Donald Trump: The landlord of the Free World

I n the gilded cage of Mar-a-Lago, the lease on the post-war order has just expired. Donald Trump, fresh from his “Absolute Resolve” adventure in Caracas, has finally said the quiet part out loud: protection requires possession.

His declaration — that the United States only defends what it owns — is not merely a negotiating tactic for Greenland; it is the foreclosure notice for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

For decades, European chancelleries have comforted themselves with the fiction that American isolationism was a passing storm, a temporary glitch in the liberal operating system. They were wrong. The “Donroe Doctrine” — a clumsy but dangerous portmanteau of Donald and Monroe — is not about retreating to the homeland. It is about expanding the homeland to match the empire.

Consider the brutal efficiency of his logic. “You don’t defend leases,” the US President quipped, dismissing seventy-five years of Article 5 obligations with the wave of a developer’s hand. In his world, a tenant has no rights that a landlord is bound to respect. If Denmark wishes to remain under the American nuclear umbrella, it seems it must first become American real estate. This places Sir Keir Starmer and Chancellor Friedrich Merz in an excruciating bind.

The “Starmer-Scholz” accord — that fragile lifeboat of Anglo-German cooperation — was designed to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down (or at least, calm). But if Washington is now in the business of hostile takeovers rather than alliances, the calculus shifts. Europe is no longer a partner; it is a distress sale.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin watches from the Kremlin, doubtless amused by the spectacle. His Oreshnik missiles, raining down on Lviv, serve as a noisy reminder that while the West bickers over deeds and titles, the East deals in iron and blood. The Russian President understands Trump’s language implicitly. He, too, believes that sovereignty is a luxury good, available only to those with the throw-weight to defend it.

The temptation for Europe will be to play for time, to offer up “strategic partnerships” and “resource corridors” in the hope of sating the American appetite. This would be a mistake. A protection racket does not end because the shopkeeper pays the first week’s vig; it ends when the shopkeeper buys a shotgun.

Unless the core of Europe — Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, Madrid — can summon the will to construct a deterrent that does not rely on the whims of a Florida retiree, we may find that we are all, eventually, up for rent. The 21st century is shaping up to be a cold, hard place for tenants. It is time Europe bought its own house.

GOING FURTHER

• Spies, drones and blowtorches: How the US captured Maduro | BBC NEWS

• Trump: ‘We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not’ | CNBC

• Trump says US needs to 'own' Greenland to prevent Russia and China from taking it | BBC NEWS

• Joint declaration on deepening and enhancing UK-Germany relations | 10 Downing Street

• Trump’s plan to make Greenlanders an offer they can’t refuse | THE TELEGRAPH

• Russia hits Ukraine with rarely used Oreshnik missile in fresh strikes | BBC NEWS

• Like Stalin before him, the only thing Putin respects is military strength. We must show him some | THE TELEGRAPH

• Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland | THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

• MAGA goes global: Trump’s plan for Europe | EUROPEAN COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Europeans TODAY on 13 January 2026.

▪ Cover: Flickr/The White House. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)