London: Denmark was worried about US intentions towards Greenland even before Donald Trump sent his troops and bombers into Venezuela over the weekend, but now the Danes are truly alarmed – and so they should be. Even if its vast island territory isn’t the next item on the US president’s acquisition list (which surely features Colombia), he seems determined to take it before leaving office.

Trump’s escalating rhetoric has forced the Danes to take the matter increasingly seriously. Danish officials have summoned the US ambassador repeatedly to complain. In December, a Danish intelligence agency for the first time described the United States as a potential security risk.

The reasons for Denmark’s concern go beyond even Trump’s repeated demands to hand the island over, made all the more real just before Christmas by the appointment of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as his special envoy for making it happen. The message wasn’t subtle: Louisiana gave its name to a vast US purchase of territory from France in 1803, and Landry stated clearly that he had volunteered “to make Greenland part of the United States”.

Any use of force by the US under Donald Trump against Greenland would pit NATO allies against one another and could spark an existential crisis for the military alliance.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

The problem for Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is the same as for Europe writ large: they have few cards to play in the world of might-makes-right that Trump is ushering in. They built their entire economic and security postures around the rules and alliance-based order that the US created for its friends after World War II. Now they’re too dependent on US arms to resist as he tears it down, with a strong assist from the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Trump administration framed its intervention in Venezuela as a modern reinterpretation of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, under which the US declared the western hemisphere off-limits to colonisation by other nations. That logic could, in theory, be extended to Greenland as well.

But a military move there would........

© The Sydney Morning Herald