By Jorge Liboreiro
Some dates go down in history and are engraved forever in the collective imagination. The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789. The end of World War II, 8 May 1945. The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 24 February 2022.
For a brief moment, it seemed the obituary of NATO would have been written on 1 February 2026.
In the span of five eternal days, Donald Trump brought the transatlantic alliance to the precipice of collapse. The group of Western nations that came together after defeating the scourge of Nazism and has remained united through countless political shifts, to the left and to the right, was closer to falling apart than it had ever been in its almost 80 years of existence.
As you know, the American president threatened to unleash his much-dreaded tariffs on eight European countries, all of which are NATO members, to force the sale of Greenland, the mineral-rich, semi-autonomous island that belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark. It was an extraordinary display of coercion, masked under the pursuit of national security interests.
Europeans reacted with a mix of shock, incredulity and horror, coupled with a painful reckoning of their entrenched dependency on America’s security umbrella.
Then, just as Europeans were coming to terms with the prospect of entering into a devastating, unpredictable trade war against their time-honoured ally, Trump suddenly backtracked and said he would no longer impose additional tariffs nor seek the annexation of Greenland. After meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Davos, Switzerland, Trump announced the “framework” of a future deal to strengthen security in the “entire Arctic region”.
“This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America and all NATO nations,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, the same platform he had used to trigger the crisis.
His U-turn was met with a loud sigh of relief, and also enormous confusion. Details of the agreement were not immediately released, prompting speculation about how much of Greenland's allies had given up for the sake of keeping NATO in one piece. (The New York Times reported the deal could mimic the British arrangement to keep military bases in Cyprus.)
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who found herself in the epicentre of a geopolitical spat without precedent, was quick to dispel the impression that the compromise had been made behind Denmark’s and Greenland’s backs, noting she had been in close contact with Rutte.
“The Kingdom of Denmark wishes to continue to engage in a constructive dialogue with allies on how we can strengthen security in the Arctic, including the US’s Golden Dome, provided that this is done with respect for our territorial integrity,” Frederiksen said in a statement.
Rutte, for his part, stressed that US ownership of Greenland “did not come up” during his meeting with Trump, which was instead focused on securing the Arctic and preventing Russia and China from gaining further access in the increasingly strategic region. “That is what we discussed. How to do that. How to make it practicable, zoning out bits of Greenland,” Rutte told Sky News.
European leaders, from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Germany’s Friedrich Merz, welcomed the news and celebrated the fact that the transatlantic alliance lived to see another day. With Russia’s war on Ukraine still raging with utter ferocity, the last thing anyone needed was an open front on Greenland.
But while the immediate crisis is solved, at least for the time being, the underlying problem is not. Something has been broken. Something has been fractured. A dangerous precedent has been set: an ally has dared to threaten, publicly and blatantly, to assault another ally’s sovereignty. Can NATO’s Article 5 of collective defence function properly if allies are willing to weaponise tariffs against each other? Can adversaries believe that NATO would stick together in adversity if they see one member trying to annex another? Can trust be restored?
These are some of the fundamental questions that European leaders, in this new age of perpetual volatility and angst, will have to answer. That is, if they dare.
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