With U.S. President Donald Trump’s operations in Venezuela appearing, at least in the administration’s eyes, to be a success, the White House appears eager to build upon its foreign-policy momentum. And while there are plenty of opportunities the administration may turn to next, there is one geopolitical project that stands in the immediate offing: annexing Greenland.
Trump himself said as much over the weekend. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump told the Atlantic on Sunday. “We need it for defense.” If anyone missed the message, administration surrogate Katie Miller—perhaps best known as the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s domestic and immigration policy—tweeted a photo of Greenland covered in an American flag, with the text, “SOON.”
Trump’s gestures at annexing Greenland are hardly new; even during his first term, the president announced an interest in acquiring the island. But whatever space once existed to dismiss Trump’s comments as mere bluster are gone. Following the United States’ lightning strike on Caracas, and the effective decapitation of Venezuela’s government, any geopolitical plans Trump has repeatedly announced—especially those focused on the Western Hemisphere—have to be taken as not merely serious, but even inevitable. And on fewer things has Trump been clearer than the supposed “need” to annex Greenland, whatever the cost.
Which is why it’s long past time not only to treat an American move on Greenland as a theoretical exercise but a real likelihood—one that would be not only a morally reprehensible crime, but a national security crisis of a sort the U.S. has not seen in decades. There’s good reason to think it would be the greatest foreign-policy blunder since at least the Vietnam War.
First things first: Consider the immediate fallout of the U.S. announcing in the not-too-distant future that it was annexing Greenland. Domestically, little would change; as an American territory, Greenland would only receive nonvoting representation in Congress, and little more. Internationally, however, the reactions would be swift, destabilizing, and wildly detrimental to American interests and influence.
The quickest response would come out of Denmark, and out of Europe more broadly. Danish officials have been unequivocal in their opposition to Trump’s threats. But if and when an American flag rises over Nuuk, U.S.-Danish relations—that is, America’s links with one of its closest European allies—would immediately shatter. While Denmark would hardly offer an armed response, European nations would close ranks in support of Danish partners. More importantly, NATO would be, for all intents and purposes, dead. After all, American annexation would mean that a NATO member state had just invaded and cleaved apart another member of the alliance. For decades, one of NATO’s unsung graces was the fact that the military alliance effectively precluded member states from assaulting or invading another. This is hardly theoretical; part of NATO’s expansion in the 1990s and 2000s stood upon concerns about renewed border disputes between places like Hungary and Romania, and NATO’s existence helped defuse roiling tensions between Greece and Turkey.
But should the U.S. suddenly invade Denmark—and claim a constituent part of Denmark as its own—that reality would come undone. What alliance could survive something like this? What ally would ever trust the U.S. not to do the same in the future? In a world of imperialism, as the saying goes, appetite grows with eating. Given how many European nations still have territory in the Western Hemisphere—from the Azores to French Guiana to the British Virgin Islands—which of America’s allies could be assured that they wouldn’t be next?
For Trumpist unilateralists, this may matter little. But for those who view America’s allies as its greatest asset in an era of rising geopolitical tension, spiking that alliance system—all for an island in which American military power is already assured—would be a suicidal maneuver, without modern compare.
Nor would Europe recoil alone. In Ottawa, Canadian officials would suddenly face a strategic nightmare, seeing an American neighbor now hemming Canada in on three sides (while still being barricaded on the fourth side by the Arctic). Greenland would be an effective bulwark against Canadian maneuverability or power projection in the North Atlantic: a gargantuan doorstop on Canada’s eastern border, isolating Canada that much more from Ottawa’s remaining allies in Europe. With an American vise squeezing Canada, Trump’s previous threats of annexing Canada itself would suddenly be taken—as they should have been all along—deadly seriously.
And while that will mean many things—not least an increasingly militarized U.S.-Canadian border and an increasingly tenuous security architecture in North America—it will also mean something that no one in the administration has apparently considered: Canada going nuclear. Nuclear discourse in Canada has accelerated already, thanks largely to Trump’s rhetoric. Watching Trump suddenly encircle Canada would effectively guarantee a nuclear arms program in Canada itself—with all of the threats, uncertainty, and destabilizing factors attendant. A Greenland seizure, coming alongside the actions of other nuclear-armed imperialists expanding their borders, would all but assure a new nuclear arms race among non-nuclear powers, realizing that these weapons may be the only guarantee of safety and sovereignty.
Meanwhile, those fellow imperialists would only cheer Trump’s moves with glee, realizing the kind of advantage an American move on Greenland would suddenly present. In China, Beijing would watch any concerns about unified pushback against invading Taiwan dissolve. With America’s alliance system in tatters, who would join (or replace) Washington in leading a concerted campaign against Chinese expansionism? So, too, in Russia, where Trump’s invasion would provide rhetorical cover for the Kremlin’s revanchism, whether in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or elsewhere. A suddenly destabilized world—in which colliding spheres of influence reign, with subalterns and trampled nations chafing against new colonial overlords—would ripple across the globe, presenting a national security disaster the likes of which the U.S. has not seen since the 1930s, when a similarly Hobbesian world birthed totalitarianism, fascistic empires, and the most devastating war the globe had ever seen.
These are all tangible realities and reactions that are easy to discern. But there’s something else that would follow America’s devouring of Greenland, which lays at the intersection of foreign and domestic policy. Trump’s seizure of Greenland would be a monumental crime of colonialism—a moral stain, from which it would take at least a generation to recover. It would also present a series of risks the U.S. has not seen in over a century, when it last went through its bout of momentous expansion, regardless of what colonized populations wanted.
Indeed, it is that last round of large-scale territorial expansion—in the late 1890s, largely following the Spanish-American War—that can be especially instructive about the kinds of threats the U.S. is about to incur, in both the near and far term. In the Philippines, American annexation was immediately followed by a nationwide Filipino rebellion, which resulted in the deaths not only of thousands of American troops but the slaughtering of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. While Washington eventually succeeded in quelling the Filipino insurgency, the Philippines represented an effective albatross around America’s strategic neck—a ripe target for Japanese imperialists, who took full advantage of U.S. overreach to trample American troops and turn the Philippines into a platform for devastating much of Asia for years.
In Puerto Rico, another island annexed in 1898, American forces immediately imposed an effective police state, smothering any Puerto Rican opposition. It’s been largely overlooked in mainland American history, but Puerto Rico’s nationalist movement led a decades-long insurgency against American forces, in San Juan and Washington alike, coming within a hair’s breadth of assassinating President Harry Truman in 1950 and opening fire on Congress a few years later. Given that Puerto Ricans have now spent nearly 130 years under American rule without basic political rights—no votes in Congress, no votes on the presidency—it’s difficult to see the island as anything other than a modern colony, or to blame those in Puerto Rico who view America as little more than a colonial overlord.
None of this is to say that America’s annexation will result in an insurgency in Greenland, or that Russian or Chinese forces will use Greenland as a stepping stone to target the American mainland. But we can hardly be surprised if Greenlanders—nearly unanimously opposed to American control—decide to take matters into their own hands in targeting Americans, or if America’s foes view the sprawling, largely undefended island as a suddenly soft underbelly for the United States. These are all factors that would dissuade any other administration from such a rash move—and factors that the Trump administration has no indication it has considered.
But perhaps there’s only one factor worth considering. Imperial expansion has a way of transitioning into imperial overreach—and, eventually, into imperial collapse. Combined with a shattered alliance system, a newly prickly (and potentially nuclear) neighbor, a rising reign of imperialists the world over, and a collapsed claim to any kind of global or moral leadership, the ingredients are all there for a thrust into Greenland to be a debacle of era-defining proportions—and a national security crisis whose ramifications are only just beginning.