Transition Updates: Trump’s Foreign Policy Threats Produce Worry and Pushback Overseas

The outgoing health secretary said he was “speaking more as a former attorney general than as a secretary or a cabinet member.” He had high praise for Dr. Fauci, who helped oversee the nation’s Covid-19 response before retiring at the end of 2022.

“I believe Dr. Fauci has been one of the greatest contributors to modern health care in this country,” he said, “and he deserves to be sainted for everything he did.”

Mr. Becerra spoke just hours after publication of a USA Today interview in which Mr. Biden said he had not ruled out pre-emptive pardons for people who have been targeted by Mr. Trump.

Dr. Fauci is among several current and former Biden officials who have been singled out by Republican lawmakers and allies of Mr. Trump, including the Tesla founder Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s pick for health secretary. “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Mr. Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, weeks before Dr. Fauci retired.

Mr. Kennedy said while running for president that he would prosecute Dr. Fauci for his actions during the coronavirus pandemic if he were elected president and his attorney general determined that “crimes were committed.”

Asked directly if he was saying Mr. Biden should not pardon Dr. Fauci, Mr. Becerra would not go that far: “I won’t try to interpret what you’re hearing; I just told you what I think,” he said.

“I believe the Constitution has value, and I believe our execution of it has even more,” he said, adding, “I think there are certain things that are pretty sacred.”

Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been accused of plotting a coup to keep himself in power after he lost the 2022 presidential election, said in a social media post that he had been invited to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, and that he had requested permission from Brazil’s Supreme Court to attend the event.

Brazil’s federal police have confiscated Bolsonaro’s passport as part of investigations into his conduct as president. In an echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, supporters of Bolsonaro had stormed the Brazilian capital in a failed attempt to overturn the results of that election and restore Bolsonaro to power.

European leaders have been focused in recent days on what many consider inflammatory statements from Mr. Trump and his allies. The president-elect has said he would like to make Greenland part of the United States. The autonomous territory is controlled by Denmark, a NATO ally. And a senior adviser, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has declared his support for a far-right political party in Germany.

“The idea expressed about Greenland is obviously not a good one, but maybe more important, it’s obviously one that’s not going to happen,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference with Mr. Barrot. “So we probably shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about it.”

He prefaced that with advice clearly intended for Mr. Trump: “We’re stronger, we’re more effective, we get better results when we’re working closely with our allies, not saying things that may alienate them.”

Mr. Barrot agreed that he did not think the United States would invade Greenland, but said: “Do we think that we are entering a period in which we’re returning to the law of the jungle? The answer is yes.”

Later, in remarks on Ukraine, he put President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia squarely in that context, too.

“It is a matter of the future of international law,” Mr. Barrot said. “If we accept Ukraine capitulating, we would allow force to prevail. It is a matter of security for the French people, as well as for Europeans.”

Mr. Blinken’s stop in Paris is part of a final, whirlwind diplomatic trip in which he is visiting Asian and European allies. He met with officials in Seoul on Monday, in the middle of the biggest political crisis in South Korea in decades; had talks in Tokyo the next day, soon after the Biden administration blocked a steel-industry merger that Japanese officials wanted; and then flew overnight to Paris, going via Alaska to avoid Russian air space.

Mr. Blinken’s visits to South Korea and Japan were a reflection of the importance of those nations in the U.S. government’s calculus for establishing military deterrence against China and North Korea. Both are key allies that host U.S. military bases and troops. And France has been one of the most important allies in opposing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and supplying the Ukrainian military with weapons.

Like other European officials, those in Paris are anxious about the return of Mr. Trump, though few were truly surprised by the outcome of the U.S. election.

In Mr. Blinken, President Biden has a diplomat well suited to trying to reassure the French: He grew up in an intellectual milieu in Paris and speaks fluent French, which he deployed here in an ornate room in the Foreign Ministry, in what was almost certain to be his final overseas news conference as secretary of state.

Both Mr. Blinken and Mr. Barrot underscored in their opening remarks the diplomacy their nations have done together during recent crises, notably the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the war between Russia and Ukraine. Their nations have also tried to coordinate on policies toward Syria, where rebels recently toppled Bashar al-Assad, the longtime dictator.

“I am delighted that you will continue carrying the torch over the next months on these crucial issues for our two countries,” Mr. Blinken told Mr. Barrot.

The French minister praised Mr. Blinken, using language that appeared to carry veiled criticism of the America represented by Mr. Trump.

“You have embodied the face of the America that we love,” Mr. Barrot said. He spoke of a nation that built an “international order based on law” after World War II through “its lofty outlook, its visceral attachment to the values ​​of freedom.”

At one point, he said, “We survived some 59 American elections, and of course we’ll survive the 60th American election.”

Among their worries, European leaders are concerned about the possibility that Mr. Trump will impose new tariffs in a period of anemic growth in Europe compared with the United States.

Mr. Blinken’s visit comes at a time of intense domestic political division for France. It is a moment that François Bayrou, the centrist prime minister appointed last month, has called the “most difficult” situation for the country since the end of World War II. But for the time being, those divisions mostly affect France’s domestic policy, particularly its inability to pass a budget.

All of this has served to weaken the hand of President Emmanuel Macron at home. But under the French system, Mr. Macron, who considers himself a pragmatic centrist, still holds great sway when it comes to foreign affairs. That has provided a certain continuity in the French posture toward Mr. Trump.

That posture is a mix of concern, caution and Mr. Macron’s belief that he has a clear-eyed view of the American president-elect and his mercurial governing style. Mr. Macron was elected president in 2017, the same year that Mr. Trump took office for his first term.

Over the years, the French president has sought to preserve the French-American relationship while preparing his country — and Europeans more generally — for the possibility that the continent may increasingly have to fend for itself militarily, given Mr. Trump’s skepticism about the U.S. role in NATO.

At a campaign event last year, Mr. Trump implied that he would not abide by NATO’s collective defense provision, known as Article 5, and even said he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that had not contributed sufficiently to the alliance.

During his yearly New Year’s Eve speech, Mr. Macron, reiterating a position he has taken many times before, said that Europe could no longer “delegate to other powers its security and its defense,” vowing to continue to invest in French “military rearmament.”

On Monday, Mr. Macron raised concerns about Mr. Musk, who recently used his social media platform, X, to praise a German far-right party and assail Britain’s Labour Party prime minister.

Without mentioning Mr. Musk’s name, Mr. Macron said: “Ten years ago, if we had said that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary force and would intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined it?”

On Wednesday, when asked at the news conference about Mr. Musk, Mr. Blinken said, “Private citizens in our country can say what they want, what they believe, and everyone else can draw their own conclusions and take their own positions on the matter.”

Mr. Barrot said the same about Mr. Musk. Soon afterward, Mr. Blinken got into a convoy to go to the Élysée Palace to meet with Mr. Macron and to receive the Légion d’Honneur, given by the French to people they consider true friends.

Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Now the ultimate price is being paid.”

The post was vintage Trump, who rarely passes up an opportunity to blame natural disasters on his political enemies. It was also a return to his denunciations of California, which has been a frequent target of his ire.

In 2019, Mr. Trump accused San Francisco of allowing used needles from drug users to be washed into the ocean, saying the city was in “serious violation” of environmental rules and demanding that officials “clean it up.”

“We can’t have our cities going to hell,” he said.

That Christmas, Mr. Trump tweeted: “Governor Gavin N has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California. If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!” The next year, Mr. Trump blamed Mr. Newsom’s administration for failing to do enough to prevent forest fires, which were then raging through the state.

“They’re starting again in California,” Mr. Trump said at a rally. “I said, you got to clean your floors, you got to clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”

Mr. Trump’s angry commentary on Wednesday about the latest fires came even as Southern California residents were fleeing three separate blazes. At least two people have been confirmed to have died from the fires, and the authorities were warning the area’s residents to be ready to evacuate their homes at a moment’s notice.

President Biden, who was in the Los Angeles area for a previously scheduled event, visited a fire station and was briefed by the state’s fire officials.

“We’re doing anything and everything and as long as it takes to contain these fires to make sure you get back to normal,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s going to be a hell of a long way. It’s going to take time. It’s astounding what’s happening.”

Mr. Trump took a different approach.

In his social media post, the president-elect called the governor “Gavin Newscum” and said he had refused to sign a declaration that would have allowed more water to flow into Southern California.

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Mr. Trump said.

The governor’s press office responded with a statement on social media.

“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction,” the statement on X said. “The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”

Mr. Newsom posted throughout the day about the resources California is deploying to fight the fires and joined Mr. Biden for a briefing from fire officials, but he did not mention Mr. Trump. In a news conference on Tuesday night — before Mr. Trump’s social media posts — the governor urged restraint.

“My message to the incoming administration, and I’m not here to play any politics, is please don’t play any politics,” he said.

Debates in California over water have a long history. Most of the state’s water comes from Northern California, which receives more rain and snow each year than Southern California, as has been the case so far this winter. But most of that water is used by Central Valley farmers and Southern California residents, setting up a perennial battle over how much water the state and the federal government should send south.

For water purposes, the conflict is over whether to divert some water to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay to save the smelt and other ecosystems or to send it to farmers in the Central Valley and urban users like Los Angeles city residents. Growers in Southern California get much of their water from a different system through the Colorado River.

That battle has generated years of litigation over the fate of the fish. The delta smelt is a federally threatened species and a California endangered species, so courts have often dictated how much water the state can pump south and how much it can divert to the ocean.

In 2019, during his first term, Mr. Trump pushed changes that would have diverted more water to growers in the Central Valley. His interior secretary was David Bernhardt, who was a lobbyist in Washington for Westlands Water District, a big player in the valley that delivers water to farmers.

Those changes were opposed by environmentalists who expressed concern about the impact on fish like salmon and smelt.

The Biden administration, working with Mr. Newsom, backed a different plan when Mr. Biden entered office that allowed water to flow but with more efforts to protect fish.

In his post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said: “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

But it is not clear that the diversion of water that Mr. Trump proposed would have affected the explosion of fires in the Los Angeles area this week, or the ability of firefighters to battle it.

Water supplies have been strained in Pacific Palisades, where some firefighters connected hoses to hydrants on Wednesday only to find them empty. And some firefighting planes were grounded as the fires erupted on Tuesday — but officials have said that was because of high winds and smoke, not because of a lack of water.

Officials also disputed Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the dispute over the smelt and other fish hampered the firefighting efforts this week. The water wars have largely focused on the need for irrigation by farmers, not on the use of water by firefighters.

Kevin Yamamura contributed reporting.

But it’s getting harder for the world to keep calm and carry on.

At Tuesday’s news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump declined to rule out the use of force in a potential land grab for Greenland and the Panama Canal. He vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” He also said he could use “economic force” to turn Canada into the 51st state as a matter of American national security.

For those eager to parse substance from bluster, it looked like another performance of scattershot bravado: Trump II, the sequel, more unrestrained. Even before taking office, Mr. Trump, with his surprising wish list, has stirred up “here we go again” commentary from across the globe.

Beyond the chatter, however, are serious stakes. As the world prepares for Trump’s return, the parallels between his preoccupations and the distant age of American imperialism in the late 19th century are becoming more relevant.

Mr. Trump has already championed the era for its protectionism, claiming that the United States in the 1890s “was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” Now, he seems to be adding the focus from the 19th and early 20th centuries on territorial control.

What both epochs share is a fear of shaky geopolitics, and the threat of being locked out of territory with great economic and military importance. As Daniel Immerwahr, an American historian at Northwestern University, put it: “We are seeing a reversion to a more grabby world.”

For Mr. Trump, China looms — ready, in his view, to take territory far from its own borders. He has falsely accused Beijing of controlling the American-built Panama Canal. There is also the specter, more grounded in reality, of China and its ally Russia moving to secure control over Arctic Sea routes and precious minerals.

At the same time, competition is increasing all around, as some nations (India, Saudi Arabia) rise and others (Venezuela, Syria) spiral and struggle, creating openings for outside influence.

In the 1880s and ’90s, there was also a scramble for control and no single dominant nation. As countries became more powerful, they were expected to physically grow, and rivalries were redrawing maps and causing conflicts from Asia to the Caribbean.

The United States mirrored Europe’s colonial designs when it annexed Guam and Puerto Rico in 1898. But in larger countries, like the Philippines, the U.S. eventually chose indirect control by negotiating deals to advance preferential treatment for American businesses and its military interests.

Some believe that Mr. Trump’s fixation on Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada is a one-man revival of the debate over expansionist pursuits.

“This is part of a pattern of the U.S. exerting control, or trying to, over areas of the globe perceived to be American interests, without having to summon up the dreaded words ‘empire,’ ‘colonies’ or ‘imperialism,’ while still extracting material benefits,” said Ian Tyrrell, a historian of American empire at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Mr. Trump’s threats of territorial takeover may be simply a transactional starting point or some kind of personal wish. The United States already has a deal with Denmark that allows for base operations in Greenland.

His suggestion of Americanization there and elsewhere amounts to what many foreign diplomats and scholars see as an escalation more than a break with the past. For years, the United States has been trying to curtail Chinese ambitions with a familiar playbook.

The Philippines is again a focus, with new deals for bases the American military can use in any potential war with Beijing. So are the sea routes that matter most for trade both in Asia and around the Arctic as climate change melts the ice and makes navigation easier.

“What the U.S. always wanted was access to markets, lines of communication and capacity for forward projections of material power,” Professor Tyrrell said.

But for some regions in particular, past as prologue inspires dread.

Panama and its neighbors tend to see Mr. Trump’s comments as a blend of both the 1890s and the 1980s, when the Cold War led Washington to meddle in many Latin American countries under the guise of fighting Communism. The Monroe Doctrine, another 19th-century creation that saw the United States treat the Western Hemisphere as its exclusive sphere of influence, has re-emerged into relevance alongside tariffs and territorial deals.

Carlos Puig, a popular columnist in Mexico City, said Latin America was more worried about Mr. Trump’s return than any other part of the world.

“This is Trump, with majorities in both houses, after four years complaining, a guy that only cares about himself and winning at all cost,” Mr. Puig said. “Not easy for a guy like that not to show that he is trying to fulfill his promises, no matter how crazy they are. I am not so sure everything is just bullying and almost comic provocations.”

But how much can Mr. Trump actually achieve or damage?

His news conference in Florida mixed vague threats (“It might be that you’ll have to do something”) with messianic promises (“I’m talking about protecting the free world”).

It was more than enough to awaken other nations, drawing rapt attention and resistance even before he has taken office.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, on Wednesday warned against threatening the “sovereign borders” of the European Union — referring to Denmark’s territory of Greenland. He added that “we have entered an era that is seeing the return of the law of the strongest.”

What may be harder to see from Mar-a-Lago but is much discussed in foreign capitals: Many countries are simply tired of the America Mr. Trump wants to make great again.

While the United States is still a dominant force, it has less leverage than in the 1980s or the 1890s, not just because of China’s rise, but because of what many nations see as America’s own drift into dysfunction and debt, coupled with the surge in development by other countries.

The international system the United States helped set up after World War II prioritized trade in hopes of deterring conquest — and it worked well enough to build paths to prosperity that made American unilateralism less potent.

As Sarang Shidore, the director of the global south program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, explained, many developing nations “are savvier, more assertive and capable even as the U.S. has become less predictable and stable.”

In other words, today the world is unsettled. The postwar equilibrium is being shaken by wars in Europe and the Middle East; by the autocratic partnership of China, Russia and North Korea; by a weakened Iran that is seeking nuclear weapons; and by climate change and artificial intelligence.

The end of the 19th century was turbulent, too. The mistake Mr. Trump may be making now, according to historians, is thinking that the world can be calmed and simplified with additional U.S. real estate.

The protectionist, imperialist age Mr. Trump seemingly romanticizes blew up when Germany and Italy tried to muscle in for a greater share of the world. The result was two world wars.

“We saw how that went with 20th-century weaponry,” said Mr. Immerwahr, the author of “How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States.” “It’s potentially far more dangerous in the 21st.”

Mr. Biden was asked whether he would pardon Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative frequently targeted by Mr. Trump and his supporters for her role investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol, or Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former top federal infectious disease official who oversaw the nation’s Covid-19 response.

“I think there are certain people like, if he were to, I don’t want to name their names,” Mr. Biden said, before asking to speak off the record.

Mr. Biden said that he had appealed to the president-elect in a two-hour Oval Office meeting after the election. “I tried to make it clear that there was no need, and it was counterintuitive to go back and try to settle scores,” Mr. Biden said. But Mr. Trump did not say how he would handle his threats of retribution.

“He didn’t reinforce it; he just basically listened,” Mr. Biden said.

Since late last year, Mr. Biden’s staff has considered what the pardons might look like were Mr. Biden to pursue them, including how to extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years.

Mr. Trump told NBC recently that he would like to jail members of the congressional panel that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. Ms. Cheney served on the panel. At least two of its other members, Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican representative, have said they do not want pardons, arguing that accepting one would falsely suggest that they had committed crimes.

“It would be the wrong precedent to set,” Mr. Schiff told CNN earlier this week. “I don’t want to see each president hereafter on their way out the door giving out a broad category of pardons.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for health secretary, is back on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with senators ahead of expected confirmation hearings. One potentially key vote, Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, said in a post on X that he had a “frank conversation” with Kennedy, discussing vaccines “at length.”

Cassidy, a physician who is set to lead the Senate health committee, said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that while he agreed with some of Kennedy’s positions, he was “wrong” about vaccines.

Mr. Trump’s proposal was met with derision in Mexico and glee by late-night comedians, although supporters such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, vowed to make it a reality.

Who named the Gulf of Mexico?

The gulf’s name first appeared on maps used by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, well before the founding of the United States.

On Wednesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico displayed a map from 1607 that included the Gulf of Mexico. It also labeled North America as “Mexican America.”

“Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?” Ms. Sheinbaum said.

Can Trump rename the Gulf?

Mr. Trump, as president, could press for changes to geographical names as they are used in the United States.

There is a precedent: In 2015, President Obama used his executive powers to change the name of an Alaska mountain from “McKinley” to “Denali.” Mr. Trump has vowed to reverse that decision.

But whether other countries would honor any change is a different story.

“Today, there is no formal international agreement or protocol in place for naming maritime areas,” said John Nyberg, the director of the International Hydrographic Organization, which works to standardize and chart marine boundaries, in an email.

The national geographic naming authority of the U.S. is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, he added.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, part of the United States Geological Survey, says on its website that it only considers name changes for “compelling” reasons. “Generally,” it adds, “the most important policy regarding names is local use and acceptance.”

What other bodies of water have disputed names?

The body of water that separates Iran from Saudi Arabia has long been a source of tension. Iran wants it called the “Persian Gulf,” while Saudi Arabia prefers “Arabian Gulf.”

The U.S. Navy has used the term “Arabian Gulf,” to avoid friction with an important ally, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has mandated use of the “Persian Gulf” for official business.

Contention also exists around the name of the sea that is bordered by Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia. Japan refers to it as the Sea of Japan while South Korea maintains that it has been called the East Sea for centuries.

The body of water that borders Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam — commonly known as the South China Sea in the English-speaking world — is also disputed. Different countries have proposed their own names for the sea to highlight their own territorial claims to certain islands.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.

“They should give it up, because we need it for national security,” Mr. Trump said of Greenland.

Denmark, which has a smaller population than New York City, is not a huge trading partner for the United States. The country — a U.S. ally and a NATO member — sent the United States more than $11 billion worth of goods in 2023, just a tiny slice of more than $3 trillion of imports. The United States, in turn, sends Denmark more than $5 billion in goods, including industrial machinery, computers, aircraft and scientific instruments.

But despite its small size, Denmark, which handles Greenland’s foreign and security affairs, is home to some products that are very well-loved in America, goods that could become more expensive if Mr. Trump follows through with heavy tariffs. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, a trade data platform, roughly half of Denmark’s recent exports to the United States are packaged medicines, insulin, vaccines and antibiotics.

That’s largely because the country is home to Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, the popular weight-loss drugs. The company is so important to the Danish economy — it has recently accounted for half of Denmark’s private sector job growth and all of the country’s economic growth — that some have branded Denmark a “pharmastate.”

Novo Nordisk is increasing its U.S. production to meet the soaring demand for its GLP-1 weight loss products. The company does not specify publicly how much of its products are exported, but it produces drugs in Denmark and the United States for the U.S. market.

A spokesperson for Novo Nordisk said in a statement that they were following the situation closely but would not comment on hypotheticals and speculation.

Gilberto Garcia, the chief economist at Datawheel and a member of the Observatory of Economic Complexity team, said that Denmark’s exports of immunological products, which includes drugs like Ozempic, have been “growing exponentially.”

Denmark is also the leading supplier to the United States of hearing aids, he said.

Beyond medicines, Denmark also sends the United States medical instruments, fish fillets, pig meat, coal tar oil, petroleum and baked goods, among other products, according to the OEC.

And notably, for many children (and adults) Denmark is home to Lego Group, the world’s largest toymaker.

It’s not clear how much Lego exports directly from Denmark to the United States — the company serves much of the U.S. market from a factory in Mexico, as well as a new carbon-neutral facility in Virginia. It also manufactures the toy bricks in factories in Hungary, the Czech Republic, China and Vietnam, as well as Denmark. Lego did not respond to requests for comment.

But Lego, like other multinational companies that have global supply chains shuffling raw materials and products around the world, could see its business disrupted by tariffs. Mr. Trump has threatened to put levies on products coming into the United States from Mexico, China and other countries globally, in addition to Denmark.

Mr. Trump’s threats to claim Greenland came in a rambling news conference in which the president-elect also suggested retaking the Panama Canal and making Canada an American state, all statements that riled foreign leaders.

Mr. Trump argued on Tuesday that U.S. ownership of Greenland was a national security issue, given the paths charted by Russian and Chinese ships.

“Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland,” Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede wrote on Facebook Tuesday. “Our future and fight for independence is our business.”

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the European Commission called Mr. Trump’s comments about seizing Greenland as “hypothetical.” When asked about tariff threats, the spokesman said that the European Commission had been preparing for all possible implications of a Trump presidency on trade in Europe.

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow in Brussels at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that few politicians in Europe take what Mr. Trump says literally.

“This is an outrageous demand,” Mr. Kirkegaard said of Mr. Trump’s threats to take Greenland. “The only way you can logically think of it is that by making this outrageous demand, Trump is going to get some concessions he otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.”

Mr. Kirkegaard said that should Mr. Trump follow through with his threat to implement tariffs on Denmark, he could expect an E.U.-wide response. “This idea that he can pressure Denmark as a single member state of the E.U., to offer policy concession by threatening tariffs, is going to invite retaliation from all of the E.U.”

Mr. Trump put tariffs into effect on numerous countries and hundreds of billions of dollars of goods in his first term. But other tariff threats never materialized, and it’s not clear how many of his new threats he will follow through on.

On Tuesday, the president-elect also reiterated a threat to put “very serious tariffs” on Mexico and Canada, complained about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and the European Union, and floated an idea to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”

“Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?” Ms. Sheinbaum said while pointing to the map and smiling.

In response to Mr. Trump’s comment that Mexico was “essentially run by the cartels,” Ms. Sheinbaum told reporters on Wednesday that, “with all due respect,” the president-elect was ill-informed.

“In Mexico, the people rule,” she said. “And we are going to collaborate and understand each other with the government of President Trump, I am sure of it, defending our sovereignty as a free, independent and sovereign country.”

Ms. Sheinbaum also said that Mexico is willing to continue collaborating with the United States on various issues, including immigration containment, security and drug trafficking. “But we are also very interested in stopping the entry of U.S. firearms into Mexico,” she said, adding that about 75 percent of seized guns in Mexican territory are illegally smuggled from the United States.

In 2021, Mexico sued seven U.S. gun manufacturers and one distributor, accusing the companies of complicity in facilitating the flow of weapons to drug cartels. A lower court had dismissed the case. But last year a federal appeals panel ruled that the $10 billion lawsuit could proceed. In October, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case; it will hear arguments in March.

Unlike the United States, Mexico has strict gun control laws, with only one single gun store issuing fewer than 50 permits a year. Gun violence, however, continues to wreak havoc across the country.

The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling. The Biden administration offered 400,000 acres after shaving off one million acres from the original boundaries to avoid areas crucial to the polar bear and Porcupine caribou populations.

“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along: There are some places too special and sacred to exploit with oil and gas drilling,” Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in a statement.

Some Alaska lawmakers and officials, including the governor, had said before the sale that the decision by the Biden administration to shrink the leasing area would guarantee failure. Republican lawmakers have said that the wilderness area would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside the refuge.

But Ms. Daniel-Davis noted that the oil and gas industry is “sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere” and should pursue those first. “We’d suggest that’s a prudent place to start, rather than engage further in speculative leasing in one of the most spectacular places in the world,” she said.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is an expanse of roughly 19 million acres along the North Slope of Alaska. It’s one of the last truly wild places in the United States. It also includes land considered sacred by the Gwich’in, an Alaska Native group.

Several major banks have said they would not finance any projects in the refuge. Drilling there would be difficult and costly because there are no roads or facilities.

But for Mr. Trump, the refuge is a field of dreams. He has called it “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia” and on the campaign trail he frequently assailed President Biden’s efforts to protect the wild area. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said drilling in the expanse remained one of his top energy priorities and pledged that extracting its “liquid gold” would help bring down the price of gasoline and groceries.

“We’re going to be opening up ANWR,” he said, using the acronym for the refuge. “We’re going to be doing all sorts of things that nobody thinks is possible.”

Democrats and Republicans have fought over the question of drilling in the Alaskan wilderness for half a century. Drilling in the refuge was barred in 1980. That ban ended with a 2017 tax bill that Congress passed and Mr. Trump signed into law in his first term. He frequently takes credit for opening the refuge.

“I got it done,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in October. “Ronald Reagan couldn’t get it done. Nobody could get it done. I got it done.”

Republicans passed legislation that required two lease sales in ANWR to be held by 2024. They predicted the leases would generate $2 billion in royalties over 10 years. Half would go to the state of Alaska, and the other half would help to pay for Mr. Trump’s tax cuts.

Two weeks before Mr. Trump left office in 2021, the Interior Department held the first auction. It was a dud.

Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation was the only bidder on nine of the tracts offered for lease in the northernmost section of the refuge, and half of the offered leases drew no bids at all. The Interior Department reported that the auction yielded a total of $14.4 million in bids.

After Mr. Biden took office, his administration suspended the leases, saying the Interior Department had not sufficiently analyzed the impact that drilling would have in the environmentally sensitive region. Then, leases sold in the 2021 auction were forfeited, relinquished, or canceled by the Biden administration.

The new environmental review, issued in November, recommended additional protections for wildlife, waterways and permafrost. It called for restricting leases to the northern and western part of the plain, areas not used by the Porcupine caribou herd.

In the sale conducted this week, the Biden administration offered 400,000 acres, the minimum amount required by law. The deadline to submit bids was Jan. 6.

The state of Alaska on Monday sued the Biden administration over the size of the lease area, saying it made the area economically unviable for oil drilling. If Alaska is successful in its lawsuit, the Trump administration could potentially redo the sale and offer more land.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, wrote in a post on social media that the Biden administration “cloaked its latest sanction on Alaska as a lease sale in ANWR,” which is “designed to fail” and part of an anti-energy “nightmare” for the state.

The Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.

Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said the latest failed lease sale was not a surprise and accused the Biden administration of trying to “shut down any chance of developing” the refuge by closing off three-quarters of the available land. He said the Trump administration would have greater success.

Environmentalists said the failures exposed false promises made by Republicans about a boon to the U.S. Treasury if the refuge were opened to drilling.

Erik Grafe, an Alaska-based attorney with Earthjustice, said oil companies “seem to understand that drilling in this remote landscape is too risky, too complicated and just plain wrong.”

He said environmental groups would fight any attempt by the Trump administration to hold new lease sales in the refuge.

The department’s decisions — laid out in a filing to a federal appeals court in Atlanta — brought a measure of clarity to what amounts to the final chapter of Mr. Smith’s work, which began more than two years ago and led to the first federal indictments of a former president in American history.

With all of the charges against Mr. Trump now dismissed, the two-volume report — only part of which may now see the light of day — was meant to be Mr. Smith’s valedictory word on his efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for a remarkable array of criminal allegations.

The Justice Department’s steps on Wednesday almost certainly meant that the incoming Trump administration will get to decide whether to release the documents portion of Mr. Smith’s report. And that seemed unlikely: Mr. Trump’s own lawyers have been fighting its disclosure.

The battle over the report had been building since Mr. Trump was re-elected in November. His victory prompted Mr. Smith to drop both of the cases — one being heard in Florida, the other in Washington — under a longstanding Justice Department policy that prohibits pursuing criminal cases against sitting presidents.

But under separate Justice Department regulations, Mr. Smith is still obliged to file a report about his work to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, explaining why he brought the charges he did and why he did not bring other charges he may have been considering.

In their court filing on Wednesday, prosecutors acknowledged that publicly releasing the volume about the classified documents case was legally problematic. That was because, even though Mr. Trump’s role in the matter has ended, the case is still active with regard to his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, and any new revelations about it could harm their efforts to defend themselves.

To avoid that harm, prosecutors said, Mr. Garland had decided, on Mr. Smith’s recommendation, not to release the classified documents volume until all proceedings against Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira were over. That process is likely to continue into Mr. Trump’s second term starting on Jan. 20.

At that point, Mr. Trump could pardon the men and end the case altogether. His appointees would then have the power to continue keeping that portion of Mr. Smith’s report secret.

Prosecutors said that while Mr. Garland would not make the volume about the documents case public, he did intend to make it available to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, except for information that is covered by a grand jury secrecy rule.

It is possible that even the release of the volume on the election interference charges may not contain much in the way of new or revelatory information. That is because in October, Mr. Smith filed an exhaustive 165-page brief laying out the evidence he planned to offer at trial.

The Justice Department regulations on special counsels envision their final reports being “confidential.” But it has become common practice for attorneys general to make those reports public with some redactions.

That is what happened to a report about the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as well as to the counter-investigation of the Russia inquiry run by the special counsel John H. Durham.

The struggle over Mr. Smith’s report began on Monday when Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira began a multipronged attempt to stop it from coming out. The lawyers said they jumped into action after Mr. Smith’s deputies showed them a draft of the report last weekend.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers started by writing a letter to Mr. Garland, arguing that the draft they had seen was “one-sided” and “a lawless political stunt, designed to politically harm President Trump.” The lawyers also complained that the draft made “baseless attacks on other anticipated members of President Trump’s incoming administration.”

Moreover, the lawyers told Mr. Garland that Mr. Smith had no authority to file the report at all. In making that claim, they cited a decision by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who dismissed the classified documents case this summer, ruling — against decades of precedent — that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his job as special counsel.

Within a day of sending their letter to Mr. Garland, Mr. Trump’s legal team changed course, joining forces with lawyers for Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira in seeking to get a formal court order to stop the report’s release from both Judge Cannon and the appeals court that oversees her.

On Tuesday, their efforts paid off when Judge Cannon issued a surprising injunction blocking the report from coming out until the appeals court made its own decision on how to proceed. It was that ruling that prompted prosecutors to file their court papers on Wednesday, laying out how they intend to proceed with the report.

In those papers, prosecutors also asked the appeals court to overturn Judge Cannon’s injunction. They argued that she had been wrong when she ruled in July that Mr. Garland had no legal authority to appoint Mr. Smith as special counsel.

The conflict over Mr. Smith’s report was only the latest clash between the special counsel’s office and Judge Cannon, who has a history of issuing unusual rulings in Mr. Trump’s favor. Her decision to temporarily block the report from coming out raised eyebrows among several legal experts who said she had no legal authority to issue the injunction because the documents case was technically in front of the appeals court, not her.

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