Is Greenland the next target for President Trump? And has the United States, with its abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last Saturday, opened a Pandora’s box that will now send new tremors through the world as we know it?
Unease is spreading after a couple of days that have brought more than one shock. You know things are bad when top politicians like Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens Frederik Nielsen assure that there is no reason to panic.
Or as he began an English-language statement over the weekend: »Let me say this calmly and clearly from the start: There is no reason for panic or concern«.
Calmly... and yet.
The reassurance came not just after the U.S. military had removed Maduro from power and abducted him to the United States. It also came after former Trump staffer Katie Miller shared a map on the social media platform X, where the American Stars-and-Stripes flag was placed over Greenland.
»SOON«, was all it said in the post from Katie Miller, who is married to one of Trump’s closest advisers, Stephen Miller.
But indeed, no reason to panic. Greenland’s future is not decided on social media, Jens Frederik Nielsen asserted. Yet he recognized the underlying seriousness and responded with a new rejection of Donald Trump’s United States.
New alarm
Less than 24 hours later, the Greenland alarm went off again.
This time it was Donald Trump himself, who in a phone interview Sunday with The Atlantic declared that Venezuela is not necessarily the last country the U.S. will attempt to take control of. He then reiterated his claim on Greenland.
»We do need Greenland, absolutely«, he said in the interview, declaring that the giant island is »surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships«.
Directly asked whether the attack on Venezuela could indicate an American readiness to take control of Greenland by military force, Donald Trump left it to others to decide what is needed.
But if anyone doubts the seriousness, it might be worth noting the statements of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a joint press conference with Trump on Saturday following the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
»I hope what people now understand is we have a president, the 47th president United States, is not a game player, when he tells you that he’s going to do something, when he’s going to tell you he’s going to address a problem, he means it. He actions it«, said Rubio, calling Trump a President of action.
So of course, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had to respond once again to Donald Trump’s statements.
»I must say this very directly to the United States. The U.S. has no right to annex one of the three countries in the Kingdom of Denmark«, she said Sunday.
Mette Frederiksen made it clear that Greenland, as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, is part of NATO and thus covered by the NATO alliance’s security guarantee.
No panic...
NATO’s death
One could add, however, that if the U.S. nevertheless takes Greenland by military force or other pressure, such as shutting down digital Denmark’s data from American tech giants, NATO would effectively be dead as an alliance. This is about much more than Greenland.
And here one might become, if not panicked, then uneasy. What will – and can – the Danish government actually do in response to Trump’s insistence? Beyond continuing the soon ritual series of verbal rejections and protests against Trump. Without comparison, Maduro tried the same.
And what will Greenland itself do? Will they realize that the dream of independence belongs to another time and rejoin the EU community, which Greenlanders left in 1985? The time has also come for Greenland to make some crucial strategic choices in a world that won’t leave it alone. Greenlanders are forced to choose sides between the U.S. and the EU, which right now is their best hope of countering the threat from Trump.
Both Denmark and Greenland lack offensive answers after months of being in an acute zone.
A line is crossed
Just as Trump’s threats against Greenland are about much more than Greenland, the American abduction of Maduro is also about much more than Venezuela.
As the vice chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, wrote in a statement over the weekend:
»If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president? Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it«.
The ink on his statement can hardly have been dry before Russia’s former president and deputy chairman of the country’s national security council, Dmitry Medvedev, played with the idea of a Russian abduction of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in an interview with the Russian news agency Tass.
Just as the U.S. has perceived Maduro as an illegitimate leader, Russia calls President Zelenskyy the same – despite him governing entirely in accordance with the Ukrainian constitution. But such details do not stop the Putin regime, which has even been able to rejoice that Donald Trump called Zelenskyj a dictator in February last year.
But Medvedev did not stop there. He also played with the idea of abducting Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whom he called a »neo-Nazi«.
This is the world Donald Trump has given new life to: great powers that give themselves the right to label other states and their leaders and act on it with the power that the law of the jungle grants them.
Few will miss Maduro as president. But the time may quickly come when we will miss a time when people like him were not just abducted. When we will miss that there were still some boundaries, even for superpowers. Otherwise, we may quickly be struck by panic.
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