The Cost of Contingency: The Greenland Crisis

The geopolitical shockwaves that began with the United States apprehension of Nicolás Maduro on 3 January 2026, have moved rapidly from the tropics to the high Arctic, signaling the decisive unravelling of the established security order. What is currently unfolding in Greenland is not a mere territorial dispute; it is the inaugural application of what the White House now terms the Don-roe Doctrine. By asserting that a “security void” in the Western Hemisphere constitutes a direct threat to the United States, the Trump administration has contributed to a shift from De Jure norms toward De Facto practice. Whether formal annexation ultimately occurs is secondary to the broader structural shift now underway. The United States has accelerated a broader regression within the transatlantic alliance, in which strategic necessity is increasingly treated as sufficient to override established understandings of sovereignty, particularly where sovereign authorities are unilaterally deemed incapable of sustaining a credible defense. Applied on a disaggregated, country-by-country basis, this logic marks a shift away from traditional multilateral guarantees toward contingent bilateralism, the systemic cost of which is the fragmentation of alliance cohesion itself.

While the crisis in Venezuela was not a direct legal precedent for Greenland, given the vastly different constitutional statuses of a sovereign state and an autonomous territory; it nevertheless served as a powerful amplifier. The intellectual connection between these geographies is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, formally codified in the 2025 National Security Strategy. The Strategy explicitly warns that the “terms of our alliances… must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence”. In other words, traditional legal distinctions are purposefully collapsed and the strategic value of an ally is no longer determined by treaty obligations, but by increasingly selective bilateral assessments that signal a shift away from traditional multilateral guarantees toward contingent bilateralism.

On 4 January 2026, less than 48 hours after the fall of Caracas, President Trump explicitly linked the two in an interview with The Atlantic, stating; “We do need Greenland, absolutely… we need it for defense”. The timing functioned as a calculated signal and was interpreted by observers accordingly; The United States had just proven it could dismantle a sovereign government over a weekend without seeking UN approval. The administration’s intellectual justification for this shift was crystallized in legal interpretations that emphasize executive authority in the absence of Security Council authorization. A recently declassified Justice Department memo concluded that the president had “inherent constitutional authority” to undertake a military-backed law enforcement operation against Nicolás Maduro without violating US law or seeking congressional approval, even if such actions contravene international treaties, including the U.N. Charter. By bypassing the Council and framing the Venezuela raid as a law-enforcement action under “inherent constitutional authority”, the United States effectively accelerated a shift in the existing rules-based order. This logic was promptly applied to the Arctic with the introduction of the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act on 12 January, which treats a NATO ally’s territory as a “vital security asset” to be secured by “whatever steps necessary”.

Congressional resistance to this trajectory has been swift. In mid-January, certain US senators introduced a bipartisan bill explicitly designed to block any unilateral attempt by the executive to seize or annex Greenland without congressional authorization, reaffirming that territorial acquisition requires legislative consent. Yet the emergence of these counter-bills underscores, rather than reverses, the deeper shift underway. As the Venezuela operation demonstrated, executive action framed as an urgent security necessity can proceed ahead of formal legislative approval, reshaping strategic realities before institutional constraints are fully applied. In this context, congressional opposition functions as a reactive safeguard rather than a preventative one. Even where annexation remains legally contingent on Congress, the precedent of acting first and contesting legality afterward signals a continued erosion of the previously established security order, in which multilateral norms and legislative consent once served as binding constraints rather than post-hoc checks. This shift is particularly consequential among US allies, including NATO members, as prior instances of unilateral intervention — however controversial — were typically directed at adversarial or non-aligned states rather than security partners.

The damage to the transatlantic bond was significantly reinforced during the 14 January meeting at the White House between Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. By agreeing to establish a “High-Level Working Group” to address US security concerns related to Greenland, Copenhagen has been effectively compelled to enter a process that, while not formally framed as negotiations over sovereignty, nonetheless draws questions of territorial authority into the scope of bilateral security dialogue.

While Minister Rasmussen characterized the talks as “frank but constructive“, the subtext reflected a significant strategic concession. This is the sovereignty discount in action: the United States has leveraged its role as the continent’s security guarantor to exert leverage through logistical dependence. This pressure is further compounded by the administration’s deployment of geoeconomic instruments, notably the introduction of targeted punitive tariffs against states opposing the proposed acquisition of Greenland. President Trump indicated that a 10% tariff would be imposed on Denmark and several other European countries — Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland; pending the conclusion of a deal, with the rate set to increase to 25% should no agreement be reached by June 1. By imposing tariff-based pressure on European partners, the United States would add strain to economies that have already financed Ukraine’s war effort through extensive loans and budgetary support and are simultaneously confronting an estimated €135.7 billion reconstruction funding gap. By leveraging asymmetric bilateralism, Washington is progressively weakening the intra-European cohesion required to mount a credible multilateral response to its hemispheric objectives. This combination of economic coercion and prospective annexation has further eroded the transatlantic bond, triggering what can be described as strategic atrophy.

The European response, Operation Arctic Endurance, serves as a visual metaphor for the continent’s strategic atrophy. The deployment of approximately 30 soldiers to Nuuk is a largely symbolic tripwire that lacks kinetic weight. This strategic paralysis is deepened by a stark reality; the United States is not merely an ally, it is arguably the operating system upon which European defense increasingly depends.

From strategic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and space-enabled intelligence to the air-domain enablers required for high-intensity operations and the US-led F-35 mission-data and upgrade ecosystem, Europe remains operationally tethered to an American defense stack. Any coordinated European effort to oppose US action in Greenland would therefore carry the risk of indirect retaliation, including restricted access to software updates, data integration or cloud-based logistics. In such a scenario, Europe’s military effectiveness would be degraded not by force, but by dependency. The recent Polish refusal to deploy troops, justified by Prime Minister Donald Tusk as a means of avoiding rifts within NATO, illustrates the constraining effect of this reality even among governments otherwise committed to the existing legal order.

This internal atrophy is further accelerated by the Veto Axis which has arguably traded collective security for national advantage. Hungary’s refusal to endorse the EU’s joint statement on the US intervention in Venezuela, the only EU member state to withhold support from a declaration backed by 26 of the bloc’s 27 members, was crystallized by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s remarks at an international press conference on 5 January 2026. Dismissing the utility of existing multilateral frameworks in the wake of the US intervention in Venezuela, Orbán argued that “international law has never provided Hungary with meaningful protection“, adding that Brussels has instead frequently used it against Hungary. In this context, he questioned why his nation should “regret the emergence of a new reality”. Orbán’s logic was transactional: he praised that “both the US and Hungary have an interest in cheaper energy” implying that American control over Venezuelan oil would lead to lower prices for Hungary.

Such positions do not require formal coordination to have strategic effect. They signal to external actors that Europe lacks a unified threshold for response, thereby weakening the credibility of collective action. This fragmentation is illustrated by Slovakia’s decision to pursue energy security through a bilateral arrangement with Washington. Notably, the timing of this decision is significant: on 16 January, amid escalating tariff threats against several European states and ongoing US discussions concerning Greenland, the United States and Slovakia signed an agreement advancing a US–Slovakia civil nuclear cooperation program, laying the groundwork for negotiations on a €15 billion intergovernmental contract with Westinghouse for the construction of a 1,200-megawatt reactor, reportedly without a tender.

By pursuing energy security through bilateral arrangements rather than collective frameworks, Slovakia has acted rationally in national terms, but at a systemic cost. Such deals reduce the likelihood of a unified European position by creating differentiated incentives across member states. In this context, the contrast between material benefits extended to some governments and the strategic vulnerability faced by others; most notably Denmark, illustrates how contingent bilateralism operates in practice, rewarding alignment while deepening fragmentation.

Crucially, this fragmentation has not emerged in response to an accomplished annexation, but in anticipation of one. The mere articulation of Greenland as a contingent security object; subject to unilateral reassessment and potential acquisition, has already altered alliance behavior, compelling some states to seek bilateral accommodation while exposing others to heightened strategic risk. In this sense, the Greenland crisis has functioned as a catalytic stress test: not by redrawing borders, but by revealing how quickly multilateral cohesion gives way to differentiated alignment once sovereignty itself is rendered conditional. This anticipatory fragmentation captures the central cost of contingency now unfolding within the transatlantic alliance.

The Greenland crisis has already become a fait accompli — not through the formal transfer of sovereignty, but through the transformation of alliance behavior it has induced. By framing Greenland as a contingent security object, the United States has demonstrated that Europe is financially constrained, technologically dependent and internally fragmented, leaving it unable, in the near term, to mount a credible collective response. In this sense, the decisive shift has occurred not on the map, but within the structure of the transatlantic alliance itself. The application of a sovereignty discount in Washington and the resulting recalibration of European strategic behavior, has accelerated a broader regression from multilateral security guarantees toward a transactional order of contingent alignment. What was once a collective framework premised on shared restraint is increasingly defined by differentiated exposure, selective accommodation and bilateral calculation. Europe now confronts the paradox of seeking strategic autonomy only to discover how long that autonomy has been structurally circumscribed.