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PBS News Hour - Segments

Greenland push helped Trump address Arctic security, Rebeccah Heinrichs says

PBS News Hour - Segments

PBS NewsHour

Daily News, News

4.11K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For perspective on the crisis over Greenland and what comes next for the U.S. and its allies, Geoff Bennett spoke with Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0

And for perspective now, we turn to Rebecca Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

0:05.4

That's the think tank in Washington, D.C. Thanks for coming in.

0:08.5

Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

0:09.7

I want to start with your reaction to President Trump today, calling off tariff threats he had issued to help secure ownership of Greenland while also backing away from a military invasion of that territory.

0:20.5

Right. So I think two big points. It was clear to me during his speech at Davos that he wanted

0:26.0

to disabuse anybody of the notion that the United States was credibly thinking of using military

0:31.8

force against Greenland. And the other thing I think is important is that President Trump

0:36.4

threatened these tariffs

0:37.7

against these particular allies in response to what he perceived as those allies potentially

0:44.5

threatening the United States.

0:46.0

It was clarified that the reason those allies were deploying troops there was in response

0:50.4

to President Trump, alerting them to the threat from Russia to Greenland.

0:55.3

So they are responding within the alliance framework.

0:58.1

That seemed to satisfy the president as well.

1:01.4

And then he had some good conversations on the sidelines at Davos and then informed everyone

1:06.3

that he would be calling off those tariffs, which is good news.

1:08.9

To what degree, though, is this just a tactical reset after blowback from the markets

1:14.7

and from allies?

1:15.6

Well, you know, I think what we've seen from President Trump again and again is he comes

1:20.0

up with these attempts to affect policy, and then he looks for a response.

1:26.0

If there's strong pushback or a pushback from the markets.

1:30.0

On this particular case, you saw not just Democrats, but Republicans pushed back on even the

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