On Greenland, Europe’s Breaking Point With Trump Has Arrived

For years, Europe has responded to Donald Trump with a mixture of eye-rolling, damage control, and hope that the nightmare would somehow pass. The strategy was pacification: smile through clenched teeth, wait out the tantrums, and reassure one another that institutions would hold. That strategy is now breaking down—and it should.

The latest rhetoric this week out of Washington, openly entertaining the use of force to seize Greenland, has snapped what remained of the illusion that this is merely bluster. It is something worse: a declaration that allied territory is a prize and that treaties are optional when power is available.

When a sitting American president and his inner circle speak casually about “taking” Greenland from Denmark—a NATO ally—and refuse to rule out military action, this cannot be swept aside as a nifty trick to control the news cycle. It is an insult to Greenlanders themselves and a direct affront to the alliance system that underpinned Western security for generations.

This comes while Trump has repeatedly questioned NATO’s value, treated European partners as freeloaders, and expressed admiration for strongmen, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Truth Social, Trump wrote that he doubted NATO “would be there for us if we really needed them”–a generous gift to Putin.

Indeed, the threats against Denmark are part of a worldview in which might makes right and values count for nothing. Whatever one makes of the abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro (a benighted and corrupt dictator whose ouster is indeed a boon for his country), America’s legally dubious actions there, followed by outrageous Trump talk about needing access to Venezuela’s oil, is raising alarms all over the world.

Trump’s national security strategy, issued last month, essentially abandons democracy promotion as a goal, heaps scorn on Europe, and reframes the entire global system as a Hobbesian scramble for securing national interests.

Greenland, the administration believes, is a U.S. interest. Is it?

Well, Greenland is a huge territory abutting the Arctic and therefore is strategic. But it is also home to 56,000 people, mostly Inuit, who have built meaningful self-government within Denmark and overwhelmingly do not wish to be absorbed into the United States. The language of “options on the table” speaks about them as objects, not citizens. Moreover, if America needs the territory for strategic reasons in the Arctic, it has that through NATO, and the Danes have made clear U.S. bases are welcome in the territory.

Given the latest reckless salvos from the White House, Denmark’s prime minister warned that an American attack on Greenland would mark the end of NATO.

She’s right: the absurd proposition itself, never mind an actual invasion, makes a mockery of the central idea of Western deterrence—that allies defend one another rather than raid one another.

It is so preposterous that Europe may finally be running out of patience.

For nearly a decade, European leaders hoped Trump could be managed with flattery and delay. They reassured themselves that advisers would restrain him, that courts would block excesses, that elections would solve the problem. But in his second term Trump has proven unrestrained, and Trumpworld has moved to active political intervention in Europe. He weighed openly into the Polish election, almost demanding Poles vote in a right wing president (which they did, by a whisker), and his allies cultivate far-right movements across the continent, bolster sympathetic media, and launder talking points through trans-Atlantic conferences and think tanks.

The objective is to weaken the European Union, divide NATO, and replace coordinated democratic policymaking with nationalist governments deferential to Washington or Moscow as convenient. Another excellent gift to Russia, and also China.

If Europe cannot draw a red line at threats to seize allied territory, then there is no line left to draw. If the continent shrugs at election interference, encouragement of illiberal populists, questioning of collective defense, and hints of annexation, then it has admitted that its security and sovereignty depend on the whims of one man in Washington.

The time has come for Europe to say—publicly and without euphemism—that the United States has become an unreliable steward of the order it once built, and that this unreliability will have consequences. Those consequences should be practical.

Europe possesses the world’s second-largest economy, enormous market power, significant regulatory reach, and the capacity, if it chooses, to build serious military capability. It is capable of imposing costs. It can make clear that treaty obligations are reciprocal, that markets are not one-way gifts, and that interference in European democracy will be treated as seriously as European interference in American democracy would be.

What, concretely, can Europe do?

The nuclear option would be to launch a campaign against the Republican Party, the way that Trump is messing with Britain’s Labour government by backing the far-right Reform UK (whose leader Nigel Farage is also a Putin apologist). Other options include:

• Accelerate real European defense integration, including shared procurement and deployable joint units
• Respond to punitive U.S. tariffs or sanctions with coordinated, proportional measures rather than national scrambling—and express public displeasure with the existing “deal” in which U.S. tariffs on European goods are now generally higher than EU tariffs on U.S. goods
• Use competition and tech regulation to limit platforms that act as megaphones for coordinated political disinformation and amplify division and hate because that’s profitable—the recent $140 million fine against X should be only the beginning—including against interference originating in the United States
• Make clear that U.S. basing rights are valued but not automatic or politically cost-free
• Deepen ties with Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India to create a wider democratic network rather than a single-axis dependency
• Invest in media literacy and public broadcasting to reduce vulnerability to imported culture-war propaganda
• Fast-track the development of a credible independent deterrence posture—centered on France and the UK—as insurance against U.S. political volatility

None of this requires breaking the alliance. It requires salvaging it—not as dependency, but as partnership. Trump might actually respect the Europeans more.

The deeper argument is moral as well as strategic. Postwar institutions were built not only to prevent interstate war but to prevent the erosion of democracy from within—which always begins with indulgence toward those who treat law as an obstacle and loyalty as currency. Does that sound like Trump?

History suggests that a world in which might makes right and rules matter for nothing does not end up in a good place. Europe once lived almost entirely inside that logic. For centuries, borders were treated as prizes, treaties as temporary, and war as an accepted instrument of policy. Dynasties expanded or collapsed at sword point. Cities were looted, populations displaced, and peace was usually nothing more than an intermission between campaigns.

The system reached its breaking point in the Thirty Years’ War. What began as a struggle over religion and succession became a continent-wide free-for-all that left central Europe devastated. Entire regions were emptied, trade networks collapsed, and famine followed armies across the map. It was not moral awakening but exhaustion that finally forced change. Out of that wreckage came the slow construction of rules, borders, and treaties—not because power had become gentler, but because Europe had learned that a world governed only by force eventually destroys the societies trying to dominate it.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

 

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/on-greenland-europes-breaking-point-with-trump-has-arrived-opinion-11331014