This is how NATO ends, not with retreat but Greenland intervention

American threats against Greenland have forced Europe to rethink NATO’s most basic assumptions. Trump’s foreign policy combines global interventionism with neo-Monroeist ambitions closer to home. The result is an Atlantic Alliance facing erosion not from outside enemies, but from its own power center.

By Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has stated that “it would be the end of NATO” if the US were to annex Greenland, a remark prompted by President Donald Trump’s declaration that Washington would “do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not”.

Such alarmist-sounding warning has now suddenly become part of mainstream debate across Europe, as Germany pledges a larger Arctic role and senior officials in France, Poland and Denmark openly discuss contingency plans against a threat coming not from Moscow, but from within the Atlantic Alliance itself.

Trump’s renewed fixation on Greenland cannot be dismissed as yet another rhetorical excess. Jeremy Shapiro (Research Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations) has outlined how US pressure could win Greenland, by exploiting economic vulnerabilities, manipulating security arrangements, and even resorting to outright military intimidation. The scenario is no longer purely theoretical. Media outlets such as The Guardian, CNN, Al Jazeera, CNBC and the Financial Times have all reported, in recent days, on emergency consultations within NATO and the EU about how to respond if a NATO member were to threaten another with invasion.

For years, analysts across the ideological spectrum predicted that Trump, sometimes wrongly portrayed as a “pro-Russian” isolationist, would “kill” NATO by withdrawing from it. Both Atlanticists and some anti-imperialist commentators converged on the same conclusion, albeit with opposite moral judgments. Ironically enough, Trump is not threatening the future of NATO through retreat, but is risking its collapse through escalation so aggressively that it turns the Alliance’s logic inside out. As it turns out, an alliance premise on collective defense against external threats cannot survive if its leading power openly threatens to conquer allied territory.

Back in 2024 I argued that Trump was no “peacemaker” at all. One may recall that, during his first term, the American leader scaled up aerial warfare, particularly in Yemen, relaxed rules for drone strikes, increased troop deployments in several theaters, and lowered the threshold for lethal “direct action” outside declared war zones.

Now, the recent US-backed intervention against Venezuela clearly signals Washington’s determination to reassert control over its hemisphere, thereby resurrecting a crude, 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine.

Many assumed that Trump’s hostility to NATO, far from being motivated by “isolationism”, was purely centered on burden-sharing issues. There was some truth to that. As discussed in mid-2024, Trump’s harsh rhetoric did prompt massive increases in European defense spending (which was probably his goal, anyway).

Trump in any case has effectively abandoned “America First” as a slogan of retrenchment and instead embraced aggressive interventionism worldwide, even going beyond the neo-neocons, with 19th century territorial ambitions, openly contemplating annexations and protectorates. This is the context of today’s crisis.

The irony then is striking. Trump may indeed “kill NATO”, but not with “isolationism” or by withdrawing US troops. He risks killing it by making Article 5 absurd. If Denmark is threatened by the US over Greenland, whom does NATO defend? If France and Germany are forced to plan against an American move in the Arctic, the Alliance’s credibility collapses from within. Thus, NATO’s purpose is undermined by American hyper-interventionism to encircle Russia and conquer resource-rich territories. Such interventionism recognizes no allies, only subordinates and vassals.

The broader strategic picture reinforces this reading. As I argued back in 2024, parts of the US foreign policy establishment were already urging for pivoting away from Europe, thereby forcing Europeans to “defend themselves” while Washington focused elsewhere. Yet Trump’s approach is even more radical and contradictory. He signals willingness to downgrade involvement in Ukraine, while simultaneously cornering Russia in the Arctic through explicit threats against Greenland.

At the same time, he pivots not only to Asia or the Pacific, but aggressively to the American continent itself, threatening Mexico, pressuring Colombia, hitting Brazil with tariffs and sanctions, while openly declaring intentions to “run” Venezuela.

The Greenland threats are of course inseparable from US energy and resource interests, particularly rare earths and Arctic routes. These threats reveal long-standing US strategic goals, now bluntly expressed without diplomatic camouflage or ambiguity. Once the mask has fallen, the discourse becomes raw enough to shock even seasoned observers.

European reactions reflect this shock. Interestingly, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, together with France’s Emmanuel Macron, is now calling for Europe to reopen dialogue with Russia, partly out of fear of being trapped between Washington’s unpredictability and an underfunded European defense. EU policymakers are openly debating how to deter a US military takeover of Greenland, an idea that would have seemed absurd only a few years ago. These discussions underscore the fact that Atlantic cohesion depended less on shared values than on Washington’s self-restraint.

The hard truth is that Trump is far from being NATO’s only problem. The Alliance has long been strained by corruption scandals and deep internal contradictions, not least the Turkish Question, as I call it. NATO has for years accommodated mutually incompatible strategic priorities, selective applications of “shared values,” and unresolved intra-alliance disputes. Washington’s extreme posture today exposes and aggravates fault lines that were already embedded in the Alliance’s structure. The “Trump factor” may well be the tipping point, opening the way for, say, Turkey openly antagonizing Greece and what not.

Be as it may, the US President now announces that the US will govern Venezuela, the Gaza Strip in Palestine, and also Greenland. Is it about “pivoting to the Pacific” or owning the Western Hemisphere in a neo-Monroeist approach that eyes even Canada? The Atlantic superpower, overburdened as it is, wants everything, and then some. And Trump proclaims it blatantly, without humanitarian pretexts and without embarrassment. With humanitarian and democratic masks finally gone, the king is now naked. And furious.

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