The NATO crisis has ceased to be abstract and has taken on concrete contours amid the sharp reversal of U.S. policy under Donald Trump.
Trump versus NATO
The crisis facing NATO today has little to do with Trump’s incendiary suggestion that China or Russia could dominate Greenland and everything to do with the logic of his “America First” doctrine. Trump’s worldview treats Europe not as a partner but as a structural liability — a continent whose security Europeans insist on outsourcing to Washington even as they fail to develop their own strategic capacity. This is why Trump has repeatedly demanded that NATO allies shoulder a far greater share of collective defence costs. At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, member states agreed to boost defence spending targets sharply after persistent US pressure — a move Trump hailed as a triumph of his leadership, even as many Europeans saw it as a coerced concession.
But that concession appears only to have emboldened Trump. Having wrung higher defence budgets from NATO capitals, he now wants more. Greenland — an Arctic territory rich in critical minerals and strategic position — has become the next obsession. The Trump administration is publicly toying with acquiring the island from Denmark, including threatening economic consequences for opponents and openly discussing military options. US control of Greenland, Trump argues, would secure not only vast reserves of future-critical resources but also a more commanding strategic posture vis-à-vis Europe itself.
This calculus dovetails European anxieties about strategic autonomy. In 2024, the European Commission commissioned former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi to produce a major report outlining the challenges facing the EU’s competitiveness and its capacity to act independently on the global stage. The Draghi Report argues that Europe must reinvigorate its economy, defence industry, and strategic decision-making if it is to avoid being outpaced by the US and China — including through reduced dependency on external partners for security and key technologies. With Trump now threating to military occupy Greenland and/or impose tariffs on those, i.e., European states, opposing this plan show that the US and EU interests now diverge more fundamentally than ever. The US does not want Europe to acquire strategic autonomy in much the same way it wants to deny the same to China and Russia on a global scale.
Greenland and NATO’s Point of No Return
If the United States moves militarily to seize Greenland — a semi-autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark — it would not be a distant geopolitical tussle but a direct assault on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself. Greenland is sovereign Danish territory and, as Denmark’s prime minister has bluntly warned, “if the United States decides to military attack another NATO country, then everything stops — that includes NATO and therefore post-World War II security.”
Across Europe, leaders have spoken with unprecedented unity on this point. European Council President António Costa declared, “Greenland belongs to its people… nothing can be decided about Denmark or Greenland without Denmark, or without Greenland,” reaffirming the bloc’s backing for Danish sovereignty in the face of US ambitions. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has underscored that the inviolability of borders is “fundamental international law,” and that sovereignty must be respected against any power, however dominant. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Nordic leaders from Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and others have echoed the same line: only Denmark and Greenland can decide Greenland’s future.
At the European Parliament, political leaders formally condemned Trump’s Greenland demands and voiced “unequivocal support to Greenland and Denmark.” European troops have even been deployed to Greenland in recent days as a symbolic and strategic signal of that solidarity, underscoring the depth of unease with Washington’s rhetoric. Greenland’s own premier has declared, “We choose Denmark… we choose NATO… we choose the EU,” reinforcing that the dispute is not abstract but rooted in firm political realities on the ground.
Herein lies the fatal dilemma for NATO. If the alliance invokes Article 5 — its collective-defense clause — in response to a US invasion of a member state, NATO would be forced to mobilize against the US itself. No treaty framework, command structure, or alliance machinery was designed to place its European members in armed conflict with Washington. Such a move would collapse the alliance de jure, as an institutional matter, on the spot. Even refusing to invoke Article 5 would not save NATO; it would expose the alliance’s core promise — that an attack on one is an attack on all — as hollow when the aggressor is the alliance’s dominant power.
Either way, NATO’s raison d’être would be gone. An alliance that cannot protect its members from external aggression — or worse, must choose between resisting and acquiescing to its strongest member’s forceful ambitions — cannot long claim to uphold collective security. Greenland, long viewed as a remote Arctic outpost, has thus become the unmistakable flashpoint of NATO’s existential crisis.
The Multipolar Moment
If NATO collapses under the strain of a US–European rupture, it will not create a security vacuum so much as accelerate a long-term shift already underway: the end of a unipolar order and the rise of multipolarity.
Denmark would not be without options. If Washington were to move militarily against Greenland, Copenhagen could invoke Article 42.7 of the EU Treaty, which commits member states to aid and assist a fellow member in the event of armed aggression. Doing so would be a dramatic political statement: the EU stepping in where NATO failed, and Europe treating the US as a potential aggressor rather than a guarantor of security.
But such a move would also confirm the death of the old Atlantic order. With NATO’s collective-defence model discredited—either because it fought the US or because it failed to defend a member—Europe would need to rebalance its ties globally, not just to the United States but to China and Russia as well. In a multipolar world, Europe cannot be a junior partner to anyone. It must become a strategic actor in its own right. Trump’s Greenland gambit is not merely a territorial grab. It is the final proof that the old Atlantic order is dead and that a new, multipolar Europe must be built from its ruins.
The moment is here. EU needs to grab it. Canada’s new trade deal with China is a sign for Europe that Washington’s China-first policy is no longer automatic. Canada did this deal to move away from the US. Europe’s own clash with the US over Greenland could push the EU toward the same conclusion: an independent China policy, negotiated from strength rather than subordination. That shift would deepen Europe’s global standing, not weaken it.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
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