The crisis over Greenland is here

A year ago, another fuss might have seemed like a temporary storm in the buzzing maelstrom of President Donald Trump’s first months in office. But no one sees this as a joke anymore.

The White House is serious about its desire to seize and control the self-governing Arctic island of Greenland, which is part of the sovereign territory of NATO ally the Kingdom of Denmark. European officials, however, believe the threat of a unilateral move is all too real.

Following the brazen weekend raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump and his aides asserted their view that the Western Hemisphere is a region where “our”—that is, the United States—security interests take priority. To this, Trump insisted without prompting on the “need” for Greenland to be under American control. “Everywhere in Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships,” Trump said. “We need Greenland for national security, and Denmark won’t be able to do that.”

In an interview broadcast on CNN on Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller did not back away from that message. He insisted that the United States should take Greenland “as part of our overall security apparatus,” while questioning the basis of Denmark’s sovereignty over this region. He ridiculed the idea of ​​any resistance by the European nation. “No one is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said.

So far, Europe’s resistance has been the same as it always is: carefully worded statements in public and hand-wringing in private. The threat to Europe’s west forced the postponement of hearings on Tuesday as European officials tried to iron out details about future security guarantees to Ukraine, mobilizing efforts to protect the continent’s east. Many of Europe’s major leaders have issued messages opposing the idea of ​​America taking over Greenland.

In the joint statement of the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Britain, it was said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” “It is up to Denmark and Greenland alone to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

But there’s still a gradual realization that the White House doesn’t care.

It has been suggested that the United States under the Trump administration may try to strengthen its role in consolidating the Ukrainian peace talks with concessions from Europe and Denmark on the Greenland issue. Atlantic. According to Reuters, Trump and his team are planning to buy Greenland during this period and are exploring options ranging from buying the territory to creating a direct “free association agreement” with the island, similar to what the United States did with Palau, where the small Pacific island nation has guaranteed its defense.

‘If the US chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, everything stops.’

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen

Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders, whatever their complex feelings about centuries of Danish rule, have no interest in joining the United States, and the political leadership in charge of the island has been clear in rejecting Washington’s overtures. “Enough is enough. No more pressure. No more insinuations. No more fantasies of annexation,” Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a social media post on Monday.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen spoke harshly about what is at stake. “If the US chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, everything stops,” Frederiksen told Danish broadcaster TV2. “So that includes our NATO and therefore the security that has been provided since the end of World War II.”

This means the unraveling of the transatlantic alliance that many on Trump’s far-right wing are seeking. “Taking Greenland would appeal to MAGA ideologues because it would destroy NATO in one fell swoop,” he wrote Finance Times columnist Edward Luce. “Denmark can apply Article 5, under which an attack on one is considered an attack on all. Since America leads NATO, the agreement would be invalid. No ally could come to Denmark’s defense. If Denmark accepted the fait accompli, the result would be the same.”

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Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot called for caution in an interview during his visit to Washington this week. “We all need this NATO alliance, especially in such troubling times around the world, but we also need to respect all allies within this alliance,” he said, adding that he hoped “in the coming weeks it will be possible to have an open dialogue and address these fears with respect for Denmark’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

Belgium hosts the executive offices of both NATO and the European Union, two key institutions of the geopolitical West that are in Trump’s sights. The White House’s National Security Strategy document, released late last year, effectively damns the project of European integration against American interests, warns that the EU’s liberal structure is leading to a “civilization erasure” of Europe, and conflates Trump’s agenda with the campaigns of the continent’s emerging and often Eurosceptic far right. The Trump administration has also slammed Brussels and some former EU officials for drafting digital regulations that have led to penalizing US tech companies.

“We have an immigration problem that perhaps we need to manage better collectively,” Prévot said. “That is true, but undermining our sovereignty, imposing sanctions on some of our citizens, threatening our companies if they support gender equality, for example, threatening our territorial integrity, as in Greenland, or interfering with our democratic process – this is not understood and unacceptable by Europeans.”

The question is whether there is any influence to rein in Trump. In Congress, the bipartisan group Friends of Denmark issued a statement condemning Trump’s “saber rattling” and warning that these expansionist impulses play into the hands of enemies in Russia and China.

“If the message is ‘We need Greenland,’ the truth is that we already have access to everything we could need from Greenland,” the statement said. “If we want to deploy more forces in Greenland or build additional missile defense infrastructure, Denmark has given us the green light to do so. Our ally has always accommodated us. The threat of annexing Greenland unnecessarily undermines this no-win cooperation.”

But the fallout from Trump’s Venezuela operation signaled a paradigm shift in which the United States, driven by neo-imperialist impulses from more than a century ago, is increasingly disconnected from the “rules-based” postwar order it helped create after World War II. European officials and leaders in other countries who do not want to live in a world where might makes right constantly appeal to the centrality of this order and the institutions established to guarantee it, such as the United Nations.

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“Without being naive, because we know the world is changing, we need to continue to have advocates of a rules-based order because that is the best context for getting results, for economic prosperity, for peace,” Prévot told me.

The White House has a different look. “We live in a world ruled by power, ruled by power, ruled by power,” Miller told CNN. “These have been the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Washington Post

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