It’s likely that few people started off this week expecting that president-elect Donald Trump’s desire to buy Greenland would be a standout story.
Or that Trump’s insistence on taking back the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico “The Gulf of America.” Or his continued references to Canada as America’s “51st State” while threatening our northern neighbor with a 25 percent tariff.
It may appear that Trump is playing a practical joke on the world by making these proposals. But maybe not.
There’s at least one prominent voice who thinks that maybe there’s a method to his madness, some clear goals and a few bedrock principles guiding them: Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and President Barack Obama’s second U.S. trade representative.
“I think that on one hand, President Trump is the master of an unconventional approach to foreign policy and diplomacy, which sometimes perhaps gets in the way of the fact that underlying what he’s saying there are grains of truth that we should take seriously,” Froman said.
In this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive, Froman and Playbook co-author Eugene Daniels discuss the state of affairs in the world that Trump is stepping into, how world leaders are watching and reacting to Trump’s every word and what he thinks Trump will do differently than Biden in global hot spots such as Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and yes, Greenland.
