The announcement by the United States to impose punitive tariffs on eight European allies unless they facilitate the “complete and total purchase” of Greenland is a pivotal moment that threatens to unravel the post-1945 transatlantic order. This act of raw aggression by the Trump administration represents a throwback to the 19th-century imperial mindset, where might makes right and the sovereignty of nations is up for negotiation.
The implications of this crisis are profound. For decades, the Western world believed that the era of naked imperialism had been consigned to history. Even China, with its growing assertiveness, has largely couched its ambitions in the language of revanchism – the “reclaiming” of lost territory. Washington’s current demand for Greenland, however, is a stark departure from this norm, harkening back to the age of the 1884 Berlin Conference, where land and people were traded as commodities.
While this coercive effort faces pushback within the US, with Senator Thom Tillis criticising the move and public polling showing only 8% of Americans support the use of force to acquire the territory, Europe must grapple with the reality of dealing with a president who is drunk on executive power, undeterred by congressional dissent or a sceptical public that he views as malleable.
The strain on Europe is already intense. Trump’s pressure is designed to expose EU fault lines and sow internal division, forcing member states to prioritise different existential threats and divergent interests. Denmark has a near-existential interest in preventing this annexation, while France and Germany risk seeing their vital access to the US export market severed if they demonstrate EU cohesion.
The most tragic tension, however, is on the Eastern flank. Poland and the Baltic states view Russian aggression as an immediate, physical threat that only American boots and missiles can deter. To maintain this shield, they will be tempted to remain silent on the Greenland issue. Yet, Trump’s policy presents them with an impossible paradox: the very coercion being used to force a deal on Greenland undermines the logic of the security guarantee itself. What responsible sovereign power in Warsaw or Tallinn can put stock in the word of an ally that uses the threat of abandonment to compel the sale of a neighbour’s territory?
In the face of this trauma, the traditional European reflex will be to try to weather the storm, with the hope that if the continent simply absorbs the tariffs and waits until 2028, transatlantic relations will return to “normal.” This approach, however, is no longer a viable strategy. The Greenland crisis is not just bad weather, but a structural shift that requires bold action.
European leaders must use this crisis as a catalyst to further the continent’s own sovereign defence. This will require overcoming the bureaucratic and nationalistic resistance that has long stalled defence integration, seizing on the crisis to force recalcitrant national defence industries into irreversible cooperation. To fund this, leaders need to break long-standing taboos and re-energise the continent’s economy through a radical mix of immigration, economic liberalism, and wise industrial policy that boosts Europe into the first tier of technological power.
The choice is no longer between the status quo and integration. It is between a painful European rebirth or a slow descent into a world where the EU collapses internally, its security is in tatters, and it becomes a target for expansion in Moscow.
