The Greenland episode was never really about territorial acquisition; rather, it was a stress test of alliance cohesion in a world where the United States government no longer sees cooperation and restraint as strategic virtues. The manufactured “crisis” that dominated the first month of 2026 reveals much about what America’s Transatlantic partners can expect from a Washington guided by Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS). The emphasis on hard power and regional hegemony over global leadership, longstanding alliances, and a rules-based international order is clear to anyone who reads the 30-page document. But the erratic decision-making, absence of interagency input, and failure to identify clear, achievable goals rooted in a clear-headed analysis of the U.S. national interest that drove the President’s push for “ownership” of the territory are equally emblematic of the new “strategy” and the chaotic process that produced it. European leaders are likely breathing a sigh of relief after the President announced a “framework of a deal” that seemed to back away from his more outlandish recent demands over Greenland (and the threat of punitive tariffs on those who opposed him). But this misses both the nature of the threat and the approach necessary to preserve the Transatlantic relationship.

Why should we be concerned?

First, we should understand that the Greenland “crisis” was not an isolated episode, but rather an indicator of a broader foreign policy approach. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) redefines the scope of U.S. foreign policy, stepping back from global leadership of a rules-based international order and aspiring instead to absolute hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The January 2026 military operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (and the months of lethal boat strikes that preceded it) offer a glimpse of what this new approach looks like in practice. The administration bypassed Congress, failed to consult with regional allies, and offered minimal, sometimes conflicting, legal justifications for its actions. In the aftermath of the operation, the President has claimed that the U.S. would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future and has spoken openly of a desire to control the country’s oil reserves and other natural resources. If this is indeed the central motivation for American military action in the hemisphere, it is not difficult to imagine it being applied to Greenland.

There is also little indication that Denmark’s NATO membership factored into the President’s decision-making at all. Where the previous NSS defined alliances, and NATO in particular, as America’s “most important strategic asset,” the current version casts allies as freeloaders seeking “to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people.” Far from reaffirming a U.S. commitment to Article 5 collective security, Trump has pointed to Denmark’s alleged inability to ensure the defence of Greenland on its own as a potential justification for a hostile U.S. takeover.

Finally, beyond its substantive content, the new strategy is emblematic of a national security decision-making process stripped of analytical rigour and inclusive deliberation, which makes abrupt policy shifts more likely. With the departure of former National Security Advisor Michael Waltz in March 2025, the National Security Council staff was essentially dissolved, with experts returning to their home agencies. The new NSS itself was produced without a formal interagency process, and as a result, is informed more by ideology than by objective analysis. Meanwhile, the administration has systematically eliminated traditional sources of friction in the decision-making process, purging senior career diplomats, military commanders, intelligence officials, inspectors general, and Judge Advocates General who might have counselled against the President’s more radical initiatives. As a result, policymaking as a whole has become less predictable, more impulsive, less constrained by diplomatic and legal considerations, and more responsive to the President’s whims.

Why was it never going to happen?

If the aggressive goals are an integral part of the new Strategy, however, so is the mismatch between those goals and the means to achieve them. Trump never had a legal mandate to negotiate the purchase of Greenland, and no Congressionally appropriated funds were available to complete the transaction, even if it could somehow be successfully negotiated.  An outright military seizure was always a remote possibility, even before Trump himself took it off the table in Davos, but even if it could somehow be accomplished, an act of Congress would be required to make the island a U.S. territory, and that was never going to happen. This disconnect between the stated goals of the administration, and their practical achievability (much less their wisdom or legality) is, sadly, a feature and not a bug of the current national security decision-making process in Washington.

What damage has already been done?

Although Danish sovereignty was never really in any practical danger, the crisis nonetheless came at a steep cost for the Transatlantic community. NATO’s strength lies not just in its raw military potential, but also in the faith Allies place in its Article 5 collective defence guarantee. That faith has now been badly, perhaps irreparably, damaged. The argument the U.S. President has used to justify America’s territorial ambitions—that “every NATO Ally has an obligation to defend their own territory”—is antithetical to the concept of collective defence itself. This argument could be used to justify U.S. annexation of Iceland (a Freudian slip he in fact made several times at Davos), or even Poland, the Baltic States, and others who rely primarily on U.S. guarantees for their security.

And it’s not just NATO that’s at stake, but also the nature of the Transatlantic community itself and its role at the core of a larger, rules-based international order. Trump’s Greenland threats have arguably run afoul of at least nine of the ten principles of the Helsinki Decalogue, as well as fundamental provisions of the UN Charter.  And Trump’s coercive tariff threats continued a year-long assault on the global trading order.

How should European leaders react?

A major challenge in dealing with the Trump administration, for foreign and domestic actors alike, is the difficulty of maintaining a clear sense of what is real and what is not. Trump never had a serious prospect of acquiring Greenland, just as he is not a Nobel laureate or acting President of Venezuela, and there is no “Department of War.”

European leaders initially attempted to resolve the Greenland “crisis” quietly, in accordance with their overall approach to the U.S. President over the past year. For example on January 13, the Secretary General of NATO responded to open threats to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a NATO member state by praising the aggressor for his leadership in “making us aware collectively of the need to protect the High North and the Arctic,” and saying that the specific dispute was “not up for me to comment on.”  The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland came to Washington on January 14 and announced the formation of a working group to address U.S. “concerns.”

Indulging Trump’s fantasies of territorial expansion as if they were legitimate issues for debate among allies, however, required compromises on long-agreed principles of Transatlantic relations. It also provided cover for American supporters of the President to rally behind his initiative, or at least to explain it away as a shrewd negotiating tactic. Only when European leaders drew firm red lines and demonstrated their ability to impose serious consequences (such as suspending ratification of the U.S.-EU trade agreement and the potential use of the anti-coercion instrument in response to tariff threats) was the U.S. President convinced to back down. Even the appearance of negotiating with Trump over the heads of European governments drew backlash against the NATO Secretary General in the European Parliament, and rightly so.

European leaders—both at the national level and within EU institutions and NATO—need to understand that the current U.S. administration is operating in both the real world and in an online space where it feels free to use its official, taxpayer-funded social media accounts to promote memes of American leaders planting a flag on EU territory. As long as this remains the case, America’s Transatlantic partners need to engage in both spaces and impose consequences on those who seek to blur the lines between them. When a member of Congress, for example, introduces legislation to annex EU territory, the EU should not hesitate to impose targeted sanctions. If forced, for at least the next three years, to operate in a world where American strategy is guided by pursuit of a global “balance of power” and respect for regional spheres of influence, European leaders need to make clear, in public messaging as well as policy, that the EU, and not Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is the predominant power in its region. And they need to highlight their own contributions to Transatlantic security in a much higher-profile way. U.S. security benefits enormously from a strong, cohesive NATO, and most of the Washington policy community knows this, even if the current administration needs periodic reminders.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / President Trump at Davos