After dominating the news for a fortnight, the Greenland issue has finally gone quiet. European leaders, as well as the Greenlanders themselves, seem to have accepted Donald Trump’s belated assurance that he would not use force to seize the territory. But in trying to justify his Greenland blustering, Trump chose to make an issue out of an even more obscure spot, the Chagos Islands.
Readers of this blog have an advantage here, since we’ve covered the Chagos dispute in the past: see here, here and here. The islands, in the Indian Ocean, were the subject of a long-running dispute between Britain and Mauritius, complicated by the presence of a major American base on the largest island, Diego Garcia. But in 2022, when Liz Truss was prime minister, Britain agreed to negotiate over sovereignty, and an agreement was reached in 2024 to recognise the islands as belonging to Mauritius, subject to a 99-year lease on Diego Garcia.
Despite the fact that it was the Conservatives that started this process, and that the Americans were kept on board the whole time, Trump and the Conservative leadership have now collaborated to make an issue of the agreement: another case of effeminate Europeans selling out to dark-skinned malefactors. As James Brocklesby remarks, an agreement to peacefully implement international law “increasingly jars with Trump’s vision of the world.”
To the Conservatives, languishing ten points behind the far right in the polls, this must have seemed like an ideal opportunity to get some coverage. But there’s already ample evidence that cozying up to Trump is not a vote winner in most democracies: last year’s elections in Canada and Australia made that clear. And as Trump won more unfavorable headlines over Greenland, even the far-right parties that have enjoyed his patronage started to have second thoughts.
A variety of far-right leaders assured voters that they did not support the Greenland move and had no intention of acting as Trump’s puppets. They may even be sincere about that, although their similar protestations about Vladimir Putin following the invasion of Ukraine were not always followed through. But their electorates are going to be hard to convince.
It’s a reminder of something we’ve noted here several times, that rival nationalisms are incompatible even in theory. Parties of the left can at least in principle co-operate across borders, since they notionally believe in internationalism – however often they fall short in practice. But imposing a single line upon the French and Dutch far right, or upon their Slovak and Hungarian counterparts, or upon Germans and Poles, would tax far greater minds than Trump’s. And of course Trump’s patronage of Europe’s extremists is not a matter of disinterested benevolence: he backs them because he expects them to dance to his tune.
It also raises the question of whether Trump’s repeated, and repeatedly erratic, interventions on the world stage are going to alienate his supporters in the US: many of whom, as the media constantly remind us, backed him as a proponent of non-intervention in foreign affairs, or “America first”.
No doubt a few will be put off, but to my mind any expectation of a big shift on this account rests on a misunderstanding. Support for non-intervention is much weaker than it appears on the surface, especially when we’re talking about intervention of the Trumpian sort, which is mostly rhetorical. Many might object to sending American troops overseas, but hardly anyone objects on principle to more limited intervention: what they object to is intervention on what by their lights is the wrong side.
This was the basis of “America first”, both the Trumpian version and the 1940s original: its leaders objected to intervention to defend democracy, not because they disliked intervention but because they disliked democracy. Trump and his allies have railed against support for Ukraine and for various other democratic causes, but it does not follow that their voters are likely to punish them when they intervene to aid the enemies of democracy.
The danger for Trump comes from the other direction – those who voted for him not because of his distinctive positions, but because they were traditional Republicans and he was the Republican candidate. For those voters, even if they now call themselves Trumpists, democracy and American power are good things, and they may eventually jack up against a leader who seems to be undermining one and devaluing the other.
The World is Not Enough 