It’s time for Washington to step up and stop Trump

As the political heat builds around the chilly topic of Greenland and its pivotal role in Arctic security, a tetchy US-Europe relationship is being strained to breaking point. For what happens next, think of this Trump vs Europe brawl as a massive game of chicken.

Everyone in this scenario has something they are angsty about. Greenland’s security faces real threats from Russia and a Chinese push to invest heavily in the North Sea shipping channel, to cut sailing times between the Pacific and Atlantic by passing north of Russia as climate change melts the ice sheet. Greenland’s critical minerals are hotly sought after, which makes it a European concern moving to centre stage from the far northern sidelines.

The manner of Donald Trump’s lunge for control, and his declaration that he needs to “have Greenland”, is a sign of a fierce new era of the president’s expansionism busting apart the remnants of the ragged “rules-based order” that prohibits states from simply making a territorial lurch at countries they deem strategically important – in this case, declaring that Denmark, which administers Greenland’s security and foreign policy, should cede control of the island to the US on a “might equals right” basis that inevitably favours America.

Add to that anxiety about the impact of a threatened new round of tariffs on the UK and Europe as revenge for standing up to the US over Greenland, and the question, as an American president in pugnacious mood and core members of his administration descend in full security pomp on the World Economic Forum at Davos, is: which chicken blinks first? It is a crowded coop, for sure.

On the UK side, Keir Starmer is right to say that talking about cancelling the King’s visit to the US is an unwise retaliation idea – it drags the royals into the political dirt fight and is hardly likely to soften Trump’s heart in terms of dropping an extra tariff threat towards Britain. The decision to join Nato and much of Europe in pushing back against the US idea of a “total and complete” purchase of Greenland has already cooled relations.

Possibly, however, the US – rather than Europe – holds the key to how this crisis works out. Two interlinked elements inside the US could be a game-changer in a crisis that is ostensibly about a thinly populated Arctic landmass – but is more fundamentally about the scope and limits of US authority. One is the constitutional court. The other is Congress, which has been largely supine on Trump’s punitive use of tariffs, but where unease is stirring at the economic cost borne by US consumers when trade dries up and prices rise.

As well as roiling the global order, at home the president has rewritten a host of rules and ditched checks and balances at will, often wrong-footing his foes by simply proceeding without heed to objections or laws. He has had some cover on this in regard to tariffs, after Republican leaders put in place a policy last year that blocked attempts to overturn them by returning the matter to the “floor” for debate and voting. That prohibition expires in the next week or so.

Even sooner – possibly this week – the mighty Supreme Court ruling will drop on the legal basis (or lack of it) for tariffs – a decision that might well sway opinion in Congress and among some Republicans who are getting twitchier about the repeated hammer blows to trade by a mercurial president. Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, is the latest of a growing number of Republicans publicly opposing his administration’s efforts to acquire Greenland.

The court, a mix of senior judges with widely differing stances on interpreting the constitution politically, was swayed heavily rightwards during the first Trump era. Yet it does still rule inconveniently at times – recently in Trump v Illinois (most of these cases sound like potential drama doc titles), judging that the administration did not have the right to impose the National Guard on Illinois over the head of its Democratic governor in order to quell protests at immigration raids.

That could be a template for another move tying Trump’s hands – two lesser courts have ruled that the president has moved in on powers that rightly belong to Congress as the legislative branch of power, not to the presidency, when it comes to tariffs.

That may, however, be what one senior Democrat legal adviser calls “wish-casting” – putting an optimistic gloss on a more likely outcome, which is that the court may back Trump on tariffs. That is certainly the view of the powerful Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, due to arrive in Davos as senior economic voice in the administration on Tuesday to meet with the world’s top business leaders (and some nervous finance ministers, too).

He has said that the court should uphold Trump’s argument on the intriguing logic that “the national emergency is avoiding a national emergency” – ie, that giving America more direct control of Greenland would stave off a wider geopolitical crisis. It is neat, if perhaps a bit sweeping as a legal case.

Anyway, overturning a signature economic policy would infuriate Trump, who might well find other ways to effectively impose punitive measures – ironically, for a president who distrusts climate change action, by boosting carbon taxes on imports that are emissions-heavy in their production.

In short, where there is a will to wield tariffs as a weapon, Trump can doubtless find a way to do so. The argument is more pragmatically about whether a united pushback from Europe – deploying figures he trusts, such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, to mitigate Trump’s heated threat of more levies that would further silt up transatlantic trade – might be more productive.

The optimist case is the “taco” strategy – “Trump always chickens out”. It means that when the markets react negatively to his tariff threats by getting “the yips”, as the president once put it in an obscure golfing reference, he eventually reaches some less heated agreement.

But this time, it feels fiercer. And as all good political and business investors know, past performance is no guide to future returns. The “yips” are therefore back in abundance, as the gap in Atlantic understanding widens by the day – and a president with a mission descends to ruffle the feathers of European leaders and global business elites huddling in the Alps.

Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and co-host of the ‘Politics at Sam and Anne’s’ podcast