Appeals to observe international law are not enough, writes Financial TImes editorial board.
The Financial Times Editorial Board pubished an op-ed ‘How Europe should respond to Trump’s Greenland threats‘ on January 7, 2026, reflecting the paper’s institutional position.
The editorial argues that Donald Trump’s renewed threats to acquire Greenland represent a grave challenge to European security and to the transatlantic alliance itself. Even the suggestion that the US could use military force or economic pressure to take control of Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, would violate core principles of sovereignty and alliance trust.
The FT stresses that Greenland’s future must be decided by its own population, not coerced by a superpower, and warns that any unilateral US move would effectively end Nato and destabilize both the EU and Europe’s security relationship with Washington. While Europe depends heavily on the US for defence — particularly in Ukraine — the editorial insists that this dependence cannot justify submission.
“America’s European allies should make clear that any move that undermined Greenland’s and Denmark’s sovereignty would be a fundamental breach of the transatlantic alliance,” FT writes. “In Trump’s might-is-right world, Europe, too, needs to learn how to project what power it has.”
Rather than relying only on legal arguments or moral appeals, the FT calls for a “transactional” European response: maintaining solidarity with Denmark, offering greater European contributions to Arctic security, and clearly signaling that undermining Danish sovereignty would trigger economic and political retaliation. The piece concludes that Europe must adapt to Trump’s “might-is-right” worldview by learning to project its own power more assertively.
