WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the bond between America and other NATO nations is weaker now, after President Trump’s aggressive talk about acquiring Greenland and many threats to impose tariffs.
“This lack of stability and reliability, I think, is causing what were traditionally reliable trade partners to be saying to other countries, ‘Hey, maybe you and I should talk, because I'm not sure about what's going on with the United States,’” Murkowski told Alaska reporters by Zoom Friday from Washington.
She recently returned from a congressional trip to Europe. In Copenhagen and Davos, she and other lawmakers tried to repair alliances and reassure foreign leaders that Congress would not allow Trump to seize Greenland.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump himself, pledged not to take Greenland by force.
Murkowski said that promise only went so far.
“With the military action off the table – that is good,” she said. “But what we have seen is a loss of faith and trust in the United States from so many of our friends and allies. In so many of the conversations that I was part of, it kept coming back to the issue of trust and reliability.”
At Davos, Trump spoke of Greenland dismissively as “a piece of ice” that Denmark should be willing to give the United States. Murkowski, who has traveled to Greenland many times for international Arctic meetings, said that was hard to hear.
“Never once was referenced the people who live there, particularly the indigenous people who have lived there for generations and generations,” she said.
The big beneficiary from Trump’s fraying of European alliances, she said, is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sees NATO as a threat to his ambitions in Ukraine and beyond.
