Trump Seizing Greenland Could Set Off a Chain Reaction
After Venezuela, Europeans are taking the president’s threats seriously.
By Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic
Danish officials think they know how Donald Trump might seize Greenland. In a late-night Truth Social post, the president announces that the Danish territory is now an American “protectorate.” Because neither Denmark nor its European allies possess the military force to prevent the United States from taking the island, they are powerless to resist Trump’s dubious claim. And as the leading member of NATO claims the sovereign territory of another state, the alliance is paralyzed. Arguing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, Trump simply declares that Greenland now belongs to the United States.
This chain of events, which some Danish officials and security experts proposed to us in recent months, may have seemed faintly ridiculous as of last Friday. By the weekend—after the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s ensuing insistence that the United States now “runs” Venezuela—it seemed far less so. For months, Danes have anxiously imagined an audacious move by the Trump administration to annex Greenland, whether by force, coercion, or an attempt to buy off the local population of about 56,000 people with the promise of cutting them in on future mining deals. Now those fears are spiking.
Shortly after U.S. forces captured Maduro, Katie Miller, a former White House official who is married to the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, posted on X a map of Greenland covered in the U.S. flag, with the caption “SOON.” Officials in Denmark told us that they were furious—and rattled. Then, yesterday morning, in an interview with our colleague Michael Scherer, Trump reasserted his intention to annex Greenland. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” he said.
