Greenland - the Truth

Yet another field-day  with Trump:

Donald Trump’s threat to “own” Greenland is often dismissed as incoherent, or waved away as the ramblings of an ageing man with a fondness for maps and property deals. That is comforting. It is also wrong.

The statement only looks irrational if you assume Trump believes in alliances. He does not.

Once you strip that assumption away, the logic becomes brutally clear. Trump does not care about Europe. He does not care about NATO. He cares about America, narrowly defined, territorially imagined, and treated less as a republic than as an estate to be secured and fenced.

Greenland matters to him because it is useful to the United States. Early warning radar. Arctic access. Missile defence. Space surveillance. Geography that protects the American homeland. That is why he talks about ownership there, and nowhere else. Not because NATO cannot defend Greenland, but because he does not believe NATO should be relied upon at all.

Greenland already sits under the protection of NATO, via Denmark. The US already has permanent forces on the island. It can deploy more at will. If Russia or China threatened Greenland, the US would be treaty bound to respond. Ownership adds nothing militarily. Zero. The only thing it adds is control without obligation.

That is the point.

Trump’s worldview has no room for mutual defence, shared risk, or collective security. Those are abstractions. What he understands is possession. If America owns something, America can defend it. If it does not, America owes nothing. Europe, in this schema, is not a partner. It is a liability.

This is why his argument is so corrosive. By insisting that territory must be owned to be defended, he is not making a strategic claim. He is quietly repudiating the entire post-war security order. NATO’s central premise is that sovereign states remain sovereign, and defence is collective. Trump’s premise is that sovereignty is provisional, and defence is transactional.

It is also why the China and Russia rhetoric is so thin. There is no armada of hostile ships swarming Greenland. The threat is exaggerated because it is a pretext. The real message is directed at allies, not adversaries. Do not expect America to defend you unless America directly benefits.

And notice what he is willing to discard to make that point. The UN Charter. The inviolability of borders. The principle that territory is not acquired by force. The very rules the US invokes when condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine. All quietly shoved aside the moment they become inconvenient.

Greenlanders themselves have been admirably clear. They do not want to be Americans. They do not want to be Danes. They want to decide their own future. Under Trump’s logic, that preference is irrelevant. Strategic utility trumps self-determination. Ownership beats consent.

So this is not dementia. It is ideology.

A cold, inward-looking nationalism that sees alliances as burdens, law as optional, and partners as disposable. Greenland is simply the first place where that worldview collides openly with reality.

Europe would be foolish to treat it as a one-off.