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Liana Fix is senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ben Harris is a research associate for Europe and U.S. foreign policy at CFR.
President Donald Trump talked of purchasing Greenland in 2019 during his first time in office, but Europeans have only now realized how serious he is about acquiring it by any means necessary.
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At first, Europeans deployed the same playbook they used to safeguard NATO during the alliance’s June 2025 summit at The Hague. To avert the worst of tariffs for the European market and prevent a breakdown of U.S. support for Ukraine, leaders engaged the president directly and sold him a victory. Announcing favorable trade deals or new defense spending successes allowed the administration to claim victory and move on from the issue, before negotiations and reality set in and complicated the picture.
Facing similar tensions over Greenland, the Europeans adopted a strategy that effectively offered “everything but territory” to address the economic and security concerns of the United States. European, Danish, and Greenlandic officials offered a greater NATO presence (called Arctic Sentry, in reference to NATO’s Baltic mission), more U.S. troops, and several investment deals for resources. All this notwithstanding the fact that the United States already has an agreement with Denmark and Greenland—one of three that governs the U.S. relationship with the island—that allows it to increase its military presence on Greenland as desired.
But Europe has found that its playbook is not working as effectively as in the past. This time, Trump’s desires seem to be not only about security and economic concerns, but about territory. And this is a bright red line for the European side: A U.S. annexation of Greenland would violate Danish sovereignty and Greenland’s right of self-determination. It would also be a crass breach of international law that would end theNATO alliance. If the United States—as the group’s most powerful member—annexed the territory of another NATO member, how could the alliance’s defense pledge be considered credible?
Europeans have therefore begun to complement their strategy of engagement with deterrence. The idea is to raise the stakes of any forceful U.S. action on Greenland and demonstrate that annexing the island will not be an easy win, but have “unprecedented knock-on effects,” as French President Emmanuel Macron put it. Europeans hope that Trump is just testing the boundaries of how much resistance he will evoke, and that standing firmly united will make him back off.
To achieve this, European leaders are working with members of the U.S. Congress with the hope of future legislation that would make it more difficult for the president to make a move on Greenland. A bipartisan congressional delegation currently visiting Denmark and the island is meant to convey the message that there is no interest whatsoever for a U.S. takeover. In addition, Europeans are signaling to Congress that the possession of an island that is much smaller than it appears on the standard Mercator projection map is not worth the dissolution of NATO.
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Europeans are also weighing their economic and military options to deter Trump’s threat. On the economic side, the use of limited sanctions, further punitive measures against U.S. tech companies, and the European Union’s (EU) anti-coercion instrument—which was already considered but discarded as a response to U.S. tariffs—are back as actions of last resort. However, Trump’s threat to use tariffs once again over Greenland may discourage some Europeans for fear of escalation.
On the military side, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden have deployed a small number of troops to Greenland to deter a fait accompli from the U.S. side (and France has proposed sending more). However, Europeans are fully aware that a military conflict with the United States would be a disastrous scenario that they will only lose. Other “nuclear options,” like limiting U.S. access to bases in Europe, are technically available. But this tactic would assume that the transatlantic relationship is already irreparably harmed.
Yet, for all the same reasons European leaders have repeatedly genuflected to Trump—namely their near-total reliance on the United States for Europe’s defense —these nuclear options are unlikely to materialize. For many European capitals, there’s a difference between considering the relationship broken and actively breaking it.
Europe could attempt to divert Trump’s attention with various delaying tactics or wait and hope that it happens naturally. It is easy to imagine this happening, with Trump’s agenda so full. Iran, for example, is one area that could consume the president’s full focus, forcing him to move on.
But Greenland is not the only item challenging transatlantic relations. For Europe’s relationship with the United States, there is now an era before the publication of the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) and one after that. Prior to its release, Europeans thought they could still work with Trump constructively and that the administration considered Europe a partner, not a potential adversary.
After the release of the NSS and the Trump administration’s twenty-eight-point Ukraine peace plan—and now these threats to seize territory from Denmark—Europeans have lost all illusions about the transatlantic relationship and are just trying to prevent the very worst. The fact that Vice President JD Vance canceled his scheduled participation at the upcoming Munich Security Conference sends the message that the administration believes there is nothing to discuss, that everything has been said in the NSS, and that the White House stands by it.
Europe cannot afford to continually be caught so flatfooted on this and other issues. It needs to take the following lesson from Greenland and all prior disputes: Trump should be taken seriously, and they must plan for what was once considered unimaginable.
This work represents the views and opinions solely of the authors. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.