The question wrestling its way through the crevices of the Swiss Alps in Davos this week is one that has dogged American politics for a decade: Does appeasing President Donald Trump buy security, or does it only invite further demands that eventually undermine or risk one’s own mission?
For Republican lawmakers, American business executives and university leaders, the answer has long been clear in practice, if not principle: Avoid raising ire. Make concessions where possible. Hope that quiet acquiescence will spare you the next attack.
Now, one year into Trump’s second term, with renewed territorial ambitions and threats of economic warfare against America’s closest allies, that same calculation is ricocheting throughout the democratic world — with some longtime U.S. allies reaching a different conclusion.
The paradigm has shifted, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared at the World Economic Forum this week, warning world leaders against the instinct to “go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety” in the face of American antagonism. “It won’t.”
It was the bluntest articulation yet of what has become unmistakable: America’s closest allies are debating whether appeasement of President Donald Trump’s expansionist threats and economic coercion will buy safety — or invite relentless accommodations that risk their own futures.
On Wednesday, addressing global leaders from the same stage in Switzerland, Trump declared: “All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”
He went on to call it “our territory” — a striking claim about land that belongs to Denmark, a NATO ally.
Carney urged the globe’s non-superpowers to view this as a moment of reckoning — one in which it’s understood that long-trusted security alliances have concretely shifted in the face of American demands and that “if you are [a country] not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Trump, in response, taunted his Canadian counterpart effectively affirming the thesis of his speech. “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
The exchange encapsulated a broader reckoning among America’s traditional partners about the transactional approach that has defined Trump’s wielding of power at home — and whether it can or should be replicated abroad.
A strategy born in Washington
For the last decade in American politics, the appease-Trump model has prevailed as the overwhelming posture taken by Republican Party leaders to dealing with the president. Time and again, elected officials who initially expressed private dismay at his norm-breaking behavior ultimately concluded that resistance was either futile or politically fatal.
Those few who challenged him openly — including former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, or former Sens. Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake — found themselves isolated, their political careers cut short or their influence within the party eviscerated.
Flake, one of his earliest conservative defectors, captured the dynamic in 2017, when he announced he would not seek another term in office. In his book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” Flake wrote that “Too often [we in Congress] observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, ‘Someone should do something!’ without seeming to realize that that someone is us. And so, that unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.”
Since President Trump’s return to power in 2025, that silence has calcified into standard operating procedure.
The pattern now extends well beyond Capitol Hill. Across American institutions, a calculus of accommodation has taken hold.
Universities have quietly complied with administration demands, wary of losing federal research funding. Media companies navigating regulatory approval for major mergers have modulated their coverage. Corporations dependent on government contracts have muted criticism. None want to become the next target of presidential pique. For international leaders, the stakes are different, but the dilemma is familiar. Trump has spent the past year musing publicly about annexing Canada as the 51st state and pressuring it with threats of punitive tariffs — an economic coercion campaign aimed at America’s northern neighbor and one of its closest trading partners. Yet this week, some of the U.S.’s closest longtime partners made a keen turn away from appeasing Trump. After Trump threatened to impose steep new tariffs on the European countries that vowed to help Greenland resist U.S. expansionism, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated a clear message to other European allies: “Appeasement is always a sign of weakness. Europe cannot afford to be weak…” The message did not go unnoticed in Moscow. Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian official who serves as President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy and met this week with Trump advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, posted online in response to Tusk: “Appeasement is your only choice.”He then posted a response to a member of Denmark’s Parliament: “Resistance is futile.” The Russian intervention underscored the broader geopolitical stakes. Putin has spent years testing whether Western unity would hold in the face of aggression; now he is watching to see whether America’s own allies will adopt the accommodationist posture that has served the Kremlin’s interests. Whether the turn away from appeasement represents a momentary flash of resistance or a sustained shift in strategy remains unclear. European nations remain deeply dependent on American military protection, particularly as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on. Canada’s economy is inextricably linked to its southern neighbor. But Carney’s speech — and Tusk’s warning — suggested that at least some leaders have concluded that the cost of endless accommodation may ultimately exceed the cost of confrontation. It is a lesson that Republican lawmakers learned in reverse: that the cost of confronting Trump, for their own purposes, exceeded the cost of accommodation. Whether that same calculus applies to sovereign nations with their own security interests and democratic mandates is the question now being tested on the global stage.
Vaughn Hillyard is a senior White House reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
An open question
