What happens when the world’s most powerful military alliance cannot answer its most fundamental question: who defends Denmark when the aggressor is America itself?
On Wednesday morning, Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers left the White House after what diplomats termed “frank but constructive” talks with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The diplomatic language masked a starker reality. “We didn’t manage to change the American position,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars LΓΈkke Rasmussen admitted. “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.”
Ten days earlier, American forces had bombed Caracas, abducted Venezuelan President NicolΓ‘s Maduro from his compound, and flown him to New York to face charges. The operation involved 150 aircraft, naval bombardment, and Delta Force operators. At least 80 Venezuelans died in the assault. Trump watched the raid in real time from Mar-a-Lago, later describing it as “one of the most stunning, effective and powerful displays of American military might” since World War II.
The connection is not subtle. Danish lawmakers now openly state that the only existential threat to Greenland comes not from Beijing or Moscow, but from Washington. “You are the threat,” Danish defence committee chairman Rasmus Jarlov told Trump directly. “Not them.”
The Contested Territories
Greenland contains approximately 1.5 million tons of proven rare earth reserves, ranking it eighth globally. The Kvanefjeld and Tanbreez deposits are among the world’s largest. These minerals are essential for smartphones, electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and advanced military systems. China currently controls 90 per cent of global rare earth processing, giving Beijing strategic leverage over supply chains across the Western world.
Yet the rare earth justification collapses under scrutiny. The United States possesses 1.9 million tons of rare earth reserves domestically, according to the US Geological Survey. Greenland’s harsh Arctic climate makes mining operations economically marginal at best. Even if ore were extracted, it would require processing in China, the very dependency Trump claims to be addressing. However, that said, we know how American geologists feel about rare earth minerals; that’s the bonus.
The strategic calculus reveals different priorities. Greenland sits astride the shortest route between North America and Europe. The US military already operates Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule), hosting missile warning systems and space surveillance infrastructure through a 1951 defence agreement with Denmark. Under that agreement, Washington can establish additional “defence areas” on the island. Danish law does not apply to American personnel on the base.
What Trump demands is not access, but control. “We need Greenland for the purpose of National Security,” he declared Wednesday morning. “Anything less than that is unacceptable.”
The Precedent
The Venezuelan operation established a template. Trump offered Maduro exile in Turkey. When the Venezuelan president refused, American forces struck. Planning had begun months earlier. A CIA team operated inside Venezuela from August onwards, tracking Maduro’s movements and habits. Elite troops rehearsed the extraction using a replica compound. By December, the USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier had positioned itself in the Caribbean, part of a military buildup that Trump believed “got the attention of Maduro.”
Congressional Democrats accused the administration of lying. “Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change,” Senator Andy Kim wrote. “I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress.”
The operation violated international law, undermined democratic principles, and set a precedent that even Republican lawmakers found alarming. “My main concern now is that Russia will use this to justify their illegal and barbaric military actions against Ukraine, or China to justify an invasion of Taiwan,” said Representative Don Bacon. “Freedom and rule of law were defended last night, but dictators will try to exploit this to rationalise their selfish objectives.”
They will not need to try hard. The logic is already established: if a large power can indict the leader of a smaller adjacent country and extract him by military force, what constraint remains on any imperial ambition?
The Alliance Crisis
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all. NATO invoked it only once, after the September 11 attacks, when European allies deployed to Afghanistan in support of the United States. Danish troops fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Denmark’s per capita death rate in Afghanistan matched America’s.
Now Copenhagen faces an unprecedented dilemma. If American forces attack Greenland, Denmark would be legally entitled to invoke Article 5. But Article 5 requires unanimous agreement from all members to activate. The alliance cannot vote to go to war against itself.
“A US attack on Greenland would be a direct violation of the NATO treaty,” legal experts at Just Security confirmed. “There is no basis for concluding that the obligation would not extend to a US attack on Denmark in the form of operations to seize control of Greenland.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that a US military move to seize Greenland “would mean the end of NATO.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the alliance would “lose its meaning” if one member attacked another. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Britain issued a joint statement declaring that “Greenland belongs to its people.”
The European response has been carefully calibrated, and utterly inadequate. Germany deployed 13 soldiers to Greenland for exercises running through Saturday. Sweden sent a contingent as well. These token gestures were described as demonstrating NATO members’ “ability to operate under the unique Arctic conditions.”
Thirteen soldiers. Against the military that just extracted a sitting president from a fortified compound on another continent.
The Orwellian Geography
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania forms after the United States merges with the British Empire, encompassing the Americas, the British Isles, Australasia, and southern Africa. The superstate maintains perpetual war in disputed territories to justify authoritarian control and keep populations mobilised under permanent emergency conditions.
Orwell published 1984 in 1949, the same year NATO was founded. “A dozen Western nations formed NATO,” writes journalist Dorian Lynskey. “In August, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first atom bomb in the Kazakh Steppe. In October, Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China. Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia.”
The parallel is no longer academic. NATO, initially conceived as a defensive pact against Soviet expansion, now faces a crisis its architects never contemplated: what happens when the threat to a member state comes from inside NATO itself?
Trump’s rhetoric frames external threats as justification for expansion. “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland,” he declared Friday. “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
Danish lawmakers reject this narrative entirely. “I can assure you that your fantasies about a big threat from China and Russia against Greenland are delusional,” Jarlov told the president. Greenlanders themselves report seeing no Chinese or Russian presence. “The only Chinese I see is when I go to the fast food market,” Nuuk resident Lars Vintner told reporters. “What has come out of the mouth of Donald Trump about all these ships is just fantasy.”
The invented threat serves familiar purposes. As Orwell emphasised, war in 1984 was not about victory but about maintaining internal stability. External danger provides a rallying point that distracts from domestic instability and justifies expanded government authority.
The Popular Will
American public opinion opposes Trump’s Greenland ambitions by overwhelming margins. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 17 per cent of Americans approve of efforts to acquire Greenland. Just 4 per cent support using military force, a figure that drops to virtually zero among Democrats and remains at only 10 per cent among Republicans.
A separate YouGov poll found that 72 per cent of Americans oppose military action to seize Greenland, with only 7 per cent in support. Even covert operations to influence Greenlandic politics were deemed unacceptable by 65 per cent of respondents.
Greenlanders themselves reject American control even more decisively. Approximately 85 per cent oppose becoming part of the United States. “Greenland does not want to be owned by the USA,” Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen stated unequivocally. “Greenland does not want to be governed by the USA. Greenland will not be part of the USA.”
Trump’s response was characteristically dismissive: “I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him, but that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
Democratic will, it seems, applies only when it aligns with imperial ambition.
The Elite Consensus
Trump’s threats represent not aberration but culmination. American territorial expansion follows established patterns. The United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) in 1917. Each acquisition involved a willing seller.
Modern precedents are fewer but no less instructive. President Harry Truman offered Denmark $100 million in gold for Greenland in 1946, recognising the island’s role in monitoring Soviet movements. Denmark refused. No military action followed. The difference between 1946 and 2026 is that postwar American power operated within constraints of international law and alliance structures, however imperfectly.
Those constraints no longer bind. White House officials have discussed various acquisition methods: purchasing the island outright, offering payments of $10,000 to $100,000 per Greenlander to influence an independence referendum, establishing a Compact of Free Association similar to arrangements with Pacific island nations, or simply seizing control through military force.
Secretary of State Rubio told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that Trump would prefer to buy Greenland rather than invade it. Yet the preference does not preclude the alternative. “All options are on the table,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed, “but Trump’s first option always has been diplomacy.”
This formulation inverts conventional meaning. Diplomacy accompanied by explicit military threats is not negotiation but coercion. When one party possesses overwhelming force and publicly refuses to rule out its use, there is no meeting of equals.
The European Paralysis
Europe’s response reveals structural weakness. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that “the knock-on effects would be unprecedented” if the sovereignty of a European ally were affected. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that “borders must not be changed by force.” British Foreign Secretary David Lammy described American desire to take Greenland as inconsistent with NATO’s core logic.
These statements cost nothing. They commit to nothing. They will change nothing.
The European Union’s Article 42(7) provides a collective defence clause analogous to NATO’s Article 5. European Commission officials argue it would apply to Greenland because the territory concerns defence of a member state. Yet activation depends on political will that European leaders have not demonstrated.
What would meaningful response require? At minimum: an unambiguous statement that any American military action against Greenland would trigger Article 42(7); immediate deployment of substantial European forces to Greenland to make the cost of attack prohibitive; economic sanctions prepared for implementation; and accelerated European military integration to prepare for a post-NATO security architecture.
None of these measures are under serious consideration. The 13 German soldiers represent the full extent of European commitment.
This paralysis is not accidental. European economies remain dependent on American military protection, intelligence sharing, and security guarantees. The continent has underfunded defence for decades, relying on the Atlantic alliance to maintain strategic stability. Now that alliance is itself the threat, and European leaders possess neither the military capability nor the political will to resist.
The Historical Reckoning
Empires rise. This one is Oceania.
The American imperial project has always operated through contradiction: democratic rhetoric masking oligarchic control, freedom discourse enabling interventionist foreign policy, security imperatives justifying expansion. What changes now is the abandonment of pretence.
Orwell understood that totalitarian systems do not require universal support. They require only that resistance be impossible. Oceania’s wars in 1984 were fought in disputed territories while the population remained mobilised, surveilled, and on rations. Victory was irrelevant. Control was permanent.
The precedents accumulate rapidly. Military extraction of a foreign head of state. Explicit threats against a NATO ally. Invented security justifications for territorial conquest. Token European resistance. Public opposition dismissed as irrelevant.
History does not repeat, but it rhymes. The question facing Europe is not whether American imperial ambition exists, but whether European sovereignty will survive its expression. Denmark cannot defend Greenland alone. NATO cannot defend a member against its most powerful participant. The European Union will not deploy meaningful force to protect Danish territory.
The Ghosts of Thule
To understand what the “hard way” looks like, we need not look to a hypothetical future invasion. We need only look to the frozen past of 1953.
In the biting cold of May that year, the Inughuit people of Uummannaq were not asked if they wished to move. They were told to leave. The United States needed to expand Thule Air Base, a strategic pivot point in the Cold War, and the indigenous population was an inconvenience.
They were given four days.
Families hastily packed sleds, leaving behind the graves of their ancestors, and trekked over a hundred kilometres north across the sea ice to Qaanaaq. They lived in tents as winter closed in. It was a forced displacement, executed by Denmark at the behest of Washington, to make way for the bombers and radar that would “protect” the free world.
I mention this not to indulge in historical sentimentality, but to clarify the stakes. The “security” that Washington sells has always come with a price tag attached, usually paid in the sovereignty and dignity of the people it claims to defend. The Inughuit paid it in 1953. The people of Nuuk are being asked to pay it today.
What remains is the choice Greenlanders articulated clearly: between American domination and continued self-determination within the Danish kingdom. It is a choice Europe faces as well, though its leaders have not yet acknowledged the terms.
In 1874, George Custer looked at the Black Hills of Dakota, a prospector had declared, “There’s gold in these hills.” What followed was conquest dressed as manifest destiny. Now, Trump looks at Greenland and sees rare earths, strategic dominance, and the near completion of Oceania.
Europe’s response will determine whether democratic alliances can survive their most powerful member transforming from protector into predator. The precedent was set in Caracas. Greenland is simply next.
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