Most of the world is breathing a big sigh of relief right now, while wondering to themselves: "What the heck was that all about?" Well, your guess is as good as mine, since answering that involves plumbing the shallows of Donald Trump's psyche (which is always fraught with uncertainty).

Personally, I am leaning towards: "It was all performative; it was just Trump making sure that all eyes were on him during the Davos conference at the expense of all others," since this fits in perfectly with his own planet-sized ego. He caused a crisis so everyone would freak out, then he "solved" the crisis by backing down. In the meantime, the world's eyes were upon him and his every utterance -- which is exactly what he wanted.

Then again it could be another TACO scenario, since Trump's threats to tear up the trade agreements he is working on with Europe and slap any country that didn't fully support America owning Greenland with higher and higher tariffs caused the markets to react badly -- including the all-important bond market. When Trump was faced with this reality, he backed down. He chickened out again.

Or maybe it was (at least in part) just another in a series of world-shaking moves by Trump designed specifically to distract all attention from the fact that it has now been a month since the legal deadline and only a tiny fraction of the Epstein files have been released. The Justice Department is breaking a law that passed Congress almost unanimously and which was signed by none other than Trump, and one has to wonder if they're just going to ignore the law altogether and try to keep stringing everyone along with miniature document dumps that have no mention of Trump in them -- while continuing to withhold the lion's share of the files. So far, that certainly seems like their game plan.

Perhaps it was no more complicated that Trump doing what he does best -- acting like an enraged toddler, shouting: "Gimme, gimme, gimme!" at Greenland and refusing to take "No" for an answer. As I said, there are any number of answers to the question: "What the heck was that all about?" It is probably a combination of a few of these (or maybe something entirely different that nobody has even figured out yet).

Trump gave his speech in Davos yesterday, and it was a combination of a toddler-like "Gimme, gimme, gimme!" tantrum, insults to all and sundry, and threatening language that one pundit described as "could have been written by Mario Puzo" (or taken from The Sopranos, take your pick). Trump made news by stating (in a fairly off-the-cuff fashion) that he wouldn't actually be using military force to invade and occupy Greenland, although it's hard to rely on such a glib statement when Trump is fully capable of changing his mind (or forgetting what he previously said) at the drop of a hat.

But then after one quick meeting with the head of NATO, Trump appeared to totally back down from all of his threats. The head of NATO has no power to hammer out an agreement between the United States and Denmark (which Denmark immediately noted, pointing out they hadn't even been consulted on any of it yet), but Trump emerged from the meeting and promptly stated that "the framework of a deal" had been agreed to. This was purely Trump's take on things -- and no details were released at all.

The big sticking point in any negotiation is going to be sovereignty. Denmark and Greenland have drawn a bright red line in the ice (so to speak) and stated unequivocally that the United States is not going to "own" or be sovereign over all of Greenland or even any part of it, period. However, that was precisely what Trump had been demanding for the past few weeks -- that Denmark just give us the island, or perhaps sell it to us. Trump refused to consider anything short of full ownership of Greenland. Right up until he met with the NATO head -- after which he seems to have completely crumbled on this demand. Reportedly, the new U.S. bargaining position is that we be allowed to build military bases there and that we be granted sovereignty over the land the bases are built on (which is a big step down from "give us the entire island," obviously). But Denmark and Greenland are never going to agree to even that much.

What it looks like, at this point, is that Trump is going to "achieve" what basically amounts to the status quo. America already has longstanding agreements with Denmark which allow us to build military bases there, and in fact back in the Cold War we used to have over a dozen of them. We still have one, but we could easily rebuild some of the other ones and station troops there (or missiles, or radar, or whatever else we wanted to). Which has always been the case, even before Trump threw his tantrum over owning the island. Nothing has changed at all.

Trump, of course, is going to present this as some sort of total victory, a triumphant "deal" he cut with Denmark and Greenland, but the reality is that any such "deal" will merely be restating the agreements we already had with them, with no real changes.

Donald Trump caused Europe and the rest of the world to freak out for weeks, with his mobster-style threats to send in American troops to take over an island belonging to a fellow member of NATO. He now appears to be walking back from the brink, now that the Davos conference is over. The only thing Trump succeeded in doing was to further alienate America's closest allies and focus the world's spotlight on himself for a few days.

Leaving everyone else to scratch their heads and wonder: "What the heck was that all about?"

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant