After Trump’s threat to Greenland: Does NATO have a future?

European threats to unleash a trade war with the US over Greenland have put any movement by the US president on hold for the moment.Donald Trumpin that arctic island under Danish sovereignty without this meaning that it renounces its ambition over a territory that it considers crucial for the security of the United States. Under pressure, Trump announced that he had agreed with NATO the “framework for a future agreement” on Greenland – the details of which remain to be known – which makes him abandon for now the idea of ​​resorting to the use of force to annex the island, a scenario that had fueled the possibility that Europe would have to defend itself from the United States, after having spent decades trusting it with its defense. A seismic earthquake whose consequences are beginning to be felt.

Although Europeans have breathed a sigh of relief and celebrated as a success that Trump retreat, The trust between partners, which was already very shaken, has been completely dynamited. Since the beginning of his second term, the American president has multiplied displays of contempt towards their alliesreproaching them for their low investment in defense, has questioned the usefulness of the Alliance, and has conveyed the idea that the security of the continent was a European responsibility. But with the escalation over Greenland the rules of the game are different, and “NATO’s European partners have gone from fear of American abandonment to fear of US hostility“, summarized this week, Steven Everts, director of the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris, told the ‘Financial Times’.

Trump did not offer more information about these negotiations with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, but assured that the talks will continue to reach this agreement, while Copenhagen insists that the conflict is far from a resolution and that this goes through listen to Denmark and Greenland. “We cannot negotiate our sovereignty,” said the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. “NATO in no case has the right to negotiate anything without us, Greenland,” he said. Aaja Chenmitzone of two Greenlandic deputies in the Danish Parliament.

mutual defense

With Denmark insisting that its sovereignty is a red line Faced with a Trump who has given ample evidence in Venezuela that international law matters to him little more than anything, Rutte has negotiated as if Greenland were property of the Atlantic Alliance. At stake is not only international law and the sovereignty of a territory and a country, but also the very future of the Atlantic Alliance, created in 1949 in a world divided into blocs to contain the Soviet Union and its satellites and guarantee the mutual defense of its members, on the idea that each and every one of them, and above all the strongest, the United States, would defend any ally that was attacked.

“If the United States decides to attack another NATO country, everything stops, including NATO and the security that the Alliance has provided since World War II”

Mette Frederiksen

— Prime Minister of Denmark

On those coordinates it was built the security architecture after the second world wara time in which NATO became the pillar of transatlantic security and cooperation. And now, the organization finds that with Trump in the White House, The enemy is now at home. An attack between allies is not contemplated in the Alliance treaties. He article 5 on mutual defense considers an armed attack against one or more member countries as an attack against all, but understanding that the attack comes from a country outside the organization.

“In the event of an invasion of Greenland, Article 5 would have no effect, since the supreme allied commander, the military chief, is an American general, who is obviously not going to give orders to send troops to Greenland,” says Domènec Ruiz, CIDOB researcher, from Brussels. In his opinion, article 42.7 of the Treaty of the European Union could be used, which is the equivalent of article 5 of NATO but for EU countries, with a mutual assistance clause copied from the Alliance treaty. “This would have a route and the rest of the European countries could mobilize through Denmark,” he says.

In the more than 70 years of history of the Alliance, Article 5 was only applied once, after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, when the US invoked it andlaunched the invasion of Afghanistan with other allied countries: first the United Kingdom and then France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Turkey, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Portugal, Greece and Iceland would join (the latter with logistical support since it does not have an Army). In 2003, it was NATO itself that took over command of the operation and Trump himself recently referred to that contribution: “You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan. And they did, but they stayed a little bit behind, a little bit outside the front lines.”

Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, maintains that aggression against Greenland would be the end of the Alliance: “If the United States decides to attack another NATO country, everything stops, including NATO and the security that the Alliance has provided since World War II.” In the event of an American invasion, Danish soldiers will have to enter combat without waiting for ordersaccording to a military directive from 1952 that the Danish Ministry of Defense confirmed to the country’s media that is still in force.

“This crisis is far worse than any other we have seen in NATO’s 77-year history and, in many ways, worse than anything since December 7, 1941, when the United States formalized the idea that The security of Europe was fundamental to the security of the United States.“, maintains Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO. “That idea, which was expressed in the form of a treaty in 1949, has disappeared. It’s over,” he told the ‘Financial Times’ newspaper.

The experts consulted by El Periódico also see it this way. Rafael Loss, researcher in defense and security policies, from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) reviews other critical moments of the Alliance such as the Suez crisis in 1956, the Turkish invasion of part of the Greek part of Cyprus o the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 but he affirms that NATO “survived these episodes because the allies, despite their differences, continued to value being part of NATO.” “With Trump, at the very least, many doubts arise. Threatening to forcibly occupy the territory of a treaty ally has eroded the credibility of American security guarantees“, he maintains. Domènec Ruiz emphasizes the same idea: “Trust has been broken in the maintenance of the transatlantic link and no one can trust that Greenland will not be reconsidered again or that other similar scenarios will not be considered,” he says.

military structure that works

But NATO is also much more than the transatlantic link. It is also an integrated military structurethe most powerful in the world, uniting 32 armies. Allies collectively develop their force structures, follow the same plans, and train and conduct exercises under unified command. NATO’s military structure depends on the US (in bases, support and command capabilities, including The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, SACEUR, is American—) but the European armies are well integrated within it. The machinery works perfectly and is oiled.a.

“Trust has been broken in the maintenance of the transatlantic link and no one can trust that the Greenland issue will not be reconsidered again or that other similar scenarios will not be considered”

Domenec Ruiz

— CIDOB researcher

In his last speech before the Senate this Wednesday, US Secretary of State, Marco Rubioinsisted on what the US Administration has been repeating for months, that the Atlantic Alliance “needs to be replanted” and that European allies must invest more in Defense to achieve a capacity that offers credible security guarantees without US support. The European Commission’s ‘Readiness 2030’ initiativewhich aims to mobilize up to 800 billion euros to strengthen defense infrastructure of Europe would in that sense be a small step in that direction.

”Europe must provide itself with its own defense system independent of NATO although compatible with NATO and trying to duplicate as little as possible,” says Ruiz, who like other experts does not rule out as impossible that the United States could end up abandoning the Alliance or boycotting its operation. In his opinion, even if the transatlantic relationship is recomposed, “it is necessary for Europe to constitute itself as European pillar of defense because a healthy, non-toxic and balanced transatlantic relationship requires that we have our own entity.” Otherwise, he insists, “they will always continue to treat us as a ‘junior partner’”.

Along these lines, Loss argues that by becoming deeply involved in European security and defense as the undisputed leader of NATO, the United States eliminated security competition in Western Europe. And he warns now that “without American leadership, Europeans will have to solve their security problems themselves. “It is a manageable challenge and external threats, mainly Russia, force Europe to succeed, but it is still a completely new and somewhat uncomfortable situation for many European leaders.”

European division

But there is still a great division between governments on how and how quickly Europeans should stop depending on the American umbrella, with the countries closest to Washington – such as the United Kingdom due to its historical relationship or Italy due to its ideological approach – more reluctant to undertake reforms. “There is a lack of political will to activate the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty on common defense and the European Council, which has the competence, is not even addressing the debate,” criticizes Domènec Ruiz, adding that the common defense policy is not only the industrial dimension that the European Commission emphasizes, but it has a “political, strategic, institutional and military” dimension.

There are contradictory ideas in the air. The Defense Commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, has raised the idea of a standing European army of 100,000 troops instead of 27 limited national forces, which would mean expanding the EU’s powers in defense matters, a scenario that today seems very distant. The French president, Emmanuel Macronwhich in 2019 declared NATO “brain dead,” calls to the “strategic awakening of Europe” but he defends that European defense must rest on the sovereign decisions of each country.

Loss expresses doubts that the EU, which depends on unanimity to make decisions on security and defense, “is capable of acting with the necessary speed and scale required by current geopolitical challenges” and rather envisions overlapping regional and functional coalitions advancing practical solutions, such as the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force or German-Polish efforts to bolster the defense of northeastern Europe.

“What else has to happen? We are no longer just talking about Greenland. We have Putin who has invaded Ukraine and threatens us from the East. We Europeans have handed ours over to a third party for 80 years, thinking that he would never fail us and it has been a mistake,” summarizes Ruiz.

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