Europe's Greenland dilemma exposes NATO fault lines as Trump threatens military action

The grand room in Paris was supposed to be about Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky told the assembled leaders his plan to end the war with Russia was 90 percent complete, and nobody wanted to jeopardise American backing for that effort. But a different territorial dispute loomed over the gathering, one that pitted a NATO ally against the alliance's most powerful member. Donald Trump wants Greenland. His administration has now said so explicitly, with the White House confirming it is discussing a range of unilateral options to acquire the island, and that military force remains on the table.

The White House makes its position explicit

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, delivered the message on Monday: the United States is actively discussing how to get Greenland. All options are unilateral. The most chilling line for European capitals was her reminder that utilising the US military is always an option at the Commander-in-Chief's disposal. This is not the first time Trump has floated buying the world's largest island, an autonomous Danish territory six times the size of Germany. In his first term, European officials privately mocked the idea. The weekend's military intervention in Venezuela, where US forces took the Venezuelan president into custody, stopped the laughter.

Trump's rationale is strategic. He claims Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships and that Denmark cannot secure the Arctic alone. The US already operates Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) on the island under a bilateral agreement dating to the Cold War. Personnel there have fallen from roughly 10,000 at the height of that era to around 200 today. Copenhagen argues it has stepped up, pledging $4 billion for Arctic patrol vessels, drones and aircraft. The Trump administration has not engaged with that offer.

Denmark draws a red line on the alliance

Mette Frederiksen, Denmark's prime minister, was in Paris. She has said plainly that if the US takes Greenland unilaterally, the transatlantic defence alliance Europe has relied on since 1945 is over. Denmark and the US are both NATO members, described by Copenhagen as extremely close allies. The irony was not lost on the leaders gathered for Ukraine: they were trying to secure American help defending a European country against Russian territorial ambition, while the US simultaneously threatened the sovereignty of another European nation and had just conducted a military operation in Venezuela.

NATO's founding treaty does not distinguish between an attack from outside the alliance and an attack from within it. But there is a long-standing understanding that Article 5, the collective defence clause, does not apply when one ally attacks another. The precedent is Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus. NATO did not intervene; the US mediated. Denmark is one of NATO's smaller but active members. The US is by far the largest. The imbalance is structural.

A joint statement that reveals more than it says

On the sidelines of the Ukraine talks, six European powers, the UK, France, Germany and three others, issued a joint statement. They said Arctic security should be achieved collectively with NATO allies including the United States, and that matters concerning Denmark and Greenland are for Denmark and Greenland alone to decide. The statement was careful. It did not criticise the US directly. It did not mention military threats. And it came from only six of the 27 EU member states plus the UK. The other 21 stayed silent.

Camille Grande of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who served as NATO's Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment from 2016 to 2022, told me a common statement from all 27 EU partners plus the UK would have sent a powerful message to Washington. Instead, the limited signatory list underscored the divisions. Nordic neighbours rushed to Denmark's defence verbally. London, Paris and Berlin were initially silent. Sir Keir Starmer spoke on Monday. Friedrich Merz has said similar in the past. Emmanuel Macron visited Greenland in December. But the collective European response remained muted.

Europe's dependency constrains its diplomacy

An EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it bluntly: this whole situation has just underlined once again Europe's fundamental weakness vis-a-vis Trump. The pattern is familiar. When Trump imposed 15 percent tariffs on EU goods last year, the bloc chose not to retaliate, fearing the loss of US security guarantees. At the end of 2025, the EU failed to fulfil a pledge to support Ukraine using frozen Russian assets, finding the money by other means but missing a chance to signal resolve to both Moscow and Washington. Now, faced with a direct threat to a member state's territory, the union cannot muster a united front.

Julianne Smith, the US ambassador to NATO until Trump's re-election, warned me that the situation risks breaking the EU as well as posing an existential dilemma for the alliance. She argued Europe should take Trump seriously and begin contingency planning: using the upcoming Munich Security Conference and Davos, where senior US officials will be present, and considering bold ideas like new defence pacts. Trump secured commitments from every NATO ally except Spain last summer to massively increase defence spending. Yet Europe remains heavily reliant on the US for intelligence gathering, command and control, and air capabilities. Washington knows it.

The legal vacuum at NATO's core

NATO insiders say that even behind closed doors, European member states can hardly contemplate what happens if Washington moves militarily on Greenland. The treaty text offers no escape hatch. Article 5 says an armed attack against one ally is an attack against all. But the alliance has never defined what happens when the attacker is another ally. The Turkey-Cyprus precedent suggests paralysis. The US, as the alliance's dominant military power, would effectively be judging its own case. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, put the reality in brutally simple terms on CNN: nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

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