Host/Reporter (2:53)

Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get his strong language.

David Rennie (2:58)

But I think he, I think genuinely, Mark Rutter, who's a very, very smart, experienced former Dutch prime minister, I think he thinks he's taking one for the team and he's doing his best to keep Donald Trump on side. And they do this provisional deal that then Trump is calling the concept of a deal, whatever that means, that does appear to stop a long way short of owning Greenland. And so if you are the Europeans and you are optimists, and that's not a lot of optimists in European capitals right now, you would say that. I don't know. People are saying this is a taco, you know, was Trump chickening out? But certainly it was not irrelevant. People suspect that the markets were in, you know, fell sharply the day before. That tends to get, you know, Trump's billionaire finance friends on the phone saying, you know, this is not great. And the very first flickers of, I don't know if it's twitching of the corpse. I'm referring to the willingness of the US Congress to stand up to the President.

Host/Reporter (3:59)

There's no emergency with Greenland. That's ridiculous. There's no threat in Greenland. To invade Greenland would be weapons grade stupid.

David Rennie (4:08)

So I guess for Europeans, the lesson is that provoking Donald Trump head on seems to be a pretty bad idea, certainly very risky. But raising the costs and making him realize that there is going to be resistance to his latest piece of bullying can sometimes work. And so there is a certain degree of confidence that the worst has been avoided for now. But the big, big picture is that trust is being shredded and destroyed in ways that are not coming back as long as Donald Trump is in the Oval Office.

Noel King (4:47)

Do we know, David, what is in this framework, this provisional deal, what it actually sets out?

David Rennie (4:52)

There are leaks to various news and organizations. The Danish government, let alone the Greenlandic government, have not been involved in formal negotiations on this. And so it's like a kind of game of telephone, right? We're sort of trying to guess what was said in a room between the Secretary General of NATO and the President of the United States. But at least there, the ideas seem to be actually pretty unobjectionable ideas about a new enhanced security presence for NATO with American command. But other NATO members rolling in to do more to protect the Arctic, perhaps more guarantees that America gets first dibs, to use the technical term, on rare earths and minerals that are lying under the kind of permafrost in Greenland. But the tragedy, if you're Denmark or any other European government right now is that Donald Trump could have had all of those perfectly sensible things before he started threatening to take Greenland and before he started posting social media pictures of him looking at Greenland with the stars and stripes on the map. He doesn't need to own, let alone invade, Greenland to have a bigger American force on the island and to get. Get American companies to sign deals to extract the minerals. That's what, to Europeans is just so baffling and worrying and ultimately depressing about this whole utterly unnecessary crisis. And so even if it's now being unwound, what was it all for?

Noel King (6:20)

Explain, if you would, why Trump didn't need to do this. There was a treaty in place here already.

David Rennie (6:26)

Right at the end of World War II, the Americans basically occupied Greenland. It became incredibly strategically important during the Cold War because basically, Greenland is the thing that Soviet missiles would have flown over had they ever been launched at the continental U.S. as a result, during the Cold War, the U.S. had 17 bases on Greenland and up to 10,000 troops and radar stations and airplanes. And all of that was entirely covered by a treaty between the US and Denmark. Goes back to, I think, 1951, just after the end of World War II, updated in the early 2000s to give the US even greater liberty to put whatever it wanted in the one base that still remains. Denmark was basically totally happy to let the Americans do whatever they wanted on Greenland for America's security. There was no need to pick this fight.

Noel King (7:21)

How did European leaders act yesterday when Trump announces there's a framework? Did they say, you know, yeah, he did the art of the deal on us?

David Rennie (7:30)

So, no, I think they are congratulating themselves on having raised the costs and hoping that that is why he climbed down. I think there is now immediately concern that European unity, which was reasonably solid at the beginning of the week, when Trump was threatening to put tariffs on those countries that had sent a few troops to Greenland recently to show solidarity with the Danes and show that NATO was taking green security seriously. That led to quite a lot of unity. Now that Donald Trump has said he's not going to impose those tariffs, Europe still needs to decide what it's going to do about a big trade deal agreed months ago with the US which is frankly pretty one sided. Back a week ago, five days ago, when there was European unity in the face of the latest Trump threats, it looked as if the whole EU US Trade deal was probably on ice and there was going to be quite a unified pushback. And so, as ever, because nothing is neat and Tidy in the kind of the universe that we now live in, Trump has climbed down. That's a huge relief for Denmark. But actually, Europe now has a problem in terms of unity because there will undoubtedly be European countries going, okay, crisis over, let's not pick a trade war with this guy. He's not going to tariff a group of us. So do we really want to pick a larger fight about the trade deal that was struck with him last year? And so there is, you know, when the pressure goes off, the unity tends to crumble. So there's always a cloud to every silver lining in Trump world. Right?

Noel King (9:05)

There's been this question in the US in the last week or so among people who do not like Donald Trump and the way he conducts himself on the world stage, which will Europe grow a spine? Will Europe push back? You said Europe is asking itself, did it successfully raise the cost here? If it did, how did it raise the cost? What was the threat from Europe that that may have put Trump in his place?

David Rennie (9:32)

So if it turns out to be, you know, we open the papers the next, you know, the next two days, and we see kind of tiktoks where people are saying, you know, it was the markets crashing, people made phone calls then maybe that European threat to start hitting Trump tariffs with counter tariff Europe, you know, $93 billion more or less of retaliatory tariffs, maybe that did the trick. But not just cause I'm sitting in London and I'm a Brit and therefore in my heart, part of Europe. Even if we left, I have a lot of sympathy for European leaders. And actually I have sympathy for the British government too, because it's all very well to say, you know, we should just tell Donald Trump where to get off. And I can tell you there are plenty of ordinary British people I speak to who know what I do for a living. And when, you know, when we talk about Trump, they're like, why don't we just tell the guy to back off and, you know, just get stuffed. And to use the kind of technical term, the problem is that Britain, along with several other European countries, our defence is absolutely dependent on the United States for years to come. And we saw the British prime minister on Monday this week give a press briefing about Greenland, where he was pretty tough on Greenland. Any decision about the future status of.

Host/Reporter (10:42)

Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland and the kingdom of Denmark alone.

David Rennie (10:50)

But then he said, and his face betrayed his kind of deep, deep, deep kind of anxiety, stroke, despair. He said, I need to remind people we need a good relationship with America to look after our defence under President.

Host/Reporter (11:04)

Trump, as under previous presidents, we're determined to keep that relationship strong, constructive and focused on results.

David Rennie (11:14)

And that approach is delivering, through sustained.

Host/Reporter (11:17)

Engagement, our cooperation on defence, nuclear capability.

David Rennie (11:22)

And intelligence remains as close and effective as anywhere in the world, keeping Britain.

Host/Reporter (11:29)

Safe in an increasingly dangerous environment.

David Rennie (11:33)

We're now into a totally, totally new and really frightening world for Europe. So for sure, Europe can be a bit kind of Euroweeny, but our dilemmas are real and painful.

Noel King (11:54)

David Rennie of leading magazine the Economist. Coming up, how did Europe raise the cost? David's words for Donald Trump.

Host/Reporter (12:18)

This week on Net Worth and chill.

Noel King (12:20)

I'm breaking down the essential money tips.

Host/Reporter (12:22)

For every stage of your relationship, from.

David Rennie (12:24)

The first date to forever.

Host/Reporter (12:25)

Who actually pays on the first date?

Noel King (12:27)

How do you split rent when you move in together?

Host/Reporter (12:29)

If one of you makes way more.

David Rennie (12:30)

Than than the other person? And yes, we need to talk about prenups. Plus, I'm sharing why I believe in equity over equality when it comes to splitting costs.

Noel King (12:40)

Whether you're single and swiping, moving in.

Host/Reporter (12:42)

With your partner, or planning your wedding.

Noel King (12:44)

This episode will help you navigate the.

David Rennie (12:46)

Uncomfortable money conversations that can make or break your relationship.

Host/Reporter (12:49)

Listen wherever you get your podcasts or.

Noel King (12:51)

Watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF in the mid-1980s.

Host/Reporter (12:56)

Nintendo basically single handedly saved the gaming industry with the Nintendo Entertainment System. And then a toy company convinced Nintendo that maybe the future of gaming wasn't controllers, but was instead this weird arm sleeve glove thing that let you control video games with your fingers. It was called the Power Glove and it was awful. This week on Version History, a new chat show about old technology. We traced the whole story of the Power Glove, which failed spectacularly and also kind of invented VR. That's version History. Wherever you get podcasts, lists, World's most dangerous Morning show today Explained.

Noel King (13:38)

I'm Noel King. All right, so the question is, why did President Trump climb down yesterday instead of dancing one step closer to World War 3? Did Europe do something or have something to deter him? We called up Henry Farrell. He's a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins and he in the hours before Trump pulled back on his threats, Professor Farrell wrote an op ed for the New York Times called Europe Has a Bazooka. Time to use it. It's about deterrence strategy. Professor Farrell, let's start this way. It's been roughly 80 years since the last World War, which means we've been doing something right, all of us. How do big powers deter attacks from other big powers?

Host/Reporter (14:21)

So I think that you really want to start with the nuclear age and the nuclear era, and you even want to start with the Cuban Missile crisis, which was a moment when the United States and the USSR scared the hell out of each other because it was very, very close to a situation in which we would have actually had a nuclear war and possibly the extinction of humanity. So missiles are 1500 miles range and more. We're pointing at American cities. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk.

David Rennie (14:52)

The course of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would.

Host/Reporter (14:56)

Be ashes in our mouth. So after that, we began to see the development of a set of concepts, a set of ideas which really tried to figure out how can you work through this situation of nuclear crisis, the risk of nuclear Armageddon, the fact that the United States and the USSR have fundamentally different political interests, and how can you actually get to a place of stability? First of all, I think you want to avoid a nuclear Armageddon by treating the fact that these weapons actually exist as incredibly important nuclear weapons, that is, but at the same time trying to avoid using them. So in a certain sense, what you're doing is you're bargaining and you're debating in the shadow of this possibility of Armageddon and the shadow of the possibility of using these kinds of weapons. So you begin to get the development of all of these ideas by people such as Thomas Schelling, who won a Nobel Prize for economics. He's a game theorist who begins to work out, how do you deter? How do you, in a sense, use the fact that you have nuclear weapons as something that people will pay attention to without ever actually having to use them. The name comes from games like chess, but most game theory went well beyond what they call zero sum games, which are games of pure opposition, and became situations in which there is both conflict and a need for cooperation to avoid disastrous outcomes. And then on top of that, there is a second set of questions which involve, if you actually get into a nuclear confrontation, how do you deal with this? How do you figure out ways that you can not, observe, march straight up the ladder to outright Armageddon, but perhaps figure out ways to defuse, to step back and to create a. A situation in which you step back from the brink of the precipice? And so the key example, which I think shows some of the brutality, in a certain sense of this way of thinking that Schelling offers, is troops in West Berlin during the Cold War. The idea behind this was that as Schelling describes these people, these Soldiers, Their job, in a certain sense, was to, as he said it bluntly, their job is to die. How can 12,000 Western troops or 7,000Americans defend Berlin? What they're really doing is they're threatening to die. And what he meant by that was something like the following, that the United States did not want the USSR And Eastern Germany to take over West Berlin. It would have been super duper easy for them to do that in conventional military terms, because West Berlin is about 100 miles inside East Germany's national territory. And so what the calculus is is that if you, these soldiers there, these soldiers are, in a sense, they're not going to be able to defend the city particularly well, but they will die or be captured if the city is, in fact, attacked by the Soviet Union. And if that happens, then any president is not going to want to be able to stand over the fact that thousands of troops have been captured and killed. This is likely to lead to further escalation. And so Schelling's argument is that this risk of further escalation and the possibility, maybe a 10% possibility, that this might actually lead to nuclear war, that this is sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from attacking. Part of the effectiveness of those troops in Berlin was the Soviets couldn't really perceive what might happen, and they couldn't be sure that a US President wouldn't do something foolhardy like starting a third world war.

Noel King (18:38)

Okay, so all of this history is on your mind when you write an op ed for the New York Times that ends up being titled Europe Has a Bazooka, It's Time to Use it. So explain to me how from the Cold War and those incidents decades ago, you map this onto the present day, where, yes, the US And Europe have different interests. Here, nobody is threatening anybody with a nuclear weapon. But Donald Trump is making some statements that very clearly make Europe very nervous. Where do we see deterrence theory operating now, today?

Host/Reporter (19:13)

So I think we see it in two ways. First of all, we see these eight European countries who send a small military force for a brief period of exercises to Greenland.

Noel King (19:23)

Europe is pushing back on President Trump's push to acquire Greenland, with troops from several European countries now arriving there.

David Rennie (19:32)

NATO forces are on exercise in Greenland at a time when American designs on the island threaten the alliance's very existence.

Host/Reporter (19:40)

And so what they are doing here is they are setting up a tripwire, which is like a less powerful version of what the United States did with West Berlin. So really, what they're doing here is they are saying effectively they are communicating to Trump. They deny that they're doing this, but it's very clearly the message that they are trying to send. They're communicating to Trump that if Trump actually goes ahead and invades Greenland, that there are going to be eight other NATO allies who are willing to be on Greenland and Denmark's side if this happens. And so the implicit message there pretty clearly is, you invade Greenland, you're going to get rid of NATO. You don't want to get rid of NATO. And that message is received loud and clear. And that is one of the reasons plausibly, why Trump initially, he goes from these saber rattling threats where he suggests that he is indeed going to invade Greenland, very possibly he moves instead to economic measures of one sort or another. In particular, these tariffs, he imposes tariffs against these eight European countries in order to punish for what they do. And then that leaves a second set of questions for Europe, which is, how did they respond to that? And they have this very weird, very complicated, very awkward legislative mechanism called the anti coercion instrument, which possibly serves as a very imperfect tripwire. And that is more or less where the argument goes.

Noel King (21:05)

How does that serve as an economic tripwire? Explain that, if you would.

Host/Reporter (21:10)

Okay, so the idea behind the anti coercion mechanism, this is a legal instrument that the European Union brought into being, which allows them to retaliate in a wide variety of ways. It's one of these very vague seeming instruments which allows the EU legally to retaliate against economic coercion by, for example, blocking investments, by taking away intellectual property, by sort of imposing import or export restrictions. It's very, very open ended. The French leader called on the EU to be ready to activate its powerful anti coercion mechanism, colloquially called the trade bazooka. And we have to use them when we are not respected. The anti coercion mechanism is a powerful instrument and we should not hesitate to deploy it in today's tough environment. But the interesting feature about it is that once you start using the coercion instrument, it becomes at least somewhat difficult to stop using it. So what happens is that the member states of the European Union, they ask the European Commission, which is a separate, somewhat independent body, to prepare a set of proposals for what kinds of punishments should happen. And then they have an opportunity to vote on those proposals. But in order to stop those proposals from going through, you have to have at least four of the member states of the European Union agreeing. So in a certain sense, it's a train which starts to rumble out of the station. It's possible for Member states to stop that train from rumbling out of the station. But it is not entirely straightforward for them to do this.

Noel King (22:49)

Okay, so here's where it gets interesting because we are speaking on Wednesday afternoon, at which point President Trump says he had a productive meeting, his words, with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that, quote, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and in fact, the entire Arctic region. And then he goes on to say that I will not be imposing the tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1, which makes it seem like the Europe did not have to push the economic tripwire, it did not have to use the economic bazooka. Trump back down anyway, or am I missing something?

Host/Reporter (23:26)

So I don't think you are missing something completely, but I do think that there's probably some interesting story to be told which we haven't yet seen. As you say, this is all brand new. And I am really waiting for good journalism to provide a kind of tick tock or a detailed explanation of what happened when. But here's some interesting clues as to what is happening which come from some of the statements of the people who were at Davos representing Trump before he got there. So that's the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant and Lutnick, who is the Commerce Secretary. And so you see over a period of two days, a huge difference in the ways that they are talking about the problem. So it begins with Besant being quite insulting to Europe, more or less saying, well, yeah, so they're just going to mount some kind of a committee of inquiry or words to that effect, sort of. Let's see how far that gets. Well, having worked with the Europeans, my guess is their next move will be to form a working group, the dreaded European working group. So in other words, completely dismissing the possibility that Europe can do anything which is effective. And then a few hours later, he is saying that Europeans really shouldn't escalate. We really don't want you to escalate. Please don't escalate. Don't escalate, don't escalate, don't escalate. Everyone take a deep breath. Do not escalate. Do not escalate. And President Trump has a strategy here. Hear him out and then everything will be fine. And so that suggests that he has been having conversations in between the first statement and the second, where clearly there has been some real sense that there is a coalition which is engaging against this measure and that coalition is sufficiently credible that the United States has something to worry about. And so it really does look like a climb down, disguised as a declaration of enormous victory. The fact that this is happening through Ruta and through NATO, rather than, for example, through direct negotiations with Denmark, suggests that what is going to happen is that we're going to get some kind of agreement on security in the Arctic region, which everybody is more or less on the same page. On. And Trump will declare this a glorious victory over Greenland and then move on. On.

Noel King (26:00)

He's professor henry farrell of johns hopkins. He was produced by dustin desoto. Miles bryan did the a. Amina el saadi is our editor. Andrea lopez crusado checks the facts. And david tadashore is our engineer today. I'm na will king. It's today expl?

Host/Reporter (26:16)

Sa.