The Greenland Crisis: America's NATO Allies Foolishly Keep Trying to Placate Trump
It's time to muster the courage to take a stand
When the April 4, 1949, treaty that created NATO was signed—and throughout the ensuing 77 years—no one imagined that the country that would one day threaten to attack a member of the alliance would be none other than its leader and prime protector, the United States.
But that’s precisely what Donald Trump says he’s prepared to do if Denmark refuses to hand over Greenland to the United States. As he put it on January 9: “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way, but if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way.”
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice-President JD Vance met last week in Washington with the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, they didn’t budge from Trump’s position. Their message was that the discussion should focus on how and when the United States would take possession of Greenland—not whether it should.
The Europeans are under the illusion that the spat over Greenland is a misunderstanding of sorts and that talks with Trump and senior members of his foreign policy team can therefore set things right.
The Danes and Greenlanders doubtless pointed out to Rubio and Vance that the April 27, 1951 treaty that gave the United States military access to the island, and under the terms of which the US still stations some 200 military personnel at the Pituffik Space Base (previously known as the Thule Air Base), can enable Washington to deploy even more troops and build additional defense installations.
They tried to address Trump’s claim that Greenland was in danger of being controlled by China and Russia and that the United States also needed the island to realize his dream of a “Golden Dome” missile defense system. The foreign ministers seemed unable to understand that these aren’t the reasons Trump wants Greenland.
He covets Greenland because he dreams of being remembered as the American president who cut a deal with a foreign government that gave the US a territory larger than the one it acquired following Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s March 1867 agreement under which Russia sold Alaska to the United States—for less than 50 cents an acre in today’s money. Greenland is about 25% larger than Alaska. As Trump sees it, attaching this vast territory to the United States would be further evidence of his greatness, the more so if he can get it for free.
Were it just a matter of bolstering Greenland’s defense to deter a Chinese or Russian takeover—an improbable scenario, but let’s set that aside for now—the United States could convene a NATO meeting to hammer out a plan, complete with benchmarks and dates, to make the island more secure.
But Trump and Stephen Miller aren’t driven by concerns about Greenland’s security. They are determined to annex it—and to use force if need be because they have the necessary military power. Their view of world politics accords with the famous dictum in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The United States’ NATO allies must abandon the illusion that talking to Trump will resolve this crisis. In one way or another, many European leaders—including NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who referred to Trump as the alliance’s “Daddy,” during its June summit at The Hague—continue to rely on negotiations, supplication, and flattery to manage Trump. These tactics have failed, miserably.
Of late, however, America’s NATO allies seem to be considering concrete measures to deter a Trump takeover of Greenland. Seven of them—Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—sent military personnel to Greenland, and France announced that its forces would be supplemented with air and sea “assets.” Just how many troops did these countries send to Greenland? All of 37—and of that number, 13 were from Germany and 15 from France. The contributions of the others ranged from three to one.
On Friday, at a press conference during his visit to Beijing, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney took the extraordinary step of stating that Canada was bound by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—its collective defense clause—and that Canada would therefore be duty-bound to honor it were Denmark attacked.
But taken together, these moves amount to little more than thin-gruel symbolism. America’s NATO allies know full well that they cannot prevent Trump from using force to conquer Greenland if he decides to do so, let alone defeat an actual US invasion of the island. Besides, even the symbolism has been watered down: German soldiers arrived on Friday and left less than 48 hours later.
Trump’s response to even this puny performative act was to announce that he would slap the seven states, as well as Denmark, with higher tariffs: 10% starting on February 1 and an additional 25% on June 1. This hike would be on top of the 15% across-the-board tariff on European exports that were written into the July 2025 EU-US trade agreement. Furthermore, in a Truth Social post, he vowed to maintain the added tariffs “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”
The EU has apparently been mulling retaliatory steps. One that’s reportedly under consideration would increase tariffs on $108 billion worth of American exports to Europe. It was considered when Trump previously threatened tariff hikes but was shelved once the US and the EU reached a trade deal last year. In addition, the European Parliament has suspended its approval of the 2025 trade agreement.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants to tighten the screws on Trump further by using the EU’s 2023 Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI). When supported by a “qualified majority vote” in the European Council—at least 15 out of 27 member states representing at least 65% of the bloc’s population—it authorizes retaliation against countries that apply economic coercion to change EU policies.
It’s virtually certain that most EU states will reject Macron’s proposal. Already, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose country has the largest population in the Union by far, has said that negotiations, not tariff hikes, are the best way to convince Trump to change his mind on Greenland.
Merz has good reason to be cautious. If Trump implemented the second installment of tariffs—25%, starting June 1—he has threatened to, the eight NATO members he has targeted would see their exports to the US plunge by as much as 50%, and Germany may take an even bigger hit.
If the EU decides not to retaliate with higher tariffs, it would be, as Trump likes to say, left with no cards to play.
There’s no ready solution to the threat that Greenland and Denmark face, but the current crisis does contain a larger lesson that America’s NATO allies would be well advised to act on.
It’s increasingly clear that Trump doesn’t value Europe. His November National Security Strategy speaks of the continent with disdain and breaks with the traditional conception of American grand strategy by asserting that Europe, a dependency with a bleak future, is no longer central to America’s foreign and national security policy.
Moreover, when Trump was asked why Greenland couldn’t be protected by strengthening its defenses, he responded that you only defend what you own. Europe (and two other NATO members, Britain and Canada) should think hard about that statement. Trump does not own any of the countries that are members of NATO, so what does his argument regarding the relationship between ownership and defense say about his willingness to use military force to defend them?
America’s NATO allies should give this question some hard thought and change their habit of bending the knee to Trump and flattering him at every turn. That merely increases his contempt for them. If they want Trump to stop treating them as vassals, they must take the hard decisions necessary to eventually eliminate their dependence on American military protection—and perhaps even prepare for the end of NATO.