Predictability is the most valuable currency of diplomacy. But it’s been in decidedly short supply in Washington since Jan. 20, as the Trump administration meddles in foreign nations’ domestic politics with abandon.
This has made the job of many of the world’s diplomats much harder, as they struggle to calibrate their country’s tone toward Washington while placating the steady churn of anxiety radiating from their bosses. Trade spats and tariff tiffs, reciprocity and revenge all are piling up as President Donald Trump seems hellbent on upending various long-standing alliances, as well as the country’s once solid economy.
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It’s all made for a boom for the foreign desks of well-positioned K Street lobbying shops, which have their pick of the litter—and seemingly no per-month-cost ceiling—for new clients as embassies are trying to hunt down the best U.S. insiders who can help them decode the signals coming from the new administration Some nations are now shelling over six-figure sums every month to have allies of the White House explain the terrain—if they can even find lobbying shops willing to take on yet another client.
Canada and Denmark currently offer a striking contrast in playbooks for responding to a suddenly hostile U.S. While Incoming Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is taking a stiff-arm tactic for the moment, others are like the Danes and trying to accommodate Trump’s impulses.
“I know that these are dark days, dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust,” said Carney on Sunday after being elected his party’s leader in a landslide vote where Trump loomed large. A few months ago, the Liberals were bracing for a resounding defeat among a disaffected Canadian electorate. All that changed in the aftermath of Trump’s campaign for Canada to become the 51st state, reminding Canadians that their leaders matter.
Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was even more direct than Carney in his recent farewell remarks: “Democracy is not a given. Freedom is not a given. Even Canada is not a given.”
That pessimism is permeating across Washington’s diplomatic community. Sometimes it emerges as a bit of gallows humor—or Freudian slip—as was the case recently when the Danish Ambassador to Washington addressed a reception of business leaders, academics, and investors.
“I would just like to raise our glasses in a toast to the longstanding friendship between our two great nations, the United States of Denmark, and the Kingdom,” Jesper Møller Sørensen said, catching himself in a room suddenly full of nervous laughter, given Trump’s persistent demands to take Greenland off Denmark’s hands.
“Can I try that one again?” he asked. “You know what I mean.”
While Denmark’s leaders aren’t adopting the pugnacious stance of Carney and Trudeau, they are seeing their own Trump-related political shift, one that’s expected to play out in Tuesday’s elections in Greenland, in which the country’s desire for independence is an animating factor.
More seriously, Denmark’s de facto business hype man, Minister of Industry, Business, and Financial Affairs Morten Bødskov, said a day after the bungled toast that the kingdom, which covers more than half of Greenland’s budget, was trying to keep an even keel and hold onto historical steadiness.
“The ties between Denmark and the U.S. are extremely strong, and out of that comes a friendship and a trust and a straightforward way of doing things,” the Danish political insider told me, trying to keep his words understated and avoid any harsh collateral damage by a mercurial U.S. President.
It’s a caution that’s common these days. Words like partnership, alliance, and friendship bandy about aplenty along Embassy Row, but it’s no secret that Trump has brought a machete to the diplomatic universe. As he’s upending decades of international norms, his own diplomats at the State Department are bracing for widespread slashing and Hill hands, especially those working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are trying to get a handle on just how severe the coming cuts will be.
Even Trump’s apologists are being blunt to their counterparts in other governments.
“President Trump approaches diplomacy and engages in a very transactional manner, with economics as the foundation and driving force behind international affairs,” retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the president’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told a Council on Foreign Relations audience last week.
Put plainly: there will be a winner and a loser, and Trump has no intentions of being the latter.
Foreign diplomats get this and are trying to adjust as necessary without alienating, in many cases, their most significant trading economic ally. For instance, 16% of the Danish export market winds up in the United States to the tune of about $40 billion.
Long-held assumptions about steady U.S. policy are no longer givens. Since Trump has returned to power, he has sided with—or at least excused—Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and advocated permanently exiling Palestinians from Gaza. A security guarantee for Taiwan is no longer assumed. And he has even suggested that the United States needs to retake the Panama Canal, maybe even by force.
Those capricious moves and bold reversals have fueled the anxiety in the diplomatic corps here in Washington even as allies and outcasts alike are trying to make sense of the moment. Take Bødskov’s trip last month to the states. Denmark’s charm-offensive chief visited Texas before stopping in Washington to promote the long-standing ties between Washington and Copenhagen, including a reception for business leaders and investors to demonstrate a steady environment. Like so many other global leaders, his message was to emphasize the upside for the U.S., noting that Danish companies employ about 200,000 Americans. But with Trump so openly agitating for control of Greenland, it’s getting more difficult to maintain a friendly posture.
“There are new positions in Washington and the rhetoric is new. We, of course, have to handle that,” Bødskov says. “The bonds between Danish companies and American companies are at the highest level ever.”
But so too are the tensions.
