



Davos, Trump, and the fragile future of multilateralism
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : The air in Davos this year was thick with trepidation. It wasn’t just anxiety about the global economy that weighed on those gathered at the World Economic Forum.
Looming larger was the fate of the much-vaunted transatlantic alliance—and whether US President Donald Trump would act on his threat to seize Greenland from Denmark by force, a move that would have effectively shattered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The irony was hard to miss. NATO was formed in 1949 to contain the former Soviet Union.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) removed that original threat. More recently, Russia—particularly after its invasion of Ukraine—has been seen as Europe’s primary security challenge. Some even speculated that China could eventually become NATO’s central preoccupation.
However, few anticipated that the most serious threat would come from within the alliance itself, long held up as a model of intergovernmental military cohesion. At the heart of the treaty lies the commitment that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all", triggering collective retaliation. That principle was put to the test after 9/11, when Article 5 was invoked, and a US-led NATO force took on Al-Qaeda and its supporters in Afghanistan.
Now, Trump was openly threatening Denmark and other European nations for supporting it on Greenland. Had that threat materialized, it would have amounted to a rupture of NATO itself. There was, therefore, a quiet collective sigh of relief after Trump’s speech on 21 January.
Read on livemint.com