This was an unusual week for me. Skift had its Megatrends events in London on Tuesday and NYC on Thursday, which meant a lot of flying, prepping, and not following the news minute-by-minute as I normally do.

So imagine my horror on Tuesday when I got a ping from a Trump Effect reader (hi, Andre) that said something like: can't wait to read the column on Saturday!

I panicked. My immediate thought was that the U.S. had invaded Greenland while I was wrestling with my deck. Mercifully, no — just a market wobble tied to Greenland-adjacent tariff threats (oh, those old chestnuts), which then seemed to get unwound somewhere between my various flights. I can't remember. It doesn't matter.

What does matter is that, for now, the United States is not invading Greenland. Trump blinked at Davos, saying he "won't use force" against the Danish territory. He backed off a tariff threat aimed at European countries that supported Denmark, pointing to a vague "framework" on Arctic security.

For the travel industry, Europe's response showed how quickly this spills into business. EU lawmakers had paused work on a U.S. trade deal; once Trump backed down, the European Parliament said talks could resume. The European Commission also extended its suspension of a €93 billion retaliatory package against the U.S., while keeping the option to reactivate it if things flare up again.

So travel executives should take the win — for now. Greenland isn't an enormous commercial story in and of itself, but the transatlantic corridor most definitely is, with about 37 million round-trip visits each year. Europeans spend roughly $41 billion annually in the U.S.; Americans spend about $47 billion in Europe.

Meanwhile, as I've said ad nauseam, inbound travel to the U.S. is softening — which is why the industry can't afford extra instability. Overseas visitation fell for an eighth straight month in December, down 1.3%, according to NTTO data. And Canada, whose PM Mark Carney was the star of Davos, reported that Canadian-resident return trips from the U.S. by automobile dropped 30.7% in December.

And apropos of nothing but entertaining, I suppose: While I was in the UK, the algorithms did what algorithms do, shoving a NATO social video into my feed that looked suspiciously like the alliance trying to recruit Gen Z via Taylor Swift.

– Sarah Kopit, Editor-in-Chief