TACO or “Trump-Always-Chickens-Out” was especially apparent in Davos Switzerland this week when the US president backed down on his threat to use force to acquire Greenland. He also dropped his threat to impose additional tariffs on the eight European countries—including Britain—that backed Denmark’s refusal to cede sovereignty.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte appears to have stepped in at the last minute to prevent Trump from dropping the expected Davos bombshell that would have left NATO in tatters. Mind you he probably had some help from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Key Republicans in Congress, the stock market and even the opinion polls were also against feeding Trump’s property-driven ego by the forced acquisition of the misnamed Greenland.

Even the other side of the world—Asia—joined battle. Japanese Defense MinisterKoizumi Shinjiro warned at a conference to strengthen US-Asia military ties: “The Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic are inseparable and indivisible”

Europe may have won this battle but it is battered and bruised and faces a long war with a dangerously unpredictable president whose administration appears to live in Alice’s looking glass world.

The old continent’s leaders are having a difficult time adjusting to the new America. For 80 years it has been a friend, confidant, ally, partner and, most of all, protector. The political, cultural, educational, intelligence, military and financial establishments are so intermeshed as to be almost impossible to imagine untangling them let alone actually doing so.

And then Trump arrives. Europe is villified. It is suffering “civilisational erasure”. It has done nothing for America. Europe’s loyalty to the alliance is being questioned by an American president whose grasp of history and reality is somewhere between tenuous and non-existent.

Europe’s leaders are practically spluttering with anger. But their ire is nothing being belt by the friends and families of the 1,000-plus non-American NATO soldiers who died fighting Afghanistan after 9/11 when America invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty for the first and only time in the history of the alliance.”Nato,” said Trump “has done nothing to help America.” They gave their lives

It is possible that an agreement can be reached on US bases in Greenland using as a template the British sovereign bases in Cyprus. This would mean that Denmark would allow the US to carve out bits of Greenland that would become sovereign American territory and would be used solely for security purposes.

If the arrangement followed the deal for the British bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia then the US would be given full sovereignty over designated territory in Greenland. That territory would be governed by US law.

To make a similar arrangement palatable to Cypriot public opinion, the British had to agree that there would be no economic exploitation, commercial development, customs or migration abuse or extraction of natural resources on the sovereign airbases. Legally speaking, the Cypriot bases are what is known as “sterile” territory.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between Cyprus and Greenland. Trump is not interested in Greenland only for national security purposes. He wants access to Greenland’s minerals; probably as much as he wants bases there. He also wants control of the Arctic shipping lanes and minerals in the 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone that extends out from Greenland’s shoreline.

Trump started his battle with Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro by claiming he had to stop narco-traffickers and gangland immigrants. But as soon as Maduro was whisked out of the country the focus shifted to moving US oil companies back into th4 country as quickly as possible. He knows that naked capitalism looks bad with the voters. But it is behind almost all of his foreign policy moves.

Trump has gone quiet for the moment, perhaps even cooperative. But Europe’s leaders have had enough experience of this troublesome president to know that his mood, tongue, pen and policies can change overnight if he does not get what he wants.

In the meantime, Europe’s leaders have had another wake-up call warning them of the need to untangle their relationship with the United States. To increase their defense spending and build up their defense industries. To develop an alternative tech industry. To look elsewhere for investments in both directions. To create alternative intelligence and banking links. To reduce their cultural and educational ties with the US.

Europe should not isolate itself from the United States. There is a reasonable chance Trump is a glitch in the history of the alliance. But it appears that even without him, the US has been moving away from multilateralism and alliances and towards a unilateral go-it-alone-we-don’t-need-or-want-anyone’s-help approach to the world.

They will discover that the world it doesn’t work that way. At least not as well as it has for the past 80 years. But America — and the rest of the world — will have to find out the hard way.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”