By Marcus Walker in Rome and David Luhnow in London
President Trump's demands that Denmark hand over Greenland to the U.S. or risk a trade war and possible military action is confronting Europe with the unthinkable: Its major ally for more than 70 years has turned into one of its most urgent threats.
The collapse of trust in the U.S. over the past year among the European public and its leaders is forcing the continent to re-examine its reliance -- from security to trade -- on America under an unpredictable Trump administration that has expressed an antipathy toward Europe and is now insisting on taking an ally's territory.
Most governments in Europe are seeking to de-escalate the confrontation and want to put off the day when they decouple the region's security and economy from the U.S. The cost of replacing the U.S.'s role as a military power in the region, while potentially also scaling back trade and investment to reduce risks, looks prohibitive for European countries that are struggling with low economic growth and overstretched government finances.
Even if a compromise is found on Greenland, however, a sense is spreading in Europe that the historically unique friendship known as the West will never be the same again. The showdown, on top of other tensions with Trump, is bringing home to many in Europe that the relationship has turned toxic.
"Donald Trump has destroyed Western cohesion," said Carlo Calenda, a centrist Italian senator and longtime Atlanticist who now argues the Trump administration is a threat to Europe's democracies. "Europe needs to make itself impermeable to every interference" by outside powers, whether the U.S. or Russia, he said. But so far, he said, "the Europeans don't have the strength."
Europe has understood for years that it needs to do more for its own security -- and it has begun rearming, prompted both by U.S. pressure and by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But until this past year, Europe's capitals were aiming for a more equal partnership with Washington within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Now they are watching the future of that partnership crumble.
"This past weekend felt like a turning point," said Rachel Ellehuus, the director general of the London-based defense-studies think tank Royal United Services Institute and a former top U.S. adviser in NATO. Ellehuus said it was remarkable to see thousands of people in both Greenland and Denmark, long among the U.S.'s closest allies, protesting the U.S.'s actions.
Breaking up would be hard for the U.S., too. NATO has given Washington political influence across Europe and a network of bases that helps American power projection worldwide. European countries are also some of the biggest customers for U.S. defense companies, as well as one of the U.S.'s most important partners for trade and investment more broadly. Ellehuus said she expects Europe to now rely more heavily on its own defense companies to rearm.
From economics to security, the relationship between the U.S. and Europe is one of the closest and deepest that the world has ever seen, so unwinding it won't happen quickly. Some analysts also say the alliance has survived other crises in the past, including being on different sides in the crisis over the Suez Canal in the 1950s.
"I think in a few weeks, this will all be solved," said Matthew Kroenig, vice president of the Atlantic Council think tank. While the threat to use military force against a NATO ally is unprecedented, Trump often escalates to strike a deal and often backs down when there is real pushback. Both sides, Kroenig said, will realize they have more to lose than gain from confrontation.
If not, expect Europe to fight back. For all Europe's desire to defuse the Greenland dispute, "there is a strong sense that a line has to be drawn," said Mujtaba Rahman, head of Europe at political-risk consulting firm Eurasia Group. "The U.S. acquiring Greenland through hostile means -- either military or economic coercion -- would be unacceptable, and would set a very dangerous precedent," he said.
European diplomats describe the relationship with the White House as descending into the purely transactional. They say that on Greenland, creative solutions could potentially be found but are currently impossible given Trump's threats and demands and uncertainty over why he really wants control of the island. Keeping heads down and avoiding confrontation with Trump is no longer working, diplomats say, making some European pushback necessary.
Martin Jacob, a trade and tax expert at IESE Business School in Spain, said increasing numbers of Europeans are willing to pay an economic price if a trade war breaks out over Greenland, he said. There is also the sense Trump needs to be confronted or he won't stop. "What's next, Iceland?" he said.
A YouGov poll on Monday showed 67% of Brits back retaliatory tariffs if Trump goes ahead with additional tariffs on European allies, with only 14% opposed. Even Europe's right-wing antiestablishment parties, who are Trump's natural allies on the continent, have criticized Trump's threats, including British populist Nigel Farage.
The past year has seen Vice President JD Vance lambasting European allies at a security conference in Munich, Vance and Trump humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, Trump threatening European countries repeatedly with tariffs and the White House pushing to end the Russia-Ukraine war on terms favorable to Moscow while attacking European allies in its new national-security strategy.
For much of this year, White House officials have spoken of NATO as if it were a foreign entity -- rather than an alliance that the U.S. built and leads. The Ukraine peace plan proposed by the Trump administration cast the U.S. as a mediator between NATO and Russia.
"NATO, for Europeans, was a religion. It led to Europeans not being serious about defense. Suddenly we understand that if American commitment to European allies is not real, then no treaty is going to defend you," said Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and head of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a think tank in Sofia, Bulgaria.
"We are living in revolutionary times," said Krastev. "You can see the shock of Europe's political elites. In Europe, conversation is going to be that, at some point, we will be decoupling from the U.S., and what does that mean?"
What makes the growing alienation from Trump's America harder for Europe to bear is that the rest of global geopolitics offers little respite.
China has turned from a lucrative customer for Europe into an industrial steamroller that threatens to crush Europe's manufacturing sectors, from cars to machinery. Russia under President Vladimir Putin is trying not only to subjugate Ukraine but to rewrite the ending of the Cold War and rebuild Russia's sphere of influence in Europe's east.
Increasingly squeezed between the world's more muscular powers, Europe is trying to compensate by deepening its trade links with Latin America as well as Asian democracies.
Ukraine's prospects for surviving Russia's invasion risk falling into the widening gulf between the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. has greatly reduced aid for Kyiv since Trump returned to the White House, but it continues to provide crucial intelligence as well as some military supplies.
There is deep concern among European officials that Trump might threaten to turn his back entirely on Ukraine to pressure Europe on Greenland, diplomats say. They say that since Trump has escalated his threats on Greenland in the past couple of weeks, there has been next to no progress on hammering out the U.S. role in security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump is once again blaming Ukraine for blocking his efforts to end the war.
Moscow must be enjoying the rise in U.S.-European tensions, say many veterans of the Atlantic alliance.
"Even more important and strategic for Putin than the Donbas and all of Ukraine is the longstanding Russian objective to divide the trans-Atlantic alliance. So recent U.S. actions that break the cohesion and trust within NATO are a gift to Putin," said Doug Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and retired U.S. Army lieutenant general.
For Europe, the cost of decoupling from the U.S. would go far beyond money. The region is having to rethink its whole relationship with power, including military force. After two disastrous world wars devastated the continent in the first half of the 20th century, many European countries reprogrammed their political identities to emphasize rules and compromises over muscle-flexing.
The European Union, with its cumbersome culture of consensus-building and give-and-take, was the most elaborate expression of that political way of life. Now the continent that hoped to overcome raw-power politics is watching the wider world revert to it.
"The EU was founded when the world was flat," said Calenda, referring to the years of peak optimism that globalization would create a level playing field for people, businesses and nations. "During the end-of-history years, you could be slow, inclusive and believe that force doesn't matter. Not any more."
While many European leaders continue to pay lip service to the need for agreement with the U.S. and the importance of NATO, public opinion in Europe was already showing signs of a backlash against America before Trump increased his pressure over Greenland.
Only 16% of Europeans view the U.S. as an ally that shares the same values, down from 21% in 2024, according to a recent survey conducted in November by the European Council on Foreign Relations, an international think tank.
The decline in the U.K., long the closest U.S. ally in Europe, was stark: down to 25%, from 37% a year earlier.
Europeans also have their pride and don't like to see their countries being pushed around, said Jérémie Gallon, a French foreign-affairs expert and head of Europe for trade-and-policy consulting firm McLarty Associates.
"People are starting to feel that the sense of humiliation, and vassalization, is at a point that is unacceptable," he said.
Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com and David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 19, 2026 18:00 ET (23:00 GMT)
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