Q&A with Constanze Stelzenmüller  

Trump administration pressure to acquire Greenland, a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark larger than Alaska, has sharpened this month, as both Greenland and Denmark have rejected ceding ownership of the island to the U.S., with support from other NATO allies as well as significant bipartisan and bicameral pushback from Congress and U.S. public opinion. We spoke to Constanze Stelzenmüller on the strategic importance of the island and the implications for European security and international relations more broadly.   

What is driving the increased U.S. interest in owning Greenland?   

According to President Trump, nothing less than “World Peace is at stake!” But a remarkably broad swath of arguments are being put forward by the administration and its MAGA supporters; some are reality-based, some less so. Greenland, like Canada, has been part of U.S. homeland defense for decades because of the flight paths of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) originating in Russia or China. Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) houses U.S. missile warning sensors as well as space surveillance and control sensors. But it does so based on an agreement with Denmark from 1951, which both Nuuk and Copenhagen are eager to continue; it does not require outright U.S. ownership. Trump has also said that Greenland would be essential for the new “Golden Dome” missile defense project—but that is still in the design phase, and the need for exclusive ownership remains unsubstantiated. It has also been suggested by Trump and others that a reinforced U.S. presence in the Arctic is necessary to check “the Russia-China authoritarian advance.” But offers by Denmark and other NATO allies to reinforce their Arctic presence have been rejected by the administration. 

As for rare earths, the U.S. was last involved in mining on Greenland during WWII. A friend who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2025 reported that the unison message from U.S. mining companies had been “if it was worth it, we’d be doing it.” So, the U.S. does not need to own the world’s largest Arctic island either for security or for economic reasons. 

Less persuasive reasons include: Denmark is a “bad ally” (Vice President JD Vance); free trade was a subsidy and “it’s time for Denmark to give back” (Trump); “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” (Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller). Techno-libertarians have argued that Greenland could be a “new spiritual frontier,” or a “privatized charter state” and prototype for a colony on Mars. The China expert (and administration official in Trump’s first term) Matt Turpin thinks this is just Trump once more expertly creating drama around himself ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.  

But on Monday, Trump appeared to have put the search for rationales to rest definitively with a letter to Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre in which he wrote that his not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by Norway (it’s awarded by an independent committee) absolved him from “an obligation to think purely of Peace.” 

How are NATO allies responding to the U.S. push for Greenland and how would U.S. escalation affect the alliance?  

One remarkable effect of Trump’s insistence on acquiring Greenland “the easy way or the hard way” and his announcement of new tariffs on eight countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) who sent small troop contingents to Greenland last week has been to unite Europe in disapproval; even Hungary’s Viktor Orbán said the issue needs to be addressed “within NATO.” More astonishingly yet, leaders of Europe’s hard right parties like the U.K.’s Nigel Farage, France’s Jordan Bardella, and Germany’s Alice Weidel also hurried to distance themselves. 

Alas, it’s too late (or possibly too early) to award Trump the Charlemagne prize for work done in the service of European unification. That will go to the economist, former president of the European Central Bank, and former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi this year. 

What are the broader ramifications for international order for a U.S. taking of Greenland? 

Trump’s threats to take Greenland have already sparked the worst crisis of the transatlantic relationship since Suez (1956) or the Iraq War (2003). Europeans are now readying a potential €93 billion ($108 billion) in countermeasures against the new tariffs. Canada’s premier Mark Carney demonstratively flew to China last week for trade conversations, saying at a press conference: “we take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” There are three more islands on Europe’s North Atlantic coast—Iceland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom—whose unshakeable reliance on their decades-old Special Relationships with the U.S. is now in question. The same is true for Norway, whose vulnerable Arctic island Svalbard (it guards the exit route of Russia’s nuclear fleet from the neighboring Kola peninsula) is coveted by Russia and China. 

On Europe’s eastern flank, the three (very small) Baltic nations have every reason to be apprehensive about Stephen Miller’s dismissal of Denmark as irrelevant because it is a “tiny country with a tiny economy and a tiny military.” Embattled Ukraine—its power plants and cities brutally bombarded by Russia every day—and its European supporters must ask themselves what U.S. security guarantees are worth in a might-makes-right world. Kirill Dimitriev, the Kremlin’s chief negotiator, posted gleefully: “Collapse of the transatlantic union. Finally—something actually worth discussing in Davos."