Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. (He seems to hate dogs, for example, but no one is forcing him to adopt one.) Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.
But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.
[Isaac Stanley-Becker: Denmark’s army chief says he’s ready to defend Greenland]
Greenland, of course, is important to the security of the United States—as it is to the entire Atlantic community and to the free world itself. This fact might be new to Trump, but Western strategists have known it for a century or more, which is why the United States has had a military presence in Greenland for decades.
During the Cold War, America and its allies were determined to defend the sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom (often referred to at the time as the “GIUK” gap), the North Atlantic passages through which the Soviet Union could have sent submarines from its Arctic bases toward NATO convoys trying to reach Europe. America and Denmark have always worked closely in the Arctic region, and even once had a secret “gentlemen’s agreement” under which Denmark declared Greenland off-limits for the stationing of nuclear weapons, but would look the other way so long as the United States kept the presence of any such weapons quiet and unacknowledged. (The U.S. Air Force, in a rather flexible reading of that agreement, flew nuclear-armed B-52 bomber patrols over Greenland; one of them crashed and scattered radioactive debris on the island in 1968.)
The Cold War is over, but Greenland is still an important part of North Atlantic security, which is one of many reasons Denmark and the United States and other North Atlantic nations are part of a thing called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But for the Trump administration, NATO—another of the president’s hostile fixations—is not enough to guarantee America’s safety. Trump, like the mad president in the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, seems to believe that the United States must absorb Canada and Greenland and create some sort of Atlantic co-prosperity sphere stretching from Alaska to Norway, a ring of ice and iron that would stand as a tribute to the imperial ambitions of America’s 47th president.
In Trump’s first term, he made overtures about buying Greenland, as if the territory and its people were just a house on the market, available for purchase with all of its original furniture and fixtures. Neither the Danes nor the Greenlanders were interested, and the whole scheme faded away once Trump was immersed in the series of scandals and outrages that led to his loss in 2020 and his attempted coup against the Constitution in 2021. When voters returned Trump to office in 2024, his electoral affirmation seemed to strengthen his determination to do all the things that the responsible adults in his previous administration told him he couldn’t do the first time around.
The idea of a purchase is, in theory, still on the table. Denmark is still not selling. At this point, Trump is so consumed with acquiring Greenland that he has implied that he would use force against an old American friend, if that’s what it takes to get the island. “I would like to make a deal the easy way,” Trump said last week, “but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” (He added, in one of his verbal tics, that he’s “a fan” of Denmark, as if it were a sports team or a rock band and not an allied nation of 6 million people located fewer than 1,000 miles from Russia.)
As Trump’s rhetoric has escalated, other administration officials have tried to clean up his remarks, but with little success. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dutifully met with members of Congress to reassure them that Trump intended only to offer to buy the island, but the next day, the White House issued a statement reaffirming that “utilizing” the military “is always an option.” The same week that Rubio was on the Hill, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on January 5 scoffed at the idea that seizing Greenland would lead to armed conflict, because “nobody’s going to fight the United States” over Greenland. (A few days earlier, his wife, Katie, also a White House aide, posted a picture on social media of an American flag superimposed over Greenland, with the comment: “SOON.”)
The president’s obsession with Greenland is especially dangerous because it has no real constituency: Trump is determined to get the island, it seems, only because Denmark and the rest of the world are telling him that he can’t have it. As is so often the case, telling Trump not to do something makes him more determined to do it.
Even the loyal MAGA base has shown no interest in Greenland, or at least not yet; the president’s supporters, of course, usually end up supporting whatever he wants. But so far, taking Greenland is not a chant or talking point on the same level as, say, building a wall along the Mexican border once was. In fact, polls show that most Americans oppose the whole idea. Even so, that didn’t stop Randy Fine, who represents Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, from introducing the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act on Monday. Perhaps Fine’s constituents in Palatka or Pierson are clamoring for a victory parade in Nuuk, but this idea seems to have possessed Trump and almost no one else, which means the president may choose to get it done with the only instrument that he feels is totally within his control: the United States Armed Forces.
This morning, Denmark sent an advance military command to Greenland in preparation for sending yet more Danish forces to the island. Danish lawmakers told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker last week that the timing of this deployment is not a coincidence and represents an attempt to create a “credible deterrent” on the island—presumably to the Americans. This afternoon, the foreign ministers of both Denmark and Greenland met with Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House, and, clearly, got nowhere: Both ministers reiterated that any solution to Trump’s “concerns” that does not respect the territorial sovereignty of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark is “totally unacceptable.” (The Danish foreign minister called these Denmark’s “red lines” on the matter.)
The Danes are not going to hand over Greenland; the Greenlanders will not vote to become part of the United States. What, exactly, is left for Trump to do, and what will happen if he takes Greenland over the objections of Denmark and NATO?
As my colleagues Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Jonathan Lemire reported recently, Danish officials are concerned that Trump will simply issue a late-night proclamation that the United States owns Greenland and then dare anyone to contradict him. The international community has become inured to many of the president’s grandiose statements, and Trump declaring himself Lord Protector of Greenland might not have much impact.
But Trump might then try to enforce his claims. He could start by ordering the U.S. military to treat Greenland as sovereign U.S. territory. And such an order, which would be illegal but would likely be fulfilled by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, could set in motion a disastrous chain of events.
Assume, for example, that Denmark closes Greenland’s airspace to U.S. flights in order to assert its continued sovereignty (and to prevent Trump from sending more troops to the island). Trump might then order the Air Force to ignore any directions from local authorities—because, of course, Greenland would now be American airspace—and to treat all such encounters as potentially hostile. Or imagine that Denmark, following some intemperate claim from Trump, demands that U.S. forces in Greenland remain confined to their bases, and Trump, incensed at the insult to his putatively unlimited power, tries to force the issue and tells American servicepeople to act as the island’s de facto police, including suppressing any demonstrations or resistance from the population.
Either by design or accident, members of the American military might end up confronting Danish forces, men and women with whom they have trained for years and may have served in Afghanistan. Someone might be killed. The death of a Greenlander, a Dane, or a member of any other military there as a show of support for Denmark—Sweden has already sent troops to Greenland and Britain is considering similar moves—would incinerate the NATO alliance. Then the real nightmare begins.
The United States is already overstretched around the world because of Trump’s chaotic threats and impulses. Ships that should be in the Gulf or near Europe or Asia are paddling around in the Caribbean because of Trump’s operation to remove the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power. The president has threatened to attack Iran, again, if the regime in Tehran continues to kill its own citizens, and U.S. forces would have to dart back across the world to undertake new assignments in the Middle East. Of course, such a move would undermine Trump’s ongoing warnings that he might strike Mexico and Colombia.
As the American military chases Trump’s ever-changing Sharpie lines across the world’s maps, the West’s enemies will be tempted to take advantage of the fact that the United States has obliterated the most powerful alliance in history while scattering American forces around the globe in showpiece operations that have more to do with Trump’s vanity than with sound strategy. They have surely noticed that the U.S. defense and intelligence services are in the hands of unqualified loyalists, and that so far Trump’s plans for improving the battle readiness of the American military are mostly limited to pictures of make-believe battleships that will never be built.
If NATO collapses because of bullets fired in Greenland, Russian President Vladimir Putin might well assume that he could bury the Atlantic Alliance once and for all by attacking NATO’s Baltic members. As the political scientist Ian Bremmer, who founded the analytical firm Eurasia Group, said on social media this week, “Nobody wants the United States to take control of Greenland (and, accordingly, destroy NATO) more than Putin.” The Russians don’t need to fully occupy Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; the point would be to start a war aimed at isolating them. (The three countries together are about the size of Wisconsin.) Putin has taken ghastly losses in Ukraine, but he has enough of an army left, backed by drones and other assets, to pummel the Baltic states and grab pieces of territory that may have no strategic value but whose capture would serve to remind the world that the United States—the new masters of Greenland—will not save Europe.
Other nations, however, are unlikely to sit by, especially neighboring NATO countries such as Poland and Finland. Should they come to the aid of their Baltic allies, at least some other European nations would likely support those efforts, and the result would be a broader European conflict involving some of the most militarily capable states in the world. For the first time in almost a century, the continent would be at war, this time one involving multiple nuclear powers. U.S. forces, like it or not, would find themselves in the middle of this bedlam, and with each day of violence the chances would grow of a cataclysmic mistake or miscalculation by any of the combatants.
[Read: Trump seizing Greenland could set off a chain reaction]
Meanwhile, a world away from Europe, China might wonder if America has finally tied itself in enough foolish knots to put the conquest of Taiwan within reach, especially with Trump’s “Golden Fleet” nowhere in sight. And although no one should try to predict what North Korea’s bizarre dynasty would do, South Korea and Japan would have to begin planning for the risks that will come during, and after, America’s voluntary strategic immolation, most likely with crash programs to develop nuclear arms.
And all this could happen—for what, exactly? The vainglorious demands of one man who can’t read a map?
Concerned leaders in both parties should explain to the citizens of the United States how much peril Trump is courting. His obsessions could lead not only to the collapse of their standard of living but present a real danger to their lives, no matter where they live. Congress, of course, should have stopped Trump—on this as on so many things—long ago. The Republican majority has the power to put an end to this lunacy by closing its purse strings and passing laws directly forbidding further adventures: Yesterday, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen introduced the NATO Unity Protection Act, which explicitly prohibits using Federal funding “to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state without that ally’s consent.” This is one case where the MAGA base, which claims to hate foreign adventures, might forgive the GOP for opposing Trump.
Most Americans probably couldn’t care less about Greenland, but they will be forced to care—tragically, too late—if Trump’s gambit engulfs the world in flames.
