Take Greenland, Lose NATO

My interview with Politico Playbook — West Wing Edition

Earlier today, President Donald Trump said that with regard to Greenland, he “would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way, we will do it the hard way.” That’s hardly reassuring, I told Irie Sentner, Politico’s West Wing Playbook author. Here’s my interview, published today.

Trump and his aides argue that the U.S. needs Greenland as a matter of national security to maintain dominance in the Arctic. Do they have a point — would “owning” Greenland offer the U.S. a strategic advantage?

No. We already have everything we want from a security perspective when it comes to Greenland, because they’re a member of NATO. And indeed, if you look around the Arctic, all but Russia, seven out of eight countries that are Arctic nations are NATO members. And so the way to improve security in the Arctic is to work through NATO.

One of the lessons that we have long learned, but this administration seems to forget, is that we’re more secure and more able to deter if we work together with our allies than if we do it by ourselves. So in many ways, the threat, even, to take over Greenland and the actual takeover of Greenland would reduce our security, because it would make allies that are today allies, if not adversaries, certainly no longer allies of the United States in the Arctic.

What did you make of Trump’s post on Wednesday casting doubt on whether NATO would really be there for us?

I take offense to that on the behalf of our European allies. Our allies have been with the United States not only from the very beginning, but at every point in time. The only time that NATO has invoked [the collective defense clause] Article Five was [after Sept. 11, 2001, when] NATO deployed aircraft to help defend the skies of the United States. Every single NATO country, without an exception, as well as another 20 other countries, deployed troops to Afghanistan for a period of 13 years. For the president of the United States to say that NATO doesn’t come and help us is, for those countries who fought alongside us, whose sons and daughters and husbands were killed in order to defend our interest, offensive.

The White House is growing more aggressive in its posture toward obtaining Greenland through “a range of options,” and has left military intervention on the table. In the event that the U.S. moves forward with annexing the island — taking military action against Denmark, a NATO member — what would happen next with the alliance?

What would happen is NATO comes to a stop. There won’t be collective NATO action against the NATO member, in part because NATO works on the basis of consensus, and presumably the United States would not support collective NATO action against itself. Nor would it be very easy to do that, given that the NATO command structure — at our insistence — has been and remains very much a U.S.-heavy command structure. So what would happen is a big debate among the Europeans and the Canadians about how we think about the future of our security and the future of our alliance.

In the worst case, everybody goes their own way, which would be terrible for everyone. In the best case, the 31 other NATO members would decide that they would have to provide for their own security together until and unless a time comes when the United States comes back to behaving in a way that normal nations and nations like them expect countries to behave.

Let me give you another hypothetical: The U.S. leaves NATO altogether. Could the alliance survive? And would that really matter to U.S. interests, given our own massive Department of Defense?

It would be a different alliance. This was an alliance very much built on American leadership and America being central to its operations, in terms of the command structure, in terms of the training, in terms of the doctrine, in terms of the planning, in terms of some of the capabilities, most notably nuclear as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

There’s nothing to prevent other countries from putting together the command and control structures, the planning, the concepts of operations, including buying the necessary capabilities, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, to do what NATO does today.

There’s a huge benefit to the United States that we have access to bases, ports, facilities, troops, training places in Europe — all of that would be at risk.

Given everything Trump did last year that was of concern to Europe — cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, not giving Ukraine the arms it wanted, etc. — why do you think Europe’s pushback on Greenland this week has been particularly aggressive?

Europe has gone through the five stages of grief. And in some ways, [German Chancellor] Friedrich Merz has led that effort. And it was his speech in early December, when he said the Pax Americana is over, that sort of crystallized it.

There’s this sense in Europe that something fundamental has broken, has ruptured, has disappeared. And it’s taken a year for Europe to accept that. Now the challenge for 2026 is for Europe to actually take the conclusion that this rupture is real and to start building the capabilities that reduce, and ultimately, perhaps even eliminate its dependence on the United States. I think we’re in for rough riding in the coming year. And I’m not sure that Trump and the people around him really understand that there are limits to their power, limits to what they can do, and that their disdain for Europe doesn’t mean that Europe can’t do more and is able to do more, and willing