US aggression against Greenland: Is NATO finished?

V or four years ago, European politicians made a pilgrimage to Moscow and tried to dissuade Vladimir Putin from annexing Ukraine – in vain. Today other European politicians are making a pilgrimage to Washington and trying To dissuade Donald Trump from his takeover plans for Greenland – with an open exit. History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes, as the US writer Mark Twain once wrote.

It is said that NATO would be at an end if the USA attacked Greenland and thus the territory of NATO member Denmark. Isn’t she already? Trump says Greenland must be protected from Russia and China, and that only works if it is part of the United States. That can only mean: Trump only protects US territory. Other countries do not, including NATO allies, and Greenland is NATO territory. The most important basis of the Western military alliance – that NATO members are under US protection in an emergency – has practically frozen under this US president.

Europe can now calculate for itself what this means for Europe’s security. And if the US President only considers US territory to be worthy of protection and nothing else, US security guarantees for Ukraine are also worthless – this changes the basis of the planned European peacekeeping in Ukraine, which has so far relied on US surveillance.

So now European countries are sending soldiers to Greenland and holding military maneuvers there. This is more than they did for Ukraine before the Russian invasion. Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if European armies had made a direct presence there, even if only for training purposes? Four years ago, no one dared to undertake such determined prevention – for fear of Putin and his nuclear weapons. There was no obligation to provide assistance; Ukraine was and is not a NATO member. But anyone who let Putin have his way in Ukraine in 2022 cannot credibly deter Trump in Greenland in 2026. The USA is stronger than Russia, Trump is just as unpredictable as his spiritual brother in the Kremlin.

Europe has still not found a convincing answer to the fact that the West’s security architecture, founded after 1945 and renewed after 1989, is collapsing. Berlin has had and is having a particularly difficult time with this. Four years ago, Germany offered Ukraine 5,000 helmets as protection against Russia. Today Germany is sending 13 soldiers to Greenland as a show of solidarity against the USA. Sometimes history repeats itself as a farce. We can only hope that this does not become a new tragedy.