Greenland Is Only the Beginning. Trump Has His Sights Set on Europe.

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Greenland Is Only the Beginning. Trump Has His Sights Set on Europe.

 

Jan. 9, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/opinion/denmark-europe-aggression.html

James Kirchick

By James Kirchick

 

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.”

 

The original purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to its founding secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Over 75 years after the alliance’s creation, keeping the Russians out remains its primary objective. But thanks to President Trump’s increasingly bellicose threats to seize Greenland from fellow NATO member Denmark, the suitability of keeping America in the coalition may soon seem as plausible as the prospect of German military hegemony returning to Europe.

 

Mr. Trump’s campaign to conquer Greenland began during the post-election 2024 transition period when he refused to rule out the use of military force, later declaring that America will get it “one way or another.” Last February, Vice President JD Vance said it was “possible” the United States might acquire the self-governing island and accused Denmark of “not being a good ally” for inadequately protecting it.

 

The following month, visiting a U.S. military installation in Greenland with his wife, Mr. Vance had the temerity to attack Denmark on its own soil, complaining that the country was not doing enough “to keep our troops, and in my view, to keep the people of Greenland safe” from Russia and China. Twice last year, the Danish government summoned American diplomats over reports that the U.S. was spying and operating a covert influence campaign on its territory.

 

Last month, Mr. Trump heightened his offensive by appointing Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana as a special envoy to “lead the charge” in getting Greenland. Emboldened by his nearly flawlessly executed capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro last weekend, Mr. Trump is speaking more brazenly about his predatory designs, declaring that “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.” Stephen Miller, the president’s tenacious adviser, went even further, asking, “By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” before claiming that “obviously Greenland should be part of the United States.” Seeking to calm nervous European allies, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Mr. Trump hopes merely to purchase the island from Denmark.

 

Any attempt to seize Greenland, whether by force or the far likelier method of economic coercion, would fatally undermine the world’s most important military alliance. On Tuesday, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain joined Denmark in releasing a joint statement stressing the importance of “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders,” the same principles that NATO invokes in its defense of Ukraine from Russian aggression.

 

Mr. Trump’s surreal endeavor to conquer Greenland is of a piece with his general hostility to Europe. In the eyes of Mr. Trump and his acolytes, the old continent is the place of right-wing caricature, a ragbag of rootless nations in irreversible decline that love open borders, abhor free speech and are too stingy to pay for their own defense. Since his 2016 campaign, when he repeatedly mused about abandoning NATO, to the trade war he launched against the European Union upon his return to office last year, Mr. Trump and senior members of his administration treat Europe like a recalcitrant child rather than the family of democratic allies with which the United States is most closely linked through shared liberal values, strategic interests, and cultural heritage.

 

To be sure, the administration’s critique of Europe is not without basis. Decades of untrammeled immigration from the non-Western world have fractured cultural cohesion and boosted far-right parties. Restrictions on free expression under the guise of preventing “hate speech” undermine European pretensions to democracy and liberty. And while Mr. Trump’s threats to leave NATO unless its members increased their defense budgets may have been uncouth, they undoubtedly played a role in achieving the desired outcome.

 

None of these valid concerns about European fecklessness have anything to do with the administration’s belligerent treatment of a NATO ally. While Mr. Trump insists that the U.S. “needs” Greenland for national security purposes, Washington already has extensive and near-exclusive military access to the island via the 1951 U.S.-Denmark defense agreement and the current Danish government has made clear its openness to increasing security cooperation.

 

Within the first week of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, announced a $2 billion plan to “improve capabilities for surveillance and maintaining sovereignty” in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions. (“One more dog sled,” Mr. Trump recently groused.) “I have a very hard time seeing that the U.S. couldn’t get pretty much everything it wanted” in negotiations with Denmark, Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, recently told The New York Times, “if it just asked nicely.”

 

Doomsday scenarios envisioning the end of NATO typically involve the alliance’s failure to repel Russian attack. Only now is the once-unthinkable prospect of an attack by one NATO member against another being taken seriously.

 

Mr. Vance is correct in saying that Denmark is not “a good ally.” It’s a great one. Relative to the size of its economy, Denmark is the most generous donor to Ukraine’s military defense. In the Afghanistan war, launched in support of the United States after it was attacked on Sept. 11, Denmark suffered more fatalities per capita than any other NATO ally apart from the U.S. It was one of only a few NATO members, and the only Nordic country, to join the United States in the initial invasion of Iraq.

 

Denmark doesn’t just punch far above its weight militarily. It has also taken positions sympathetic to those that the Trump administration has placed at the forefront of its Europe policy. In a blistering speech at last year’s Munich Security Conference, Mr. Vance declared,“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia” but “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” identifying lax attitudes on immigration and regulations on free speech as two notable examples.

 

More than any other country on the continent, Denmark has been farsighted and courageous on both. In 2006, after a Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, an angry mob set the Danish embassy in Damascus on fire, and violent attacks were carried out against Danish diplomatic outposts in Beirut, Tehran and Islamabad. Despite enormous international pressure to cave to Muslim fundamentalists, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen defended freedom of the press, stating that “the Danish government and the Danish nation as such cannot be held responsible for what is published in independent media.”

 

As David Leonhardt argued last year in The Times, Denmark’s combination of restrictive immigration and stringent integration measures — supported by a wide consensus of the Danish electorate — has damped support for the far right and may prove to be the model to save Western social democracy. (Which is a very different thing from socialism: the libertarian Fraser Institute and Cato Institute rank Denmark second in the world on their Human Freedom Index, which should be another point in the country’s favor as far as the Trump administration is concerned.) In a speech last year, Ms. Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, called for a “spiritual rearmament” and called upon the state-funded Church of Denmark to play an increased role in society.

 

Debating Ronald Reagan about the Panama Canal Treaties in 1978, the conservative luminary William F. Buckley Jr. asked if Americans could see “the irrelevance of prideful exercises, suitable rather to the peacock than to the lion, to assert our national masculinity.” Mr. Buckley, who saw continued American control over the waterway as a glaring example of such national chauvinism, asked his audience if Americans “believe even in sovereignty for little countries whose natural resources, where and when necessary, we are entitled to use but not to abuse?” Spoken about another ally whom Mr. Trump has also decided to needlessly antagonize, Mr. Buckley’s prescient words about Panama could not have been more antithetical to the worldview being espoused from the Oval Office today.

 

Since 1801, Denmark and the United States have enjoyed one of the longest unbroken diplomatic relationships in the world. Though it might seem like a blip in the grand scheme of international affairs, America’s bullying of this admirable “little country” and loyal ally sends a disturbing message to the world.

 

If a nation with as enduring a bond with the United States as Denmark is treated this way, then what is the point of being America’s friend?