Donald Trump’s Greenland fixation has never been about maps or minerals. It is about possession — a muscular assertion of power for its own sake — and it now threatens to turn a long‑standing alliance into collateral damage.
In a three-hour interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, the former president did what he so often claims to do: say the quiet part out loud. Asked why he wants to take over Greenland, he was disarmingly blunt. “Ownership is very important,” he said. Pressed on whether the world’s most powerful military alliance or the world’s largest island matters more, he added: “It may be a choice.”
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Those remarks strip away the usual strategic rationales. Under a 1951 treaty with Denmark, the United States already has the right to establish military bases in Greenland, a crucial Arctic outpost. U.S. security needs are not in question. What Trump articulated, instead, was a psychological imperative — a conviction that control must be literal to be real. In this framing, international law, treaties and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization become optional, if not inconvenient.
That outlook mirrors what his aides have been signaling. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said the United States should “conduct itself as a superpower,” a phrase that in this context means demonstrating power through force rather than through alliances, consensus or rules. Miller has dismissed “international niceties” — the U.N. Charter, defense pacts, multilateral frameworks that underwrote relative stability since 1945 — as constraints to be shrugged off.
The administration’s recent behavior is meant to prove the point. Last week’s seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was treated internally as a proof of concept: the United States could defy international law without immediate consequence. Venezuelan leadership was isolated; the perceived costs were modest.
But if Venezuela was low-risk theater, Greenland is a direct challenge to a NATO ally. Threatening Denmark’s sovereignty would not occur in some legal vacuum. It would strike at the core of the Western security architecture, forcing allies to choose between defending the rules that bind them and preserving the alliance itself. That is the catastrophe-in-waiting embedded in Trump’s “ownership” mantra.
Even his closest ideological partners in Europe see the hazard. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — the only EU leader invited to his inauguration, a political ally on immigration and nationalism — warned that any military move on Greenland would carry “grave consequences for NATO.” “I continue not to believe in the hypothesis that the United States would launch a military action to take control of Greenland,” she told reporters. But she added she would “clearly not support” such an action, and stressed, “I believe it would not be in anyone’s interest. I think it would not even be in the interest of the United States of America, to be clear.”
Meloni has been cast as a bridge between Brussels and Washington, a “Trump whisperer” with a line into the former president’s thinking. The fact that she felt compelled to underline the costs is telling. It suggests Europe’s most sympathetic ear in the Trump orbit is unconvinced he will be constrained by tradition or etiquette, even if she publicly clings to the belief he won’t use force.
Trump himself told the Times he doesn’t “need international law,” and the White House has refused to take military options off the table. After Venezuela — and after his own insistence that this is about psychology, not strategy — any confident prediction about his ceiling is wishful thinking.
That leaves European capitals confronting an impossible choice. Defend international law, and you risk confrontation with Washington that could fracture NATO from within. Default to alliance preservation at any cost, and you tacitly accept that sovereignty can be overridden by superior force. Either path wounds the postwar premise that rules restrain power — a premise that has been tested before, but rarely so explicitly by the alliance’s largest member.
Within the European Union and at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the working theory is to raise costs enough to dissuade action. That might mean coordinated diplomatic isolation, defense readiness measures, or economic consequences calibrated to register in Washington. But deterrence assumes the other side counts costs the same way. Trump’s own words cast doubt on that assumption: if the animating impulse is to prove possession, not to solve a security problem, then legal, reputational and even economic penalties may not touch the underlying drive.
There is a tragic irony here. The practical aims Trump claims to pursue — more robust Arctic defense, secure basing rights, a firmer U.S. footprint in the High North — are already attainable through cooperation with Denmark, a loyal NATO ally that has spent billions bolstering Arctic capabilities. Joint surveillance, infrastructure upgrades and shared early-warning systems would strengthen deterrence against Russia and stabilize a warming region riddled with new shipping lanes and resource claims. These are solvable tasks inside the framework of law and alliance.
But cooperation does not confer “ownership.” And in the worldview Trump laid bare, ownership is what validates status. It is power as performance — power whose legitimacy is measured not by outcomes but by the visible act of taking and holding. The danger is not only to Greenland or Denmark, but to a transatlantic system that relies on restraint as a form of strength.
Greenlanders hear all of this plainly. They have lived for generations at the intersection of superpower interests, often without being asked. The island’s strategic value is undisputed; its people have absorbed the costs of that value. What has changed is the readiness of a former U.S. president to say that rules do not matter, that alliances are negotiable, and that “ownership” is the goal.
If Europe is searching for a way through, it must keep two truths in view. First, credibility matters: hollow warnings do more harm than silence. Second, unity matters more: a fragmented response invites the very test Europe hopes to avoid. The route to both runs through clear red lines, expressed privately and publicly, coupled with concrete offers to meet legitimate security needs within the alliance framework. That will not satisfy a psychology of possession. But it may stiffen the guardrails around a volatile moment.
The stakes of Greenland are not confined to Arctic ice. They reach into the question that has shadowed the West since 1945: do rules curb power, or does power, in the end, take what it wants? Trump has offered his answer. Europe — and the United States — now have to decide whether they accept it.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
