Marc Champion: Europe can't afford a throwdown over Greenland

As a U.S. citizen living abroad, I sympathize with European outrage over Donald Trump’s naked attempt to bully Denmark, a particularly loyal NATO ally, into handing over Greenland. In fact, if he stays on this path I’d encourage Europeans to boycott American imports, social-media platforms, and maybe even the World Cup.

But as some leaders call for using the European Union’s so-called bazooka of counter measures to launch a full-blown trade war with the U.S., I’d suggest they game out the consequences before pulling the trigger. That’s true no matter how principled, justified and cathartic such a collective "Love Actually" moment would be.

The thinking behind all this tough talk is sound: Europe has had enough. It’s bent over backward to manage Trump by appeasing and flattering him, and that attempt has failed. Instead, it’s confirmed his belief that America’s closest allies are weak, encouraging him to push them further, because he feels that he can.

And it should be possible to persuade Trump to change course, because what he’s saying makes so little sense. The U.S. absolutely does not “have to have” Greenland in order to get what Trump says he needs — security for the U.S.

Frank Rose served in a number of U.S. security and arms control posts over the decades, including five years in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for space and defense policy. In that role, he led negotiations with Denmark and the Greenlanders to build an early warning radar near Pituffik Space Base. So, he knows what’s possible. It isn’t just that under a 1951 U.S.-Danish defense treaty “we can basically do anything in Greenland we want,” Rose told me. The current arrangement also means the U.S. doesn’t have to worry about dealing with the domestic issues and demands of the island’s local home-rule government, which — speaking from personal experience, he said — is a boon worth having, because it isn’t easy. Let the Danes handle that.

But if Trump is ignoring Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s advice never to start a fight that won’t gain you much in victory, then Europe risks ignoring even wiser counsel from the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: Don’t start a battle you can’t win.The bottom line is that Trump wants Greenland, and why that is doesn’t greatly matter. So long as he remains determined to get it, the fate of this vast, ice-covered island won’t be decided by principles, but by power — and there Trump always wins. The EU might be able to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. on trade, but this president sees no distinction between issues of commerce and security, treating both as leverage. As U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spelled out on Sunday, the U.S. calculates Europe will back down because it’s too dependent on American might to risk sacrificing both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine.

Would Poland and the Baltic States truly be willing to endanger their U.S. security umbrella over Greenland? Territorial sovereignty is a principle they very much embrace, but it’s a principle. The threat of losing U.S. protection against Russia is for them existential. Would they or most other European countries really risk giving Trump an excuse to withdraw intelligence sharing and U.S. sales of Patriot air defense missiles to Kyiv, with the potential for a collapse of Ukrainian lines that would follow? Likewise, would Italy really support the launch of a trade war with Washington, when it isn’t among the eight nations Trump has threatened with tariffs?

The issue isn’t that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is friendly with Trump; it’s that, according to the Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, the Italian economy would be among the most exposed to fallout from a U.S.-EU trade war. Meloni’s decision not to join France, Germany, the UK and five others in sending a symbolic handful of troops to Greenland suggests that her answer is already “no.” In fact, those few dozen soldiers — sent to Nuuk to show both resolve and willingness to help defend the Arctic — have instead reemphasized European weakness and given Trump an excuse to escalate his tariff threats.

Having sent a single officer, the UK was among those countries threatened with tariffs. The habitually emollient Keir Starmer attacked that response as “completely wrong.” But would Britain’s already embattled prime minister risk the hit to exports and inbound investment that a trade war with the U.S. would precipitate? Equally important are close ties between U.S. and UK intelligence agencies, and a defense system so intertwined that even Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent relies on American-made missiles. The answer, as Starmer tried to have it all ways in a Monday press conference, was a pretty clear “no.” He called for pragmatism.

That’s probably going to have to come from the UK and Europe, rather than Trump, because they’re simply too weak to win a trade war that escalates into all reaches of the transatlantic relationship. If they try, I suspect they’ll fall at the first hurdle, dividing over whether to fire that trade bazooka.

Europe’s best hope is that a backlash from Republicans over Trump’s readiness to sacrifice NATO over what amounts to a vanity project will force him to back down. At least part of the appeal for Trump is surely that taking Greenland would make him the first U.S. president to add a meaningful piece of territory to the country’s map since his idol, William McKinley, annexed Hawaii in 1898. And if you don’t think this whole Greenland dispute can be about something as venal as narcissism, read Trump’s reported text message to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store; he linked his bid for Greenland to the Oslo-based Nobel Committee’s refusal to award him a peace prize.

Until the two world wars, buying and grabbing territory from other states was common. None other than Denmark sold its possessions in the Caribbean – now the U.S. Virgin Islands – in 1917. It’s thanks to the Cold War and U.S. dominance thereafter that it hasn’t happened as much since. Europe, sadly, isn’t strong enough to go on holding that ring now the U.S. itself is determined to break it.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.