US President Donald Trump has increasingly ramped up the rhetoric concerning a possible takeover of Greenland. Photo / Getty Images
Speaking on Air Force One, United States President Donald Trump could not resist a dig at Greenland’s defences.
“You know what Denmark did recently to boost security on Greenland? They added one more dog sled,” the US President told reporters. “It’s true. They thought that was a great move.”
It would certainly be outrageous if Denmark, under pressure from the US to show it can defend Greenland or risk losing it, had only bothered to knock together a dog sled this year.
But in reality, Trump was referring to the expansion of Denmark’s Arctic special forces unit, Sirius Patrol, which uses 45kg dogs on sleds to navigate Greenland’s harsh landscapes.
This is just one piece of a wider £4.8 billion ($11.2b) defence package earmarked by Denmark to address Trump’s complaint that it fails to protect its territory from Russian and Chinese ships in the Arctic region.
Denmark has pledged to station a radar system in eastern Greenland, as well as five new inspection ships to replace the ageing Thetis-class vessels, a Poseidon-type patrol aircraft and four long-range MQ-9B Sea Guardian air drones.
The thinking in Copenhagen was that if huge amounts of new kit were rushed to Greenland, then Trump might back off on his insinuations that the Danes cannot be trusted to protect it.
Yet Trump, who seems determined to annex the strategic island with its rare earth minerals, might have a point about Greenland’s weak defences after it emerged yesterday that none of this military equipment will be ready until 2031.
To make matters worse, even if the delivery of equipment were to be accelerated – and some items on the list ironically come from US suppliers – none of those Danish ships and aircraft would be much use in defending Greenland from a US invasion or a coup in Nuuk, the island’s capital.
It appears to be a case of too little, too late for Denmark, which has prepared the generous defence package to appease Trump’s concerns about its Arctic security posture against threats from Russia and China.
“They are not combat platforms but simply surveillance platforms,” Peter Viggo Jakobsen, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, told the Telegraph.
“The United States was demanding that Denmark have 24/7 situational awareness. So that is primarily the kind of thing Denmark has invested in, and it goes to replace ships we already have up there, for search and rescue and so on,” he said.
Greenland does not have its own military and Denmark, which is tasked with defending the island, has limited air and naval assets in place to defend it.
Greenland’s main source of defence is a US military base, which hosts about 150 US soldiers, mostly Air Force and Space Force, as well as an ICBM early missile detection system.
There is also a Danish military base, the Joint Arctic Command, in Nuuk, which has about 130 troops, and a handful of remote research stations around the island.
Jakobsen said it was “surreal” to see Trump mocking Denmark, a Nato ally, for setting up defences in Greenland that only exist because of a request from the Trump Administration.
It remains unclear if Trump was aware that the “dog sled” belonged to elite Sirius troops or, as some in Copenhagen suspect, he opted for a twist on the truth to humiliate the Danish Government.
Either way, it is the clearest sign yet that Denmark’s race to beef up its defence posture in Greenland has failed to impress America, which now seems determined to annex the island.
Trump said that the US will “do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not”. We will do it “the easy way” or the “hard way”, he warned.
“Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don’t defend leases. And we’ll have to defend Greenland,” he added.
And if Trump did invade Greenland, Denmark would not be able to defend its territory, analysts said.
They suggested the island can even be taken without a shot being fired as US soldiers, already based at the Pituffik Space Base, just need to cross the road and enter the Greenlandic government buildings.
Mocking Greenland’s expanding defences added to a growing suspicion that fending off Russia is just an excuse for Trump to have Greenland all to himself.
Yesterday, the leaders of all five parties in Greenland’s Parliament said: “We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danish, we want to be Greenlanders. The future of Greenland must be decided by Greenlanders.
“No other country can meddle in this. We must decide our country’s future ourselves – without pressure to make a hasty decision, without procrastination, and without interference from other countries.”
The coalition Government is not in favour of a hasty independence from Denmark.
The only opposition party, Naleraq, which won 24.5% of the vote in the 2025 legislative elections, wants to cut ties as quickly as possible but it is also a signatory of the joint declaration.
Lin Alexandra Mortensgaard, an expert at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said it felt “absurd” to have to discuss the prospect of a US military takeover of Greenland, and that such a scenario would mean “probably the end of the Nato alliance”.
That view was echoed by Anna Wieslander, the director for Northern Europe at the Atlantic Council, a Washington DC-based think-tank.
“It’s the darkest hour for Nato if the US follows through with this threat – that’s basically the end of it for Nato,” she told the Telegraph.
That chief concern – that Trump, in his fervour for pursuing his “America First” goal, risks destroying Nato – is being felt keenly across the entire Western alliance.
Major European leaders issued a joint statement rallying behind Denmark and Greenland to insist it decide its own domestic matters, and strongly urging the US to engage collectively rather than unilaterally as the lead partner in Nato.
The security alliance, established in 1949 after World War II, was designed to respond to external threats – such as Russia and China – and was never meant to handle internal rifts.
“Nato is not a referee … it is not a marriage counsellor,” said Jim Townsend, who spent eight years as US deputy assistant secretary of defence for European and Nato policy under Barack Obama. “Nato doesn’t like allies to bring bilateral or domestic problems into the alliance.”
Ed Arnold, the senior research fellow for European security at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute said: “When the threat is external, you get a solidifying factor ... Nato pulls together. When it’s an internal challenge … it has the opposite effect and starts to split and fracture the alliance.”
As there is no sign of Trump backing down on Greenland, the conversation has shifted in Copenhagen from the blunt refrain of “it’s not for sale” to yet more appeasement.
Next week, Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, will meet Danish officials to discuss the future of Greenland. It is hoped that the meeting might foster a more sober and grounded discussion on what exactly Trump wants from Copenhagen.
But no one is holding their breath.
“Trump keeps going on about Chinese and Russian ships,” said Jakobsen, with an air of foreboding. “But they are a figment of his imagination. They do not exist.”
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