By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 06, 2026
China, Russia, and Iran had to be alarmed by the display
of U.S. power in Venezuela, but so did Denmark, a NATO ally of the United
States.
In the aftermath of the snatch-and-grab of Nicolás
Maduro, Trump spoke to The Atlantic about his other foreign policy
priorities: “We do need Greenland, absolutely.”
It might have been easy not too long ago to dismiss this
as bluster. Not anymore — not after the strikes on the Iran nuclear program and
the Venezuela operation. We’ve gone from “Trump always chickens out” when he
was backing off his Liberation Day tariffs to “Dismiss Trump’s threats at your
own peril.”
Trump doesn’t do everything he says, but almost
everything he does do, he talks about openly beforehand.
In this respect, enemies of the United States can never
complain that they weren’t warned — and perhaps allies, too.
Denmark controls Greenland as a semi-autonomous
territory. It colonized the sparsely populated island several hundred years
ago. Mostly within the Arctic Circle, Greenland is not desirable real estate by
any typical metric, but has outsized strategic significance.
As more waters become navigable in the Arctic Sea, the
top of the world opens up for greater geopolitical contention. Greenland
occupies a crucial spot. It sits on a key naval lane between the Atlantic and
the Arctic, and it has prodigious reserves of critical minerals, and maybe
fossil fuels, as well.
If it fell into our lap, it’d be an excellent addition to
our territorial holdings. There’s a reason that American statesmen have long
coveted the island.
The problem is that it’s not currently available. What
are other options? A lightly armed contingent of U.S. crossing guards could
probably take it over in a couple of days. The challenge, though, is political
and diplomatic, not military.
A NATO ally seizing the territory of another NATO ally
would obviously be a grave threat to the integrity of the alliance. Would
Denmark invoke Article 5 against the United States? It has the makings of a
good spoof musical, but it’s not something anyone should want to experience in
reality.
Although Trump has said in the past that he doesn’t take
military force off the table — an amazing statement in and of itself — he’s
also talked of buying Greenland. The Danes, though, say it’s not for sale, and
the Greenlanders don’t want to be bought.
If Trump really pushes the issue, and forces Denmark and
NATO into a corner with the 82nd Airborne ready to go on an airstrip somewhere,
he could probably compel a sale, but it’d be courting a diplomatic crisis and
damage the reputation of the United States without enough upside.
We can almost certainly get whatever we need from
Greenland without violating a friendly country’s sovereignty or straining a
world-historical alliance to the breaking point. We already have a
missile-defense base there. The 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement between
Denmark and the U.S. allowing us to keep bases could presumably be updated and
extended. Given the national security importance of rare earths to the U.S. and
NATO, it should be possible to unlock Greenland’s minerals.
Instead of clapping back at Trump, Danish Prime Minister
Mette Frederiksen should be reaching out for a steak dinner at Mar-a-Lago and
offering a deal. While public pressure gets Trump’s back up, private persuasion
— and a warm relationship — goes a long way. The Panamanians managed to get
Trump to stop talking about taking back the Canal (for now) with prudent
concessions.
For his part, Trump should realize that making everyone
in a friendly nation hate him doesn’t help his cause. His talk of annexing
Canada last year helped Justin Trudeau’s party survive a national election that
it should have lost. His Greenland saber-rattling is presumably making it
harder for Denmark to work with him on sensible cooperation.
If Nicolás Maduro got what he deserved, Denmark is a
different matter. Even the unsentimental, results-oriented Trump foreign policy
needs to distinguish between friend and foe.
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