AT THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

A quick round up of the past week. Donald Trump was surprisingly gentle with Andy Burnham, struck an uninspiring deal with Denmark, and blustered plenty about Iran.

The main media focus of UK prime minister Andy Burnham's visit to New York has, inevitably, been his head-to-head with the US president yesterday. The meeting took place on the margins of the UN General Assembly, where Burnham delivered a speech in which he pledged to fight Russian information warfare and revived allegations that it interfered in the UK's 2019 general election. The speech provoked an angry reaction from the Kremlin. Burnham also said that Britain was 'America's closest ally'. But I was a little nervous his meeting with Donald Trump might prove disastrous, well-briefed though I knew the UK premier would be.

What caught my attention was that the pair appear to have bonded over their positive thinking. Beneath Donald Trump's delusional rhetoric, he is often clinging on to vanishing small positives; he spins everything as a 'win' and evidently believes anything is 'possible'. One source for this, as the journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan note in their recent book, may be the church that Trump attended as a child. His family belonged to one of pastor Norman Vincent Peale's churches; Peale popularised the idea that a positive mental attitude is integral to attaining one's goals. Burnham, who has himself displayed oodles of optimism since becoming prime minister, appears to have connected with Trump through their similarly positive outlooks.

Consequently, the potential stumbling blocks in the meeting were largely avoided. These included the fragile US support for the UK's sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, which Trump has said is 'under review', and Britain's recent sanctions on Israel that the US disapproves of. Burnham survived mild criticism for the agreement to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius; Trump, despite being on good behaviour, could not help himself from telling the press it was 'a terrible deal' (see my earlier comments on this). The UK has now said it will review the deal on the Chagos Islands, though given that only days earlier Burnham had told Mauritius's prime minister the agreement would go ahead, there is a risk that Burnham is making incompatible pledges. Unlike Trump, he will not be able to sustain an obviously contradictory position.

For now, Trump suggests that Burnham might prove 'a great prime minister' – if only because he grasped that the British leader has some rose-tinted glasses, too.

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The US and Denmark signed a 'permanent agreement' on Greenland. It is potentially a resolution to tensions that erupted noisily in January. Trump had said 'anything less' than US control of Greenland would be 'unacceptable'; the idea that the US could annex territory from a NATO ally alarmed many of us. The main detail to catch my attention, as US officials briefed media ahead of the agreement being published, were references to blocking non-NATO states from any military presence or activities on the territory. Could Trump, notoriously ambivalent about NATO, be about to sign an agreement which deepened the US commitment to the alliance?

The relevant words are there, above his signature. The agreement states: 'No state that is not a member of NATO shall be allowed to establish its own manned or unmanned military installations... unless otherwise agreed by the parties' (Article IX). US lawyers will have pored over the text and I expect they will claim that Article VI, concerning the US's rights, has effect independently of US involvement in NATO (because the US is a party to the agreement not a third state). But what is clear throughout the text is that is through and through framed in terms of NATO; the signatories have strengthened the ability to keep NATO adversaries at bay.

The agreement allows the US to open two military bases ('defence areas' in the language of the agreement) on Greenland, modernise its existing Pituffik Space Base, whilst reaffirming Danish sovereignty over Greenland. The preamble says it amends the 1951 Treaty between the US and Denmark, but the US obtains only a few rights for itself it did not already possess. Most significantly, the US already had basing rights so the new bases did not require this latest agreement.

Its wording does expressly expand on US access and transit rights. The amendments are relatively subtle: Article V Clause 3 of the 1951 Treaty granted the US rights of free movement in air, land and water 'between the defence areas' on Greenland; the updated agreement grants the US 'without restriction' rights throughout Greenland's territorial waters (including undersea access) and overflight rights. The new agreement, should it come into force, explicitly addresses what would happen in the event of Greenlandic independence – but since it does assert Danish sovereignty, the Danes should be pleased that Trump came away with a deal of the kind that in January he called 'unacceptable'. Although it cannot be amended without US agreement, it does not constitute US 'control' of Greenland.

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Trump also gave a speech to the UN General Assembly. There was more bluster about Iran. He presented himself at the point of 'a big decision': he could do a deal or 'annihilate' Iran. He has claimed a deal is imminent more than a hundred times already, and threatened to eliminate Iran – or claimed that it has been 'decimated' – an even greater number of times. Meanwhile there has been an admission that the Pentagon's munitions stockpiles are suffering from the war, which arguably constrains Trump's options. The only real decision Trump has is whether to capitulate or to get mired down in 'a forever war'.

Trump then met Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy, shortly after telling him by phone to stop attacks on Russian oil refineries. He is blaming Ukraine's strikes for rising petrol and diesel prices in the US, despite the fact that prices were more strongly affected by the US bombing of Iran than Ukraine's strikes on Russia (which began several months earlier).

After the meeting, Trump claimed that peace in the Russia-Ukraine war would come 'quickly'. As readers will remember, he claimed he would end the conflict 'in 24 hours' before his election; he has already spent 20 months failing to find a resolution. There is, naturally, a limit to how far a positive mental attitude can get you. With China's premier Xi, who is not at the General Assembly, heading to Washington later this week, Trump's conviction that positivity gets results might be tested even more.