Europeans Befuddled By Trump’s Russian Rationale For Taking Greenland

President Donald Trump says controlling Greenland is essential to prevent Russia and China from gaining more of a foothold in the Arctic.

But a number of concerned European officials and a growing, bipartisan contingent of lawmakers in Washington believe that Trump’s insistence that the U.S. take Greenland over the objection of Denmark, Greenlanders and other NATO allies is a boon for Russia and President Vladimir Putin — and strains an already fractious NATO alliance.

That contingent believes that Trump’s obsession with acquiring Greenland — and the shaky and varying reasons underpinning it — have diverted attention from Ukraine and even redirected resources to Greenland. That all complicates European efforts to maintain a strong, united front as the U.S. is pushing hard for a peace deal to end the war.

“What I find extremely worrying is seeing that in NATO and the EU some are starting to accept the narrative about Russian and Chinese threats to Greenland,” said a European government official, who, like others interviewed for this report, was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “Respect for territorial integrity cannot be enforced by a land grab and we should say it out loud. But instead of dealing with the actual threat [of war in Ukraine], we’ll be sending troops to Greenland.”

Trump doesn’t need to seize Greenland to counter Russia. The U.S. has military bases on the island and has traditionally worked closely with Denmark on security.

Instead, some see dubious claims about imminent Chinese and Russian aggression as one of several pretexts for some future action, up to and including a military strike.

The president and administration officials have also suggested the United States needs Greenland for its Golden Dome missile defense shield, “economic security” and access to minerals — all areas where Denmark has signaled an openness to stronger collaboration.

“The President's arguments about Greenland are self-evidently bullshit from top to bottom,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official during the Barack Obama administration who’s now research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

And European officials note that if Trump was so concerned about Russian aggression he has ample ways to address that — most notably in Ukraine, where allies have pleaded for the president to take a harder line against Putin since he returned to office.

Instead some fear that Trump’s insistence on taking Greenland and his refusal to rule out a military takeover help Putin achieve his longtime aim of weakening Western alliances.

Trump’s latest threat came Friday, when during an unrelated event on health care he suggested he could levy additional tariffs on the European Union if it blocks him from acquiring the territory.

“Putin wants a weaker NATO,” said a second European government official. “Trump is giving it to him.”

Trump has often suggested that Putin is a man of peace, even as Russia has increased its aerial bombardment of civilian targets and taken aggressive steps such as deploying a nuclear-capable missile earlier this month in a strike on Western Ukraine. This week, the president insisted again in an interview with Reuters that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the main impediment to a peace deal.

Over weeks of talks with Trump’s most trusted interlocutors, Zelenskyy has shown a willingness to make territorial concessions and to hold elections in exchange for postwar security guarantees from the U.S. Meanwhile, Putin has shown no willingness to negotiate, content to keep up the bombardment of Ukrainian cities despite having made only marginal gains over nearly four years of war.

“Russia thought it would take Kyiv in three days and has instead spent four years making very modest gains,” said a third European government official. “The idea that they have the bandwidth to challenge the West in Greenland is ludicrous.”

In his first year back in office, Trump bullied NATO into higher defense spending, demanded Europe pay for all future defense aid for Ukraine and forced the EU to accept higher tariffs. But his renewed saber rattling about taking Greenland has created even deeper panic in European capitals in 2026.

Still, the president’s apparent seriousness about controlling Greenland, which he’s said he’ll either buy from Denmark or take by force, has pushed the anguish to new heights among several European leaders, who opted this week to send troops to Greenland for unplanned military exercises, a hasty effort to showcase the European defense capabilities Trump has belittled by arguing that only U.S. forces can keep the territory secure.

And there is still no action in the Senate on legislation to increase sanctions on Russia, even though the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said last week that Trump had finally greenlit putting it on the floor this week.

Taken together, Trump’s actions belie his ostensible concerns about a Russian threat.

“It is very, very clear at this point what Donald Trump is looking for, and it has nothing to do with security,” Shapiro said. “Has nothing to do with Russia. It has to do with his own personal aggrandizement, his sort of real estate mogul's view that the way that you achieve power and greatness is by [acquiring] land and by expanding the map of the United States. Anybody who believes that this is about Russians, about security and about Russia and China, is not paying attention.”

After a year spent trying to mollify Trump with public and private flattery, European leaders are losing patience. That’s been most evident from the leadership posture of France and Germany, two EU stalwarts whose leaders have vented publicly in recent days.

President Emmanuel Macron of France this month lamented that the U.S. under Trump was “gradually turning away” from allies that have been bound together for 80 years by shared democratic values. While warning Trump directly about the repercussions of violating the sovereignty of a NATO ally, Macron acknowledged that a geopolitical shift was already underway.

“We are living in a world of great powers with a real temptation to divide up the world,” he said.

A White House official responding to the criticism noted that Trump is not the first president to understand the increasing strategic importance of the Arctic region. The person pointed to recent efforts by European forces to respond to the presence of Russian submarines in the waters around Greenland.

“The President has been clear that he believes Greenland is a strategically important location that is critical from the standpoint of national security,” the official said. “And he is confident Greenlanders would be better served as part of the United States.”

Some Republicans in Washington have dismissed the president’s fixation on taking Greenland as preposterous. As part of the Danish realm, Greenland is already protected by NATO’s Article 5, which deems any attack against a member nation an attack on the entire alliance. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) predicted any military operation to seize the island would lead to impeachment and called Trump’s Greenland obsession “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

In a blistering floor speech last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned of “disastrous” consequences should Trump violate the sovereignty of a longtime ally, stating that doing so would amount to “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”

He was one of many to point out that beefing up security in Greenland is achievable without annexation. “I have yet to hear from this administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us,” he said.

In Copenhagen on Friday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asserted that the legislative branch would have its say on the matter and that there was scant support for allowing Trump to proceed with an effort to gain control of Greenland.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters after meeting with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen that there is little public support among Americans for acquiring Greenland and hinted that broad majority of lawmakers would use congressional “tools” to oppose it, stating that it “is not a subject of Republicans versus Democrats.”

Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said following his meeting Wednesday with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that he and Greenland’s foreign minister Vivian Motzfeldt took the opportunity to dismantle a number of Trump’s dubious rationalizations for a U.S. takeover. That included pushing back on the president’s claims that Chinese and Russian ships are circling around Greenland and threatening to take the island.

“According to our intelligence, we haven't had a Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade or so,” Rasmussen said. But he also made clear he wasn’t dismissing Trump’s comments about the importance of securing the region over the long term.

“There's also always a bit of truth in what he's saying,” he continued. “We share to some extent his concerns. There is definitely a new security situation in the Arctic and the high north.”