Last Tuesday, delegations from the Danish Parliament and their Greenlandic counterparts logged into an unsecure Teams chat. They were there to discuss recent threats and bellicose rhetoric coming out of Washington.
When President Trump declared, following the removal of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, that “we need Greenland” – effectively threatening Danish sovereignty over the Arctic island – more than a century of national defense interests, transatlantic partnership, and established security alliances were summarily terminated. Then over the course of the week ahead, Trump said he might consider purchasing Greenland and, according to one report in a British tabloid, sought military options for securing the Arctic island.
Before the tensions crescendoed late last week, before Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to announce he would meet to discuss ways to make Greenland Great Again, the Danish and Greenlandic representatives met for the emergency meeting during which they hoped to reaffirm their longstanding partnership and to disavow Washington’s discord between them.
The opposite happened. And the little-known meeting concluded before the Trump Administration seemed to make Greenland its primary focus after Venezuela. The question most representatives had was whether or not the Americans had been listening.
During the meeting the Danish representatives called the Greenlandic representatives uneducated and uninformed. The Greenlandic officials fired off terse statements about the Kingdom of Denmark’s colonial and neo-colonial aspirations. Danish officials on the call, according to local media, feared that American representatives were listening in on that call, using the arguments that unfolded in the Teams meeting as justification for moving forward with their pressure on Denmark.
The discussions between the Danish Foreign Policy Committee and the Greenlandic Foreign and Security Policy Committee lasted longer than the scheduled hour, and came to a conclusion that worried the Danish members of parliament on the call. Some of the Greenlandic representatives had stated they would seek to establish a relationship directly with the U.S., circumventing the Danish government.
Danish officials believe it was no coincidence that the Teams chat preceded Trump’s eventual statement on Sunday that "one way or the other" the U.S. would “get” Greenland.
These types of shadow wars, or grey-zone tactics which fall just below the threshold of outright combat, have in the last five years increased across the circumpolar north. (The U.S. has as recently as 2021 partnered with Denmark to spy on Germany.) When unidentified drones flew over four Danish airports in September, it seemed to many of us looking closely at the Arctic that what had persisted in the north as tit-for-tat de rigueur nuisance campaigns were reaching southward, having been fine-tuned in the north.
In December, an annual threat assessment released by Denmark’s military intelligence service underscored rising concerns in Copenhagen about the U.S.’s role on the global stage as it seems to outmaneuver China in a great power competition spilling into Europe. Indeed, in May, U.S. intelligence agencies had begun focusing more resources on Greenland, with an increase in intelligence reports about the Arctic island circulated around Capitol Hill.
Though Trump has been loath to seek Congressional approval for his foreign strikes in the Caribbean, Iran, and against Venezuela, it would be difficult to imagine a formal declaration of war against Denmark, despite the ongoing destabilization campaigns seemingly aimed at that very goal.
A Denmark that’s no longer an ally could revoke the lease of the Pituffik Space Base, turning it over instead to another NATO country, perhaps Canada, which in turn could turn the lights off for millions of Americans relying on the Canadian electrical grid.
Danish officials could revoke mining and exploration licenses to American extractive industries, favoring instead European enterprises – perhaps Swedish and Finnish companies who would no longer need to remain in agreements with the U.S. to purchase military weapons (Sweden) or build much-needed icebreakers for the American Arctic (Finland).
Perhaps the biggest geopolitical blow Denmark could deal is to relegate Washington to the sidelines of the Arctic Council, which Greenland now chairs. Washington would be cast out of the very region it sought to control, a very region it has long neglected and in which it has not only lost all competency, but also its allies.
But none of this would satisfy what the Greenlandic politicians had sought during their secretive Teams call. They wanted a direct channel to the U.S. They could have one, but it may cost them their search for independence and self-governance, exchanging one Arctic power for another.
Kenneth R. Rosen is the author of Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic (Simon & Schuster)
