The Great Greenland War

Three Possible Histories

Most of my writing to this point has focused on the analysis of wars that have either already happened (sometimes very long ago) or are currently happening. Here, I’ll risk a slight deviation by attempting three theoretical histories of a war that has not yet begun, but which looks increasingly possible. What happens if the United States makes an aggressive push to seize Greenland against the wishes of the Greenlanders, the Danes, and the European security community writ large?

Perhaps these histories will strike the reader as nothing more than fiction, although hopefully enjoyable and interesting fiction at that. I think, however, that each case has an essentially coherent chain of cause and effect, and the wildly different outcomes that ensue should sober us. Nothing about geopolitics - and by extension history - is truly deterministic in ways that are obvious to us in real time. Like balls careening around a pool table, second order effects begin to multiply quickly. Our history is full of great wars which began in seemingly small places: the Lexington Common, Fort Sumter, an Archduke’s touring car in the back alleys of Sarajevo. Will Nuuk be next?

The First Story: The Great Shattering

The battle in Greenland ended before the world had come to grips with the fact that it had begun. The idea of live fire between the Americans and their former European allies - a notion which seemed ludicrous and unthinkable barely a year before - was considered so impossible that governments across Europe were still in a state of disbelief when the outcome of the fighting became obvious, some 9 hours after the first shots were fired. It was as if the sky was falling.

President Trump was on a roll. In January of 2026, US forces had conducted a lightning raid in Venezuela which captured President Nicolás Maduro and extracted him to the states for trial. The previous year, American strategic bombers had penetrated Iranian airspace and struck sensitive nuclear facilities. While armchair analysts and bloggers had incessantly debated the particulars of these two incidents, pouring over grainy images of impact sites and iPhone video of American helicopters over Caracas, the basic fact was that America had boldly excursed into two hostile countries, seemingly at will, without suffering a single casualty. The President could be forgiven for feeling that he was on a bit of a heater.

As he pivoted his attention back to Greenland, President Trump insisted that America absolutely had to have the thinly populated and inhospitable island, to ensure both American security and the safety of the broader western world. Justifications seemed to vary by the day - from the spectral threat of a Chinese presence in Greenland, to the need to defend theoretical future shipping routes, to basing for strategic assets like Upgraded Early Warning Radar for detecting ballistic missiles and space activity. Nobody could quite agree on why Trump wanted Greenland so badly, but he was adamant that America needed to not only maintain a military presence there, but annex the island outright.

At first, the American President deployed his favorite all-purpose diplomatic tool and began levying import tariffs on the Europeans, with promises to raise them over time, to pressure the Danish government to sell. It was perhaps not unreasonable that Trump expected the Europeans to cave, yet again. The Danes, however, refused categorically, and instead began deploying forces to defend the island, scrounging up a coalition of European partners to help garrison Greenland.

Few could question the fighting spirit of the Danes - who after all had contributed and in turn suffered disproportionate casualties participating in America’s Middle Eastern wars - but the idea of truly fighting the Americans for Greenland was doomed from the start. To begin with, it was clear that the Europeans never actually expected the Americans to shoot at them. The European mission to Greenland had a symbolic sheen from the beginning: the idea, one supposes, was that confronting the Americans with the prospect of actually killing their own allies would compel even someone as intransigent as Trump to balk. Accordingly, the European and allied forces consisted of relatively small contingents. The British government made the strongest showing and dispatched the brigade-sized 40 Commando of the Royal Marines; Canada contributed a single Arctic Response Company Group; Norway provided two companies of the Narvik Battalion (specialists in Arctic warfare); the Dutch, Finns, and Germans sent company equivalent formations.

What all of these deployments had in common, like the Danish garrison, was that they consisted mostly of light infantry, and they lacked critical enablers like layered air defense, standoff strike capability, robust combat engineering, and air support. This was a classically expeditionary force. In terms of sheer firepower, it was clear that they were woefully overmatched by the American armada, now massed in the Labrador Sea under USNORTHCOM. It was obvious that their deployment was designed mainly as a demonstration of European resolve, and to confront the White House with the idea that they could only have Greenland if they were willing to shoot at their own allies. The Europeans thought they were calling President Trump’s bluff. He was not bluffing.

Early in the morning on Monday, April 27, 2026, American forces began to shower targets in Greenland with a mixed strike package of air and sea launched missiles, while layered cyber effects wreaked havoc on European ISR and Command and Control. Ship-launched Tomahawks struck ammunition depots, barracks, and command posts sprinkled around the fjords on Greenland’s western coast. The HDMS Niels Juel, a Danish Air Defense Frigate, was struck and disabled by an air-launched AGM-158C LRASM. Within an hour, the Europeans were in disarray, and resistance was minimal when the American 11th Airborne Division - the “Arctic Angels” - began their insertion as the sun was coming up. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Denning, who commanded the Royal Marine 40 Commando (stationed around Sisimiut), managed to inform the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in the north of London that “The Americans have engaged us” shortly before communications went offline.

The Europeans, staggered, had no choice but to order a stand down and retreat. The death toll was relatively minor by the standards of Europe’s long and bloody history: a total of 97 European KIA, mostly in the initial wave of strikes, but the sight of coffins returning home, draped in their various national flags, was shocking. European capitals roiled in a psychologically overwhelming mixture of disorientation, betrayal, disbelief, and anger.

The Europeans were determined to retaliate with everything in their toolkits, short of escalating a kinetic war with the Americans, which they belatedly admitted they could not win. In July, the European members, along with Canada, began a coordinated mass withdrawal from NATO, precipitating an American withdraw from what remained of the organization. By August, the only remaining members were Turkey, Croatia, and Bulgaria, who awkwardly disbanded the alliance.

As they withdrew, European states began formally ejecting American troops from their bases across the continent. As the American armed forces began drawing down their long held positions, abandoning Cold War keystones like Ramstein, Lakenheath, and Aviano Air Base, some troops came home, but most redeployed to the expanding Incirlik Air Base in Turkey (which was quick to leverage the new Atlantic divide by welcoming a larger American presence) and facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, the Europeans unleashed a three-pronged economic counteroffensive against the Americans, targeting American imports, tech, and military procurements. A whopping 100% import tariff on American goods all but priced the Americans out of the European common market, while European regulators - who had long been gunning for American tech companies - were finally let off the leash. Over the summer, the EU finally realized its vision for a single digital regulatory agency for the entire union, which began to systematically crush American giants like Google, Meta, Tesla, and X, eventually banning them completely. Enterprising young men continued to use VPNs and other workarounds to access American social media, but publicly the American presence faded and Chinese offerings like Baidu, BYD, Huawei, and ByteDance moved in to replace them.

Finally, the Europeans realized at long last that they could no longer remain reliant on American defense contractors. Orders were unceremoniously cancelled across the continent (even Poland wistfully cancelled its exorbitant orders for American HIMARS), and the Europeans began flooding money into indigenous producers like Rheinmetall, BAE systems, and Saab. It was satisfying to finally snub the Americans, but deliveries were scheduled on long timetables and costs seemed to consistently overrun promises. Nobody said it, but everyone began to wish that they could have back all the gear that had trickled into Ukraine over the years.

The shattering of the NATO bloc did not occur in a vacuum. The Russian government, ever calculating and opportunistic, immediately began to step up the pressure on Ukraine, which was now in severe disarray. By the summer of 2026, President Trump - seeking to dump a flaming Ukrainian crisis in Europe’s lap - cut off Ukrainian access to American weaponry, intelligence, and targeting data. On July 4, in his TruthSocial post wishing “HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO ALL”, he announced that he had instructed Elon Musk to disconnect Ukraine’s Starlink. Put out of command and with the flow of western munitions now shut off, Ukrainian forces began to evaporate. Facing mass surrenders and Russian breakthroughs across the front by early September, Kiev was forced to sign a peace treaty acknowledging Russia’s annexation of ten oblasts: Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Dnipro, Kharkov, and Sumy.

The Kremlin did not waste time. By the end of the summer, European media was reporting with alarm on the buildup of Russian forces along the border with the Baltic states. In October, the Russians went in. They had learned from their mistakes in Ukraine, and came in with a heavy hand - striking power generation, barracks, and municipal infrastructure at the outset. It took 17 days for Russian ground forces to overrun the Baltics. NATO did nothing. NATO was gone.

Lacking any formal security commitments to the Baltics, the European community was bitterly divided over whether to intervene. Only the Poles were willing to step up at the outset, but they sobered quickly after the 18th Mechanized Division was mauled outside Kaunas (advancing in stereotyped marching columns, it was badly savaged by veteran Russian drone operators), and Warsaw signed an armistice. With winter descending, and in desperate need of Russian gas to prop up a reeling economy, the Europeans decided to cede Russian administration of the Baltics. Finland, reverting to the hedgehog strategy that had served it so well in the Cold War, formally adopted a policy of neutrality and intensified refresher training for its large pool of military reservists.

China wisely decided to be the last man into the fight. With the Americans dealing with thorny economic problems (the collapse of economic relations with Europe had pushed American treasury rates to the roof and shocked supply chains), and the American military reorienting itself, the Chinese waited until mid-2027 to blockade Taiwan. Nvidia’s stock cratered in after hours trading. Chaining attacks on America’s overweight tech sector, Beijing paired their move on Taiwan with the release of a wave of open source AI models, including the cutting edge DeepSeek V5. The sudden launch of dozens of competing AI models, combined with the prospect of the total loss of Taiwanese chip manufacture, sent American tech stocks into a spiral of collapse, and the S&P 500 fell 23%. President Trump announced his intention to retaliate with tariffs. Taipei capitulated.

As the world groped forward into 2028, the emerging geopolitical landscape was wholly unrecognizable. The launch of America’s hemispheric policy was an unqualified success, within its own narrow parameters. Greenland was consolidated as an unincorporated American territory, along the lines of Guam and Puerto Rico, while eager junior partners like El Salvador and Argentina provided outposts of American power along the spine of the Americas. After a brief standoff in the summer of 2027, Panama returned control of the Canal Zone to the United States, which set to work reactivating military facilities including Howard Air Force Base and Naval Station Coco Solo. With control over both the Panama Canal and the Venezuelan Oil Fields, and an intensified military presence in Greenland, the Donroe Doctrine had been realized.

The costs, however, had been exorbitantly high. The American alliance in Europe, built up and maintained a great cost all through the Cold War, had been lost. America’s position in Asia was mostly intact - the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and Australia remained keystone American allies - but the failure of the United States to actively defend Taiwan had deeply sobered them all, and it was an open question whether they could count on the Americans to resist further Chinese encroachment. In an interview on FOX News, Professor John Mearsheimer suggested that Japan and South Korea might be best able to ensure their own security by acquiring nuclear weapons. Tokyo was already thinking the same thing: in October 2027, the Japanese Air Self Defense Forces tested a new intermediate range ballistic missile. The media nicknamed it Godzilla.

The Second Story: Turbo-America

“He’s a madman. But there’s nothing we can do.”

Internally, the Danish government roiled with rage and disbelief that it had come to this. After declining, diplomatically but firmly, the American President’s $700 billion offer to purchase Greenland, they had been subjected to a blistering pressure campaign on all fronts. The Americans had begun slapping escalating tariffs on Denmark’s European partners, while President Trump publicly berated the Danes for their ingratitude and stubbornness. An American aircraft carrier group had parked itself in the North Atlantic, some 200 miles off the coast of Greenland. The Danish ambassador to Washington had been summoned to the Oval Office, where the President excoriated him and threatened to “blast you out of the sky” if the Danes continued airlifting additional military personnel into Greenland.

The Danes weighed their options and found that they had none. Danish military personnel were quietly recalled from Greenland, and Copenhagen began seeking ways to save face. On July 4, 2026 - the anniversary not only of America’s founding, but of the Louisiana Purchase - the White House tweeted a photo of President Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, signing the formal transfer of Greenland to the United States. In the background, a lustrous poster displayed a map of Greenland shaded in the stars and stripes. President Trump beamed. The Prime Minister did not smile.

The American annexation of Greenland sobered the Europeans to the two basic premises which now governed their political reality. First, the Americans were perfectly willing to take recourse to coercion against not only enemies, but allies as well. Secondly, Europe had checkmated itself so that it was unable to resist this coercion. For all the talk of American decline and the emerging multi-polar world, the view from Brussels indicated that America was more powerful than ever.

President Trump was hardly finished with his tour de force against the Europeans. Later that summer, with Russian forces on the approaches to the sister cities in the Donbas, the Ukrainians finally reached a breaking point. Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew to Moscow. On August 24 - Ukraine’s independence day, rather pointedly - the United States announced that an agreement had been reached with Moscow. Washington would recognize Russia’s annexation of the four eastern oblasts, along with Crimea, and compel the Ukrainians to adopt a formal policy of neutrality, in exchange for Russian guarantees of non-aggression towards the remaining rump Ukraine. Ukraine was to receive security guarantees and an investment fund for the reconstruction of the country.

The Europeans quickly learned that they would be bearing the costs of these latter items. America would be pocketing any proceeds accruing from the 2025 minerals deal - “They have to pay us back”, Trump insisted - and Washington would take a hand in overseeing the reconstruction fund, but the actual costs would fall on the Europeans. The total tab was now estimated at a whopping $650 billion dollars - hardly a meager sum. Behind the scenes, however, Trump threatened repeatedly to withdraw the United States from NATO and simply walk away from Europe altogether. When the European Commission publicly pushed back against the idea of bearing the reconstruction costs, the President threatened to levy a 25% tariff on the EU and direct the revenue to the reconstruction fund. “They’ll pay for it one way or another”, he said. “They have to pay for it.”

Europe was caught between a hammer and an anvil. On the one hand, it had irreparably estranged itself from Russia, and it was unable to course correct on that front due to the continued intransigence of the former Warsaw Pact states. On the other hand, it remained intensely reliant on an American overseer which was perfectly willing to offload all the costs of the Ukraine War onto Europe, use ostentatious coercion to ensure that the Europeans complied, and even demand that they say thank you.

Ultimately, what prevented the EU from solving these problems was the fact that the EU was not a truly functional polity, but a multitude. A dangerous asymmetry existed, wherein the EU could be bullied and tariffed and coerced like a single entity, but internally it was unable to craft a coherent, unified foreign policy. Now it was left holding the flaming bag that was a rump, wrecked Ukraine.

In practical terms, President Trump had successfully executed full-spectrum domination of Europe. He had humiliated them with the annexation of Greenland, using a mixture of economic and military threats to force the Danes to hand over the island. In Ukraine, he’d achieved a successful dismount: bringing home a mineral deal and a peace agreement as “shiny objects” to show off to the electorate, while leaving the Europeans with the bill. And of course, in a program that ran back to the Biden administration, the Ukraine War had vacuumed up extant European military inventories and forced them to replenish with purchases from American defense contractors.

He was a madman. But what could they do?

The Third Story: Nuclear Charlemagne

The Danish humiliation was felt as a European humiliation. One European leader after another had confronted President Trump directly, or made public statements affirming that Greenland was Danish territory, that Danish sovereignty was sacrosanct, and that NATO would defend its members against any threat - even an American threat. When push came to shove, however, the Danes of course had to back down. Greenland was indefensible, and nobody actually believed that the Europeans would fight a hot war with the Americans in the Arctic.

President Trump was over the moon, of course. The Danes had backed down bloodlessly, Marco Rubio had flown to Greenland and taken an awkward picture in front of the Inatsisartut building in Nuuk, where the American flag now waved. It appeared, cosmetically, to be yet another major foreign policy coup for the Americans, who seemed to act with impunity and get away with it, time and time again.

Internally, however, European governments felt that the roiling, mutual resentment had become intolerable. Trump lectured Europe about ingratitude, but where was American gratitude for the Danes - a loyal ally who had fought and died in those wasteful American bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Time and time again, Europe had toed the line and dutifully formed up behind the Americans, and where had it gotten them? It was time for a divorce.

Of course, not everybody in the European community was keen on abandoning the American alliance which had been the cornerstone of continental security policy for so long. The eastern states in particular - Poland, the Baltics, Finland - remained preoccupied with the Russian threat on their border, and would hardly dream of abandoning NATO and willingly walking out from under the American nuclear umbrella. For the states of Western Europe, however, it was long past time to create a coherent security architecture: under, by, and for Europeans.

In Brussels, on November 11, 2026 (Armistice Day, chosen to evoke the memory of old Europe before it was a satrapy of the American president), sixteen European states announced their intention to withdraw from NATO and enter into a new security architecture under the European Common Defense Organization (ECDO), although of course it would be colloquially known as the Brussels Pact. Taken together, these states - Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden - counted a population of some 350 million people, and a GDP of nearly $20 trillion, dwarfing the remaining European members of the now greatly reduced NATO.

Predicated on a similar tripwire defense protocol of common defense (an attack on one is considered an attack on all), the new defense pact was designed from the outset to pack a serious punch. The text of the European Common Defense Treaty called for the establishment of a multi-national rapid reaction force of twelve brigade equivalent units, ready to deploy rapidly anywhere within the “European theater”. The treaty also bound all of its member states to be “prepared to contribute to the common defense” by reintroducing mandatory universal conscription of 18 year old males, and extracted a commitment to expend no less than 4% of gross domestic product on defense.

By far the most revolutionary development of the ECDO, however, was the formal integration of France (the organization’s sole nuclear state) as the bearer of the pact’s strategic deterrent. This was achieved by granting France a veto prerogative in the Common Defense Council, in exchange for clauses which could invoke a “review of strategic strike options” in cases where the council determined that the “territorial or political integrity of the common defense area is threatened.” This innovation, which amounted to a de-facto extension of a French nuclear umbrella over the pact (and a tacit admission of French leadership in Europe) became popularly known as the Charlemagne protocol.

The creation of the ECDO and the withdrawal of its members from NATO led necessarily to the expulsion of American forces from bases across Europe. Facilities like Ramstein, in Germany, and Aviano Air Base in Italy were drawn down, and the Americans began a migration to their remaining outposts in Europe. The United Kingdom remained in the fold, but Poland, Turkey, and Hungary hosted the majority of the redeployed American garrisons - though increasingly, it was unclear whether they were there to ward off threats from the east or the west.

Undoubtedly, the ECDO member states hoped to maintain cordial relations with the Americans. Inevitably, however, frictions arose, largely because America now maintained an irritating blocking position in East Central Europe. With NATO’s continental foothold now limited to a thin band of states (Finland, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey) - this greatly reduced American satrapy remained in a position to block European access to Russia (and Russian gas), and the Americans worked incessantly to mediate and control the relationship. Worse still, in 2027 Turkish forces overran northern Syria and annexed large swathes of the country with American backing. This paved the way for the revival of the Qatar-Turkey pipeline, placing yet another high-leverage energy stream in the hands of the American alliance.

The ECDO had solved a major problem of modern European history. For the first time, Western Europe - which represented the mass of the European economy - had crafted both a political mechanism for coordinated military action, and laid the groundwork for a real force capable of backing it up. It had not been easy for all the member parties to grant the de-facto leadership role to the French, but this bitter pill was made easier to swallow by the humiliating memory of the Greenland crisis. In any case, Gaullism had certainly been vindicated and it was high past time to follow the French lead on such matters.

Superficially, the new geopolitical lines in Europe appeared mostly stable - with one notable exception. In May 2028, the Common Defense Council met to discuss increasing tensions in the disputed territorial waters between Greece and Turkey. This had been a major source of tension for decades, and on two occasions - 1987 and 1996 - Greece and Turkey had come close to general military hostilities. Now, however, Greece was a member of the ECDO, subject to the Charlemagne Protocol, while Turkey remained a constituent of NATO. More than that, Turkey had become arguably the most strategically critical American ally in the world, mediating access and energy flows between Europe, the Middle East, and Russia. Incirlik Air Base - expanded in 2027 - was home to more than 9,000 American personnel, and nearly 80 American nuclear weapons. Now, Turkish patrol vessels were said to be repeatedly and intentionally intruding on Greece’s territorial waters.

The German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, was heard to say: “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Aegean.”