If you’re sitting in Copenhagen or Nuuk and looking for bespoke lessons from the trade war that President Donald Trump just declared on the world, here are two.
First, what this American president signals, he also carries out. Second, it does not matter whether the object of his fixation is obviously self-defeating or nonsensical; he’ll press on regardless, just because. Put both insights together, and you may conclude that when Trump says he’ll “get” Greenland from Denmark — “100%,” with or without force — he will try.
Among the latest indicators is the firing of Colonel Susannah Meyers. She commanded the Pituffik Space Base (formerly named Thule Air Base), an American outpost in Greenland that monitors the Arctic skies for incoming enemy missiles. At first blush, Meyers might seem to be just one more victim in the ongoing purge of national-security and military officials deemed disloyal to Trump or suspiciously woke. In this case, though, the Pentagon specified that actions “to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated.”
What could have been Meyers’ transgression? It occurred just after a visit to the base by JD Vance and his entourage, during which the vice president wantonly snubbed the host country. “Our message to Denmark is very simple,” Vance said. “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”
Danes and Greenlanders were understandably offended. So Meyers sent an internal email to all her staff, including the American service members and the Danish and Greenlandic contractors working with them, reassuring them that Vance’s “concerns” are “not reflective of Pituffik Space Base.” And now she’s out, on grounds of subversion.
Washington, meanwhile, is abuzz with other planning. The Office of Management and Budget has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis that balances such items as the expense of subsidizing Greenland’s 56,000 residents (so that Trump can outbid the block grants that Copenhagen sends to its semi-autonomous Arctic territory) against the value of extracting minerals from the frozen land. Will the Pentagon draw up invasion scenarios next?
To grasp the insanity of these developments, you need to appreciate the long and intimate relationship of the U.S. and Denmark in Greenland. Its military roots date to World War II, when the Third Reich overran Denmark, and the Danes discreetly invited the U.S. to defend Greenland. The Americans did just that, building bases from which they took out Nazi planes and submarines in the North Atlantic.
The cooperation continued and deepened during the Cold War, formalized in an agreement in 1951. It regulated the Thule Air Base, but also about a dozen others, with colorful names like Bluie West One and Bluie East Two. (“Bluie” was code for Greenland, and the directions and numbers spared American aviators from mispronouncing Inuit place names.) The U.S. and Denmark also have five other defense agreements, weaving together their logistics, spying and fighting prowess. A sixth was signed under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden; impressively, under the circumstances, the Danish parliament just ratified it last week.
The Danes, in short, usually like working with the Yanks, and have always been open to doing more together. Even so, both Copenhagen and Washington, like other Western capitals, concluded after the Cold War that a peace dividend was due. The Arctic seemed less threatening, so the Americans closed all their bases in Greenland except Thule/Pituffik.
More recently, that risk environment has changed again, and as dramatically as the climate, which causes the Arctic ice to melt and frees shipping lanes for commercial and military craft. Russia and China are now vying with the West for access and dominance in the region, in what resembles a new Great Game. Moscow and Beijing are even teaming up for joint patrols in the Arctic.
In response, NATO countries are boosting their defenses. Norway is fortifying its Svalbard archipelago, and Canada is modernizing and growing its forces in the region. Denmark, the U.S. and their partners are right in planning to do more.
Together, that is. That’s as it has been since World War II and as it should be. Canada’s new defense investments, for example, go into the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a bi-national operation between the U.S. and Canada in which each ally contributes its expertise.
That’s the spirit in which Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, now appeals to the U.S. “We do not appreciate the tone” in which Vance and Trump talk to Copenhagen, he says, because “this is not how you speak to close allies.” At the same time, he agrees that “the U.S. needs a greater military presence in Greenland” and offers that “we, Denmark and Greenland, are very much open to discussing this with you.”
Geopolitically and strategically, Greenland is as important as everyone including Trump thinks. For that reason, the West needs to do more to secure the territory and its waters and skies.
The good news is that the U.S. already has the time-tested friendships to do that. The bad news is that the American president doesn’t understand this.
Instead, he alienates America’s allies by bullying and threatening them, increasingly resembling the imperialist adversary in the Kremlin that NATO should jointly stare down. Trump has got Greenland, like his entire foreign policy, exactly upside down.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
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