{"id":91507,"date":"2026-01-06T20:47:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T20:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/91507\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T20:47:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T20:47:13","slug":"how-trump-can-get-greenland-without-grabbing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/91507\/","title":{"rendered":"How Trump can get Greenland \u2014 without grabbing it"},"content":{"rendered":"

China, Russia, and Iran had to be alarmed by the display of US power in the Venezuela incursion \u2014 but so did Denmark<\/a>, a NATO ally of the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the snatch-and-grab of Nichol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a>, President Donald Trump spoke to The Atlantic about his other foreign-policy priorities<\/a>: \u201cWe do need Greenland, absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

It might have been easy not too long ago to dismiss this as bluster.<\/p>\n

Not anymore \u2014 not after the successful strikes on the Iran nuclear program and the Venezuela operation.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve gone from \u201cTrump always chickens out,\u201d when he was backing off his Liberation Day tariffs<\/a>, to \u201cdismiss Trump\u2019s threats at your own peril.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump doesn\u2019t do everything he says, but almost everything he does do, he talks about openly beforehand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this respect, enemies of the United States can never complain that they weren\u2019t warned \u2014 and perhaps allies, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Denmark controls Greenland<\/a> as a semi-autonomous territory. It colonized the sparsely populated island several hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

Mostly within the Arctic Circle, Greenland is not desirable real estate by any typical metric, but it has outsized strategic significance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As more waters become navigable in the Arctic Sea, the top of the world opens up for greater geopolitical contention.<\/p>\n

Greenland occupies a crucial spot: It sits on a key naval corridor between the Atlantic and the Arctic, and it has prodigious reserves of critical minerals, and perhaps fossil fuels, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If it fell into our lap, it\u2019d be an excellent addition to our territorial holdings.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason that American statesmen down through the decades have coveted the island.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem is that it\u2019s not currently available<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What are the other options? A lightly armed contingent of American crossing guards could probably take it over in a couple of days.<\/p>\n

The challenge, though, is political and diplomatic<\/a>, not military.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A NATO ally seizing the territory of another NATO ally would obviously be a grave threat to the integrity of the alliance.<\/p>\n

Would Denmark invoke Article 5 against the United States?<\/p>\n

It has the makings of a good spoof musical, but it\u2019s not something anyone should want to experience in reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although Trump has said in the past that he doesn\u2019t take military force off the table \u2014 an amazing statement in and of itself \u2014 he\u2019s also talked of buying Greenland.<\/p>\n

The Danes, though, say it\u2019s not for sale, and the Greenlanders don\u2019t want to be bought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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If Trump really pushes the issue, and forces Denmark and NATO into a corner with the 82nd Airborne ready to go on an airstrip somewhere, he could probably compel a sale \u2014 but it\u2019d be courting a diplomatic crisis, damaging the reputation of the United States without enough upside.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fact of the matter is, we can almost certainly get whatever we need from Greenland without violating a friendly country\u2019s sovereignty, or straining a world-historical alliance to the breaking point.<\/p>\n

We already have a missile-defense base there. The 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement between Denmark and the United States that allows for the Pituffik Space Base could presumably be updated and extended.<\/p>\n

Given the national-security importance of critical minerals to both the United States and NATO, it should be possible to unlock Greenland\u2019s resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead of clapping back at Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen should be reaching out, asking to sit down for a steak dinner at Mar-a-lago and offering a deal.<\/p>\n

While public pressure gets Trump\u2019s back up, private persuasion \u2014 and a warm relationship \u2014 goes a long way: The Panamanians managed to get him to stop<\/a> talking about taking back the Canal (for now) with prudent concessions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For his part, Trump should realize that making everyone in a friendly nation hate him doesn\u2019t help his cause.<\/p>\n

His loose talk of annexing Canada<\/a> last year helped Justin Trudeau\u2019s party survive a national election that it should have lost.<\/p>\n

His Greenland saber-rattling is presumably making it harder for leaders in Denmark to work with him on sensible economic and security cooperation.<\/p>\n

If Nichol\u00e1s Maduro got what he deserved, Demark is a different matter.<\/p>\n

Even the unsentimental, results-oriented foreign policy of Donald Trump needs to distinguish between friend and foe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

X: @RichLowry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China, Russia, and Iran had to be alarmed by the display of US power in the Venezuela incursion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[21389,22625,153,425,43322,27678,9,11,10,299],"class_list":["post-91507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-arctic","tag-denmark","tag-donald-trump","tag-foreign-policy","tag-greenland","tag-nato","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}