The hysteria surrounding Greenland over the past few years tells us far more about NATO’s insecurities than about any supposed Chinese or Russian threat. When Donald Trump floated the crude but revealing idea of “buying” Greenland in 2019, the world laughed. Denmark rejected it outright, Greenland’s leadership asserted its autonomy, and the episode was dismissed as one more Trumpian absurdity. Yet beneath the ridicule lay a serious imperial instinct—and when that instinct failed, NATO quietly shifted the narrative. What followed was not strategy, but bluff. And that bluff is now unravelling.

Greenland was never about real security threats. It was about control, optics, and the West’s refusal to accept a changing world order.

Trump did not “lose interest” in Greenland; he lost. His gambit failed because sovereignty still matters—at least when small nations assert it against Western power. The United States already maintains a military presence at Thule Air Base, strategically positioned for missile detection and Arctic surveillance. If Greenland were genuinely under threat, NATO already had more than enough infrastructure to address it. Instead, what followed Trump’s failure was a campaign of fear: breathless warnings about Chinese “debt traps,” Russian submarines, and an Arctic invasion that exists largely in Western imagination.

This is where the bluff begins.

China has invested in Arctic research, shipping routes, and infrastructure proposals—openly, transparently, and largely through civilian and multilateral frameworks. Russia, for its part, operates within its own Arctic territory, where it has coastlines, communities, and a historical presence that predates NATO by centuries. None of this constitutes an “evil design.” Yet NATO insists on framing any non-Western presence as aggression, while its own military expansion is described as “defensive,” “stabilising,” and “rules-based.”

This double standard is not accidental. It is structural.

READ: 

© Middle East Monitor