A growing, bipartisan contingent of lawmakers in Washington believe that Trump’s insistence that the U.S. take Greenland over the objection of Denmark, Greenlanders and other NATO allies is a boon for Russia and President Vladimir Putin — and strains an already fractious NATO alliance.
Trump doesn’t need to seize Greenland to counter Russia. The U.S. has military bases on the island and has traditionally worked closely with Denmark on security.
Instead, some see dubious claims about imminent Chinese and Russian aggression as one of several pretexts for some future action, up to and including a military strike,
& not on China or Russia, but on an ally.
The president and administration officials have also suggested the United States needs Greenland for its Golden Dome missile defense shield, “economic security” and access to minerals — all areas where Denmark has signaled an openness to stronger collaboration already.
“The President's arguments about Greenland are self-evidently bullshit from top to bottom,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official during the Barack Obama administration who’s now research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
And European officials note that if Trump was so concerned about Russian aggression he has ample ways to address that — most notably in Ukraine, where allies have pleaded for the president to take a harder line against Putin since he returned to office.

Instead some fear that Trump’s insistence on taking Greenland and his refusal to rule out a military takeover help Putin achieve his longtime aim of weakening Western alliances.
Trump’s latest threat (
Against Denmark, not Russia) came Friday, when during an unrelated event on health care he suggested he could levy additional tariffs on the European Union if it blocks him from acquiring the territory. “Putin wants a weaker NATO,” said a second European government official. “Trump is giving it to him.”
Trump has often suggested that Putin is a man of peace as we’re approaching day 1425 of Russia’s “Special Military Operation into Ukraine,” even as Russia has increased its aerial bombardment of civilian targets and taken aggressive steps such as deploying a nuclear-capable missile earlier this month in a strike on Western Ukraine. This week, the president insisted again in an interview with Reuters that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the main impediment to a peace deal.
Trump claims he wants to counter Russia, but allies say threatening Denmark plays right into Putin's hands.
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Over weeks of talks with Trump’s most trusted interlocutors, Zelenskyy has shown a willingness to make territorial concessions and to hold elections in exchange for postwar security guarantees from the U.S. Meanwhile, Putin has shown no willingness to negotiate, content to keep up the bombardment of Ukrainian cities despite having made only marginal gains over nearly four years of war.
“Russia thought it would take Kyiv in three days and has instead spent four years making very modest gains,” said a third European government official. “The idea that they have the bandwidth to challenge the West in Greenland is ludicrous.”
Congressional Republicans criticize ‘absurd’ idea as polls show most Americans oppose taking control of territory
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“It is very, very clear at this point what Donald Trump is looking for, and it has nothing to do with security,” Shapiro said. “Has nothing to do with Russia. It has to do with his own personal aggrandizement, his sort of real estate mogul's view that the way that you achieve power and greatness is by [acquiring] land and by expanding the map of the United States. Anybody who believes that this is about Russians, about security and about Russia and China, is not paying attention.”
Some Republicans in Washington have dismissed the president’s fixation on taking Greenland as preposterous. As part of the Danish realm, Greenland is already protected by NATO’s Article 5, which deems any attack against a member nation an attack on the entire alliance. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) predicted any military operation to seize the island would lead to impeachment and called Trump’s Greenland obsession “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
In a blistering floor speech last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned of “disastrous” consequences should Trump violate the sovereignty of a longtime ally, stating that doing so would amount to “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”
He was one of many to point out that beefing up security in Greenland is achievable without annexation. “I have yet to hear from this administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us,” he said.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters after meeting with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen that there is little public support among Americans for acquiring Greenland and hinted that broad majority of lawmakers would use congressional “tools” to oppose it, stating that it “is not a subject of Republicans versus Democrats.”
Protesters in Denmark and Greenland demonstrated on Saturday against President Donald Trump's demand that the Arctic island be ceded to the U.S. and called for it to be left to determine its own future.
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