LONDON — For the last year, European friends-turned-frenemies of the United States have delicately navigated one shock after another, hoping for the best as President Donald Trump threatened to lay waste to the global order.
When Trump scolded NATO allies, lambasted Ukraine’s president, laid on tariffs and framed ratified treaties as conditional deals, the go-to play by European leaders was to placate — with military spending pledges, trade concessions, disciplined summits, in language scrubbed of morality or judgment.
It wasn’t always elegant, or even dignified, but the policy of strategic acquiescence seemed to be working, sort of. U.S. arms kept flowing to Ukraine, an all-out trade war was averted and Trump deigned to say some nice things about NATO.
Then came the Tomahawk missiles that rocked Caracas, explosions that echoed in capitals around the world. Governments that spent years preaching restraint, legality and multilateralism found themselves scrambling for words to express unease without triggering Trump’s fury.
The precarious strategy of managing Trump, rather than confronting him, suddenly looked exposed when Trump and his inner circle revived their talk of “getting” Greenland and even floated the idea of military action. To European ears, it sounded less like bluster than a retrograde worldview now backed by unvarnished American might: power over process, leverage over law, loyalty conditioned on utility.
“It’s approaching a full-on existential crisis,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group. “It could be far greater than Russia invading Ukraine because Russia is an adversary. Now, it’s the guarantor of European security undermining European security.”
Where many European leaders’ reactions to the Venezuela raid were muted, caveated or outsourced to legal abstractions about the United Nations Charter, European leaders on Tuesday came out with uncommonly forceful rebukes about the Trump administration’s greediness on Greenland.
The prime minister of Denmark, a NATO member, said a U.S. action on Greenland, a territory of the kingdom of Denmark for more than 300 years, would be the end of the alliance. Leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Britain closed ranks with Copenhagen, issuing a joint statement that Greenland’s future is a matter for “Denmark and Greenland, and them only.”
Denmark and Greenland have stated emphatically, and repeatedly, that the huge Arctic territory — sparsely populated with 59,000 mostly Indigenous residents and boasting potentially rich deposits of rare earth minerals — is not for sale. Greenland is officially designated as an autonomous region, and residents say they have no intention of living under the yoke of a new colonial ruler.
Conflicting signals from Washington, however, have only heightened the anxiety.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday told lawmakers in a closed briefing that Trump’s goal is to buy Greenland from Denmark, playing down military action. But on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump and his team are “discussing a range of options” and that “utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.”
Europe had been riding out Trump’s shocks, betting there would be limits. To many, those bets now look much riskier.
NATO has survived clashing allies before. Greece and Turkey, notably, have been in a standoff since Turkish forces occupied northern Cyprus in 1974. But, as Rahman noted, the U.S., NATO’s wealthiest and most powerful member, was instrumental in mediating that rift.
“Now it is causing it,” he said. “NATO can’t survive a forceful annexation. The alliance would be meaningless even if it continues to exist on paper.”
Tensions over Greenland’s status were already escalating even before the Venezuela raid.
In December, Trump appointed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) as his “special envoy to Greenland,” a post Denmark and Greenland rejected. Landry embraced the goal of working to “make Greenland a part of the U.S.”
The Danish government called in U.S. diplomats to personally object to Landry’s comments, the second time in recent months Denmark summoned American officials for a face-to-face wrist slap as it reached for Greenland.
After the Caracas operation, the rhetoric grew edgier and — following Trump’s effective takeover of a sovereign neighbor — far more believable.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Tuesday that the “formal position” of the United States is that Greenland should be American, for national security reasons, and, that essentially, it was Trump’s for the taking. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said.
Miller’s wife posted an image of the American flag superimposed on a map of Greenland with the caption “SOON.”
“It’s clear that some people in and adjacent to the administration felt empowered by the success of the operation,” said Heather Hurlburt, an associate fellow in the Americas Program at Chatham House, the London-based think tank.
Hurlburt cited a retired U.S. general who viewed the White House move in Venezuela and its fixation on Greenland as reminiscent of teenagers playing the geostrategic board game Risk.
“Once you start down the road of the Monroe Doctrine or the ‘Donroe’ doctrine, or whatever we’re saying now, you look at a map of the Western Hemisphere, and there is Greenland,” she said.
Whether its gaming or grasping, European leaders face unpalatable choices. One is to stick with the unified hard line that emerged in recent days, making clear that any move on Greenland could trigger a response by European allies — not against Russia or China but, unthinkably, against the United States.
Invoking the NATO treaties collective defense clause, known as Article 5, under which an attack on one member is regarded as an attack on all, requires the unanimity of all 32 allies. The United States, of course, would reject any plea for help by Denmark — effectively neutering the treaty.
“Article 5 did not anticipate that the invading country would be a member of NATO,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) told reporters asking about bill in Congress to prohibit Trump for acting in Greenland.
Military experts say Denmark and Greenland would stand no chance against American military might. In reality that is nonstarter in every way; political analysts across the board agree with Miller that no one will go to war over Greenland. Europe is too dependent on the U.S. militarily and economically to risk a true break.
But the mere prospect of such conflict, only highlights how much more difficult it is now for U.S. allies to toe the line with Trump. That, too, could lead to a drastic deterioration of the transatlantic alliance if not it’s end, analysts say.
“Many European countries are still seeking to ride both a European and an American horse,” Rahman said. “That may become impossible.”
Another option would be to make a deal on Greenland — a sale or lease, with expanded access to mineral rights, and U.S. role in security. In the event of a crisis, “the rest of Europe will lean on Denmark to make some kind of arrangement with the U.S.,” Rahman said.
A Louisiana Purchase-style sale may be the least likely. Danish law recognizes Greenlanders as a people with the right to decide their own future, meaning Copenhagen cannot barter the island away even if it wanted to. Any change in sovereignty would first require Greenland to choose independence — a separate legal, electoral process — before it could negotiate anything with Washington.
Politically, there is deep public resistance on both countries to any transfer of sovereignty. A YouGov poll last year found that 78 percent of Danes oppose selling the island to the United States, while 85 percent of Greenland residents said in a separate survey they do not want to be part of the U.S.. The office of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declined to comment.
Some European officials are arguing quietly that the pushback coming from European capitals may be counterproductive. A flat “no” never sits well with Trump, they point out, and his most hard-line supporters delight in turning up the volume whenever the White House is challenged.
“This administration, when provoked, doubles down,” said a European diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. “That’s a bit dangerous at the moment. We should be saying there are indeed serious security concerns in the Arctic and how do we go about addressing them together.”
European militaries largely agree with Trump that the icy northern reaches of the Atlantic are going to be a strategic hot spot in coming decades, an obvious pathway for Chinese missiles and Russian submarines. Many say there would be little resistance to any U.S. plans to beef up its presence around the territory, which is already covered by NATO and numerous bilateral agreements between Washington and Denmark, and where the U.S. already has a military base.
Their fear, which has spiked since the White House delivered its object lesson in Venezuela, is that the old protocols really may be out the window. And their bigger fear may simply be: what comes next?
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