Name: What a US Invasion of Greenland Would Actually Look Like
Uploaded: 2026-01-30T17:08:38.000Z
Duration: 40 min 58 s
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There is unfortunately an increasing chance of a war happening between Denmark and the United States, a sentence that you would have said was insane and completely unrealistic just a couple of years ago.

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The recent escalation in tensions began just Hours after the U.S.

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military raided Venezuela and seized that country's president, when Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump's immigration and domestic policies, tweeted out an image of Greenland covered in the American flag with a caption ominously reading soon in all capitals.

At nearly the same time, Trump himself, while aboard Air Force One, insisted that America needed Greenland from the standpoint of national security.

Trump has repeatedly said over the past few weeks that anything less than full American control over Greenland is completely unacceptable to him and that deploying military force to seize the island isn't off the table.

On 14 January, the Danish Foreign minister and his Greenlandic counterpart met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D.

vance in Washington to discuss the status of Greenland, which ended with the Danish foreign minister leaving exasperated and convinced that Trump fully intends to conquer Greenland by any means necessary.

Shortly afterwards, eight European countries sent a small token force of military personnel to Greenland to conduct joint exercises with the Danes on the island and to send a message of solidarity against the United States, which Trump responded to with fury.

A couple of days later, on the 17th of January, he he announced that he would be implementing new tariffs of 10% on all goods exported to the US by the European countries who sent their troops to Greenland plus Denmark, and

that the rate would increase further to 25% on each of them by 1 June unless they relented and agreed to support America's desire to purchase Greenland, in which case the new tariffs would be dropped.

Denmark and Greenland's position throughout this whole dispute has repeatedly been that Greenland is not for sale, no matter what the price on offer is.

While the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened that they will do whatever it takes to acquire Greenland, including using military force through an invasion, if they continue refusing.

Trump has since seemingly walked back some of these threats, though while speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Trump for the first time said that he was dropping his military threat to seize Greenland through force.

Nonetheless, he said that he was still committed to acquiring Greenland through a purchase and complained that it had been a historical mistake for the United States to have returned Greenland back to Denmark after the Second World War, when the US Occupied the island for a few years during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

Most recently, Trump has claimed that he has reached a compromise deal with NATO in which smaller pockets of territory in Greenland around U.S.

military based sites will effectively be ceded and transferred over to American sovereignty, an agreement that is supposedly being modeled on the Sovereign Base Agreement in Cyprus, where the UK carved out two territories around their own military bases on the island in 1960 that are recognized sovereign British territories beyond the authority of the government in Cyprus.

Denmark, however, has stated that they have rejected this agreement and that their position remains that no territory in Greenland will be ceded under any circumstances.

Trump, ever unpredictable, may always return back to Greenland with his pressure tactics and threats again in the future.

So what was previously an unthinkable question now actually has to be what would actually happen if the United States really did launch an invasion and occupied Greenland?

Allow me to do my best to explain and speculate to the best of my abilities.

First of all, if the US actually did launch an invasion of Greenland, the operation to occupy and control it would be fairly simple and straightforward.

Denmark, who controls Greenland as a self governing autonomous territory, has very few actual defenses on the island.

There are usually only about 150 Danish military and civilian personnel who work across six small military facilities on the island, although Denmark has recently announced that they will be deploying 1,000 combat ready troops to the island in light of America's threats.

Nonetheless, Denmark has placed no fighter aircraft, missile defenses or heavy ground forces on Greenland of any kind that could offer up any sort of meaningful resistance to a committed American invasion force.

Denmark's tiny military presence on the island usually consists only of small patrol units and limited surveillance assets, which ironically, is because Denmark has historically relied on the much more powerful United States to defend Greenland instead.

Greenland is a geographically massive territory, roughly the same size as the entire eastern time zone of the United States.

But it's also incredibly sparsely populated, home to fewer than 57,000 people, most of whom are Greenlandic Inuits by ethnicity.

Because of that, there are very few population centers across the island to be concerned with taking over during an invasion scenario.

Greenland's capital and largest city, Nook, is home to only around 20,000 people, which is already more than a third of the entire island's population, all concentrated right there, while everywhere else are basically small settlements.

An American invasion of Greenland wouldn't look anything at all like other modern invasions in Ukraine or Iraq, or even like the US military raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

There would not be any contested beach landings or large scale kinetic combat operations.

Instead, American invasion forces would be focused on securing control over Greenland's principal infrastructure and access points as rapidly as possible, US military transport planes would land at the already existing US military base in Greenland at Petufik, while others would land at Greenland's handful of major settlements.

Fighter aircraft would secure Greenland's airspace, while the navy would secure the possible maritime approaches.

The troops on the ground would deploy to quickly capture and secure the island's port ports, airfields, and

communications systems to deny access to Greenland from reinforcements coming from Europe in an operation that would kind of resemble Russia's capture of Crimea in 2014, and

doing so wouldn't require a large invasion force like what was recently deployed to Venezuela.

Most military theorists argue that in order to successfully occupy and hold a territory and combat the insurgency from the local population in the territory, you need a ratio of about 20 to 25 occupying soldiers per 1000 residents to conduct counterinsurgency operations.

That implies that in order to occupy and hold Greenland and suppress an insurgency from the local population, the American invasion force would realistically only need to consist of between 1,140 and 1,425 soldiers, which is only a fraction of the armed force that the US assembled off the coast of Venezuela before the operation was launched that seized Maduro.

Realistically, when considering that Denmark might have up to 1,000 soldiers present in Greenland for defense like, the US would probably not need to commit any more than 10,000 of their own soldiers to the initial invasion and occupation of Greenland.

With no air defenses, no fighter aircraft, and

no heavy ground forces to worry about in Greenland, a lightning and determined US operation to seize control over the island would likely be successful, and

it would probably also involve minimal bloodshed, even with Denmark's recent but still modest and under equipped deployments.

Indeed, the local Greenlandic opposition would no doubt vehemently resist the whole operation.

According to a poll in 2025 that was conducted by a Danish paper, nearly 85% of Greenland's population reject the idea of joining the United States.

There would be virtually universal protest and resistance and probably even initial insurgent activities against the invasion.

But they are so few in number and so lightly armed that that any substantial resistance couldn't possibly last for very long.

Take the example of Argentina's invasion and occupation of the Falkland Islands in 1982 in what I believe would be the most similar modern historical comparison to this.

Back then, Argentina invaded and occupied the British controlled Falkland Islands with an initial force of about 2,000 soldiers and marines who were able to rapidly overpower the tiny British population on the islands, who only numbered around 2,000 themselves.

Themselves, only 68 Royal Marines were present on the islands to resist the initial 2000 strong Argentine invasion force, and

so their capability to resist them was very limited.

They initially fought back and killed one of the invading Argentine soldiers, but

other than that, they were ordered to avoid heavy casualties and quickly surrendered within hours.

A similar course of events would almost certainly take place during a hypothetical U.S. invasion of Greenland today.

The initial military takeover of the island would be fairly easy and well within the capabilities of the United States.

But what would come afterwards would be absolutely catastrophic from an economic, geopolitical, and political perspective.

During an interview with CNN in early January, Stephen Miller exclaimed that nobody would fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

Indeed, this was the exact same belief that drove Argentina to invade and occupy the Falkland Islands in 1982.

The assumption that the Falkland Islands weren't actually important enough to the British to really start a war over.

In their case, Argentina grossly miscalculated Britain's willingness to defend their own territory, no matter how far away from the mainland and sparsely populated, which triggered a ferocious British counteroffensive that drove them out of the islands, killed hundreds of soldiers, and

even resulted in the collapse of their government.

In that case, however, British Britain's military capabilities far exceeded those of Argentina, which of course influenced their decision to counterattack.

During a US invasion of Greenland scenario, though, the opposite situation would be in place.

Because America's military capabilities utterly dwarf those of Denmark and indeed even the whole of Europe combined, the budget of the US military is nearly 100 times larger than the Danish military's budget is.

While the US military spending alone makes up around 2/3 of all of NATO's collective military spending put together, meaning that the US spends roughly twice as much on its military as every single other country in NATO does combined.

Unlike during the Argentine invasion of the Falkland scenario, when Britain realistically could consider a military response to retake the islands, Denmark and even the rest of Europe would simply not have the same option to work with.

almost certainly would, immediately take every possible political avenue available to protest against America's invasion and occupation.

Politically, while Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it is not itself a member of the EU or considered EU territory.

Because of that legal distinction, it's ambiguous and unclear if the EU's mutual defense clause would actually be able to be triggered over a Greenland invasion.

But since Greenland is actually a part of NATO, NATO's mutual defense clause would be much more legally concrete than the EU's would be.

So right away, Denmark would argue that America's invasion of its sovereign territory in Greenland directly violated Article 5 of NATO's founding treaties, which asserts that an armed attack against the territory of one NATO member shall be considered an armed attack against all of the other members as well.

The problem with this direction is that NATO as an organization was never founded with the belief that one of the alliance's members would blatantly attack another one.

And so there's no internal mechanism within NATO that's built to handle a situation like this.

It's important to state that NATO has experienced significant internal military tensions between its members in the past.

Between the 1950s and 70s, the UK and Iceland engaged in the so called cod wars over fishing rights in the North Atlantic that culminated with Icelandic ships actually opening fire on British ships in 1975 and Iceland's threat that it would even withdraw from NATO entirely before the crisis was diffused diplomatically in the 1990s and 2000s.

During NATO's expansion east, there were significant concerns at the time about the renewal of border disputes concerning Hungary and the large Hungarian majority territories in neighboring Romania and Slovakia.

And most critically of all, there has been the long running military confrontation between Greece and Turkey, who until recently were considered the most likely two NATO countries to go to war with each other.

Turkey and Greece both joined NATO in the 1950s, but

in 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus and entered into direct conflict with Greek troops who were present there, after which Greece withdrew from NATO's Integrated Military Command.

For the next six, six years in protest, both sides maintained extensive and bitter maritime disputes against each other in the aegean Sea.

In 1996, a great fighter aircraft even shot down a Turkish fighter over the Aegean Sea and killed its Turkish pilot.

And as recently as 2020, a Turkish warship locked its fire control radar system onto a French frigate in the Eastern Mediterranean during boiling tensions over the civil war in Libya.

Ultimately, none of these incidents between NATO members caused any long lasting impact.

But a full on invasion by the United States into the sovereign territory of another NATO member would make all of these previous incidents seem like child's play by comparison.

Denmark would argue to the North Atlantic Council, NATO's decision making body, that the United States had directly violated Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

The problem is that in order for the North Atlantic Council to actually activate Article 5, it requires the universal consensus of all 32 of the NATO allied members.

If any one of the NATO allies refuses to give its approval to the Council for an Article 5 violation, then there won't be a consensus and Article 5 won't be formally triggered.

This essentially gives any NATO member a de facto veto power over the triggering of Article 5 by the Council by simply refusing to give its approval.

And in this scenario, the United States would almost certainly do this and block the Article 5 clause from being formally activated in response to its own invasion.

Even if every single other NATO member approved of it.

NATO in effect would become paralyzed and trapped by the invasion and would not be capable of formally responding to it as a collective organization.

This is why many analysts and politicians say that a U.S.

invasion of Greenland would immediately spell the death of NATO as an organization, including Denmark's own Prime Minister Mehdi Frederiksen.

The United States is the fundamental core of NATO as an organization.

Not only does the US alone make up 2/3 of NATO's collective military spending, but

for more than 3/4 of a century now, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the second highest ranking position within the alliance, has always been held by an American general, including today.

This commander is responsible for drafting up NATO's defense plans for Europe, including Greenland.

And they've consequently always assumed a high degree of U.S. military involvement.

military officers are deeply interconnected throughout every major NATO command, responding through NATO, an organization that is dominated by the US against armed US Aggression, will simply not be possible.

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What a US Invasion of Greenland Would Actually Look Like

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