Trump’s Greenland threat made Nato less ‘boring’, Rutte says

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US under secretary of war Elbridge Colby (l) with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte in Brussels on 12 February (Source: Nato)

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Trump’s Greenland threat made Nato less ‘boring’, Rutte says

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By Andrew Rettman,

Nato head Mark Rutte joked about US president Donald Trump’s invasion threat at the Western allies’ first high-level meeting since the peak in the Greenland crisis.

Asked by press in Brussels on Thursday (12 February) if he was worried Trump might still renew his Greenland menace, Rutte said Nato was a “coalition of democracies” with various kinds of leaders.

“It means you will always have debates and discussions and Nato would be boring otherwise … so I’m not worried”, he joked.

He also flattered Trump as a peacemaker on Ukraine and made excuses for US defence chief Pete Hegseth’s decision to snub the Nato event due to diary issues.

Trump was the only man in the world “capable of breaking the deadlock with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin — so the US is doing exactly what we need when it comes to Ukraine,” Rutte said.

Asked why Trump was pressing Ukraine instead of Russia to make concessions in peace talks, Rutte also said: “This is not fair — the US is putting every pressure on Russia”.

He mentioned US sanctions on two Russian oil firms and its sale of air-defences to Kyiv as examples.

Rutte said Hegseth did not come on Thursday because the US was so big that he must have had other global priorities.

The US instead sent Elbridge Colby, a Hegseth subordinate, who had in the past advocated cutting US troops in Europe and halting aid to Kyiv.

But Rutte said Colby was “leading US strategic thinking” and praised his “excellent speech” in Brussels.

For his part, Colby told media earlier on Thursday that “Europe should [in future] field the preponderance of the forces required to deter and, if necessary, defeat conventional aggression in Europe”, as the US focused on China instead.

But he promised: “We will continue to provide the US extended nuclear deterrent”.

Colby called the new US vision a “Nato 3.0”, adding: “There is nothing anti-European about this … That is not a retreat from Europe. It is, rather, an affirmation of strategic pragmatism”.

‘Appeasement and submission‘

Thursday’s meeting came after Trump had threatened to seize Greenland by force in January and made derogatory remarks about European soldiers in Afghanistan.

He later rowed back, but had still caused serious offence among European leaders and the general public, which stood quite at odds with Rutte’s humour.

Rutte had, additionally, said on Thursday that Nato was stronger than before Trump came along, as Trump had coerced allies into spending more on defence.

But for their part, a group of 16 former US ambassadors and Nato commanders also voiced worries on Trump’s attitude in an open letter the same day.

“Nato is not an act of American generosity … [but] the cornerstone of United States national security,” they said.

Going back to January, Trump had claimed the US needed Greenland on grounds of new threats to the Danish territory by Russia and China.

But some in Europe feared that he wanted it for an ego trip — to go down in history for expanding US territory, the same way that Putin wanted to expand Russia.

“We don’t have the same euphoria [on Greenland] — Trump is still saying he can do what he wants with the island,” Italian leftwing MEP Danilo Della Valle told Rutte in an EU Parliament hearing on 26 January.

Della Valle, and others, warned that Rutte’s “strategy of appeasement and submissiveness”, would not deter the US leader.

Greenland war games

Nato, on Wednesday, also unveiled plans for a future Arctic security mission in a bid to keep Trump happy.

Asked if Nato had ever war-gamed a Greenland invasion by a hostile foreign power, a Nato official told EUobserver: “Nato conducts wargaming on a regular basis … we never disclose additional details, for operational and security reasons”.

But a former senior Nato official from 1980 to 2018, Jamie Shea, told EUobserver: “I never came across such a war game [on Greenland] during my time at Nato”.

Russia has reopened some Cold War-era bases in the Arctic, but Shea added: “Even during the Cold War … Greenland was mainly of interest because of the missiles flying over it rather than what would happen on land.”

Kari Aga Myklebost, a professor of Russian history at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, also told this website: “Russia has not displayed military ambitions concerning Greenland, neither historically nor today”.

It was unlikely to escalate tension on Greenland or on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago “because this could harm ongoing Russian efforts to draw the US into economic deals in Russia”, she added.

“Russia’s tactics were manipulation, not confrontation, or overt competition [with Trump],” Myklebost said.

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US under secretary of war Elbridge Colby (l) with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte in Brussels on 12 February (Source: Nato)

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Author Bio

Andrew Rettman is EUobserver’s foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.

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