The opportunity of a forceful U.S. takeover of Greenland is raising many unprecedented questions — including how Canada, the European Union and NATO could respond and even retaliate against an ostensible ally.
A high-level meeting between Greenlandic, Danish and U.S. officials this week didn’t resolve the “fundamental disagreement” over the territory’s sovereignty but did set the stage for more talks. The White House made clear Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s desire to manage Greenland has not modified after the meeting.
“He wants the US to accumulate Greenland. He thinks it’s in our greatest national security to try this,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Denmark and European allies are sending more troops to the territory in a show of force and to display a commitment to Arctic security.
Experts say there are other, non-military measures available within the event of a U.S. annexation or invasion of Greenland, or which could a minimum of be threatened to try to get Trump to back down.
Whether those economic measures are literally used is one other matter, those experts say.
“I feel it stays highly unlikely that we’ll get to that time where we now have to noticeably discuss consequences for a U.S. move on Greenland,” said Otto Svendsen, an associate fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program on the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“So it stays contingency planning for a highly unlikely event. That being said … Denmark will surely do all the things in its power to rally a really robust European response.”
Here’s what that would entail.
EU trade, tech disruptions?
Experts agree the most important pressure points that might be utilized in the U.S. surround trade and technology.
The European Parliament’s trade committee is currently debating whether to postpone implementing the trade deal signed between Trump and the EU last summer to protest the threats against Greenland, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Many lawmakers have complained that the deal is lopsided, with the EU required to chop most import duties while the U.S. sticks to a broad 15 per cent tariff for European goods.
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A fair bolder move can be triggering the EU’s anti-coercion instrument — often known as the “trade bazooka” — that will allow the bloc to hit non-member nations with tariffs, trade restrictions, foreign investment bans, and other penalties if that country is found to be using coercive economic measures.
Although the regulation defines coercion as “measures affecting trade and investment,” Svendsen said it could feasibly be utilized in a diplomatic or territorial dispute as well.
“EU lawyers have proven themselves to be very creative lately,” he said.
Nevertheless, David Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said in an email that economic measures against the U.S. are unlikely “given the large asymmetry within the defence and economic relationship between the U.S.” and other western nations.
“Any type of sanction against the U.S. doesn’t make sense for a similar reason they’ll impose tariffs on others: they’ve the ability,” Perry added.
Goal U.S. tech corporations?
The likeliest — and potentially least harmful — scenario for retaliation within the event of an attack on Greenland, Svendsen said, can be fines or bans against U.S. tech corporations like Google, Meta and X operating in Europe.
That’s since the Trump administration has taken particular deal with stopping what they call “attacks” on American corporations by foreign governments looking for to manage their online content or tax their revenues, which has led to calls on Canada, Britain and the EU to repeal laws like digital services taxes.
“I feel that will be a very smart and targeted technique to get to economic interests very near the president, while minimizing the direct impact on the on the European economy,” Svendsen said, calling such a move “low-hanging fruit.”
He also compared a future U.S. tech platform ban to how Europe moved to wean itself off Russian gas after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“In the event you told anyone back then that Europe would mainly rid itself of its dependence on Russian gas mainly inside a two-year period … that will have been considered completely unattainable,” he said.
“Weaning the European economy off of U.S. tech will surely be painful within the short term, but they’ve proven that they’ll get off those dependencies quickly if there may be political will behind it previously.”
A U.S. hostile takeover of Greenland would mean the “end” of the NATO alliance, experts and European leaders have said.
Trump himself has acknowledged it may very well be a “selection” between preserving the alliance or acquiring Greenland.
There is no such thing as a provision throughout the NATO founding treaty that addresses the potential of a NATO member taking territory from one other, and the way the alliance should reply to such an act.
A NATO spokesperson told Global News it wouldn’t “speculate on hypothetical scenarios” when asked the way it could potentially act.
“None of this could be actionable in a NATO sense,” Perry said. “It’s an alliance that’s organized to bind the U.S. to European security, and revolves across the U.S. So there’s no scenario of NATO doing that to the U.S.”
Denmark and other European nations could move to scale back or close U.S. military bases of their countries as a possible response, experts say.
Balkan Devlen, a a senior fellow on the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and director of its Transatlantic Program, said in an interview that a U.S. annexation of Greenland would force Canada to focus entirely on boosting its defences within the Arctic.
Which will include attempting to decouple from NORAD, the joint northern defence network with the U.S., in favour of a purely domestic Arctic command, he said — although that process would take years and require Canada to extend defence spending even further.
“Never mind five per cent (of GDP) — we’ll probably must go like seven, eight, nine per cent on defence spending to have the opportunity to do anything of that kind,” he said. “It’s not even clear that we’ll have the opportunity to have enough people to try this.”
Devlen added that any retaliatory motion, whether military or financial, must be targeted and proportionate to what the U.S. does.
“The issue with nuclear options is that when you employ it, it’s gone,” he said. “And if it doesn’t do the damage or make the change of behaviour on the opposite party, you’ve mainly lost lots of leverage and you would possibly actually sustain quite a bit more loss yourself.”