The Greenland Mile

After claiming the “framework of a deal” to expand America’s presence on the world’s largest island, Trump has dropped his threats to invade Greenland. Thank God, because a direct assault on Greenland wasn’t going to be a cakewalk.

The president’s “framework of an agreement”—which still seems rather hazy, a day after its announcement—doesn’t change the hostile nature of Greenland’s climate or terrain, and the best way to address those challenges is, ironically, enlisting the very NATO countries that Trump and his vice president have been so assiduously alienating. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Julia Ioffe

January 22, 2026

Taco emojis—a callback to the Wall Street mantra “Trump always chickens out”—ricocheted across Washington foreign policy text threads as the president announced on Wednesday that he had taken tariffs off the table in his quest to conquer Greenland. He and Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, had hammered out the “framework of a deal” in Davos that would supposedly give the U.S. sovereignty over “small pockets” of Greenland around U.S. military bases.