The Question of Greenland and European Uselesness

“We need it for defence.” With these words, U.S. President Donald Trump sought to frame Greenland as a question of national security. The island’s vast reserves of critical minerals and its strategic position in the Arctic have long made it geopolitically significant, yet Trump’s rhetoric elevated it into a symbol of broader American ambitions. This move prompted a rare joint statement by the leaders of seven NATO member states, who rejected any attempt to annex Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. Coming alongside U.S. actions elsewhere, including the removal of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and threats of intervention in other regions, these developments have fuelled growing concern within NATO that Washington is advancing a new international order driven primarily by its own interests. The prospect of Greenland’s annexation therefore raises serious questions not only about the future of the alliance, but also reveals Europe’s weakened position in the international system and its limited capacity to resist American pressure.

It is no surprise that Greenland matters to Donald Trump as it sits at the intersection of three priorities that have increasingly defined his worldview, security, resources, and leverage. As Arctic ice melts, Greenland is no longer a distant frozen outpost but a gateway to newly navigable sea routes and untapped wealth. Control over these routes would give the U.S. a strategic advantage as global trade patterns shift northwards, especially as China and Russia move to cooperate on Arctic shipping corridors. For Trump, who tends to see geopolitics through the lens of competition and zero sum gains, allowing rivals to shape the Arctic’s future is an unacceptable risk. Resources are equally central to his interest. Greenland holds significant reserves of rare earth minerals and other critical materials essential for defence systems and advanced manufacturing. With China dominating global rare earth production and openly using export restrictions as a political tool, Trump views Greenland as a way to secure supply chains and reduce U.S. vulnerability. His earlier framing of the island as a “real estate deal” has gradually evolved into a sharper focus on economic security, and now national security.

There is also a military logic underpinning Trump’s fixation. Greenland’s position between the U.S. and Russia makes it a natural anchor for missile early warning systems and Arctic defence. Although the U.S. already operates a base at Pituffik, Trump appears to believe that formal ownership would ensure uncontested access. His pressure tactics toward Denmark suggest that he sees Copenhagen’s concerns over security and investment as an opportunity to extract concessions, whether through expanded mining rights or deeper strategic alignment. What ultimately distinguishes Trump’s approach is his willingness to push norms to their limits. By openly floating the idea of buying Greenland, and at times implying coercion, he signals that no option is off the table. Even if he ultimately pursues more conventional and peaceful arrangements, ironically including the unprecedented idea of purchasing territory from an ally, the idea itself sets a troubling precedent. It challenges long standing assumptions within NATO about sovereignty and collective defence, and marks a moment where alliance politics are tested by transactional logic in a way not seen before.

Trump’s approach to Greenland cannot be separated from his long standing scepticism toward NATO itself. He has repeatedly argued that the alliance fellow members are exploiting American protection, portraying European allies as free riders and, more recently, as an outright burden. From this perspective, the survival of NATO or even the broader western project is secondary to what he defines as the narrow national interest of the U.S. The logic of “America First” leaves little room for alliance solidarity, especially if alliances are seen as constraining American freedom of action. For decades, one of NATO’s most important foundational logics has been the absence of war between its own members. Article 5, with its commitment to collective defence, has made full-scale conflict between allies not only unlikely but fundamentally incompatible with the alliance’s purpose. This has held even when tensions have run dangerously high. Disputes between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and the Aegean Sea nearly escalated into armed conflict, yet the alliance’s political and military framework repeatedly helped contain these crises.

A U.S. move against Greenland would shatter this precedent. The immediate response would come from Denmark and from Europe more broadly, with Danish officials already unequivocal in rejecting Trump’s threats. While Denmark would be unlikely to respond militarily, European states would close ranks in political support of Copenhagen. If an American flag were ever raised over Nuuk, U.S. Danish relations would collapse overnight, taking with them Washington’s credibility with some of its closest allies. More fundamentally, NATO would effectively cease to exist. An American annexation of Greenland would mean that one NATO member had invaded and dismantled part of another. The principle that members do not attack one another, a principle that reassured states in central and Eastern Europe during the alliance’s expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, would be broken. The damage would not stop there. If the U.S. were willing to seize territory from Denmark, what confidence could any ally have that it would not do the same again? In a world where power politics reassert themselves, ambition tends to grow once limits are crossed. Many European countries still hold territories in the Western Hemisphere, from the Azores to French Guiana to the British Virgin Islands. The precedent set by Greenland would cast a long shadow over all of them.

This crisis would also unfold at a particularly dangerous moment. The Greenland issue has surfaced while European governments are struggling to secure a settlement in Ukraine. European diplomats believe they have finally persuaded Washington to commit to playing a meaningful role in guaranteeing a long-term peace, something Europe has long seen as essential for Kyiv’s survival but which the U.S. has historically been reluctant to embrace. On January 7, Ukraine’s allies outlined a series of multilayered security guarantees at a landmark summit in Paris, involving senior figures from the U.S., France, the UK, Canada, and key EU and NATO institutions. For the first time, the U.S. openly backed security guarantees that would come into force after a ceasefire with Russia.

Any escalation over Greenland would almost certainly destroy this fragile momentum. A fractured NATO would remove any incentive for Russia to compromise. If Moscow believes that American support is no longer reliable, it could simply wait out a divided and exhausted Europe, gaining a strategic pause in the war without signing even a temporary ceasefire. In this sense, a U.S. annexation of Greenland would be a strategic gift to Vladimir Putin, leaving Europe weakened, distracted by another crisis, and stripped of its primary security shield.

Crucially, the implications extend well beyond European soil. NATO is not only a European security organisation but a global one. It has deployed forces and conducted operations in places such as Afghanistan and Libya, where NATOintervention in 2011 played a decisive role in the conflict. NATO naval missions operate in the Mediterranean, it maintains a presence in the Black Sea, and it has been central to managing tensions in hotspots such as Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, where disputes between Turkey and Greece could easily reignite into open conflict. If NATO were to collapse, instability would ripple across regions where the alliance currently acts as a deterrent or mediator.

The risk posed by Greenland, therefore, is not simply about one island or even one alliance. It is about the erosion of the structures that have underpinned global security for decades. What is at stake is not only NATO’s survival, but the wider balance of power that has, however imperfectly, prevented a return to unchecked great power conflict.

Europe now finds itself trapped in a strategic dilemma with no painless option. If it acquiesces in U.S. actions against the Maduro regime, it risks hollowing out the legal and moral principles that underpin its opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If, however, it condemns those actions, Europe risks alienating its primary security guarantor and fracturing transatlantic unity at precisely the moment when collective defence against Russia matters most. This tension captures the essence of Europe’s current situation. European leaders are reluctant to confront Trump directly, not because they fail to see the danger, but because they lack the means to deter or meaningfully constrain American action. As a result, Europe has slipped into a strategy of appeasement rather than confrontation. This may appear rational in the short term, given Europe’s military weakness and heavy reliance on U.S. protection, but it is not a viable long term strategy. Trump still has years left in his term, he is increasingly unpredictable, and his actions are becoming more assertive and consequential. Europe cannot indefinitely base its security on the hope that restraint in Washington will prevail.

For many Europeans, the U.S. is no longer viewed as a benign or even neutral actor, but as a predatory power pursuing its own interests at Europe’s expense. The Trump administration openly supports MAGA aligned far right movements across the continent, forces that many European leaders see as an existential threat to their democratic systems. At the same time, Washington has pressured Kyiv to accept territorial concessions without offering firm U.S. security guarantees. Despite this, many European governments still struggle to accept the implications of this shift, clinging to the assumption that the transatlantic relationship will ultimately stabilise itself. The core reason for this hesitation is Europe’s continued dependence on the United States for its own security. Although European rearmament began in earnest last year, it will take at least three to five years before it becomes credible. Until then, Europe remains reliant on American weapons, intelligence, logistics, and strategic capabilities to sustain Ukraine’s resistance and to deter Russia through NATO.

The Trump administration is acutely aware of these vulnerabilities and has shown a willingness to exploit them. Last year, it compelled European states to accept a 15% tariff on exports to the U.S., with the implicit threat that defiance could accelerate a unilateral American withdrawal from Ukraine or even from NATO itself. This episode reinforced a perception in Washington that pressure works, and in Europe that resistance carries unacceptable costs.

Accordingly, Europe has few credible responses if the U.S. were to move to annex Greenland. In theory, Europeans could attempt to construct a purely European NATO, or slow their de risking from China in search of a strategic counterweight. In practice, these options are either unrealistic or deeply destabilising. The most plausible response would be to pressure Denmark into reaching some form of accommodation with the White House, in the hope that U.S. ambitions could be moderated and reframed. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has been clear about the stakes, warning that if the U.S. were to attack another NATO country militarily, everything would stop, including the alliance itself and the security architecture built since the end of the Second World War. Even an annexation achieved through money rather than force, buying Greenland rather than invading it, would represent one humiliation too many for Europe. Frederiksen’s warning is therefore not rhetorical. A U.S. land grab in Greenland would signal the collapse of the assumptions that have sustained European security for generations, leaving Europe exposed in a far more dangerous and uncertain world.

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