The free world exhaled on Wednesday when President Trump retreated from his administration’s threat to invade Greenland. That relief, however, masks the damage that Mr. Trump has done to America this week. Mr. Trump’s apologists once dismissed his bullying of Greenland as an attempt at humor. Instead, it has been something far darker. His immoral threats against a loyal NATO ally have escalated a crisis in U.S.-European relations, weakened one of history’s most successful alliances and hurt American interests in tangible ways.
NATO has been an important force for global stability and for the democratic values that our nation champions. It has made the world safer, more prosperous and better able to work together in common purpose. The alliance amplifies American military might, deterring Russia and adversaries around the world through the original promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. NATO also serves nonmilitary purposes, helping present a unified front that limits the rising technological and economic influence of China and its autocratic allies.
Mr. Trump is undermining these interests with his push to take control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, despite vociferous resistance from Denmark and Greenlanders themselves. He is attacking the shared values to which democracies have aspired for decades: the rule of law, recognition of national sovereignty and respect for self-determination. Mr. Trump is causing what Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada this week called “a rupture, not a transition” in the world order.
In normal times, the president deserves great deference in the exercise of foreign affairs, but that deference is never absolute, especially not when the president has shown himself unbound by legal and ethical constraints. When the president endangers the country or breaks its laws, other branches of government have a responsibility to intervene. Mr. Trump’s repeated moves to undercut our most valuable alliance require other Americans to reaffirm our commitment to our international partners. The Republicans who control Congress cannot sit on their hands as they have so many times in the last year. Many of them know the value of NATO. Congress should pass a bill that bars spending on any military action against Greenland or Western Europe. It should also hold up all of Mr. Trump’s nominees to national security positions until he commits to halting his attacks on the alliance.
The Supreme Court has a role to play as well. Mr. Trump’s attempt to use tariffs to coerce allies, including in the fight over Greenland, is unconstitutional. He has justified using them by declaring a national emergency on false pretenses. We are encouraged that most justices expressed skepticism of his use of tariffs during oral arguments in November. We are disappointed that the justices are about to embark on a midwinter break that will last until late February, apparently without acting on the case. They should issue an expedited ruling, given the policy’s illegality and the damage it is causing.
Mr. Trump has always been an undisciplined and unprincipled politician, but the shambolic and sometimes illegal nature of his foreign policy moves of the past few weeks has been unusually harmful.
After months of blowing up boats in the Caribbean, without giving the victims any chance to defend themselves, he ordered a military operation to capture Venezuela’s dictator — and has since allowed the dictator’s corrupt deputies to continue ruling the country. Mr. Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up against their brutal government, saying “help is on the way,” and abandoned the protesters to a crackdown that reportedly killed thousands of them and imprisoned thousands more. And his confrontation with NATO crossed a new line: threatening the territory of a longtime ally. The notion that the United States might invade Greenland would sound like satire under any other modern-day president.
Yet it fits with Mr. Trump’s escalating attacks against NATO. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he called the alliance obsolete. In his first term, he reportedly considered withdrawing from it. During the 2024 campaign, he said he would encourage Russian leaders to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies if the allies did not increase their military spending. The threat was chilling to Russia’s Baltic neighbors, like Latvia and Estonia, given President Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of civilians in Ukraine.
As is often the case, Mr. Trump has blended a reasonable policy critique with blatant falsehoods and extreme behavior. In this instance, the reasonable critique is that most European countries have long spent too little on their defense, relying on the United States to protect them. President Barack Obama understandably complained in 2016 that they were behaving as “free riders.” Mr. Trump deserves credit for pressuring Europe to increase military spending, in both his first and second terms. That success, however, underlines that there is no need to threaten invasion or annexation to promote American interests.
The most recent falsehood that he has told about other NATO countries is that they cannot be relied on in a crisis. He made that claim again on Jan. 21 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In fact, the only time NATO has activated its guarantee of collective defense was after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. The U.S. ally that suffered the most casualties per capita in the ensuing war in Afghanistan was Denmark.
Mr. Trump’s threats indicate to friend and foe just how little regard he has for NATO’s value. Mr. Trump claims that the United States should own Greenland — “That’s our territory,” he said in Davos — because it is in the Western Hemisphere. He says the United States needs to own the island if it is to establish an effective missile defense system for the United States. These claims fly in the face of NATO’s extraordinary record of collective self-defense over the last 75 years.
By Wednesday, Mr. Trump had partly backed down and declared a framework for a still uncertain deal to end the dispute over Greenland. Even if a deal comes together and Greenland recedes from the headlines, though, the bullying will have enduring costs.
NATO’s strength is not just its formidable military power. It is also a collective commitment to the shared values of democracy and open markets that underpin a system that has been enormously beneficial to the people of the United States since World War II. Those values have also been good for the world, contributing to stability that allowed poverty to plummet in recent decades and violent deaths to become far less common than during much of humanity’s war-torn history.
NATO has weathered crises before, and it will likely survive this one, not least because European countries still rely on it for their defense. In the face of Mr. Trump’s attacks, however, it risks becoming what Rebecca Lissner of the Council on Foreign Relations calls a “zombie alliance,” capable of the logistics of combined defense but devoid of the trust that deterred aggressors. NATO countries other than the United States may also seek closer ties with autocracies. Already, Canada has warmed relations with China. France recently cut deals with Beijing on technology and trade that hurt America. The Dutch have declared they will limit intelligence sharing with Washington because of Mr. Trump’s autocratic actions.
Winning back the trust of these allies will be difficult. The best hope involves bipartisan expressions of revulsion at Mr. Trump’s actions, coming primarily from Congress. Already, Republican criticism of his menacing of Greenland seems to have played a role in his backtracking. Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both decried the threats, with Mr. Tillis calling them “beyond stupid.” Ms. Murkowski joined the Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in introducing legislation to constrain Mr. Trump’s aggression toward NATO allies.
Members of Congress should follow through and pass that legislation as a show of America’s commitment to the alliance. They should also freeze approval of Mr. Trump’s national security nominees until he agrees to halt his attacks on NATO.
Mr. Trump has a habit of declaring national emergencies on dubious pretenses to justify his policies. His reckless assault on a pillar of our national security and abandonment of longtime allies are the true national emergencies. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow are no doubt thrilled. America is less safe than it was a week ago.
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