Danish officials think they know how Donald Trump might seize Greenland. In a late-night Truth Social post, the president announces that the Danish territory is now an American “protectorate.” Because neither Denmark nor its European allies possess the military force to prevent the United States from taking the island, they are powerless to resist Trump’s dubious claim. And as the leading member of NATO claims the sovereign territory of another state, the alliance is paralyzed. Arguing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, Trump simply declares that Greenland now belongs to the United States.
This chain of events, which some Danish officials and security experts proposed to us in recent months, may have seemed faintly ridiculous as of last Friday. By the weekend—after the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s ensuing insistence that the United States now “runs” Venezuela—it seemed far less so. For months, Danes have anxiously imagined an audacious move by the Trump administration to annex Greenland, whether by force, coercion, or an attempt to buy off the local population of about 56,000 people with the promise of cutting them in on future mining deals. Now those fears are spiking.
Shortly after U.S. forces captured Maduro, Katie Miller, a former White House official who is married to the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, posted on X a map of Greenland covered in the U.S. flag, with the caption “SOON.” Officials in Denmark told us that they were furious—and rattled. Then, yesterday morning, in an interview with our colleague Michael Scherer, Trump reasserted his intention to annex Greenland. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” he said.
European leaders have long downplayed Trump’s acquisitive posture and tried to ignore his comments. Not after what happened in Venezuela. Today, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, argued that the president’s threats are credible. “Unfortunately, I think the American president should be taken seriously when he says he wants Greenland,” she told the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR).
U.S. officials and Trump allies we spoke with downplayed the possibility of military action in Greenland. (Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper today that it would hardly be necessary. “No one is going to fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said, reiterating that the territory should belong to the United States.) But Trump has pointedly not ruled out taking Greenland by force. And if the U.S. goes down that road, NATO will effectively cease to exist the moment the first military personnel enter Greenlandic territory.
“If the United States attacks another NATO country, everything stops,” Frederiksen said on DR.
The German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, made clear to reporters during a visit to Lithuania that Greenland falls under Article 5 of the alliance, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all, obligating other members to respond: “Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. And since Denmark is a member of NATO, Greenland will, in principle, also be subject to NATO defence.”
But how exactly would that play out in practice? One European official was blunt: “We won’t be able to defend Greenland. Are you kidding?”
Boosters of Trump’s Greenlandic ambitions are delighted by the Venezuela operation and by the president’s restated commitment to their cause. “I think it’s a big opportunity and a new beginning for Greenland, with Trump’s interest,” Jørgen Boassen, the president’s most prominent and vocal advocate in Greenland, told us. Boassen, known for his collection of MAGA hats and for wearing T-shirts with Trump’s face printed on them, said that Greenlanders yearn for independence from Denmark and from “Danish elites” in Greenland who don’t speak the native language or understand local culture.
Those long-standing rifts aside, polls do not show widespread Greenlandic support for swapping the Danish flag for the Stars and Stripes. Boassen insisted that many Greenlanders are afraid to speak up in favor of annexation because they would face professional and political retribution. He claimed that Danish authorities shut down his Facebook page, which is his primary means of spreading his support for Trump’s policies. (We were able to access the page this afternoon.) Boassen said that “Trump has heard about people suffering” and that he is “a savior for us right now.”
European leaders see matters very differently. Since yesterday, they have dispensed with the kind of equivocation that sometimes marks their public statements about the American president. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Sky News, “Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark are to decide the future of Greenland, and only Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark.” France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, wrote on social media, “Greenland is neither for the taking nor for sale.”
[Read: Trump threatens Venezuela’s new leader with a fate worse than Maduro’s]
As for the Danes, they’re cycling through various stages of grief, according to Rufus Gifford, who served as U.S. ambassador to Denmark under President Barack Obama. Above all, they can’t figure out what Trump’s true intentions are, Gifford told us. The likeliest outcome, in his estimation, is that the president uses the leverage of U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine to pressure European countries, including Denmark, to accept U.S. plans for the Arctic island. Indeed, a former senior U.S. official in Europe told us that one reason NATO leaders didn’t speak up sooner, and more emphatically, in opposition to U.S. territorial designs on Greenland was fear that Trump would lash out in response and curtail U.S. support for Ukraine, possibly interrupting intelligence sharing and weapons sales.
The former official said that panic first set in about U.S. plans a year ago, after MAGA acolytes, led by Donald Trump Jr., made a trip to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “From the standpoint of the Danish government, that’s when it began to get really heated,” said the former official, who, like some others, spoke with us on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. The visit had a carnival atmosphere, with locals flocking to see the visiting delegation that had arrived in the president’s personal airplane, dubbed “Trump Force One.”
Danish officials and experts told us it was on this trip that Trump lost any prospect of popular support from Greenlanders. Rumors circulated that Trump’s son was handing out $100 bills to local homeless people. That wasn’t true, but Trump Jr. did buy the people lunch, said Boassen, who helped organize the trip. Still, many Greenlanders believed that Trump Jr. was exhibiting the kind of colonialist mentality that they have long complained about.
Over the following months, some dared to hope that Trump had moved on from his dreams of acquiring Greenland. But a series of recent moves created a new sense of urgency for Denmark. In December, Trump named Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland. (Landry’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The same month, the president appointed Tom Dans, an ally, entrepreneur, and investor involved in organizing American excursions to the island, to lead an Arctic research commission. The U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, told us in a statement that members of his staff have “interacted” with Dans and that he expects to meet with him, given Dans’s new role. Dans wrote on social media that he would make “the ARCTIC GREAT AGAIN!” He declined to comment.
The operation in Venezuela seems to confirm that the president is willing to back up his demands of foreign nations with military action, a kind of gunboat diplomacy for the 21st century. People close to the president told us that Trump is enamored with the success of the military interventions he has ordered in Iran, Nigeria, and now Venezuela—and that he will not shy away from wielding force again. And he’s happy, at least, to use the threat of force as leverage while he eyes Greenland. Some around Trump have delighted in Europe’s impassioned reaction to his latest expression of interest in the mineral-rich island. “Let them squirm,” one close outside ally told us. “Maybe we’ll take it; maybe we won’t. But after what we just saw in Caracas, do you want to try to call Trump’s bluff?” Trump said this past weekend that Greenland is not yet at the top of his to-do list, but he offered multiple timelines—from 20 days to two months—for when he might fully engage on the issue.
Western diplomats and security officials we spoke with were apoplectic. One told us that Denmark and its Nordic neighbors have been taking the president’s statements seriously for a year but have remained uncertain about how to interpret them and, especially, how to respond. The editor in chief of the Copenhagen-based newspaper Berlingske wrote in a column today that Denmark and its allies should seek to raise the cost for Washington of any possible military aggression, including by moving more military assets to the island: “It won’t be able to stop the USA, but it will be a symbolic step.”
A Danish lawmaker, who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to address the security situation candidly, said that the very notion of the U.S. invading Greenland—both mounting an invasion and defending against it—is absurd. The island is nearly four times the size of France and is mostly ice. The lawmaker told us that Danes are particularly baffled by Trump’s designs on Greenland because he could accomplish all of his security objectives by working with Denmark, a committed U.S. ally. During the Cold War, there was even a nuclear-powered U.S. base built under Greenlandic ice. “If the Americans want another military base, just say where,” the lawmaker said. “If you want a radar, you can put it up.”
[Read: The view from Greenland ]
Carsten Søndergaard, a career Danish diplomat who served as an ambassador to Russia and as the permanent representative to NATO, told us that additional U.S. troops in Greenland, as well as mining rights, could be negotiated, to the benefit of all parties. “A hostile takeover of an ally’s territory will have severe consequences for the transatlantic relations and the West. So much is at stake,” he said.
There was one specific jab at Denmark, made by Trump aboard Air Force One last night, that the Danish lawmaker felt compelled to counter. “You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security on Greenland?” Trump joked to reporters. “They added one more dogsled.”
A Danish naval unit, called the Sirius Patrol, actually does conduct reconnaissance missions by dogsled in the unforgiving northeastern part of the island. The U.S. Department of Defense—or the Department of War, as Trump’s team has taken to calling it—even celebrates the unit’s history on its website: Danish, Norwegian, and Greenlandic hunters patrolled Greenland’s coast by dogsled to fend off German intruders during the Second World War. Drawing on that legacy, the unit still conducts long-range missions and “enforces Danish sovereignty in the Arctic wilderness of northern and eastern Greenland,” according to the Defense Department.
Patrolling is typically done in pairs, sometimes for months on end without other human contact. The Danish lawmaker said that it’s a tough job in some of the bleakest conditions in the world. “Very few U.S. soldiers,” he told us, “would survive a week up there.”
