The Greenland Warning: Preparing for a Post-NATO World

Why would the United States seek sovereignty over Greenland, where it already enjoys extensive military access? For more than seventy years, the United States has operated military installations in Greenland under the 1951 defence treaty and through NATO. Yet in late 2025 and early 2026, President Donald Trump revived his ambition to acquire the island outright, briefly refusing to rule out force and threatening tariffs, before retreating behind a “framework” agreement on Arctic security.[i] The episode makes sense only if one assumes a shift in the underlying logic of US foreign policy, away from alliance-based permanence and toward a more openly transactional approach that treats even NATO guarantees as contingent.

US Transactional Turn

The move by the US administration prompted a series of ad hoc interpretations. Many dismissed the whole episode as irrational, or, as one US senator put it, “weapons-grade stupid.”[ii] Some suggested a pursuit of something legacy defining, others a symbolic fixation with Greenland’s size on the Mercator map or its potential mineral wealth.[iii] Yet these explanations struggle to account for the consistency of US behaviour and for the strategic value of Greenland in US-China-Russia competition in the Arctic and North Atlantic. There was the attempt to purchase Greenland in 2019, followed by the cancellation of Trump’s planned visit to Denmark after Copenhagen refused.[iv] Then there were the references to territorial expansion in Trump’s second inaugural address,[v] andhigh-level visits to the island in 2025.[vi] In April 2026, Trump’s Greenland ambitions resurfaced, even as the conflict with Iran was still not settled.[vii] This all points to a sustained line of policy rather than an impulsive reaction. Even if personal motives played a role, they do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the persistent focus on acquiring Greenland.

Rather, it reflects a broader shift toward a transactional understanding of US foreign policy under Trump.[viii] Under a transactional logic, international relations revolve less around institutionalized cooperation than around short-term exchanges and immediate returns. Commitments become contingent and continuously renegotiable, while alliances are seen as burdens that impose open-ended costs without clear gains. Partners are treated less as strategic allies than as counterparts expected to deliver visible concessions in return for protection or access. The picture indeed changes if one views the Greenland events through a transactional lens. If alliances are no longer viewed as durable, but as arrangements that will be rendered functionally meaningless in the near future, then the question facing Washington looks very different: How does the United States secure critical interests in the Arctic in a world where NATO no longer functions as an alliance?

While there is still a long way to go before the annexation of Greenland appears sensible, let alone desirable, this perspective does make it intelligible. In other words, the Greenland episode can be read as the United States preparing for a post-NATO world, one in which securing the Arctic no longer rests on alliance structures but on direct instruments of influence. This approach may operate well below the threshold of military coercion, relying instead on political signalling, economic leverage, and strategic positioning to reshape outcomes without overt confrontation.

None of this is new: a transactional logic was already visible during Trump’s first term and has become increasingly explicit in his second. It has been accompanied by repeated episodes of dismissiveness toward NATO, from suggesting that NATO’s Article 5 is dependent on adequate defence spending,[ix]minimizing European efforts in Afghanistan,[x] to internal communications surrounding the Red Sea strikes in March 2025 that revealed frustration at “bailing out” Europe once again.[xi] This logic became even more explicit in April 2026, when Trump called NATO a “paper tiger”, said US withdrawal from Europe was “beyond reconsideration”, and linked his frustration directly to allies’ refusal to back the US in the Iran war and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.[xii]

The continued surprise at episodes such as the Greenland crisis therefore points to a deeper problem in European analysis of US strategy. Decades of stability under NATO have made European policymakers rely heavily on alliance-based thinking, in which American power was embedded in institutionalized cooperation.[xiii] Even if the costs of leading the liberal international order are substantial, the United States has benefited enormously from it.[xiv]However, this is not how the current US administration sees it.

Europe’s Strategic Gap

While Greenland may yet prove to be a turning point, European leaders and analysts have been slow to accept this shift and its implications. Biden’s election in 2020 allowed many to treat Trump as an aberration. His re-election in 2024 makes that interpretation far less tenable. European policymakers must now reckon with the reality that transactionalism has become a structural feature of US foreign policy, at least on one side of the aisle. The greater danger for Europe lies in misreading the shift itself and continuing to plan and act on outdated premises. The tensions surrounding the Danish territory must make clear that, for Europe, there is simply no going back. A durable security policy cannot rest on having the safety of the continent depend on a few hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states every four years.

This also means resisting the impulse to manage each rupture through ad hoc arrangements in the hope that the broader transatlantic relationship can be preserved, as some European leaders appear to be doing.[xv] That caution applies directly to the Arctic. Rather than relying implicitly on continued US leadership in the Arctic, the EU should develop and lead a Europe-centred Arctic security framework that also incorporates key non-EU partners such as Norway, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Designing such a framework will require reconciling different threat perceptions among EU and Nordic states, managing Denmark’s special constitutional arrangements with Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and ensuring that greater EU visibility does not sideline Greenlandic authorities or existing Nordic formats.

In addition, given that the US already enjoys extensive operational privileges under existing treaty arrangements, Europe and the EU should approach any future Arctic security framework with caution and avoid commitments that would expand those privileges without clear strategic necessity. To do otherwise would risk rewarding transactionalism.

The logic extends beyond Greenland to the transatlantic relationship more generally. Europe must resist the familiar pattern of mistaking warmer tones for renewed commitment.[xvi] A durable European security policy cannot remain dependent on US guarantees that are increasingly contingent and politically reversible.[xvii] It must instead rest on deeper defence integration: more joint planning and procurement, and ultimately shared military capabilities.[xviii] It also demands a shared threat assessment within the European Council as without a unified diagnostic, integration will fragment along national lines.

Europe should also leverage its regulatory power to preserve influence in an increasingly transactional multipolar order. At the same time, this shift does not require Europe to abandon cooperation or adopt a similar power-based foreign policy. On the contrary, Europe’s response should be to strengthen an alternative, rules-based order by deepening trade and political ties with other partners such as Mercosur, India, Canada, and Australia. Europe cannot shape American politics, but it can shape its own strategic future.

Christophe Lesschaeve is the Director of Research at the European Strategy Institute Luxembourg – ESILUX and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg.

Donada Rata is a Research Fellow at the European Strategy Institute Luxembourg – ESILUX and Doctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg.

Photo credit: Pixabay

[i] Shawn McCreesh et al., “Trump Announces New European Tariffs in Greenland Standoff; Allies Outraged,” US, New York Times, January 17, 2026; “US Discussing Options to Acquire Greenland Including Using Military - White House,” BBC News, January 7, 2026; Mark John et al., “Trump Touts ‘total Access’ Greenland Deal as NATO Asks Allies to Step Up,” Reuters, January 23, 2026.

[ii] Matt Fuller, “‘Weapons-Grade Stupid’: Trump’s Greenland Threats Leave GOP Taking Him Seriously but Not Literally,” MS NOW, January 8, 2026.

[iii] Alan Smith et al., “The Trouble with Maps: Greenland’s Allure for Trump Is Based on an Illusion,” Australian Financial Review, January 22, 2026,; Steve Holland et al., “Trump Looks to Greenland to Cement His Legacy and Expand Sphere of US Influence,” Reuters, January 9, 2025.

[iv] Shaun Walker, “Danish PM ‘Surprised and Disappointed’ over Cancelled Trump Visit,” The Guardian, August 21, 2019.

[v] The White House, “The Inaugural Address,” The White House, January 20, 2025.

[vi] Miranda Bryant, “Danish PM Accuses US of ‘Unacceptable Pressure’ as JD Vance Says He Will Join Greenland Visit,” The Guardian, March 25, 2025.

[vii] Natasha Turak, “Trump’s Greenland Push Resurfaces as NATO Rift Deepens over Iran War,” CNBC, April 9, 2026.

[viii] Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (Penguin Press, 2017).

[ix] Trevor Hunnicutt et al., “Trump: If NATO Members Don’t Pay, US Won’t Defend Them,” Reuters, March 7, 2025.

[x] “German Defence Minister Urges Trump to Apologise for Afghanistan Remarks,” Reuters, January 26, 2026.

[xi] Jeanna Smialek and Steven Erlanger, “Now Europe Knows What Trump’s Team Calls It Behind Its Back: ‘Pathetic,’”New York Times, March 25, 2025.

[xii] Robert Tait, “Can Trump pull the US out of Nato – and why is he considering it?”, The Guardian, April 1, 2026.

[xiii] G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and the Transformation of the American World Order, (Princeton University Press, 2011).

[xiv] Keith Rockwell, “Criticism of NATO Ignores Its Economic Benefit to the US," Wilson Center, March 29, 2024.

[xv] Tim Ross, “Rob Jetten’s New Dutch Government Wants to Save NATO,” POLITICO, January 30, 2026; Jennifer Rankin, “‘Keep on Dreaming’: Could Europe Really Defend Itself without the US?,” The Guardian, January 31, 2026.

[xvi] “America’s Charm Offensive in Munich Masks Harder Line on Europe,” POLITICO, February 14, 2026.

[xvii] Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “Here’s How Much Aid the United States Has Sent Ukraine,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 23, 2026.

[xviii] Jolyon Howorth, “The Myth of European Security ‘Autonomy’,” European Review of International Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 38-45.