According to President Donald Trump, taking control of Greenland is a “national security” necessity, essential to strengthening control of the Arctic against possible threats from Russia and China.
However, for America’s allies and the Greenlanders themselves, Trump’s threats to seize the semi-autonomous Danish territory are far more serious and threaten to shatter the decades-old principle of Western defense cooperation.
But there may not be much they can do to stop it.
“This is a very terrible threat, to be honest,” Aaja Chemnitz, one of two Greenlandic MPs in the Danish parliament, said in an interview on Thursday. “You can’t just buy another country, a people, the soul of Greenland,” she added.
“Everyone in Greenland is discussing it and a lot of people are worried and concerned. »
This alarm is shared in all European capitals.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday accused the United States of “freeing itself from the international rules it promoted”, while German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned that the world risked falling into “a den of thieves, where the most unscrupulous take what they want”.
A church in Nuuk, Greenland, in March.File Evgeniy Maloletka / APAlthough it appears artificially large on a Mercator projection map, where it spans the scale of Africa despite being 14 times smaller, Greenland has rarely figured so prominently in mainstream Western consciousness.
The vast island – the size of Alaska and California combined – is inhabited by just 57,000 residents, about the same as Carson City, Nevada. About 90% of them are indigenous Inuit whose ancestors arrived more than 1,000 years ago.
Denmark colonized Greenland 300 years ago and granted it self-governing status in the 1970s, while retaining control of military and foreign policy.
US plans for Greenland go back much further than Trump. In 1867, William H. Seward, then Secretary of State, considered annexing Greenland as well as Iceland, having recently purchased Alaska from Russia.
The United States briefly took control of Greenland during World War II to prevent its use by the Nazis, and an agreement has existed since 1951 allowing the United States to “construct, install, maintain and operate” military bases across the island.
Greenland’s only U.S. military base was used as an early warning station for Soviet nuclear missiles during the Cold War, housing thousands of troops at its peak. Sealed by ice for nine months of the year, the Pituffik base is now supervised by the US Space Force and houses a much smaller number of troops.
Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, with the domes of the Thule Tracking Station, photographed in northern Greenland in 2023.Thomas Traasdahl / Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images fileWhen Trump first said he wanted to buy Greenland in 2019, in what he described as a “real estate deal,” it was widely seen as absurd internationally.
But after years of pressure from Trump and the US attack on Venezuela, few in Europe are laughing.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland next week for further discussions, as officials push for a deal.
But the White House says all options are on the table, including military action. An attack by NATO’s most powerful member against an ally would likely implode the alliance, which has for decades upheld the principle of collective defense.
“We’re going to do something to Greenland whether they like it or not, because if we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we won’t have Russia or China as neighbors,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.
“We’re not going to allow Russia or China to occupy Greenland, and that’s what will happen if we don’t have it,” he said during the public portion of a meeting with oil and gas executives.
European powers including Britain, France and Germany said in a joint statement this week that they “will not stop defending” the principles of territorial integrity, but most experts agree with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s blunt assessment that “no one will fight the United States over the future of Greenland.”
The European Union could impose sanctions on Washington or limit its use of military bases in Europe, but both would be mutually extremely painful, said Mika Aaltola, a Finnish lawmaker who sits on the European Union’s foreign affairs committee.
“We’re basically in a trap that’s hard to solve,” Aaltola told NBC News. “We thought January would be about peace agreements or a ceasefire in Ukraine,” he said, referring to diplomatic efforts between the United States and Europe to end that conflict. “But all of a sudden we realized that Trump had manipulated us into a situation where he wanted to have Greenland.”
Iain Duncan Smith, a senior British lawmaker, said that “the reality for Europe is that it probably needs to offer an alternative to the demand made by Trump.”
There is perplexity alongside dismay. Trump already has enormous options to build new military bases in Greenland or negotiate deals for its minerals, but he has refused to compromise on his demand for a transfer of “ownership.”
He said Friday: “When we own it, we defend it. You don’t defend leases the same way. You have to own it.”
The Danish Navy patrol vessel HDMS Ejnar Mikkelsen docked in Nuuk, Greenland in November.Juliette Pavy/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesIn addition to being a good outpost from which to monitor Russia, Greenland also forms one side of the “GIUK gap” (which stands for Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom), a naval chokepoint for submarines and other ships entering and leaving the Atlantic.
As the global ice sheet melts, new Arctic shipping routes are emerging that Trump’s team and other Western officials fear could be exploited by China and Russia.
Beijing has certainly taken steps in the region, declaring itself a “near Arctic nation” in 2019 and laying out plans for a “Polar Silk Road” mirroring the infrastructure belt it has built on land.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt underscored that motive Wednesday, saying U.S. ownership of Greenland was necessary “to deter Russian and Chinese aggression in the Arctic region,” although she said there would be “many other benefits.”
Vice President JD Vance discussed Greenland’s continued role in missile defense infrastructure in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, criticizing what he said was a lack of investment from Denmark and Europe that left it vulnerable to potential threats from “the Russians and Chinese.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on December 30.Mikhail Metzel / AFP – Getty Images“They haven’t done a good job securing this area, this landmass,” he said.
Denmark’s Ambassador to the United States, Jesper Møller Sørensen, said his country recently invested $4 billion in Arctic security, including expanding the permanent presence of its armed forces.
The retreat of the sea ice could also provide new opportunities to exploit its vast mineral reserves, a topic that has proven to be at the forefront of Trump’s concerns in negotiations over Ukraine and Venezuela.
In 2023, the European Commission conducted a survey revealing that 25 of the 34 elements it classifies as “critical raw materials” were found in Greenland. These substances are essential to the production of everything from electric vehicle batteries to advanced military equipment – a vital currency in the global technology battle with China and others.
Trump himself has denied that minerals are a factor, positioning Greenland as a “national security” issue, even if some around him are eager to profit from it.
Children play ice hockey in Nuuk, Greenland, in February.Emilio Morenatti / AP file”These are critical minerals. These are natural resources,” Mike Waltz, then a congressman who would later become Trump’s national security adviser, said last January.
The reality is probably a mix of all these factors, according to William Alberque, former director of NATO’s Center for Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
“Greenland is a toxic combination of problems in terms of the interests of this administration,” Alberque said. “It brings together China hawks, legitimate concerns about Atlantic security, supporters of America First and continental security, not to mention naked economic interests.”
Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.