Trump's Most Dangerous Obsession [View all]

Trump’s Most Dangerous Obsession
His irrational fixation with Greenland could lead to global conflict.

By Tom Nichols
January 14, 2026, 2:47 PM ET

Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. (He seems to hate dogs, for example, but no one is forcing him to adopt one.) Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.

But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.

Greenland, of course, is important to the security of the United States—as it is to the entire Atlantic community and to the free world itself. This fact might be new to Trump, but Western strategists have known it for a century or more, which is why the United States has had a military presence in Greenland for decades.

During the Cold War, America and its allies were determined to defend the sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom (often referred to at the time as the “GIUK” gap), the North Atlantic passages through which the Soviet Union could have sent submarines from its Arctic bases toward NATO convoys trying to reach Europe. America and Denmark have always worked closely in the Arctic region, and even once had a secret “gentlemen’s agreement” under which Denmark declared Greenland off-limits for the stationing of nuclear weapons, but would look the other way so long as the United States kept the presence of any such weapons quiet and unacknowledged. (The U.S. Air Force, in a rather flexible reading of that agreement, flew nuclear-armed B-52 bomber patrols over Greenland; one of them crashed and scattered radioactive debris on the island in 1968.)
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-greenland-risk-global-conflict/685616/?gift=_IXYI0Wrwnxuvm7JZ0fMfHIS37bmW6qvKfwBJXB4_F0