As the struggle for control of Greenland intensifies — and with it, the question of whether the Atlantic alliance will suffer a mortal wound — two raw geopolitical realities have come into focus.
The first is that all the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization underinvested in Arctic security for years, as melting glaciers, aggressive Chinese and Russian navies and critical undersea communications cables made one of earth’s coldest landscapes ripe for renewed superpower conflict.
The second is that President Trump has no intention of seeking a common solution to this long-brewing problem.
Instead, he has deliberately opened what could become the largest rift in the nearly 77-year history of the alliance, one that led the German vice chancellor to declare over the weekend that European nations “must not allow ourselves to be blackmailed” by the largest power in the group.
Even one of Mr. Trump’s favorite fellow leaders, President Alexander Stubb of Finland, whose country rushed into the alliance in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, warned of a “dangerous downward spiral.”
What makes this crisis both remarkable and unnecessary is that it appears so deliberately manufactured by Mr. Trump himself. As an opening position, he has made clear he is not interested in diplomatic compromises that would almost certainly achieve his stated defense aims: More U.S. bases to monitor Chinese and Russian shipping, and the expansion of his still-nascent “Golden Dome” missile defense project.
He has shown no interest so far in looking for diplomatic offramps, or the kind of defense partnerships that NATO has long fostered. Every time the Europeans offer solutions — everything short of outright American ownership of the Danish territory — Mr. Trump turns them aside, demanding all 836,000 square miles of Greenland, even if most of it is covered in ice sheet.
In fact, the sheer size of it appears to be part of the lure. The fact that most of the territory is uninhabitable does not seem to bother Mr. Trump. It is the ultimate real estate prize: a territory about three times the size of Texas, and bigger than Alaska, which is around a mere 665,000 square miles.
If Mr. Trump prevails, he will have pulled off the largest land acquisition in American history, even larger than Secretary of State William H. Seward’s negotiation in 1867, when he bought Alaska from Russia for about 2 cents an acre.
To increase the pressure on Denmark and its European allies, Mr. Trump has quickly reached for his favorite weapon of economic coercion: tariffs. A year to the week after he used his inaugural address to warn that “nothing will stand” in the way of his carrying out his America First agenda, he sounded unconcerned about the possibility of breaking up the most effective military alliance in modern history to satisfy his demand for Greenland.
He does have an easier option. A treaty between the United States and Denmark, signed in 1951 at the end of the Truman administration, gives the United States broad rights to reopen the 16 or so military bases that it once had on Greenland.
They were shuttered because Washington thought the era of strategic competition for the Arctic ended when the Soviet Union collapsed. It did not want to pay for frozen bases. So they were left to the winds and the ice: A tour of a few of the old facilities last summer revealed that the long Greenland winters had blown out the windows of the surviving houses and command centers. Runways were broken up into chunks, and overgrown.
But for a few billion dollars — far less than it would cost to buy Greenland outright — the United States has the right to build deep ports, long runways, radar stations and launch sites for missile defense interceptors. It just has not asked. As one senior Danish official put it archly, the country is ready to say yes — which may be why Mr. Trump does not want to raise the issue.
And when asked in a New York Times interview earlier this month what would happen if he had to choose between his territorial ambitions and preserving the alliance, he simply said, “It may be a choice.”
“Ownership is very important,” he said. “Because that is what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”
Asked about the prospect of using military force, he replied, “I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”
Heather Conley, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a scholar of Arctic defense politics, noted on Friday in a talk for the Council on Foreign Relations that the strategic issues Mr. Trump brought up were justified — even if the demand for ownership was mystifying.
“The Arctic shortens distances, whether that’s missile, whether that’s submarine, maritime vessels, undersea cables,” she said. “And as the Arctic transforms environmentally, we’re seeing a lot of additional economic activity.”
Mr. Trump has inflated the urgency of the threat, making it sound like China and Russia are about to take over the territory. But China, Ms. Conley noted, is “doing a lot acoustical science research” — which helps track submarines — along with deep sea mining. And “now NATO, because of all of this, is finally stepping up to increase its exercising and its presence,” she said.
But none of that fits in Mr. Trump’s narrative, which has grown louder and more urgent. At first, the Europeans thought Mr. Trump was just blustering, or just applying the rules of the New York real estate world — take maximalist positions, threaten lawsuits — to negotiate a better deal.
Then, just before his inauguration, Mr. Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago that of course he might consider the use of force to win his way on Greenland and the Panama Canal, which he has demanded be returned to American possession.
For a while, things calmed down. But as they have flared up anew, European leaders announced a series of steps they insisted would satisfy Mr. Trump’s demands, short of actually turning over the keys to the icy territory.
They started an expansion of NATO member “military presence in and around Greenland,” and said it would include air, naval and ground components. Denmark has sharply increased its military spending, despite Mr. Trump’s claim that the country’s military capabilities are limited to “two dog sleds.”
The protests from the Danish, and from the rest of Europe, about the importance of preserving the concept of sovereignty incited Mr. Trump to dig in deeper. On Saturday, in a statement, President Emmanuel Macron of France obliquely compared Mr. Trump’s efforts to coerce the sale of Greenland to Russia’s seizure of parts of Ukraine.
Now the Europeans and Americans are talking past one another — and setting up the conditions for potential confrontation.
When several European powers said they were dispatching a tiny group of military personnel to Greenland, Mr. Trump immediately interpreted it as intended to deter any armed takeover by the United States. (He was not wrong, but it was more a token presence than a serious defensive force.)
Mr. Trump then declared that “anything less” than selling all of Greenland to the United States “is unacceptable.”
Then came the tariffs, based on a presidential declaration of an incipient “emergency” that he has yet to define.
Over the weekend, a European ambassador in Washington said he and his colleagues feared where this might be going: Europe would impose counter-tariffs, and Mr. Trump, he said, might threaten to leave NATO or announce he would not come to the defense of any country in the alliance who opposed him on Greenland.
Yet European officials say they cannot back down.
“In Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, Europeans have a particular responsibility,” Mr. Macron told French defense forces at a ceremony on Sunday. “This territory belongs to the European Union, and it is also the territory of one of our NATO allies.”
What he left unsaid is what he plans to do about it, if Mr. Trump will settle for nothing less than a coerced territorial surrender.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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