We have all heard of the butterfly effect, the notion that, by gently flapping its brightly-coloured wings somewhere in the Amazon rainforest, a humble insect could set off a chain of events leading to a devastating sandstorm in the Gobi desert. It is an attractive theory, but there are so many butterflies and other tiny creatures fluttering about that it has little practical value.
Nonetheless, something rather similar has just happened in the world of international politics. By declining to hand Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, a bunch of obscure Norwegian lefties – academics, retired politicians and the like – have not only made it much harder for Venezuela to get rid of an appalling dictatorship but have also dealt a body blow to NATO which, as its supporters like to remind us, kept peace in Europe for over 70 years until Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. It is as though a small municipal council somewhere in the backwoods had suddenly found itself called on to decide the fate of the world.
Why does Trump openly crave an award that on previous occasions was given to decidedly warlike people like Yasser Arafat? Perhaps because Barack Obama was granted it for presumably racial reasons soon after he was sworn in as US president and had yet to do anything (if he ever did) to make the “extraordinary contribution to strengthening international diplomacy and cooperation” he was credited with. In any event, Trump must be at least dimly aware that the Nobel Committee has long been a “progressive” stronghold and that its members share the views of their counterparts in his own country who loathe him and everything they think he stands for, so the likelihood of them being nice to him was approximately zero.
For a short while, it looked as though the principal victim of Trump’s strange obsession with the prize was the Venezuelan democratic leader María Corina Machado. By winning and, what was worse, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the most popular politician in her benighted country earned herself a privileged place on the rapidly lengthening list of enemies the great man has it in for. Her attempts to massage his ego by telling the world he really deserved it and then offering him the medals and diplomas that came with it only made matters worse. Since grabbing Nicolás Maduro and putting him in a New York jail, Trump has let her know that she would have to play second fiddle, if that, to Maduro’s sinister understudy, Delcy Rodríguez.
But brushing Machado aside was not enough. Trump lost no time in letting the world know that he was determined to get his own back on those preachy Scandinavians by demanding that the Danes let him have Greenland. In strategic terms, there is much to be said for his argument that the ice-covered wasteland should become sovereign US territory because unless it does the Russians and Chinese could exploit the opportunities that, thanks to global warming – which he says is a leftist scam – are beginning to open up.
However, his way of going about it could hardly be worse. Had he adopted a friendly, softly-softly approach by in effect bribing the less than 60,000 Greenlanders, offering them a million dollars a head after a majority voted in favour of annexation, he or his immediate successor might have pulled off the trick, but he decided that military bullying would help speed things up. He has made it clear that he wants to have Greenland – which he sees as a prime piece of real estate – firmly in his pocket before his term in office runs out.
For Trump, the details, among them the future of the Atlantic Alliance, matter less than his desire to go down in the history books as the man who increased the size of the US by roughly 836,000 square miles. He also relishes the idea of showing the wretched Europeans who is boss. In an effort to counter him, they have been going on and on about the “rules-based order” and the importance of “international law,” by which they mean whatever meets the approval of the United Nations Security Council in which Russia and China are permanent members, but Trump and his minions despise all that rhetorical guff. They know that raw power is what counts and they are perfectly prepared to make full use of it. By dispatching to Greenland, and then withdrawing, a minute token force, Denmark’s allies only succeeded in riling him still further and making themselves look ridiculous.
The Europeans can console themselves with the thought that before too long, the United States could once again be ruled by sensible folk willing to take them seriously, but even if this does happen fairly soon, the disparity between the power they wield and that of the US will continue to be taken into account in Washington. In the last couple of decades, it has widened considerably and there is no reason to believe that much will change in the coming years. Perhaps it is too early for the US to write off Europe entirely, but a great deal will have to happen before the peoples of that part of the world recover their lost mojo. Unless they do so very quickly by beefing up their armed forces and spending much less on welfare, as well as devoting themselves more to the old-fashioned business of having children, their ability to influence events in an unforgiving world will continue to shrink.
Trump’s pathetic desire to win a prize that is awarded by people who despise him is reshaping geopolitics. Like that butterfly’s wings, the whims of a few Norwegians have offended him so much that he has redoubled his efforts to distance the US from a continent that is rolling downhill at an accelerating rate. Many Europeans understand what is happening, but the solutions that are being proposed are unappealing and would require major cultural shifts for them to become acceptable to electorates that are more interested in the price of groceries at the local supermarket than in the world they are preparing for their descendants, that their ability to apply them remains limited. This may be changing: the transformation of the annual get-together in Davos from a woke coven into what some attendees described as a Trump fan club suggests that something important is in the air. However, to paraphrase Virgil, while going down into hell can be wonderfully easy, climbing out back into the daylight is always a fearfully forbidding task.
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