"Don't Trust My Bank"
Trump's Greenland gambit signals that America has lost faith in the institution that has offered reliable protection for 75 years
Suppose you have a lot of money in a bank.
In fact, it’s a bank you founded.
You put up most of the money to build out a branch network with state-of-the-art safe deposit facilities.
Yes, you invited a bunch of other shareholders to invest in the bank. They don’t pay as much for the upkeep, but they don’t have as much say in the management either. For the last 75 years, despite a few attempted robberies and financial crises, your bank has given you better protection than you could have imagined. Almost as important, the security of your assets has underpinned enormous economic returns for you and your shareholders.
But one day you wake up, and you decide that all these other shareholders are really just freeloading. You’re bearing most of the burden. They do nothing at board meetings but sip espresso and recite condescending aphorisms. You are thinking big things about your future, and they are petty and annoying.
What do you do?
The worst part about President Trump’s Greenland strategy is not that he is attempting to seize land from friends who would gladly host new U.S. bases and help to block new Chinese investments. It’s not even that he is threatening a fresh trade war with America’s most important trade and investment partner. Nor, perhaps, is the cascade of ancient border disputes that this effort may revive.
Worst of all, he has told everyone that Washington doesn’t trust the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to ensure America’s own security.
When Trump belittles Denmark’s “dogsleds” as insufficient to protect Greenland, he is really saying that the NATO alliance, which has kept the European peace since its founding documents were signed in 1949, cannot be counted upon to defend U.S. interests. The organization that deterred the mighty Soviet military and its Warsaw Pact allies isn’t up to patrolling the “Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap” for Russian submarines. The compact that has mounted complex joint operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Libya cannot manage the interception of a few Chinese icebreakers.
Trump has long raised questions about NATO. “Do you think they’re going to come and protect us? They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure,” he told reporters last year. But when he made a similar statement yesterday in the context of his latest Greenland gambit, the message was unmistakable that Washington has officially lost faith in the Atlantic alliance.
It’s the geopolitical equivalent of saying: “Don’t trust my bank.”
And that is not just corrosive to the bank that you have spent years and billions building into a reliable institution with an unmatched track record. It also puts your own treasure at immediate risk, since you haven’t even begun to think about another bank to hold your money.
Excellent analogy