Trump’s Greenland retreat is no victory for Europe

In Nuuk, people spoke to me about what they called the “psychological terror” of the preceding weeks, as Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to take control of their country.

One story has stayed with me. Shortly before I arrived, Nuuk suffered a city-wide power cut. It was caused by a transmission failure in severe weather, but that was not how many people initially experienced it. Only weeks earlier, American forces had seized Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela after Caracas was plunged into darkness. In Greenland, already subjected to weeks of threats from Washington, the resemblance was enough to cause genuine alarm.

People told me they had moved money out of their bank accounts because they feared what an invasion might mean for their savings. Denmark was preparing for contingencies that would once have seemed inconceivable between NATO allies.

It is difficult to read the agreement signed this week by the United States, Denmark and Greenland without remembering that atmosphere.

Trump has retreated a very long way from his original position. Greenland remains outside American sovereignty. Danish sovereignty, Greenlandic territorial integrity and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination are all expressly reaffirmed. This is not the Greenland of the maps Trump shared beneath the Stars and Stripes, or the territory he insisted America would acquire “one way or the other”.

Read alongside the 1951 Defence of Greenland Agreement, though, the new settlement is much more than diplomatic housekeeping.

America already possessed extensive military rights in Greenland. It now has an agreement explicitly linking the territory to the defence of the American continent and the Golden Dome system, extending the network of US defence areas and providing a route for unmanned military installations. Undersea access is expressly provided for.

The settlement also extends into areas that would scarcely have featured in a Cold War basing treaty: foreign investment, critical infrastructure and resource extraction. And it has been written with the possibility of Greenlandic independence already in mind.

Trump didn’t get Greenland. But he changed America’s place in it.

I am less certain that Washington has reckoned with what the months preceding this agreement have done to America’s place in Greenlandic politics.

The United States is asking Greenlanders to accept an enlarged and potentially permanent strategic presence after its president spent months treating their sovereignty as negotiable. The agreement itself recognises Greenlanders as a people entitled to self-determination; indeed, it explicitly anticipates that they may one day exercise that right by becoming independent. What Greenlanders think about the American presence is therefore hardly incidental to its long-term future.

Copenhagen and Nuuk will have their own political arguments to navigate. Some will see this agreement as a pragmatic settlement, preserving sovereignty while accommodating legitimate American security requirements in an Arctic that has become markedly more dangerous.

Others may ask whether concessions made after months of extraordinary pressure went further than was necessary. That debate will not be settled by signatures in New York.

There is a wider European story here too.

For most of the post-war era, Europe has built its security on the knowledge that American power ultimately sat behind it. That remains enormously important. NATO without the United States would be a profoundly weaker alliance, and the idea that Europe can simply detach itself from American military power is neither realistic nor desirable.

The difficulty is rather different. Europe increasingly has to contemplate large changes in American policy arriving quickly, sometimes with very little warning, and according to the political instincts of one administration. Greenland is an unusually stark example because the pressure was directed at the territory of an ally.

This is part of why Liberal Democrats have argued for a deeper UK–European security relationship, including a European Security Council, stronger defence-industrial cooperation and a more capable European pillar of NATO. Ursula von der Leyen has since suggested a European Security Council that would bring Britain together with EU members and other European partners.

I would not claim that such a body would somehow have made the Greenland dispute disappear. Nor can we know whether a Europe with greater military capacity would have changed Denmark’s negotiating position in this particular case. But a continent with more of its own capability, better mechanisms for making strategic decisions together and a stronger defence-industrial base would plainly have more options when Washington abruptly changes direction.

For Britain this ought to be familiar territory. Our security geography did not change when we left the European Union. The United States remains our most powerful military ally; our closest neighbours remain European. A serious British security policy has to be able to work with both, rather than assuming that dependence on one can compensate indefinitely for distance from the other.

And the Greenland story is not necessarily over.

Trump’s signature is now attached to an agreement affirming the very sovereignty he spent much of the past year calling into question. Perhaps that marks the end of his territorial ambitions. Perhaps the maps disappear and the language of American ownership disappears with them.

Nobody in Nuuk can yet know that.

Treaties can define military access and legal rights. They are less good at resolving uncertainty about the intentions of the people who sign them.

Denmark and Greenland now have an agreement with the United States that is intended to endure indefinitely. At the same time, the current US president's behaviour has made assumptions about the future unusually difficult.

Europe should take that uncertainty seriously. Not by turning away from America, and certainly not by imagining that strategic self-sufficiency can be conjured into existence, but by acquiring more of the capacity to act when American and European interests do not neatly coincide.

The Greenland crisis may have ended in compromise rather than annexation. But what it exposed about the structure of European security will be harder to put back where it was.

____________________

Dr Al Pinkerton MP was an associate professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway University before being elected as the Lib Dem MP for Surrey Heath in 2024. He is also the party’s spokesperson on Europe.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk