Trump Rules Out Force on Greenland, Tariff Threats Persist (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: A very warm welcome to Davos over the last hour. We've been watching President Trump, who has been speaking here at the World Economic Forum. Plenty to digest over the course of the next hour. The President currently in a number of bilateral meetings with Greenland, of course, top of the agenda. There was some important news this afternoon on Greenland. The President said he won't use force to take it. He praised the people and the leaders of Denmark, which has a lot of sovereignty over the Arctic island, but he said only the US could defend it. He repeated that Greenland was vital to US and international security, especially for missile defence. Before Mr Trump's arrival in the Swiss resort, European leaders had rebuked the United States' designs on the Danish territory, saying it was upending the world order. Let's hear a little bit of what the US President had to say about it.

[00:00:53] Speaker 2: 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. OK? 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, where we already had it.

[00:01:27] Speaker 1: With us to discuss is our security correspondent, Frank Gardner. It's almost surreal that we have to put at the top of our headlines today the very fact that the United States will not be invading a NATO ally. But there it is. And I guess the Europeans will be breathing a sigh of relief.

[00:01:45] Speaker 3: Well, yeah, but only a qualified sigh of relief, because remember, he's threatening economic tariffs, i.e. sanctions. His speech contained, I would say, a kind of almost predictable mixture of truths, half-truths and untruths. He's perfectly correct when he says that if the US decided to take Greenland by force, it would be unstoppable. And there's no question about that. The concept of Danish forces, tiny Denmark trying to fend off massive United States, would be absurd and it would be irresistible. But he also said things like, what has NATO ever done for us? Well, that's deeply insulting to Denmark, because Denmark lost 44 soldiers in Afghanistan in the wake of 9-11. The only time that NATO's Article 5 has been invoked was when the US got attacked on 9-11 in September 2001 and the whole of NATO came to its defence and a large number of countries, including Denmark, deployed willingly to Afghanistan and Iraq to do the US bidding to help it fight the so-called war on terror under Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. And Denmark lost more troops per size of its population than any other nation. So that's pretty insulting to them. The high watermark of danger I think has possibly passed for now. And I think the best that we can hope for is that Donald Trump possibly gets distracted by something else. Panama Canal, Mexico, Cuba, whatever is next in his sights, because he is primarily focused on that hemisphere. But certainly the statements he's been making leading up to the Davos summit have implied that he's not going to give up on this one. So, yes, it's great that he's not going to do it by force, but he clearly wants to punish those countries that are resisting him, including the United Kingdom, America's so-called closest ally.

[00:03:48] Speaker 1: Yeah, Gary O'Donoghue, our colleague in Washington, was making the point earlier today that there's never a final chapter to many of the pronouncements that Donald Trump makes, and that's the way that he views this particular issue on Greenland. Do you think there's anything that the Europeans could do to placate him?

[00:04:09] Speaker 3: There's always something. I mean, so far, the tactic of kind of flattery and blandishments has not really worked. I mean, you know, there was that famous moment where Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, produced that letter in the Oval Office saying, aha, you know, here is an invitation from His Majesty the King for you to come and have a second state visit. So almost unprecedented, Donald Trump has been given a second state visit to Britain, and yet that hasn't spared Britain from the tariffs. So, you know, the heat needs to be taken out of this, and I think it's a very difficult dilemma for Europe, this, because, I mean, to answer your question, more and more people are saying, well, the only way to deal with a bully, and that's what some people are characterising Donald Trump as, is to stand up to him, is to stand tall and firm, and in this case, you've got French President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Merz of Germany suggesting that economic tariffs could be exercised by Europe to the detriment of the United States, in other words, tit for tat, which is entering a reluctant and damaging trade war. It's not good for anybody, this. But you know what, you're playing with fire here, because let's make no mistake, Europe and the UK still depend for a very large extent on the US for security, for intelligence, for military support. Britain's Trident missiles, for example, that carry the nuclear warheads, that carry Britain's continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, where are they serviced? They're serviced in Virginia, in the United States. So, you know, if the US chose to cut that off, we'd be in trouble. We would no longer have a nuclear deterrent. The Five Eyes military or intelligence-sharing spy alliance between the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the five Anglophone countries, by far the largest contributor to that is the United States, because it's got the massive signals intelligence of the National Security Agency. Lose that, and you blind, to a large extent, those other four countries, including the UK.

[00:06:23] Speaker 1: Which is why many people have commended Sikir Starmer's approach to this, the multi-layered nature of defence and the economy. Frank Garner, thank you very much for that.