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NPR's podcast, Trump's Terms is your source for same day updates on big news about the Trump administration. Short, focused episodes, one topic at a time, about five minutes or so. We carry out reporting from across all of NPR's coverage. So you are always getting the biggest, most urgent stories. Listen to Trump's Terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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But it does seem that he is kind of testing the willingness of allies and potential allies to push back. And this was an opportunity for him to see what was their limit.
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It's Thursday. Do we know what's happening with Greenland? For weeks, President Trump has made plain he wants the United States to own the Arctic island. He dropped threats of military action. He also threatened tariffs against US Allies to get his way. President Trump appears to have backed off those threats for now. This is Sources and Methods from npr. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Every week on this podcast, we dive deep on some of the biggest national security stories with the NPR reporters who are out there covering them. If you are new here, welcome. We have a new episode every Thursday and the name of our show, Sources and Methods is a nod to a phrase those in the NATSAC world know well. It's shorthand for how do we know what we know and who told us? Well, this week, all eyes and all ears have been on a small Swiss mountain town. That town, of course, is Davos. And that is where we find reporter Willem Marx. Hi there, Willem. Welcome to Sources and Methods.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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And I also want to welcome back our stalwart Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman in the studio with me.
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So good to be here. I'll try to watch my language this time.
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Yes, you were getting a little salty last time, so behave. I will timestamp our podcast. We are taping this at 1:30 in Washington, D.C. that would be 7:30pm where you are in Switzerland, Willem, and where. It has been quite the week. So let's get into it. Greenland. President Trump says there is now a framework of a deal in place, although details of that framework, they're starting to leak, but they're still very, I would say, not entirely clear at this hour. We're going to get into that. But Willem, would you start just by setting the stage? All the diplomatic back and forth and all the threats and the backing off of the threats that's been unfolding in Davos this week, this tiny Swiss sleepy ski town 51 weeks of the year, not this week. Tell us about the World Economic Forum and just paint us a picture so.
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You take a train two and a half hours from Zurich, one of the major cities in Switzerland. You climb up into the mountains to a beautiful, long, elongated valley with a series of small towns, all of them with ski slopes, and you get to the end of the line to Davos, where there's a kind of combination of old chocolate box wooden chalets and then some quite brutalist modern architecture. And that tends to be housing some of the conference centers and corporate shindigs, I think you could call them, for some of the biggest companies on earth that come here every year to tout their wares alongside dozens, if not hundreds of policymakers and political leaders. It's a very strange mix.
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Plus, not to mention all the journalists who throng in to try to get to all of those statesmen and tycoons. So it's into this that President Trump flies this week, delivers a lengthy speech in which he takes a swipe at French President Emmanuel Macron, also at Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, among others. His bottom line is the insistence that the US Must own Greenland, that this is good not just for the U.S. but for NATO, for the whole world. And then by the end of the day yester Wednesday, he says he's got a deal. So, Willem, what do we know about this deal, this framework of a deal?
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I'm going to disappoint you, Mary Louise. We don't know a lot for sure in terms of confirmed information from public sources.
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The US does not own Greenland that we know of at this hour.
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Not yet. Not yet. There may be conversations about that down the road. It's not clear. It seems like there have been these very, very key discussions between President Trump and a man called Mark Rutted, who is the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. He's a former Dutch prime minister. I have a Dutch passport. I've known the guy for years. He's very charming, very glib and very astute politically. He stayed on top of a coalition in the Netherlands for a long time, and those skills have been brought to bear, not for the first time, with President Trump this week. The discussions seem to have unlocked some of the US President's concerns about the role that Greenland would play in Arctic security. And Rutte, on behalf of NATO at least, seems to have made some sorts of assurances about security efforts, potentially security expenditure and security access for the US in that North Atlantic massive island as Greenland is.
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So Ruta has somehow managed to back us up from the precipice. For now, we have not seen the end of NATO the alliance he leads this week. But I mean, I'll point out the obvious, which is that NATO is not Greenland, NATO is not Denmark and Greenland is part of Denmark. Were Danish officials involved in these conversations? Are they on board with whatever has been agreed?
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That is a very delicate question. There was no one from Denmark or their delegation in the room with Rutte and Trump. The Danish have made very clear that Rota does not speak on behalf of them, even though he speaks on behalf of an alliance to which they're members. In fact, you know, we've heard from the Danish Prime Minister Meta Fredriksen since this announcement that they can't negotiate on their sovereignty. And in fact the Danish Prime Minister Merta Frederickson has been meeting with the British Prime Minister in the UK presumably for conversations about this pretty exclusively. Very grateful that the UK and others stood with Denmark over the last couple of weeks after we heard those initial threats from President Trump. But it's pretty clear from what we've heard both from Danish officials and Greenlandic officials over the last few hours that essentially they haven't been that closely involved in any of these conversations, but they look forward to having further conversations with the US Side in the days and weeks to come.
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Tom Bowman, what are you hearing from sources here in the States?
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Well, as far as this so called framework, I talked to a European official. He said one of the things they're looking at is providing the US with another US Military base or bases in Greenland. Of course they have one there now that does early warning and also operates satellites. Trump importantly mentioned the Golden Dome, his missile defense system. So it's possible that this additional base or another extra bases could be used for Golden Dome. You could have interceptor missiles there or some high tech equipment and so forth and so on. Now there are reports that, well right now with the current base there, it flies the Danish flag. Denmark has sovereignty over it. The reports what the US wants is if we can't have all of Greenland, just give us a little piece so we can put this base or other bases there.
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So there is a US Flag flying somewhere over there.
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And as Willem pointed out, the Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen said sovereignty is non negotiable. It's not going to happen. Here's the other thing. I'm hearing that they're talking about mineral rights as well in Greenland, maybe giving the US access to those mineral rights. But here's the thing. Denmark can't sign off on that on its own. It's an economic issue. The Greenland would also have to sign up with that as well. And also, you know, looking forward, as we saw with Trump in the past, he demanded that NATO forces increase their defense spending to 5%. You're likely going to see the dealmaker basically say, I want you NATO to spend even more on Arctic defense. So keep an eye on that. That's likely going to happen.
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So bottom line, it sounds like there's still many, many details, at least that we don't know in the wider public still to be sorted out. And I'm still struggling. And I'll throw this to either of you to wr around what may have changed because Denmark and Greenland had signaled they were open to an increased US Military footprint on Greenland. That was always on the table.
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Well, and also the defense agreement from 1951 allows the US to create more military bases. It was always sort of a bravado, Trump thing about I want all of Greenland, just like, remember, I want to take the Panama Canal back. So it's kind of hard and nobody listen. No one ever thought there was going to be military action by the US Going after Greenland. Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune said no one is taking that seriously. The other thing is, if they headed down that road, it would explode NATO, a NATO member attacking another NATO member. The other members would have to come.
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To its aid just to stay on this point because this was a huge question hanging over the proceedings this week. And President Trump in Davos on Wednesday, he did explicitly say he won't use military force to acquire Greenland.
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We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be frankly, unstoppable. But I won't do that. Okay, now everyone's saying, oh, good. That's probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.
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We just heard Trump there saying, I don't want to use force. I won't use force. Willem, sum up what European reaction has been to what they can make out of what has been agreed and what questions are still outstanding. President Trump just said, everybody's saying, oh, good. They're breathing a sigh of relief. Is Europe collectively exhaling today?
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Certainly, some of the officials here in Davos seemingly very, very relieved that there was an off ramp that was found and that Rutte managed to get the president in the public domain, acknowledging that in terms of actual public reactions from European leaders, you know, Keir Starmer The British prime minister is in a sense the easiest person for us to hear from because he was meeting with his Danish counterpart in the UK today and he talked through about his relief, not just about the fact that the threat against Greenland in a military sense has been seemingly taken off the table, but also that the tariffs, let's not forget, against eight European nations, including the UK Were also by President Trump, annulled, cancelled, taken off the table. What's now happened is good in the sense the threat of tariffs has gone and now we can get on with the job of rolling up our sleeves and answering the question how do we improve security in the Arctic? And that was something that really beyond even what was always quite a bombastic military threat against the island. It was the idea that by sending individual, very small numbers of military personnel up there by these eight European countries, including the UK that that in and of itself would draw the president's anger to such an extent that he'd be willing to impose 10% tariffs. That's what really angered Starmer, Macron and others in Europe when they found that they would be the recipients of economic damage because of their decision to stand by their fellow NATO ally, in this case Denmark.
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We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, more on those tariffs which President Trump had spent days escalating threats about tariffs towards Europe. On Wednesday, he seemed to back away, but is the damage already done? That's ahead on Sources and Methods from npr. This Message comes from MongoDB. Tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale? Think outside rows and columns. MongoDB is built for developers by developers. Start building faster@mongodb.com build this message comes from Brex.
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Of AI agents that handle manual finance tasks.
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Learn more@brex.com.
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And we're back. It has been a whirlwind of a week. In the span of a few days, President Trump threatened tariffs on his NATO allies. Then he backed down. No new tariffs for now. There's an acronym for this, by the way, meant to capture the president's habit of announcing sweeping tariffs. And then the markets plummet and then President Trump walks it all back. That acronym is TACO T A C O Trump always chickens out. That was coined last year by Robert Armstrong, a columnist for the Financial Times. And I will note, Trump doesn't always back down. He has implemented plenty of tariffs in his first year back in office. But Willem Marx in Europe, where you are, this threat of another tariff war, and then Europe saying, well, if you do that, we'll pull out the tariff bazooka, as Macron is fond of calling it, what damage may already be done?
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Well, there's two separate ways of talking about damage to the transatlantic relationship. One of them is military and one of them is economic. And what we've seen over the past several years, and this dates back to Trump's first term, was a very clear realization by European leaders. And Macron was really foremost amongst this. But to some extent, British prime ministers, as well as some of the German leaders that we've seen over the years, a recognition that the funding model for their militaries, for their security agencies, needed to change. And that's not just driven by the United States. Of course, you have to think about the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But leaving that aside, the economic threats that we've seen over the last 12 months, and I've been in Switzerland reporting on the consequences of trade war potential between the US And China, they had talks near Geneva last year. It's been absolutely top of mind for European leaders, particularly in the first few months of Trump's term, when that was an ever present threat for them. And for countries like France, like the UK they would have been really catastrophic in terms of their export potential to the United States. We've seen, Mary Louise, some of those trade flows change really dramatically. And here in Davos, where there's all these big companies talking about this, supply chains, tech stacks, the way they think about where they're going to source material, it has created a bifurcation, a sense of economic silos in some senses and in some sectors that I don't think anyone can put that genie back in the bottle after what we've seen.
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What about just the question of basic trust amongst allies, which is hard to quantify, but which is a real thing, that if the US Says it will do something, it will do this thing. When tariffs are dangled or threatened and then walked back, and then dangled and then walked back, does it leave Europe? Both political leaders and business leaders, in a very difficult situation, trying to figure out how to plan.
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In the corporate sense, reliability and stability is key. And again and again and again, conversations I've had with corporate leaders this week has really been concerned about that lack of stability and reliability. And I guess in a sense, trust. Trust in what will happen in the future, in the political sense, it depends on the leader, depends on their constituency domestically, Trump is not popular in many European countries. That's no secret. And so there's, you know, not a huge amount of political pressure amongst ordinary citizens on their leaders to, you know, bend the knee, as it were, to President Trump. But there is huge economic pressure that those leaders recognize. They understand what could happen to their economies. And in terms of trust, you've heard very clearly from people like Emmanuel Macron, from Mark Carney, now is the time there has been a rupture, even though we've seen this off ramp offered by Mark Rutte when it comes to Greenland, and from President Trump in terms of tariffs. These leaders of other G7 nations saying, There is a new world order. We have to accommodate that reality and we have to forge a new path.
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Mary Louise along those lines, I had lunch with a military attache from an Eastern European country, and he was raising these issues of trust as well, saying, if Trump keeps heading down this road about NATO, I don't like NATO. NATO has to spend more. I don't trust NATO. Don't need NATO. He said, there could be a permanent rupture. You could never go back, and maybe Europe will basically have to say, you know what? We're on our own.
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Speaking of rupture, it doesn't feel like any discussion about what unfolded in Davos this week would be complete. Without pausing a moment on the remarkable speech by the leader of Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney. He spoke on 2 Tuesday. His speech went completely viral. I wonder whether, over time it will be the one that is more enduring than President Trump's. He said, the world order that the US built and which the US has led for 80 years is not just strained, but it has come apart.
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Let me be direct.
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We are in the midst of a.
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Rupture, not a transition.
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I was watching that from Chicago here in the U.S. willem, how was it watched? How was it received by the many US Allies listening in the room at Davos?
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Well, he got a very long, very enthusiastic standing ovation when he finished speaking. The moderator, Gideon Rackman from the Financial Times of an interview immediately afterwards on stage pointed out that, you know, standing ovation at Davos was very rare. And, you know, by all accounts, Mr. Carney spent a lot of time and energy on that speech. It was, you know, as a student, once upon a time of Ciceronian rhetoric. There was some really fantastic use of rhetoric and rhetorical devices in the speech. And it does seem to have been a bit of a watershed moment. It was a time for a leader of a G7 nation, a NATO nation who really pointed out an alternative direction for major economies, for major military powers.
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In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice, compete with each other for favor or to combine to create a third path with impact.
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You know, describing Canada as a mid level power in the context of countries like the US And Russia and China, but pointing out that, you know, collaboration amongst such mid sized powers was an alternative path. I think he called it Canada's path at the end of the speech and he invited others to join Canada on that path.
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We choose it openly and confidently and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.
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To me, it seemed very, very strong directionally in terms of trying to forge a new path. And for people in Davos talking to them since that speech was delivered, a lot of Europeans in particular, very, very happy about the fact that someone was willing to say those things on that.
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Stage, to say some of the quiet things out loud. So this is very big picture. But take a swing at it with me. Where does this week leave us? We've been talking through real questions over whether President Trump wants Greenland badly enough to potentially blow up the NATO alliance over it. Real questions as we heard from Mark Carney about a rupture in the world order. Where are we? What is the state of the world order as we close out this week in January 2026?
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Look, I don't think he's going to take Greenland as we've just talked about. A lot of this is bluster, bravado. Remember, he said, I'm going to take back the Panama Canal. And that never happened. The Panamanians basically axed a deal with China.
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But it doesn't appear that the international law or the existing structure of that international law was the constraint on him.
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Right. But I think as we were talking about the speech by Carney, I think that's a warning shot across the bow for the United States. It's like, listen, where is this going? And again, the people you all talk with say, what's the future of NATO? Is the US Going to walk away from NATO? Are we in this on our own? I think those are the serious questions.
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And you don't feel like we got an answer to that this morning?
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I don't think we got an answer to that.
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Not a definitive one?
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No.
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Willem.
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Mary Louise, one thing I'd say is when we talk about the world order, really striking image today was President Trump on stage with more than a dozen other either leaders or very senior officials from a bunch of countries, most of them what we would call developing non Western countries, all of whom willing to sign up to essentially a charter for what he called his board of peace that was originally designated on Gaza. He's talked about this board becoming an alternative to the UN a few days ago. And then a bit to Tom's point, he's then turned around and said I'm a fan of the UN and its potential. It doesn't always live up to its potential. But it does seem that he is kind of testing the willingness of allies and potential allies to push back. And some of the conversations I've had this week have been really interesting about that. This idea that he is seeing what the boundaries are seeing where he can probe and potentially take advantage, he thinks in this zero sum way. Someone said to me this morning, and this was an opportunity for him to see what was zero for other people, what was their limit, when would they come back at him and push on a specific issue. The idea that he's able to stand up a new non governmental body that is essentially something at his direct disposal is a testament seemingly to his willingness to really shake up the status quo. And Davos, whether you like it or not, represents a very long standing status quo, a collaboration between policymakers and and business executives. And he's willing to come here in his helicopter and throw a huge spanner in the works.
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Let's take a quick break. When we get back, we'll check on what's happening in Minnesota and Osint. We'll crack open each other's reporters notebooks. That's ahead on Sources and Methods from npr. We're back. And we want to check in on one other spot where we are paying attention this week, which is Minnesota. US Active duty military are on standby for possible deployment. Now this comes after President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection act to suppress ongoing protests there. So Tom explained deploying troops to Greenland off the table for definitely off the table. Deploying troops to Minnesota may be on what's going on.
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It's on the table. 1,500 troops in Alaska, active duty troops with the 11th Airborne Division have been put on notice to deploy. And just recently, the other day, yesterday, I believe that another 500 MPs from Fort Bragg, North Carolina have military police, Military police have also been put on notice to deploy. Now nothing has happened yet. They're kind of getting, making sure everyone is healthy and the paperwork is done so they know how many troops could deploy if need be. But nothing yet. And also the so it's exactly what.
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It sounds like standby, they may go, they may not. The option is open.
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Right. And meanwhile, the Minnesota National Guard, they've been put on standby. Governor Tim Waltz, they also have not deployed yet. So all of this is on standby. And so it's uncertain what's going to happen. If you look at the protests there, they're not rising to the level of sending in either National Guard or active duty troops. That could change as we're speaking right now, but we don't get a sense that. But it's again rising to the level you would need military people to go in there and help police this city. Minneapolis.
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Remind us the last time the Insurrection.
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Act was invoked, it was 1992 after the Rodney King beatings. What's interesting about that time is first of all, the protests were huge and a lot of there were deaths. You know, buildings were set on fire. And what's interesting there is the governor, Pete Wilson of California wanted US Active duty troops to come in, as did the mayor because they couldn't handle the situation. So they did invoke President H.W. bush, invoke the Insurrection act and send in active duty troops. Among them were Marines. And one of the Marine officers was a guy named John Kelly who went on to be a four star general and later President Trump's chief of staff in his first term, one of his.
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Several chiefs of staff in his first term. Okay. So as we approach the end of the show, we want to say thank you to listeners who wrote in response to our holiday episode about some of our favorite spy novels. Among them, Ryan in Portland wrote to recommend you'd Face Tomorrow. That's trilogy by Javier Marias listener Jo Plugged is Berry and especially her first novel the Peacock and the Sparrow. And listener Thomas wrote, and I quote, I enjoyed this episode. I had thought that you'd skipped Ian Fleming due to him being more of a pulp author and was very happy to hear him getting a mention at the end. It is true, Thomas, you can't talk about spy novels without talking about Ian Fleming of of course, James Bond fame. If you are listening and you want to revisit any of the books we mentioned in that episode, you can find a transcript of that and every one of our episodes@npr.org thanks as always for writing to us about anything you hear on the show. We love to read your mail. Our email is Sources and methods, all one word@NPR.org now as always, we will end with OSINT Open source intelligence, the not so secret yet sometimes very telling details. We stumble across in our reporting. Tom, you're a veteran. Why don't you go first?
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Well, we've all seen the videos of ICE agents out in Minneapolis. They're all kitted out. They look like the Green Berets I would run around with in Afghanistan. Now, I'm told that some high school principals in New Jersey do not want their National Guardsmen, the recruiters, to show up in the high schools wearing their camo gear because it's scaring the students and also the staff. They think they're ICE agents.
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They would be okay if they showed up in jeans and a polo.
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I think that would be quite all right. Just no camo.
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Filem, what do you have for osint?
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So Davos is a pretty unique place in this regard, Marilu. You have all these world leaders, all these business tycoons, not just coming to give presentations, but also, you know, hanging out in the evenings, drinking and. You know, it's very few places on earth where I find myself at a cocktail party with a former British Prime Minister, a former British Foreign Minister, and the recently retired head of MI6 chatting away to me over a couple of negronis. But that's where I found myself last night. That was pretty extraordinary. But the story I wanted to relate to you was earlier in the week, I slunk off to have a very quiet lunch on my own at a restaurant. I walked in there, I ordered a bowl of pasta. The former Italian Foreign Minister walked in, who I've met a few times before. I said hello. And then I looked to the next door table and there was another very tall, familiar figure with long hair, a man called Sebastian Kurtz, who was the Austrian Chancellor until a few years ago. He resigned amid a pretty massive corruption scandal that he was involved in. And next to him was a guy that looked super, super, super familiar. And so I got my phone out and I looked up what has Sebastian Kurtz been up to recently? And of course he has very Davos. This is helped to co found an AI powered cyber security firm. And the gentleman next to him had been the CEO of a company you may may recognize nso, the guys behind the Pegasus spyware.
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Ah.
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Opposite them in this restaurant, as they're being waited on by some very, very friendly Italian waiters, are three men from Central Asia, from what I can see. And I waited for one of them to stand up and he had a Kazakh flag pin in his lapel. And you suddenly think, where else do you see a former Austrian chancellor, one of the guys behind Pegasus, pitching AI powered cybersecurity solutions to the Kazakh government. I leave you with that.
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You're making us very jealous of your glamorous life. We did not have although Tom and I are obviously doing this. Tom's in a dinner suit here and I'm in a ball again. So we got that going for us.
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Where's the champagne?
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Choking down our turkey sandwiches from the NPR canteen.
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It's a $50 plate of pasta.
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So there are downsides expense account on that, I'm sure.
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What kind of pasta did you have? Key detail.
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I had some mushroom filled tortellini. It was very good.
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This is very lovely. I hope you expensed it to npr. I'm also sorry. I can't compete with that. So I'm sorry I let myself go last. But I will stay in Europe for my Osint and note soccer diplomacy or lack thereof. This is circling back to the tariffs that were being threatened by the US On European allies until just a few hours ago. But should he change his mind again, Europe obviously wants to be ready. And I am a soccer mom. I'm a soccer fan in my own right. So I was very interested to follow along with conversations apparently that have been unfolding in various European capitals this week about the possibility, very, very remote possibility, but still, of boycotting the World cup, the 2026 FIFA World cup, which is of course, being hosted here in the US And Mexico and Canada this summer. It would, of course, be a lot less fun and a lot less interesting if Europe doesn't show up, like if Germany and England and France and Portugal, if they don't play, it's a much smaller tournament. And there's been a lot of commentary. I've been tracking in European newspapers wondering if soccer bureaucrats may hold more cards and wield more leverage than the European Commission or Europe's finance ministers. All kinds of ways to flex your soft power. So that is it for OSINT and for Sources and Methods. This week I've been speaking with NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman here in the studio and our reporter Villa Marx in Davos. Thanks so much to you both.
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You're welcome.
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B
Thanks so much.
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I'm Mary Louise Kelly. We are back next week with another episode of SOURCES AND methods. From npr, it.