Europe’s Unexpected Reply to Trump Over Greenland: A Last Crack in the Transatlantic Alliance? |
By deploying troops to Greenland in response to Donald Trump’s annexation threats, European states draw an unprecedented red line against Washington, signalling that the era of automatic deference in the transatlantic relationship may be coming to an end.
The trilateral meeting went sour
The move follows a tense trilateral meeting between American, Danish, and Greenlandic officials that ended without resolving what Copenhagen described as a “fundamental disagreement” over the island’s status. Within hours, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he still intended to take control of Greenland and that “there’s not a thing that Denmark can do about it.”
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who described the talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio as “frank,” went out of his way to insist he was “no modern-day Neville Chamberlain.” To complete the historical analogy, that would make Trump… Hitler? Rasmussen added that Greenlanders would never choose to join the United States, even if Washington were to pay the rumoured price tag of $700 billion. “You trade with people; you don’t trade people,” he later said on Fox News.
Any diplomatic progress was swiftly offset by Trump’s mockery of Denmark’s military capacity, joking that it had added “a second dog sled” to its arsenal. The remarks prompted an unusually direct rebuke from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. An EU diplomat, however, cut short the sled talk: rhetoric matters less than facts on the ground. And on the ground, European military personnel are now arriving in........