I was at home in Washington, D.C., a few miles from the Pentagon after Al Qaeda flew commercial airliners into the Twin Towers of New York, a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Department of Defense headquarters, murdering 2,977 people. My little kids were a few blocks away from the house at the bucolic Janney Elementary School, and it was chaos: smoke rising over the Pentagon, drifting over the neighborhood, and frantic, confused parents barred from retrieving their children from school.
Within hours, all 16 members of NATO, the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, invoked Article 5 of its charter, which says an attack on one is an attack on all, and the next day multinational military aircraft were patrolling the skies over the United States.
As a reporter covering the Bosnian War, I saw firsthand the power of the NATO alliance as our treaty allies conducted air strikes side by side with U.S. pilots and worked hand in glove with American soldiers to stop another genocide in Europe. Expanding NATO from 16 member nations to 32 after the fall of the Soviet Union was a bipartisan master stroke of diplomacy and strategy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has never gotten over it, which lies at the heart of his invasion of Ukraine and his core demand that Kiev never join NATO.
It’s good to have friends like that. We call it “ride or die” out here in Far West Texas, unforgiving, remote territory where people are spread out, basic services are scarce, and neighbors rely on each other for help with rattlesnake bites, chainsaw accidents, rampaging feral pigs, tornadoes, carpools, jumpstarts, and lost dogs. We may not agree on politics, but we agree on the basics: loyalty, integrity, consistency, and honesty. Qualities, needless to say, not in abundance with President Trump.
The latest example being his threat to invade Greenland unless NATO ally Denmark cedes the territory to the United States as an Arctic defense hedge against Russia and China. Trump seems to have a myopic, imperial vision of the world in which those three powers carve up the globe while the “little people” scurry around displaying their obeisance and expressing their gratitude by groveling, opening their purses and giving up their precious minerals. Pitiful to the extreme, such as Venezuelan Nobel Laureate Morina Corina Machado, opposition leader and duly elected president, giving her 2025 medal to Trump during a recent White House parley to curry favor with him after months of whining about not receiving it.
No place is the existential danger of Trump and his enablers more acute than in his play for Greenland.
The geostrategic calculus is simple. If Trump seizes Greenland through force by invading a treaty ally, the allies are stuck. Which of them will stand toe to toe trying to slug it out with the overwhelming military and economic might of the United States? The United Kingdom, France, Germany, or any of the other NATO countries?; I think not.
As Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, “If the United States attacks another NATO country, everything stops,” meaning the end of a 76-year alliance that has ensured global deterrence since the end of World War II. China is likely to take it as a green light to invade Taiwan, another nation with which the United States has a defense pact, and Russia might start to pick off neighboring nations such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia––all NATO allies.
Distance and force multipliers are bedrock principles of military doctrine, both of which manifest in the case of Greenland and the Arctic Sea. A nation wants its enemies as far away as possible, in the case of the Arctic Sea, almost 6 million square miles, and strong, well-armed allies, such as the current 32 NATO members, on its side. Granted, controlling Greenland makes strategic sense, but invading it and blowing up NATO does not. Besides, the United States has a tapestry of agreements with Denmark dating back to 1941 that grant almost limitless access to Greenland for defense purposes.
Trump has all the tools at his disposal for a peaceful resolution to the Greenland question, and he would be well served to be reminded of the adage that “war is the failure of diplomacy.”
Sid Balman Jr. is a Pulitzer-nominated war correspondent, writer in residence at Sul Ross State University, and author of the upcoming novel The Mural, based on the 2022 Uvalde school shooting. Sidbalman.com