Trump has achived nothing for America and done Putin a big favour

Donald Trump left Davos, Switzerland, with a smile on is face. No-one else did.

That's because Trump thinks he has achieved something great for America, the "framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland", while everybody else is focussed on the damage he has done to the NATO alliance. "It's long-term deal", he says, that "everybody's very happy with". Right. Furthermore, "it'll be forever for Greenland at this point, forever", whatever the hell that means. Trump only spoke with NATO chief Mark Rutte; neither Greenland nor Denmark have had their say yet.

Ironically, Trump achieved next to nothing for America. When he blusters about, "It was an incredible time in Davos", and "We're getting everything we wanted - total security, total access to everything", everybody else knows that he didn't get anything America didn't already have, courtesy of an agreement from the 1950s that Trump seems blissfully unaware of. The US has always been able to place troops, bases and military hardware on the island. Nothing Trump has done has changed that.

The TACO ("Trump Always Chickens Out") monicker has been resurrected, as the US blinked before Europe.

However, as has been said, the damage to NATO is done. As one professor put it, "NATO is based on shared values and trust. What is becoming very clear to European leaders, and to Canada as well, is that these values are not shared any more. And the trust is simply not there." EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas bemoaned the fact that Europe-US relation had "taken a big blow" over the past week.

Vladimir Putin wants more than anything else to destabilize the NATO alliance. Donald Trump has done that for him, without Putin needing to move a finger. As a Democratic congressman phrases it, "Putin is celebrating this misguided effort to extract meaningless concessions that were more about Trump's needs for an abstract win than American national interests".