Over the weekend, President Donald Trump threatened to place new punitive tariffs on European allies until they acquiesce to his designs on Greenland, an escalation of his ongoing attempts to acquire the large Arctic island for the United States.
Critics loudly decried the move as devastating for the transatlantic relationship, echoing Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen’s earlier warning that a coercive U.S. seizure of the semi-autonomous Danish territory would mean the end of NATO.
The integrity of the 76-year-old alliance appears in the balance here, but the row over Greenland is a symptom, not the cause. Today, NATO faces a deep and existential challenge: a fundamental divide between the United States and the alliance’s European members over the type and extent of the threat posed by Russia. Ultimately, it is this fracture—and not the outcome of the current territorial dispute—that will be the alliance’s undoing.
The core of this transatlantic rupture is simple. While much of Europe is convinced that a future war with Russia is all but inevitable, some parts of Washington and key power centers in the Trump administration increasingly do not see Russia as a conventional military threat to the United States and do not believe that Moscow harbors imperialist intentions toward the rest of Europe.
Read at Responsible Statecraft
Author
