So, the troops will remain in their garrisons, for now. The Greenland episode might not have ended in crisis, but it has ended an illusion.
President Donald Trump announced at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos that the US would not use military force to secure Greenland. Nor would Washington impose new tariffs, as previously threatened, on some European countries – ‘for now’. Talk of a compromise ‘framework of a future deal’ began circulating shortly afterwards.
Whatever comes of that, the president has lowered the temperature without fundamentally altering the underlying power dynamic. The immediate threat was paused, and the military option is now off the table. Until it is back.
The method, however, remains.
In his press conference, Trump framed Greenland as a matter of strategic necessity and European resistance as a problem to be managed rather than accommodated. For Europe, this distinction matters less than it might appear.
The question is no longer whether an escalation will occur, over Greenland again or another issue. It likely will, in some form or another. The question is how the European Union (EU) reacts to the fact that coercion seems to have been normalized as a legitimate tool inside the transatlantic relationship.
Greenland as signal, not episode
The US has long viewed Greenland as strategically vital, for missile defence, Arctic access and other reasons. What unsettled European capitals was not that interest, but Donald Trump’s willingness to use tariffs and market access to force European acquiescence over territory belonging to an EU member state. Those threats may have been temporarily suspended, but the signal remains intact. Something in the Transatlantic relationship is irreparably broken.
From a European perspective, these events mirror precisely the behaviour the EU has sought to deter from external actors. The Anti-Coercion Instrument, which entered into force in December 2023, was designed for such situations, in which economic pressure is used to force political change. That it may now apply to the US is no legal incongruity; it is a geopolitical one.
If Greenland can be treated as negotiable under pressure, the line between alliance management and coercive bargaining becomes uncomfortably thin.
Strategic autonomy, fast-tracked…
The Greenland episode has accelerated something that had long been moving too slowly. It has made clear that the EU remains structurally exposed to pressure from its closest ally – and that US pressure may be applied in many ways without crossing the threshold of force.
That is why the sense of urgency has intensified rather than dissipated. The fact that military options are off the table should not reassure European capitals; it is merely a narrow and temporary escape that only sharpens the lesson. Power is being exercised through economic leverage, not tanks, and in that domain the asymmetry still favours Washington. Greenland demonstrated that US coercion can be applied, modulated, and withdrawn at will – leaving the EU reacting to Trump’s tempo rather than setting it.
Energy, of all areas, illustrates the EU’s lingering dependency on the US in a strategic sector crucial to its sovereignty. In 2025, the US accounted for nearly 60 per cent of EU Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) imports. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this was framed as transatlantic energy solidarity. It now appears, in strategic terms, as a new asymmetric dependence, one poised to fuel growing political vulnerability. In a benign relationship, that interdependence is more or less manageable – at least for a while. In a strained one, it becomes a liability, paving the way for even greater weakness tomorrow.
This is why EU ‘strategic autonomy’ is expected to be fast-tracked (leaving, incidentally, the United Kingdom naked). Not because Europe seeks distance from the US as such (although a growing number of EU citizens would not necessarily be against that). It is because deep integration with the US, without countervailing capacity, leaves the bloc open to pressure from an administration whose bellicosity grows by the day.
Greenland underscored that EU ‘strategic autonomy’ is no longer a matter of long-term ambition or brain-splitting institutional debate. For years, the concept was debated as a distant objective, if not overtly seen as a Trojan horse of the French geopolitical agenda. Donald Trump’s Greenland gambit – even softened at Davos – has transformed attitudes and compressed timelines. The issue is no longer whether Europe should reduce its vulnerability – even less so if Paris is really pulling the strings behind the scenes – but how quickly Europe can react without fracturing internally.
In that sense, the absence of US military escalation is not a comfort. It is a warning. The balance of power remains unfavourable to the EU precisely because pressure can be applied below the threshold of force, where Europe has traditionally been least prepared.
European voices, sharper than usual
European leaders at Davos were unusually explicit. President Emmanuel Macron speaking one day before Trump, argued that Europe must be ‘stronger and more autonomous’ if it wants to remain credible, even as he stressed continued cooperation with Washington.
Warning that Europe was entering a world increasingly shaped by ‘bullies’ and coercion, the French president insisted that the EU could no longer afford to be naïve about power.
Bart De Wever was blunter still, and perhaps even more explicit. Speaking on a panel about ‘Europe’s Future’, the Belgian prime minister warned that Europe could become the ‘slave’ of the US president if it does not urgently develop its ‘own technological platforms to build tomorrow’s prosperity’.
Interestingly enough, the Eurostack debate captures the same concern in structural terms: an EU reliant on systems it does not control is an EU permanently exposed to life-threatening risks.
The EU does have a nuclear weapon— it just did not know it did, until now…
But the EU is not without leverage. The Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) allows Brussels to respond to coercion with targeted countermeasures in areas such as services, procurement and investment – sectors where US firms are deeply exposed to the EU single market. In other words, the ACI provides the EU with the tool to weaponize, in its turn, others’ dependencies on its single market.