hand, America is no good (for world order, global justice, international law). And on the other hand, America is no good (as an ally of European powers, defender of European stability, maintainer of European defence against Russia, China et al.) Everyone agrees America is no good. And everyone is paying more attention to America.

That’s two reasons why we are encouraged to take this very seriously.

But note: what we actually have in Greenland is a very small concern that is being magnified by what people suppose it implies into a very great and grave concern. It is a conduit, a possible small cause, a gesture, a thing-in-itself, also a move-on-the-grand-chessboard, a morsel and scrap: Trump’s ‘Greenland Purchase’. However, one thing that I have not seen mentioned clearly anywhere is that there is no casus belli, no cause at all: it is almost pure action, that is, an action that is not a reaction, an offensive gesture that is neither a consequence of some major existential historic grievance (rival China on the island of Taiwan, rival kingdom of Rus in Ukraine) nor the consequence of some relatively trivial or personal Don Pacifico or Dreyfus incident. It is capricious.

The Oxford philosopher R.G. Collingwood (in his book New Leviathan) once asked why we do anything. He said there are four answers, which are, respectively, from most exactly specified to least exactly specified: 1. “Because I have to: it is my duty.” 2. “Because it is right.” 3. “Because it is useful: it benefits me somehow.” 4. “Because!” Trump is confusing everyone because he seems to come from the world of “Because!” This is confusing because this has not been the style of major powers since around the time of the Congress of Vienna. There were a few exponents of “Because!” like Gaddafi and perhaps Saddam Hussein, but they seemed to be medieval throwbacks who suffered medieval deaths. Listening to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart talk about Trump is always amusing since they can barely express a thought without also expressing moral condemnation.

However, since I have nothing to say about this myself, being a historian or philosopher, not a politician, let me turn to parse Mark Carney’s unusual and much admired speech at Davos. Carney has said the following, and I paraphrase after having listened to it:

• The rules-based international order was a fiction: something we talked about though none of us believed in it.
• From now on, we need to be principled and pragmatic.
• Pragmatic = notice that since the advent of Trump we are back to talking about ‘power’ rather than ‘law’.
• This means that we are better able to recognise that the great powers seek their own interests.
• Principled = [and this is the contradiction, or the mixed signalling, which means that Carney’s speech is not pure analysis or philosophy but political] try to establish international order in such a way that it will “function as described”.
• The “middle powers”, especially, should work together for international order since they have most to benefit from it.

I thought the speech was part admission, part continuation: and so entertainingly confusing. In short, a mixed signal. The world has changed, but we shall continue as before. Carney was showing that he is shrewd and sees what is going on. It is a high-wire act. He wants to rebuild the international order while admitting that Trump has effectively undermined the rhetoric of that order – or, has exposed it as rhetoric.

The most important phrase in the speech is “function as described”. This reveals that the major significance of Trump, whether Trump intends it or not, is to encourage other powers to tell the truth. And since the truth of politics is power, not law, this means that powers have to tell the truth about power. For The Rest is Politics this is calamitous, because we should never tell the truth. But for the rest of us, this is surely a good thing.

Who are the middle powers? They fall into two groups. The first group is the Anglosphere sans America plus Europe = UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany etc. The second group is BRICS sans Russia and China. The great powers are, in terms of power, China and America; in terms of self-image, China, America, France, Russia and the United Kingdom. G7 is not so important except that it includes an Asian member in Japan.

Look at this. Really this is about European civilisation. It is Europe that is feeling the cold Arctic wind over this Greenland business, as America does to NATO what Britain for a long time appeared to be doing to the EU. Yes, that is it: Britain is the awkward, island, go-it-alone insider/outsider of Europe, and, by analogy, America is the awkward, independently continental, go-it-alone insider/outsider of the West. This has always been the case. Carney’s reference to “middle powers” helps us see that American foreign policy from 1945 was based on America shoring up middle powers – after having ensured that the United Kingdom, for instance, was no longer a great power (having helped the United Kingdom demolish its foreign reserves and its empire over the course of two wars). Andrew Roberts used to tell us that the US and UK were pals, special relationship and all that, but this is only half the story. The US is perhaps an even bitterer enemy than the French, but a subtler enemy: a Rome to our Greece, tied to us by cultural deference, still ruled by some of the Aeneases who left England to set America up in the first place, and still reading Shakespeare and the English Bible to acquire a sense of who they are. But the one thing that the Americans hated more than anything else was British condescension and the British Empire, while also admiring it.

It will be fascinating to watch statesman, politicians and pundits try to keep up with Trump. He is an old man in a hurry: he wants peace in a hurry, he wants this or that in a hurry. He is hurrying everyone along: but he cannot hurry everyone along for long, and he certainly has no or little idea about consequences. He has the privilege of existing, in the short term, in a world almost perfectly suited to be disrupted by someone unwilling to play by the old rules. If we set aside his vainglory and pleonexia (a useful Greek word for infinite greed), he has been good for the world in encouraging everyone to start telling the truth again. NB: This does not mean he tells the truth.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.