Last week, NATO countries asked the alliance to look into options for securing the Arctic, including shifting more military assets to the region and holding more military exercises in Greenland’s vicinity. The U.K. and Germany are reportedly in talks to send troops to the self-ruling Danish territory in an attempt to assuage Washington’s concerns.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen on Monday also said the territory would “increase its efforts to ensure that the defense of Greenland takes place under the auspices of NATO.”
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, speaking alongside Rutte, said that “allies have to respect each other, including the U.S. as the largest NATO member.”
But Rutte also heaped praise on the U.S. president, underscoring the near-impossible tightrope he continues to tread as he attempts to speak for all 32 members of the alliance.
“Donald Trump is doing the right things for NATO by encouraging us all to spend more to equalize this,” he said, referencing the alliance’s defense spending target of 5 percent of GDP, agreed last year after intense pressure from Trump. “As [NATO] secretary-general, it is my role to make sure that the whole of the alliance is as secure and safe as possible,” he said.
NATO has previously survived the 1974 Turkish invasion of Greek-allied Cyprus, a series of naval confrontations between the U.K. and Iceland over cod and several territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey climaxing in 1987. But an outright attack by its biggest and most well-armed member against another would be unprecedented.
“No provision [in the alliance’s 1949 founding treaty] envisions an attack on one NATO ally by another one,” said one NATO diplomat, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. It would mean “the end of the alliance,” they added.