"US unpredictability won't persist beyond Trump" | Berlin Briefing Podcast – Live at #MSC2026

Ian Bremmer

President, Eurasia Group

Greenland is a good example of this. There was absolutely zero interest in Trump to negotiate the national interests of the US with NATO, with Denmark, with Greenland, with any of the allies. It was purely about ego, a little bit of money: "This has to be mine." That is absolutely not in the interests [of] the United States. It is truly not. It is just Trump. There is a big gap there. We have never seen that in history before. And, on those issues, the Europeans need to be resolute; they should be surprised, but they also need to understand that those things will not persist beyond Trump. That unreliability and unpredictability you’re talking about. That is specific to this guy. And, when Trump is gone — and Trump is already getting constrained and pushed back on this kind of stuff: on Greenland, on Minneapolis and ICE, on saying he’s going to nationalize the elections. And — immediately — the Republican heads of the Senate and the House come out publicly and say, "No, you’re not." That’s not happened before. So, when the Europeans that have this special relationship with the US see that the president of the US is acting in ways that are not actually aligned with the country: Whoa! Now, that’s a problem for everybody. That’s not just a problem for Europe. That’s a problem for the world. That's a problem for America. But it’s not going to persist. And so, I think that we have to — if you want to start figuring out not just what the problem is but how you are going to respond to it, let us collectively understand that there are two different types of problems: one of which is long term, structural, persistent that we can respond to, but the other is deeply urgent, but not permanent.

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