Greenland Is a Test of Alliance Discipline, Not American Power

Donald Trump’s renewed interest in acquiring Greenland has exposed a fault line in transatlantic relations, not over territory, but over how the United States now exercises power inside its alliances. The issue is not whether Washington needs the island. Under a decades old treaty framework, it already has what it needs. The question is why impatience has begun to replace restraint, and what that shift signals to allies who have long treated American commitments as durable.

The arrangement itself is neither novel nor ambiguous. The 1951 US Denmark defence agreement gives Washington broad military access to Greenland, including installations such as Thule Air Base, which anchors missile warning and Arctic surveillance. Sovereignty remains Danish. Operational control is American. The agreement was designed to secure US strategic interests without coercion, and for more than seventy years it has done exactly that.

Nothing material has changed. Denmark has not restricted access or sought to dilute cooperation. On the contrary, in early 2025 Copenhagen committed roughly two billion dollars to strengthen Arctic and North Atlantic security, explicitly framing the move as allied burden sharing. If strategic necessity were the test, it has already been met. Pressing the issue further raises a different question: why escalate when treaties already deliver.

Denmark’s position exposes the gap between rhetoric and reality. Frequently lumped into a disparaged and undifferentiated Europe in American political discourse, Denmark overperforms on the very measures critics cite. Relative to economic size, it ranks among the most generous military donors to Ukraine. In Afghanistan, it suffered among the highest per capita fatalities of any NATO ally apart from the United States and Britain. It joined the invasion of Iraq when other Nordic states declined. Its defence spending has consistently moved ahead of alliance benchmarks.

If Denmark qualifies as a bad ally, the category collapses. If it does not, then the pressure being applied is not corrective but performative. Alliances are not enforced hierarchies. They are reputation markets. States contribute today because they expect predictability tomorrow. When reliability is met with intimidation, hedging becomes rational.

This episode unfolds against a broader narrative in US politics in which Europe has been recast as a domestic political instrument. In conservative and libertarian online spaces, the continent is shorthand for regulated speech, uncontrolled migration, defence dependency, and economic drift. The portrait is simplified, but it is effective. It externalises American culture war conflicts by projecting them onto a foreign object.

The danger begins when that caricature is mistaken for operational reality. Policy shaped against symbols will misfire when applied to actual states, especially those, like Denmark, whose conduct directly contradicts the stereotype. Rather than disciplining allies, such an approach risks hardening positions and turning cooperation into concession.

Speech regulation illustrates the problem. At the level of EU institutions, online content is increasingly treated as a systemic risk, with platforms required to police illegal material, disinformation, and coordinated harm. European regulators frame this as fundamental rights protection. US critics see overreach that chills expression. But the core conflict is jurisdictional rather than moral. Brussels is extending its regulatory perimeter globally, shaping how American political speech is moderated on worldwide platforms.

Europe, however, is not uniform. Denmark’s refusal to curb press freedom during the 2006 Muhammad cartoons crisis remains a standing counterexample to claims that the continent reflexively subordinates expression to offence management. Germany and France have taken far more interventionist approaches. To claim that Europe abhors free speech is inaccurate. To say it is contesting its limits, and exporting those contests through regulation, is not.

Immigration presents a similar pattern. Broad claims of social fracture collapse without precision. Cohesion is measurable through public trust, labour market integration, housing capacity, and service strain. On those indicators, Europe shows wide variation. Where inflows are matched to infrastructure and enforceable integration, political stability tends to hold. Where capacity lags, backlash follows.

Denmark again illustrates the point. Restrictive entry combined with demanding requirements for language acquisition and employment has maintained broad political support and limited extremist gains. Elsewhere, mismatches between population change and state capacity have fuelled volatility. The divide is not ideological, open versus closed, but operational: states that align governance capacity with change, and those that do not.

Defence and economic pressures add to the strain. The US critique of European underinvestment in defence is not without merit. For years, deterrence was subsidised. Pressure accelerated rearmament, and budgets rose. What has shifted is the method. Public shaming and ultimatums corrode the trust on which long term defence planning depends, encouraging diversification rather than deeper alignment.

Europe’s economic constraints compound the challenge. Growth remains modest, productivity weak, and energy costs structurally higher than in the United States. This is not collapse, but it is limitation. States balancing rearmament, welfare commitments, and industrial transition operate within narrow margins. Strategic theatre ignores those constraints at a cost.

Ultimately, the Greenland push reveals less about European weakness than about American tactics. With access secured, contributions delivered, and no immediate threat to deter, escalation signals that treaties are no longer settlements but opening bids. That message will not be read only in Copenhagen.

Alliance power is cumulative and reputational. Once cooperation is treated as weakness and loyalty as provisional, rational allies hedge. Greenland is not the issue. The credibility of alliance discipline is.