Ben Taub

The Danes also carried fresh blood packs in case of casualties and were operating under standing orders that were reiterated to them that they should shoot at any invading forces.

One thing to be really clear of, though, is that they don't have any concrete evidence of a planned US attack.

There was no direct intelligence that this was likely to happen.

It was more contextual.

And in the aftermath of Venezuela, it seemed like this, as Trump's folks frame it, this extension of the Monroe Doctrine, which was really now looking at as a kind of like conquering strategy all over the Western Hemisphere, was something that would put them in the target sites.

And so as far as the Europeans were concerned, and this is as one senior European source who was involved with the planning put it to me, the idea was to raise the cost.

As in explicitly, if the United States is going to invade Greenland, they're going to have to kill European troops to do so.

And probably the Americans would succeed.

at taking over Greenland.

They have the military capacity to do so.

The Europeans didn't doubt that, but they would actually fight and they would force them to shoot them and they would force them to kill them.

And this was the gamble that doing so would sort of raise the cost politically as well for Trump and the White House in terms of planning for something like this.

It would make it difficult to do the quick and dirty annexation, as a Danish military intelligence officer put it to me.

It would make it something that would be potentially very, very complicated and unpalatable in terms of domestic politics, where obviously going to war with Europe is the kind of thing that could escalate to impeachment very quickly in a way that going to war with Iran did not.

And so that was the message they intended to send.

He absolutely understood the message of force.

And his response was to announce that every European nation that had deployed troops to Greenland would face new tariffs.

At first, 10%.

And then he added that if by June 1st, the United States did not reach a deal for what he called the complete and total purchase of Greenland by that date, he said, then they would rise to 25%.

Later, Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, spoke to Trump a few days later at Davos, and he diffused the situation and Trump rolled back these tariff threats and said that for now, military options were off the table.