Over the past year, President Trump has pushed NATO with threats and coercion to make divisive changes. Now he is threatening to seize control of Greenland, potentially with military force, which has heightened concerns that he will destroy the trans-Atlantic security alliance.
Leaders in Europe and Canada, which have depended on the United States for nearly 77 years as the alliance’s largest partner, are determined to not let that happen.
Greenland is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, which is a founding member of NATO. Top diplomats from Greenland and Denmark will defend the territory from Mr. Trump’s ambitions at the White House on Wednesday.
Discussions set with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will provide “a meeting room where we can look each other in the eye and talk about these things,” the Danish foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump has cast himself as NATO’s biggest booster. “I’m the one who SAVED NATO!!!” he wrote on social media on Monday.
His threats to withdraw the United States from NATO spurred the alliance last summer to increase defense spending. He also agreed to continue sending American weapons to Ukraine — after initially pausing them — once NATO allies proposed paying for military aid instead of the United States donating it.
Now NATO allies are devising plans to better secure Greenland’s surrounding waters from adversaries like Russia and China — the reason Mr. Trump says American ownership is necessary.
“We all agree in NATO — we all agree — that when it comes to the protection of the Arctic, we have to work together, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said on Tuesday.
But the flap has raised the prospect that one NATO member might invade the territory of another, throwing the alliance into a tailspin.
“It really is a deal breaker in the trans-Atlantic relationship,” said Sten Rynning, a NATO analyst and professor at the University of Southern Denmark.
