Why Europeans Must Maintain a Stable Military Presence in Greenland

Since Donald Trump announced his intention to annex Greenland to the United States by whatever means necessary, Europeans once again find themselves up against the wall. As in Ukraine, they are once more confronted with the damaging effects of their powerlessness and their strategic dependence on Washington.

Admittedly, this is not the first time they have been forced to deal with the geopolitical consequences of decisions that are not their own: fundamentally, Europe has depended on the United States for its security for more than seven decades. But this time, the situation has changed. This dependence no longer applies to an ally. It now concerns a hostile, predatory power that recognises only power politics and disregards the most basic principles of international law.

Faced with this new reality, the heart of the ‘Greenland problem’ no longer lies solely in the neo-colonial reflexes of American power. It also lies in European weakness. For although Donald Trump’s claims over Greenland are unacceptable – and must therefore never be endorsed – the President of the United States nevertheless puts his finger on a genuine question: the concrete exercise of sovereignty over the world’s largest non-continental island in the long term.

With the gradual opening of the Arctic, technological progress and the relentless rise in great-power rivalries, it is unlikely that, in the decades to come, the roughly 56,000 local inhabitants and the five million Danes – living more than 2,000 kilometres away – will, on their own, be able to guarantee control of Greenland. Yet power abhors a vacuum: whether one likes it or not, this issue was always bound to emerge sooner or later.

The island’s security could, of course, be ensured by NATO, as the Danes and Europeans, in their anxiety, insist. They have repeatedly reminded the occupant of the White House that the United States already has military bases in Greenland and that the door is wide open should it wish to build new ones. Nothing would prevent the Americans from shielding the island from any hypothetical future ambitions on the part of China or Russia, without annexing it.

And this is precisely where the problem lies. Some Europeans may not yet have grasped it, but the United States is no longer prepared to assume responsibility for their security, and is even speaking of a “Europeanisation” of NATO. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to imagine that a strictly NATO-based solution would suit them. Why, indeed, would Washington secure a territory destined to remain Danish, and which it also perceives as almost uninhabited – since the views of the Greenlanders themselves appear not to feature in the equation?

Trump’s reasoning on this point is simple, ruthless and – in his eyes – unassailable: if it is the United States that must protect Greenland from Chinese or Russian ambitions, then it is the United States that must govern it.

What can Europeans do to resist their supposed ally? Across the continent, the idea of deploying troops on the ground – at the request of the Greenlanders and the Danes – has sparked fierce criticism. For some, this option would be pointless. Yet it could nonetheless prove useful.

A European presence would not necessarily deter Donald Trump from seizing the island if he decided to pursue his ambition at all costs. It would not prevent him from deploying his own troops either, loudly proclaiming that Greenland now belongs to him. One may, however, reasonably hope that American soldiers would not attack European soldiers stationed there – and vice versa.

The West would then find itself in an absurd situation: two military forces, from either side of the Atlantic, coexisting on Greenlandic soil, each claiming sovereignty over the island. This scenario would be more than absurd; it would verge on the grotesque. But it would have at least one virtue: it would allow Europeans to show the world and, above all, themselves that for once – perhaps for the first time – they were able to reject Trump’s diktats, and managed to say no to him.