When US President Donald Trump first mused about a Greenland takeover, the initial reactions were a blend of disbelief, bemusement and nervous laughter. It felt like yet another outlandish flourish, and marginally more realistic than annexing Canada.
But beneath the jokes sat a truth few confronted: Greenland’s position within Europe is fragile. The island bears deep scars from Danish colonialism, depends heavily on Danish funds and exists in a constitutional limbo: tied to Denmark, yet outside the EU’s political system. Those unresolved tensions leave Greenland politically unanchored, and exposed.
One week after Washington removed Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in an extraordinary military raid, the laughter has stopped. Trump has doubled down on his Arctic ambition, declaring that the US “absolutely need[s] Greenland,” and that the EU “needs us to get it."
While military seizure of the autonomous Danish territory remains unlikely, analysts speaking to The Parliament nonetheless saw reason to worry.
Greenland’s uneasy ties and spotty history with both Copenhagen and Brussels gives Washington leverage in any political influence or coercion campaign — and once again leaves the EU scrambling over a security crisis on its own doorstep.
Trump’s bid for Greenland
American interest in Greenland predates Donald Trump by generations. In 1946, US officials offered Denmark $100 million in gold bars for the island, which had already been deemed a “military necessity.”
The ambition went dormant for decades, dismissed as a joke or historical curiosity. That was, until Trump revived it during his first term and later escalated it in the opening weeks of his second, insisting that “one way or the other, we’re going to get it.”
Since the snatch and grab in Caracas, American rhetoric has hardened still, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday reportedly telling lawmakers that Trump wants to buy the island.
American officials say control of Greenland is essential to ensure security in the Western Hemisphere and the Arctic — a region where melting sea ice has opened up new trade routes and exposed valuable resources. China and Russia view the territory as increasingly important and Beijing has already attempted to buy key infrastructure on the island, attempts Denmark blocked.
Copenhagen counters that it has boosted defense spending for Greenland and that the US already has extensive access to the island through NATO and a Cold War-era military pact.
“When you go through all the concerns from the US side, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that this is about territorial expansion,” said Otto Svendsen, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. “This is about president Trump wanting to be the first US president in centuries to expand the geographical boundaries of the US.”
A US strike on NATO itself
As such, an American military move — once absurd — is now being assessed seriously. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and Denmark issued a joint statement on Tuesday emphasizing the self-determination of Greenland, though it made no mention of European military deterrence.
Analysts say the omission reflects reality. Militarily speaking, Denmark is a minnow compared to the US, and Trump aides have boasted that “nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
Greenland’s legal relationship with the EU also muddies the water. It’s an autonomous territory of Denmark, but not a full member of the EU. Instead, Greenland is classified as an overseas country and territory, or OCT, a legal holdover from Europe’s colonial history.
That means that if the US moved to seize the island by force, Copenhagen could try to invoke the mutual assistance clause of Article 42.7, the EU’s version of NATO’s Article 5.
However, because of Greenland’s associate status under EU law, it’s a point of debate whether the island qualifies for protection, said Ulla Neergaard, a professor of European law at the University of Copenhagen, and if triggered, whether EU members would even answer the call.
“I don’t think the EU would defend Greenland militarily,” said Juraj Majcin, a policy analyst specializing in the transatlantic relationship at the European Centre for Policy Analysis in Brussels. “The EU isn’t a military institution, and then NATO will be blocked."
US military intervention on the island would lead to the “disintegration” of NATO, Majcin and Svendsen said, a view voiced by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to Danish broadcasters this week.
American pressure, interference and influence
Even if not opting for force, Washington has other options, and analysts say they’re already in motion. US intelligence assets are already on the island, cultivating allies and probing vulnerabilities in Greenland’s politics and media landscape.
Polling shows that Greenlanders have so far reacted negatively to American rhetoric. But with a mere 56,000 residents and minimal local media capacity, the island is vulnerable to an influence campaign, Signe Ravn-Højgaard, the director of Digital Infrastruktur, a Danish think tank that researches Greenland’s communications infrastructure, told The Parliament.
Public debate runs overwhelmingly through Facebook and only two deep sea cables connect Greenland digitally to the outside world. She added that hard-to-detect Facebook algorithm changes could alter public debate, especially as local capacity for fact-checking is limited.
“This creates a vulnerability rooted in the Greenlandic public sphere’s dependence on US-owned digital infrastructure,” Ravn-Højgaard said. “We have already seen how American Big Tech companies can be highly responsive to political pressure from figures like Trump.”
Behind the technological vulnerability sits an even softer potential target: history.
Danish colonialism in Greenland stretches back to the 18th century, but the most traumatic years were in the 1950s and 1960s, Astrid Nonbo Andersen, a historian of Danish colonialism at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told The Parliament. Attempts to integrate Greenland into the Danish state led to forced relocations of children and sterilizations, as well as the removals of Inuit people to clear land for an American military base.
“The relations between Denmark and Greenland have been strained for years, so if the US wants to leverage that, it can,” said Nonbo Andersen.
Independence from Denmark remains central to local politics today, with nearly all parties advocating for it. However, polling shows that dream collapses if it jeopardizes the island’s social welfare system, which is largely funded by Denmark’s annual €600-million block grant per year.
That financial dependency is another weak point, as the US, with vastly deeper pockets, could present itself as an alternative patron — or propose alternative options for economic growth such as through a Compact of Free Association Agreement.
“It’s peanuts for the US,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, adding that developing a sustainable economic model is critical to the island’s dreams of independence.
Greenland’s delicate EU dance
Greenland’s uneasy relationship with the EU is another faultline.
When Denmark first voted in favor of joining the European Community — now the EU — in 1972, Greenlanders voted against by a two-to-one margin. In 1985, the island voted in a referendum to leave the EU after gaining expanded autonomy. Today, it holds associate status: outside the EU and the single market but dependent on the bloc for investment in education and green growth. As Danish citizens, Greenlanders are also EU citizens.
In recent years, Brussels has tried to expand relations with Greenland, planning to more than double financial support to €530 million in the next seven-year multiannual financial framework, making the EU Greenland’s second largest financial backer after Denmark.
A 2025 poll showed 60 % support for EU membership, but leaders have emphasized they want a future independent from both the US and EU and aren’t considering a referendum. In other words, any European effort to counter US involvement would remain controversial.
Denmark’s hard line meets America’s hard power
According to Svendsen, Denmark’s position is uncompromising. To him, Washington fundamentally misunderstands what pressure can achieve, saying that under no conditions will the Danes entertain a sale of the island, and that Greenlandic leaders and voters have already firmly rejected American influence.
And yet, there's an imbalance of power. The US can pressure, manipulate and destabilize. Europe can object, but perhaps not much else. As such, the question now hanging in the Arctic air is whether Trump is at all willing to negotiate, or if he will stop at nothing to expand the US' footprint.
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