When President Donald Trump took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20th, he delivered a speech that was characteristically bombastic, tangential, and yet—beneath the noise—revealing of fundamental truths about the transatlantic relationship and the future of European power. To understand what Trump said requires the discipline to separate his inflammatory rhetoric from the substantive policy signals buried within it. First and foremost, Trump made clear that he wants a confident and strong Europe, not one that is becoming, in his words, more and more unrecognisable due to mass immigration from the non-Western parts of the world.
Yes, Trump was provocative. Yes, he mocked Denmark as “ungrateful”, joked about Switzerland being “only good because of us”, and delivered the memorable line that without America, “You’d all be speaking German and maybe a little bit of Japanese”. Given the fact that he said this in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, this was a bit like a Frenchman telling an American audience that without French support during the Revolutionary War “everybody in the US would be speaking English”. Also, his constant ignorance of the sacrifices made by European soldiers who were sent to fight with their American allies in Iraq and Afghanistan is more than annoying. Relative to population size, Denmark lost as many soldiers in Afghanistan as the US.
These statements were crude, reductive, and designed for maximum theatrical effect. But this is how negotiations work in the Trump lexicon: He opens with maximum pressure, maximum visibility, maximum affront to ego. It is not subtle diplomacy. It is not the language of Metternich. It is the language of a deal-maker who believes that showing strength and demanding gratitude is the path to favourable outcomes.
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