Former Vice President Al Gore said he was shocked by President Donald Trump's threats against a NATO ally during a speech in Switzerland.
Trump told European leaders in Davos that he would not send troops to seize Greenland from Denmark but still demanded ownership of the world's largest island, saying he would impose severe economic and security penalties if he was not given what he wanted, and Gore reacted to the speech afterwards in an interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins.
"Well, I think it was a classic Trump performance," Gore said. "I would hate to be the fact checker that had to go through that speech, but I think there was one element of the speech that I would interpret it as a positive. I think perhaps because of the stock market's reaction yesterday, he appeared to back down from his previous threat to use military force to acquire Greenland, and if I'm interpreting that correctly, I think that's a good thing. It was, of course, crazy that he would do such a thing in the first place, but I think he backed down and that's good."
Gore then appeared to correct himself and say that he could not say whether Trump's apparent backdown from military force was influenced by Tuesday's sell-off of U.S. Treasury bonds and the stock market plunge.
"Oh, I can only speculate," Gore said. "I don't know what's inside his mind. It would be quite something if I could see inside his mind, but many people have speculated that the bond market and the stock market really have a lot of influence on him, and when it goes down almost 900 points and people do interpret it as a sell-America trade, that may well have been the reason he backed down. It may have also been that a lot of people who are close to him, who are more tethered to reality, convinced him that he had made a mistake."
Collins asked the former vice president to comment on Trump's claims that he had a right to Greenland because the U.S. had put bases there when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, but Gore said he did not agree with that assessment.
"No, not at all," he said. "You know, when the United States was attacked on 9/11, Denmark immediately responded as part of NATO and had more per capita casualties than any other member of NATO, defending the United States against an attack. NATO has been a tremendous foreign policy achievement for the United States, as our effort to build up other alliances to establish the rule of law, a rules-based order, all of that has benefited the United States enormously, and to try to take a wrecking ball to these alliances, the way he took a wrecking ball to the East Wing, is literally insane."
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