Capitals Uncovered, ep 23: Trump and Greenland

Welcome to Capitals Uncovered, the transatlantic current affairs programme hosted by journalists Martin Sieff and Pelle Neroth Taylor. This episode’s special guest is Steve Bonta, publisher of The New American.

In this episode, the hosts examine Donald Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland and what it reveals about shifting U.S.–European relations. From Neroth Taylor’s perspective, Europe’s political leaders are increasingly weak at home yet fixated on confronting Russia, risking dangerous escalation by attempting to draw the United States into a direct conflict. Trump’s confrontation with Europe over Greenland is interpreted as a means of pressuring European elites, weakening NATO in practice, and signalling that the U.S. will no longer underwrite European security ambitions.

Steve Bonta explains that the original Monroe Doctrine (1823) was fundamentally defensive: American non-interference in Europe in exchange for European non-interference in the Western Hemisphere. Crucially, the doctrine did not authorize U.S. intervention in Latin America. It was a negative doctrine: keep Europe out, not give America license to intervene. The U.S. claimed no right to police, occupy, or reform other American states.

Later, more muscular interpretations—that the United States had the right and duty to intervene in Western Hemisphere countries suffering from “chronic wrongdoing”—emerged and lack legitimacy in his view. Under the original doctrine, intervention in Venezuela could be justified, while the annexation of Greenland, as a long-standing European possession, would not.