Greenland is 836,000 square miles, more than five times the size of California, and it’s mostly ice. President Trump has been threatening to commandeer the island, complaining that Denmark has neglected the Arctic territory. On Wednesday, I met with Peter Boysen, the chief of the Danish army, and asked him how his country plans to strengthen Greenland’s defenses.
Boysen, who has a lean frame and stoic features, with piercing blue eyes, ticked off air capabilities and cyber defenses—satellites, drones, and other technology that can collect data and establish “domain awareness.” In layman’s terms, that means figuring out exactly who’s doing what on the mostly uninhabited territory at the top of the world, which acts as a bridge between the European continent and the northernmost reaches of the Americas.
But then the army chief paused. “In order to maintain sovereignty, you need boots on the ground,” he said. He leaned forward over a small table in the Kastellet, a 17th-century fort in Copenhagen that still houses military offices, so that I could not mistake his meaning. “We need, of course, to have units that are able to deploy to Greenland in times of crisis to show presence.”
The crisis has come. The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland meet today at the White House with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Hours before the meeting, the Danish defense ministry announced a stepped-up military presence in Greenland, including aircraft, ships, and soldiers.
A spokesperson for the Danish Defense Command told me that the military presence represents “routine task execution,” part of “preparation for upcoming activities,” and presented it as the fulfillment of promises made last fall to spend more on Arctic security, including on Greenland. Sweden’s prime minister said today that his country would also be sending soldiers to Greenland.
But Danish lawmakers I spoke with suspected that the timing was not a coincidence. They said the government wants to avoid inflaming tensions with the United States, but also knows it can’t sit on its hands. “If we want to have a credible deterrent, we have to send something,” said a member of the Danish parliament’s defense committee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. A U.S. official in Copenhagen told me that the deployment is consistent with Denmark’s promises to boost Arctic deterrence, but was likely expedited because of tensions with the United States.
The move seems to offer the Trump administration a stark choice: Will you join our efforts or destroy them?
Denmark’s defense minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, appeared to preview the new military footprint in remarks to reporters yesterday. He said additional forces would showcase a “clear response to the challenge facing the Arctic,” but he characterized the deployment as a joint NATO effort, not a threat to the Americans.
Boysen struck a similar note in our conversation. He has been head of the army since 2024, helping to lead a military buildup that stretches eastward to the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm and westward to Greenland. Historically, Denmark’s military hasn’t had a large permanent presence on Greenland, though its Joint Arctic Command is headquartered in the capital, Nuuk, and there are additional personnel at Station Nord, the northernmost military base in the world, as well as several other outposts. Despite Trump’s claims that adversaries are bearing down on the island, Boysen said Denmark’s foreign intelligence service hasn’t identified an imminent threat—“from Russia or China or anybody else.” Current and former U.S. officials told me the same.
Boysen said Denmark has one battalion, numbering about 600 soldiers, capable of deploying to the Arctic. With new conscription rules adding to the ranks of the Danish army, as well as joint NATO priorities in the polar region, he said the country’s “ability to operate up there will increase.” Danish authorities expect allies to step up their footprint on Greenland as well, Boysen told me, pointing to a Denmark-led exercise on the island in 2025, which included France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway. “So again,” he said, “I think some of our key allies would want to join us, including the Americans, on Greenland.”
[Read: Trump seizing Greenland could set off a chain reaction]
But Trump seems intent on a different path. He has ridiculed existing efforts to defend Greenland, and insisted that the United States must own the island, which has enjoyed home rule within the Kingdom of Denmark since 1979. A Cold War-era agreement signed by Denmark and the United States gave Washington broad latitude to conduct military operations on the territory, and the U.S. Space Force currently has a base on the island’s northwest coast. Rasmus Jarlov, a Danish lawmaker, told me that the Trump administration has yet to articulate a single objective on Greenland, aside from acquiring it. “That’s the challenge we have,” Jarlov said. “And, of course, since they already have full access, it’s a little hard to improve.”
“But,” the lawmaker added with a laugh, “we’re willing to try.”
Trump, for his part, doesn’t appear to be in the mood to negotiate. He wrote this morning on social media that anything less than ownership was “unacceptable.” Yesterday, after Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, vowed to cast his lot with Denmark over the United States, the president said that he didn’t “know anything about” Nielsen but that such a choice would be a “big problem for him.”
What would be a big problem, for everyone, is a U.S. military incursion in Greenland. For one thing, Article 5 of NATO’s charter compels members of the alliance to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. (It doesn’t contemplate what happens if NATO members attack one another.) There’s also a royal decree from 1952, issued in response to Denmark’s humiliating rout by Nazi forces in the Second World War, that compels the country’s soldiers to fight back if their territory is invaded. Boysen was unequivocal in describing the decree as a fact of military service. “You have to,” he said. “It’s an obligation.”
When I asked whether Danish forces would really fight back against Americans, he demurred. “This is highly political,” he said. “And I’m just a soldier.”
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