Trump’s Greenland Ambition Is About U.S. Power, Not Alliances

Danish and other European governments are struggling to decide how to manage President Donald Trump’s latest demands that Greenland become part of the United States. This week, foreign ministers from Denmark and Greenland are making the case in Washington to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance that Greenland’s security from Russian and Chinese encroachment would best be enhanced through joint investments by the United States and its European allies under the framework of NATO and the 1951 bilateral treaty between the Danish and U.S. governments. European leaders have recently suggested building a new NATO mission, “Arctic Sentry,” modelled on the ongoing “Baltic Sentry” mission.

As Denmark, Greenland, and other European leaders have also reasonably argued, there is no need for the United States to “own” Greenland to make it safe. The United States can already track Russian missiles overflying the island to the United States from the Pituffik Space Base on Greenland’s northwest coast, just as it does via radar based in Canada as part of the joint U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command. Nothing is stopping the United States from adding more missile tracking stations or “Golden Dome” interceptors in Greenland.

These arguments are all correct in theory, but they entirely misunderstand President Trump’s thinking. The European countries’ focus on these discussions assumes he is interested in strengthening NATO allies’ collective security, when the president’s “America First” doctrine is focused on achieving benefits for the United States, above all else.

One of Trump’s longest-standing complaints is that European countries have been free riding on the United States’ security guarantee to defend them—first, from the Soviet Union and, since 2014, from a revanchist Russia. While the United States continued spending roughly 3.5 percent of its GDP on sustaining world-class military capabilities, European countries spent under 2 percent on their defenses, investing the difference—in Trump’s eyes—to build globally competitive manufacturing industries that have then outcompeted their U.S. counterparts in the United States and abroad. For Trump, the United States’ decades-long investments in Europe’s security have been rewarded by transatlantic trade deficits and regulatory warfare against U.S. businesses.

Why then would Donald Trump turn to a 1951 treaty to negotiate spending more U.S. dollars to help Denmark defend hugely valuable mineral reserves whose exploitation might mostly benefit—if not Russia and China—then equally rapacious European countries? As Trump said in February last year, “the European Union was formed to screw the United States.”

President Trump’s problem with Venezuela wasn’t only drug trafficking and narcoterrorism; it was that Chinese and Russian companies might control its vast oil reserves more than U.S. companies.

Similarly, when Trump says the United States needs Greenland for U.S. security, what he really means is that he wants the United States to control Greenland’s extensive, though mostly untapped and extremely hard to extract, rare earth deposits and large reserves of copper, graphite, nickel, titanium, zinc, and gold. Trump wants to go down in history as the president who did the best real estate deal for the United States since Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, adding trillions to the United States’ net wealth.

And for Trump, only by owning the territory can the U.S. government ensure that its economic benefits accrue to U.S. companies and the U.S. balance sheet. As he said in his recent interview with the New York Times, “ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty.”

European countries will need to hold their nerve and stick to their principles, making clear in Washington, especially to the U.S. Congress, that the essence of post-1945 European security is that borders should not be changed by force or any other sort of coercion. For the United States to go against this principle in the case of Greenland would mean the end of the Atlantic Alliance. It would then put in jeopardy many of the benefits the United States gains in Europe from NATO’s continued existence, including bases and arms sales.

There is little hope that President Trump will be swayed over Greenland by appeals to Cold War treaties built on the idea that the United States and Europe are stronger together. Yet, pursuing Greenland will only leave the United States weaker and alone.

Sir Robin Niblett is a CSIS senior adviser and distinguished fellow at Chatham House. He previously served as director and chief executive of Chatham House (2007–2022) and as executive vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is also affiliated with the Asia Society Policy Institute.