Key Highlights
- The crisis over Greenland may deliver the moment when Europe must stand up to Donald Trump, as officials have said a US attempt to annex the territory could shatter the Nato transatlantic alliance. European leaders have entertained Trump’s demands for nearly a year as he has pushed Nato countries to increase their defence spending to 5% of GDP, and threatened to pull US support from Ukraine as part of a peace process that appears to favour Russia.
- They have also given a muted response to US adventurism abroad including the capture and rendition of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. The obsequiousness has often played out in public.
- Various European leaders have vied for the role of “Trump whisperer” and Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, infamously referred to him as “daddy” at a summit last June. But Trump’s’ repeated and increasingly bellicose demands that Denmark cede or sell him semi-autonomous Greenland has sparked one of the greatest crises for transatlantic partnership in its history – and may force Europe to draw a line in the snow.“The president’s ambition is on the table,” the Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen told Fox News after the talks.
- “Of course we have our red lines.
- This is 2026, you trade with people but you don’t trade people.”After an hour-long meeting with the US vice-president, JD Vance, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, Rasmussen and Greenland’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, stood grim-faced smoking cigarettes outside of the Eisenhower executive building in Washington DC.“When it comes to Greenland, the Europeans have found a red line that they really want to stand by,” said Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund for US defence and transatlantic security.“Everything else has been subject to negotiation … but the Greenland situation is different because it comes to the question of sovereignty, and it comes to the question of whether Europe is capable of standing up for itself in terms of its own territory, its own rights.”Europe, however, was at a “diplomatic disadvantage” because of its dependency on the US for security, said Latvia’s former prime minister Krišjanis Kariņš. map“Europe is not, unfortunately, in a strong position to strongly object, because, say, if Europe were to open up the dispute into the trade area, I’m certain that the US would respond in kind or more than in kind,” he said.
