Filenews 8 January 2026
By Marc Champion
Denmark was concerned about U.S. intentions regarding Greenland even before Donald Trump's sending troops and bombers to Venezuela last weekend, but now the Danes are genuinely alarmed – and rightly so. Even if this vast island territory is not the next target on the US president's wish list (which certainly includes Colombia), he seems determined to conquer it before he leaves office.
The reasons for Denmark's concern go beyond even Trump's repeated requests to surrender the island, which became even more intense just before Christmas with the appointment of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as special envoy to achieve the president's goal. His message was not subtle: Louisiana was associated with a vast purchase of territory from France by the U.S. in 1803, and Landry declared that he had offered "to make Greenland part of the United States."
The problem for the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, is the same as that of Europe in general: she has few cards to play in the world of power introduced by Trump. They built their entire economic and defense stance around the rules and allied order that the U.S. created for their friends after World War II. They are now overly dependent on American weapons to resist as Trump destroys it, with the powerful help of people like Vladimir Putin.
Frederiksen tried hard to oppose Trump's latest claims on Greenland, but the language she used is revealing. He stressed that the US has no right under international law to occupy Danish territory, that the two countries are close allies, that Trump does not need to occupy the island to ensure American security and that, if he attempted to do so, he would act against the democratic will of the approximately 57.000 inhabitants of the autonomous Danish territory. All this is undoubtedly true. But he is completely unaware of what became clear from Trump's actions over the weekend in Venezuela: he is not interested in any of this.
This does not rule out the possibility that Trump's actions to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will have positive effects for the country. But that would not be the case for Greenland. In fact, it may be more useful to think about the case of Greenland by considering Crimea rather than Venezuela.
Crimea is the peninsula that Putin seized from Ukraine in 2014, using every means except declaring war and citing every possible reason to do so, except the most real. His motives were to project Russian power in a region that Moscow considers its legitimate sphere of influence, if not an imperial possession, and to control resources, including oil and gas fields in Crimea's territorial waters.
Trump has made similarly misleading statements about his goals, saying that he intervened in Venezuela because of Maduro's involvement in drug trafficking to the U.S. (even though Venezuela does not play a significant role in this trade) and that he should acquire Greenland for reasons of national security. If the latter were true, however, it would have already increased the number of U.S. troops in Greenland from the current minimum of 150-200. During the Cold War, there were up to 6,000 American soldiers there. Denmark has indicated that it is open to negotiations to accommodate any proposed increase in this number.
U.S. Air Force personnel and other personnel have a presence at Pituffik Space Base on Greenland's northwest coast, under a 1951 treaty that depends on maintaining the two countries' NATO alliance relationship. But Trump doesn't care about alliances, and security is not his primary goal in Greenland. As in Venezuela, and like Putin in Crimea, what interests him is access to resources and the restoration of an exclusive sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.
Greenland is three times the size of Texas, under which it is believed that there are large amounts of unexploited, albeit hard-to-access, rare earths, among other minerals that Trump desires. This vast island also boasts oil and gas under its undisputed territorial waters, as well as more within the territorial claims in the Arctic – including the North Pole – that Denmark has submitted to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS). Denmark's request clashes with other similar claims from Canada, Norway, Russia and the US.
We can assume that the possible timing of U.S. action in Greenland may come before November's midterm elections for Congress. As for the way, I doubt that even Trump knows about it – after all, sending special forces to remove Nicolás Maduro was not his first choice to achieve what he wanted in Venezuela (he initially tried to negotiate the departure of the country's dictator). But what seems more likely for Greenland is some version of the hybrid use of force, capital, political pressure and disinformation that Putin used to seize Crimea without firing almost a single bullet.
The White House could pay up to $1 million to each resident of the island to first vote for independence and then join the US, which would cost about as much as the State Department's annual budget. However, it is unlikely that it will have to bear these costs. Denmark does not have the means to compete militarily or economically with the US – something Frederiksen knows. Copenhagen, like the rest of Europe, is also exposed to U.S. retaliation in the area of trade, support for Ukraine and its security in general, which makes a confrontation with Washington economically unprofitable.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that Europe is vulnerable because it remains dependent on the old US-led world order in ways that are not the case for most of the rest of the world. The unequal trade agreements, the handling of the Ukrainian issue and now Trump's threats to occupy Greenland are just the test cases that prove it. At the same time, we do not yet have a new world "order", but only the death agony of the previous one. It seems clear that we are returning to a form of competition between the great powers of the 19th century, but without – for the time being – any mechanism like the European Agreement that followed the Napoleonic Wars to curb rivalry and the propensity for war that this would entail.
There will be countless issues that will have to be resolved in order to lead to such a condition. How much Europe, for example, should be under Russia's control? Where exactly in the Pacific or in the Himalayas, should China's sphere of influence end and that of the US and India begin? What will happen to Taiwan and its vital microchip industry? And what will be the implications in the Western Balkans, where in the 1990s the US and Europe prevented Serbia, the dominant regional power, from changing the borders with its neighbours by force of arms and ethnic cleansing? Will the European Union – the rules-based international order par excellence – be able to rearm itself and remain sufficiently united to survive as we know it today?
None of these questions can be fully answered at the moment, because the war in Ukraine continues and Trump's attempt to impose a new "Donroe Doctrine" on America's neighbourhood does not yet amount to a new international order. All these issues and more, however, are now ongoing.
