The Greenland Crisis Could Break NATO

For all of 2025, the Europeans had a single goal when it came to the Trump Administration: keep the U.S. invested in European security, in Ukraine, and in NATO. That goal will become redundant in 2026 if the U.S. attempts to annex Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. European leaders believe the White House is preparing to do just that, as the White House says it is discussing a “range of options.” For Europeans, the U.S. is now a predatory regime. The Trump Administration supports MAGA allied far-right parties across the continent that many European leaders believe pose an existential threat to their democracies. Washington continues to put pressure on Kyiv to accept territorial concessions absent clear U.S. security guarantees. Normalizing economic relations with Russia remains a goal for Trump’s team. And yet, many European leaders refuse to accept this reality. Read More: How Europe Can Find Its Strength in 2026 The reason? Europe remains hugely dependent upon the U.S. for its own security. The continent’s rearmament, a process that began in earnest last year, will take at least three to five years to be credible. Until then, Europe will be highly dependent on U.S. weapons, kit, intelligence, and other strategic enablers to keep Ukraine in the fight. And they will remain hugely dependant on the U.S., through NATO, to deter Russia. The Trump Administration sees Europe’s weakness and its vulnerabilities and is exploiting them. It did so last year, forcing the Europeans to accept a 15% tariff on their exports to America in order to avoid alienating Trump and hastening a unilateral U.S. exit from Ukraine and NATO. The White House is deploying that playbook again. But the annexation of Greenland would shatter the illusion that America remains a friend. President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, recently appointed special envoy to Greenland Jeff Landry, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have all spoken provocatively about Greenland’s territory in recent days. Senior U.S. officials argue the White House has legitimate security concerns in the Artic region. These include countering Russian and Chinese bases there; bolstering the U.S.’s missile defenses to constrain China’s new capabilities; controlling access during wartime and expanding the U.S.’s Naval presence. They don’t fully trust the Greenlanders or Danes to manage these on the U.S.’s behalf. The seriousness of these American anxieties is reflected by the amount of policy planning taking place on Greenland across U.S. government agencies, involving work on economic incentives, diplomatic and legal agreements, and security arrangements. It is true that Denmark is a small country with relatively limited military capabilities, even if it spent a sizable 3% of its GDP on defense in 2025 and is investing in the Arctic. But the island is also part of NATO’s territory and senior European officials tell me that all of Trump’s security goals can easily be met. There is no opposition to more U.S. bases on the Island; security and defense co-operation is also underpinned by U.S.-Danish bilateral arrangements; and the U.S. already enjoys substantial military access and base-operating authority on the Island since 1951. And if the U.S.’s interest in Greenland is largely economic, the exploitation of the territory’s minerals and rare earths is already open to American investors. This is why many European leaders fear there is little they can do to defuse this crisis, because a far cruder and sinister goal is at play: territorial expansion and real estate. Trump appears to driven by a desire to enlarge America on the map. Read More: The Ways Trump Could Try to Take Denmark This would likely come about not by not boots on the ground, but political and economic coercion to influence the 57,000 Greenlanders directly and politically, perhaps by a referendum, so the U.S. can claim civilian—and not only military—sovereignty over the island. The Europeans have no good answers for what they would do if the U.S. attempted to annex Greenland’s territory in this way. It could attempt to forge ahead with a “European NATO.” It could slow down the pace of its de-risking from China to seek an alliance with Beijing. But a more credible option would be to put pressure on Copenhagen to come to some form of amicable arrangement with the White House—so long as U.S. aims could be tempered and rationalized. Until now, the goal of the Danish government has been to keep Greenland out of the headlines; to wait it out and keep a cool head. That strategy has now changed. Copenhagen is trying to raise the costs—to the U.S. of moving any plan forward, and to the rest of Europe, of sitting on the fence. That is why Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen pointedly said that, “if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” A U.S.-imposed annexation of Greenland, even with a bombardment of dollars, not missiles, would be one humiliation too far the Europeans. Frederiksen is right: a U.S. landgrab would be the end of the Alliance, and do irreperable damage to the E.U.