NATO, a security alliance that has protected Europe for decades, has found itself with limited power to determine its own destiny due to President Donald Trump's desire for the United States to take over Greenland.
Since Trump revived his ambition to annex the semi-autonomous Danish territory following the US military operation to capture the president of Venezuela, NATO members have been scrambling to find ideas on how to respond to US criticism that Greenland is insufficiently protected.
Any forcible American takeover of Greenland would be unprecedented: the seizure of the territory of one NATO member by another - a nuclear-armed superpower that is supposed to provide the ultimate security guarantee to all members.
Many politicians, diplomats and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic say that would spell the end of the alliance, or at least its serious weakening. That, in turn, could have devastating consequences for European security, leaving the continent significantly more vulnerable to Russian attack.
“I can’t think of any other cases where NATO has really been on the brink, especially not when the United States was the culprit,” Sten Rinning, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark and author of several books on NATO, told Reuters.
Talks about what NATO could do about Greenland are still in the early stages, diplomats say, but could include additional aerial surveillance, naval patrols and greater use of technology to monitor the region.
In order to act quickly, rather than wait for a collective NATO decision, Denmark and individual allies, including Germany, France, Sweden and Norway, announced on Wednesday small but symbolic troop deployments to Greenland for exercises to demonstrate their commitment to Arctic security.
NATO members' strategy to bolster security in the Arctic will only succeed in keeping the alliance together if Trump accepts it as an alternative - or part of an alternative - to the US takeover of Greenland.
The announcement came as the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers met in Washington, apparently unsuccessfully, with US Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
NATO members' strategy to strengthen security in the Arctic will only succeed in keeping the alliance together if Trump accepts it as an alternative - or part of an alternative - to the US takeover of Greenland.
However, he repeatedly insisted that nothing less than ownership was out of the question, leading many European officials to conclude that he was motivated more by a desire to expand US territory than by security concerns.
“NATO can help and be part of the solution by developing a serious Arctic surveillance and deterrence strategy,” Fabrice Pottier, former NATO director of policy planning and current CEO of Rasmussen Global, a geopolitical consultancy founded by former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told Reuters.
"But his credibility is already collateral damage to these tensions. With his demands, Trump has cast doubt on the US commitment to NATO, which is rarely forgotten."
Trump said last week that the United States remains committed to NATO and that Russia and China only fear the alliance as long as the United States is a member. He said NATO would become much stronger if Greenland were in US hands.
On the other hand, Russia claims that NATO's stories about Russia and China posing a threat to Greenland are a myth designed to artificially incite hysteria, and that, as it stated, the Western alliance's policy of escalating confrontation in the Arctic is extremely dangerous.
For many NATO members, the latest escalation over Greenland is an unwelcome and dangerous distraction. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought the war to NATO's borders, the alliance has been intensely focused on strengthening its eastern flank, amid fears that one of its members could be Russian President Vladimir Putin's next target.
The leaders of Denmark and Greenland insist that the island is not for sale and does not want to be part of the United States. European leaders have stood by them in recent days.
Many European diplomats consider a U.S. military takeover of Greenland unlikely, although Trump has repeatedly mentioned such a scenario or refused to rule it out. Still, they acknowledge that it would have enormous consequences. One Eastern European official said it would be “an earthquake situation, with the risk of destroying NATO.”
Danish and other European officials have pointed out that Greenland, as part of NATO, is already covered by Article 5 of the alliance's collective security treaty. So if Russia or China were to try to take over the territory - as Trump has suggested they might - they would risk war with the entire alliance, including the United States.
Officials also stressed that the United States already has a military base in Greenland, the Pitufik Space Base, with about 200 troops, and that it can deploy as many additional forces as it wants under a 1951 agreement.
However, diplomats say NATO allies agree that the alliance as a whole should do more to ensure security in the Arctic, which has so far been largely provided by countries in the region such as Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada.
Denmark has a Joint Arctic Command in Greenland, with around 150 military and civilian personnel.
“When it comes to the Arctic region, we need to work together as an alliance,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in Brussels on Tuesday. “And now we are working out more details on the next steps, to make sure that we can really do this as a collective alliance.”
Rutte said Trump was right to point out the need for greater security in the Arctic. He also said Denmark was investing more in Boeing P-8 surveillance aircraft, long-range drones, F-35 fighter jets, aerial refueling and other capabilities to better protect the region.
However, because NATO operates on a consensus basis, any major change to the alliance's security posture in the Arctic would have to be agreed upon by all 32 members - including the United States.
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