Don’t attack Greenland. U.S. risks undoing a great foreign policy achievement.
Venezuela seemingly safely in hand, the Trump White House has revitalized its calls for seizing Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, if necessary, by “utilizing the U.S. military.”
One is reminded of 2003, when flush with apparent victory in Iraq, the Bush administration began to consider bagging the other two members of the “axis of evil,” Iran and North Korea.
What makes Greenland, a massive ice sheet three times the size of Texas, with a total population one-third that of Macon, such a tempting conquest?
Some stress military considerations. Greenland’s location in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans makes it attractive for military bases to protect North America, control shipping lanes, and monitor the skies.
But the U.S. already has a base there, beyond Cold War bases that were mothballed. Further, a 1951 agreement gives the U.S. wide latitude to expand its military presence as needed. And, neither the Danes nor the Greenlanders object to expanding the U.S. military footprint.
Then there are dreams of natural resources: strategic minerals, gas and oil. Initial geological surveys have speculated about the possibility of substantial deposits. Maybe we should seize Greenland to secure the raw materials that America’s economy demands.
Allies don’t like it when you seize their territory
Leaving aside that the nature and scale of these deposits remain uncertain, actually extracting resources would be gigantically costly, taking years if not decades.
Greenland is massive and sparsely populated, with no roads or rail between its few human settlements. Building the needed infrastructure and then extracting these resources could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
And we don’t need to seize Greenland to access these resources. The Greenland and Danish populations and governments are open to foreign investment to expand mining operations, respecting environmental concerns. They are motivated partners that the U.S. government and corporations could develop strong relationships with, and work with them over the long haul to extract these resources.
If the benefits of seizing Greenland are doubtful, the massive risks and costs are not. Allies don’t like it when you seize their territory. This is especially true within consent-based alliances of democracies, like NATO.
The grand, unstated bargain of NATO is that smaller powers accept U.S. leadership and grant concessions to the U.S., like permitting basing rights. In exchange, the U.S. treats allies with at least a modicum of respect, if nothing else, not attacking them. Invading smaller allies is how the Soviet Union treated its Warsaw Pact allies, who fled the alliance as soon as their puppet Communist governments fell from power.
If the U.S. signals that it is no longer willing to accept its part of the NATO bargain, things could quickly get ugly. It’s difficult to find something comparable from past NATO history, America seizing territory from a resistant NATO ally, especially when the local population is heavily opposed to being “liberated.”
The Danish prime minister has bluntly declared that an American attack on Greenland would mean the end of NATO. Other NATO allies have stated that seizing Greenland would cross a red line. Congressional representatives from both parties agree that attacking Greenland would be “an attack on NATO.”
NATO allies can disagree and still keep the alliance going
NATO has been and remains a tremendous American foreign policy asset. All signs are that Russia respects NATO’s Article 5 defense commitment, helping dissuade Russia from attacking further into Europe, past Ukraine. NATO provides a structure for nurturing an array of intelligence and military relationships, helping the U.S. strengthen its national security, fight terrorism and insurgency, and achieve other objectives.
The most severe alliance crises in the past were often when the U.S. deployed forces to the territory of an ally in opposition to the local population, like Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces to Western Europe in the early 1980s. But in these instances, the local governments approved the deployments, public opposition notwithstanding, and the alliance endured.
NATO allies have occasionally disagreed with the U.S. about the collective use of force, such as during the Vietnam War, the 1986 raid on Libya and the 2003 Iraq War. However, the U.S. did not force the issue, proceeded with its military plans without demanding unwilling allies to join, and alliances were preserved.
Seizing Greenland would present NATO with the greatest crisis in its history. Rather than celebrating a treasured real estate prize to put on the White House mantle, America will quickly realize that the game is not worth the candle.
Raising the stars and stripes over a frozen wasteland to secure access and resources we have access to anyway is not worth risking one of America’s greatest foreign policy achievements.
Dan Reiter, Ph.D., is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and author most recently of “Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars” (Cambridge, 2025).
