Wednesday’s Danish‑Greenlandic‑American meeting in Washington may have gone better than feared. But everyone involved knows the next chapter: the drama continues.
And it’s a drama playing out as a completely lopsided fight. It’s not just that the players are holding different cards. It’s about the game itself: they’re no longer playing by the same rules—and maybe not even playing the same game.
On one side stands American President Trump, who recently declared that he feels constrained neither by international rules nor treaties, but only by his own moral compass. We saw the practical implications when the U.S. recently abducted Venezuela’s president and subsequently seized control of the country’s oil.
On the other side stand Denmark, Greenland, and all of Europe’s key NATO countries, who believe that the rule-based world order still applies, at least within NATO’s core territory and in their mutual relations. But that’s not what Donald Trump is saying.
So they are playing two entirely different games. One side plays by personal intuition, the other by written rules.
The Cards
But even if the game were the same, it would still be unequal. The cards are uneven, and not just slightly.
Since taking office, Donald Trump has been far more dedicated to his hostile takeover of Greenland than to the preservation of NATO, at least in its current form. His often close partnership with Russia regarding Ukraine has shown that the U.S. and Europe’s NATO countries hardly share the same enemy image anymore.
Thus, it doesn’t necessarily deter Donald Trump when Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S) or others say that NATO could collapse if the U.S. pressures and tears apart an old NATO ally like Denmark.
The drama of the game is naturally heightened by NATO countries like Sweden, Norway, and Germany now sending symbolic groups of soldiers to Greenland to show that this is about more than a dispute between the U.S. and the Kingdom of Denmark. It also internally divides NATO.
The truth is, Europe’s NATO countries might bark, but they won’t bite when it comes to the U.S. They know perfectly well their security against Russia would be in shreds without America’s nuclear umbrella. Europe’s NATO allies need the U.S. more than the U.S. needs them.
That goes for Ukraine—and all the more in a moment when the final scraps of U.S.–Russian nuclear arms control will vanish in roughly three weeks with the expiration of the so‑called New START 2 agreement.
Under Donald Trump, what Noam Chomsky calls the »mafia doctrine« prevails: the boss’s word is law; cross him and you’re punished; only those who obey can expect protection.
Chamberlain
So it’s understandable that Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) downplayed expectations after he and Greenlandic colleague Vivian Motzfeldt met with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House in Washington on Wednesday.
»I’m no Chamberlain promising ‘peace in our time,’« he said.
He is well aware that the drama over Greenland continues. He said it himself: The parties agree to disagree. And even before anyone had briefed President Donald Trump about the White House meeting, the president reiterated that the U.S. still wants Greenland.
»We’ll see what happens. We need Greenland for security,« he said at a press conference that otherwise focused on legalizing high-fat milk.
»We have a good relationship with Denmark. And if we don’t step in, China and Russia will. There’s nothing Denmark can do, but we (the U.S.) can do everything.«
Pax Panama
This doesn’t change the fact that Denmark and Greenland achieved the most they could have hoped for.
They avoided a »Zelensky moment,« as Lars Løkke Rasmussen put it: being blown over by a United States that, under Donald Trump, has turned the law of the jungle into a guiding principle—might makes right.
They also secured the creation of a high‑level expert panel that, at best, could open the door to a constructive political dialogue on Greenland—rather than the Trumpian shout‑fests on social media and in the traditional media.
Impressive diplomatic work in a difficult time.
The hope is to negotiate an agreement that makes Greenland ’go away.’ Just as Donald Trump’s claims on Panama and Canada have faded after he made claims on those countries about a year ago.
The fear, conversely, is that Donald Trump will short-circuit the process before it even begins. Even the couple of weeks that are supposed to pass before the new expert group’s first meeting is a long time in Trump-land.
What could he do? Send the military to Greenland? Unlikely. There is still an American Congress that limits the president. But less could suffice.
Geo-osmosis
Just a few days ago, research director Jeremy Shapiro from the esteemed European Council on Foreign Relations pointed to the concept of »geo-osmosis.«
In its simplest form, it involves gradually binding Greenland so deeply into American interests that it ends up in an economic and supply dependency.
Under the headline »How Greenland Falls,« he outlines in Foreign Affairs a hypothetical development towards 2028, when Donald Trump’s term ends: »Danish resupply routes began to face delays as ships were stopped and searched at sea. Fuel shortages, medical supply bottlenecks, and bureaucratic ’miscommunications’ caused by unexplained electricity and Internet outages pushed municipalities toward the only actors offering an alternative: the Americans.«
He imagines how American soldiers from the northern Greenland Pituffik Space Base in 2027 might step in for humanitarian reasons, contributing to a »sovereignty twilight«:
»Formally, it [Greenland] was still part of the Danish realm, but it had become functionally dependent on a U.S. presidential administration that had not even bothered to try to secure Greenlandic popular support.«
For Jeremy Shapiro, such absorption rather than occupation would constitute a new dimension of 21st-century geopolitics: »In the absence of coherent international resistance, norms matter little; facts on the ground suffice.«
And who knows, he goes on to speculate—maybe that’s how Donald Trump secures himself a place in history alongside William Seward, the architect of the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.
All this may seem very speculative and far removed from Wednesday’s meeting at the White House. But then again: Who would have thought just a year ago that we would be where we are now?
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