Why Greenland Could Spur Europe’s Digital Awakening

Commentary by Emily Benson

Published January 14, 2026

Following U.S. action in Venezuela that toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, international attention has moved to another region long coveted by Trump: Greenland. U.S. threats to acquire Greenland are more than rhetorical posturing.

President Trump has been interested in Greenland at least since 2019, when he discussed acquiring the territory with advisers and publicly expressed his desire for it. Despite consistent messaging from the U.S. president on Greenland, Europe has failed to take the ongoing White House push for territorial expansion seriously. In December 2025, President Trump appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, saying, "We have to have it." This decision led to a strong rebuke by Danish leadership, which noted that "territorial integrity must be respected." White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has doubled down on how easy acquiring Greenland would be, claiming there would be no need for U.S. military intervention because "nobody's going to fight the U.S. over the future of Greenland."

Despite clear and transparent messaging from the administration, Europe has been slow to mount a collective response. As it contemplates how to respond to the United States' threat to take NATO territory, Europe will inevitably turn to technology. U.S. threats to Greenland will accelerate the European Union's drive to de-risk from U.S. technology. While military action remains unlikely, the Trump administration's aggressive posture toward Greenland is an additional catalyst for Europe's digital sovereignty movement and could significantly impact the long-term market share of U.S. companies across Europe.

Strategic Underpinnings of U.S. Action
Greenland holds strategic value in its potential. It contains major untapped reserves of critical minerals, which are of great interest to the United States and Europe, as they try to wean themselves off of reliance on China for critical inputs. RESourceEU, unveiled alongside the recently updated European Economic Security Strategy, specifically earmarks funds for critical mineral projects in Greenland. Yet most of these deposits are not currently viable economically because extraction remains challenging, if not impossible. As ice melt accelerates, these deposits could become more accessible, but critical minerals for now are little more than a distraction from hard power dynamics.

More immediately, Greenland's vast Arctic coastline gives it growing strategic importance. The United States has grown anxious that additional ice melt will encourage China to expand shipping lines in the Arctic, presenting new commercial and military risks, potentially resulting in an "Arctic Silk Road." In 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and others warned that China had expanded its Arctic container shipping with a record of 14 container ship voyages-an uptick but far from the tens of thousands of vessels that transit the Suez and Panama Canals each year. The true extent of Chinese activity in the region is hotly contested. Winter conditions have not made full passage from East Asia easier, and Russia does not maintain functional search and rescue missions in the far North, discouraging vessels from traversing the Russian coastline.

Aside from the desire to police international shipping routes, U.S. interests in Greenland relate primarily to military affairs and U.S. national security. China and Russia have held joint military drills in the region, and decades of regional military buildup are palpable. Russia's northern fleet, a core part of Russia's nuclear deterrent, is stationed on the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic. The U.S. desire for expanded presence in the region comes alongside new fears about warfare conducted via autonomous subsea vehicles, including those with nuclear weapons launch capabilities, such as Russia's Poseidon tests. Ice melt will enable better intelligence collection via satellite imagery, potentially exposing a fuller extent of regional military ambitions.

In short, climate change is opening the Arctic to more commercial activity, from shipping to mining, which is in turn attracting the attention of the world's major powers, making it a region of greater geopolitical focus and competition. Indeed, President Trump said in December 2025, "We need Greenland for national security, not minerals."

And yet, there is little need for the United States to possess Greenland for its security. The United States had roughly 15,000 troops and numerous bases in Greenland during the Cold War, and now it has just 150 troops and one base. Should the United States want to increase its presence, it is at liberty to do so under the agreement it has with Denmark. Thus, despite the growing importance of Arctic security, the Trump administration's focus on possessing the Arctic strikes Europeans as detached from any security rationale and being driven by an imperialist approach.

Europe's Digital Reckoning and the Sovereignty Imperative
The Trump administration's hard-power and extractive approach to geopolitics has already convinced European governments they must urgently de-risk from U.S. technology providers, a prospect few in Washington seem to take seriously. Recognizing the changing nature of digital interconnectedness and associated threats, European governments are pursuing digital sovereignty to insulate critical services from disruptions and espionage alike and to develop technology stacks governable by domestic rules with fewer diplomatic complications.

Short on European alternatives, some governments have instead begun to diversify their set of cloud services so that they rely not on one single cloud service provider but a mix of mostly American cloud service giants plus EU firms. Denmark's decision to pursue open-source alternatives following service disruptions is likely just the beginning. In 2025, the European Union unveiled ambitious plans to build AI gigafactories and is set to accelerate indigenous semiconductor production through a potential CHIPS Act 2.0.

EU sovereignty discussions also coincide with the Trump administration's ongoing attempts to seek EU regulatory concessions on its Digital Decade package. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has linked relief on steel and other tariffs to EU acquiescence on digital regulation. More dramatically, the Department of State sanctioned former European Commissioner Thierry Breton and other EU officials over alleged online censorship, a move telegraphed months in advance as a clear warning. That EU officials did not take these threats seriously far in advance should serve as a stark reminder that the Trump administration is very transparent in its policy objectives: If the United States threatens certain actions, believe them the first time.

The budding diplomatic crisis over Greenland has further intensified Europe's digital sovereignty concerns, transforming them from abstract policy debates into urgent strategic imperatives. As U.S. and EU views on the future of digital governance continue to grow apart, what began as divergent opinions over civil liberties and data security has become a set of strategic imperatives that could impact multiple domains, from electrical grid continuity to the storage of government files. If Russian tanks cross the border into Europe, some infrastructure will be damaged. On the other hand, if a cloud service outage impacts an entire country, all hospitals could go offline. Other recent incidents have hardened European attitudes about the trustworthiness of U.S. technology. For example, nonconsensual AI-generated imagery on X, formerly Twitter, has fueled consumer and government skepticism of U.S. social media platforms.

For their part, U.S. tech companies have demonstrated an eagerness to maintain market share and are willing to build bespoke products to meet foreign government needs. This includes, for example, the deployment of Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped solution in Germany, where Google will service sensitive German military and government needs. Bespoke offerings have assuaged some member state governments' concerns, but other European parties are beginning to look anew at existing and future contracts with foreign providers.

The Path Ahead
There is an assumption in the United States that Europe is incapable of reversing its dependence on U.S. technology, therefore giving the United States significant leverage. However, U.S. technology companies have significantly benefited from the benign perception of dependence on the United States. It has been assumed that if Europe could be reliant on the United States for defense, why not also for tech? Tech companies should look at the sizable European investments in defense and Europe's race for greater strategic autonomy with some alarm. If Europe determines it cannot rely on the United States for its security, it may also decide it cannot rely on U.S. tech.

The fear over Greenland could spur the European Union and its member states to de-risk from U.S. technology. De-risking and pushing back could include stiffer fines on U.S. companies and subsidies or other affirmative inducements for domestic European alternatives. Worse yet for U.S. companies would be if the European Union were to adopt some of the pointier sides of the U.S. trade and investment toolkit, as China has repeatedly done. This includes export restrictions on critical inputs, the denial of export licenses for software, outbound investment rules to curtail European participation in U.S. funds, or the development of an instrument similar to the foreign direct product rule or Chinese equivalent, which affords governments tremendous authority over global supply chains.

Instead of aiming for a more abrupt decoupling, the European Union could focus its efforts on determining where geopolitical risks are most acute and where risks do not merit immediate action. Major changes are not necessary across the entire stack and for every single end-use. For example, vacation bookings do not need to be sovereign or air-gapped, whereas military services might need to be. The European Union could determine that it needs limited sovereign compute for core government services, ranging from cloud storage for government to technologies supporting public health care.

It is unlikely that the European Union would determine it needs to follow the United States in vying for reach artificial general intelligence, a resource-intensive endeavor largely associated with U.S.-China tech competition. Instead, the European Union might conclude that diversifying its basket of goods and services is most viable. In the short-term, diversification could entail spreading services across several U.S. providers, while slowly integrating European players as capacity grows. Although the loss of U.S. market share might be limited at first, this approach could seriously squeeze U.S. technology providers over the long run, particularly if coupled with lasting changes in European consumer sentiment about the reliability of the United States as a partner.

Another factor the European Union could add to bolster its tech sovereignty credibility is to retool tech sector financing. Europe has already undertaken serious efforts to rework the way it underwrites defense spending, and lessons learned in that domain could easily transfer to consumer and dual-use technologies. After evaluating parts of the stack that do deserve diversification and potential sovereign buildout, the European Union could also turn to emerging U.S. models for creative financing. Under the Trump administration, the United States offers a panoply of options, from standing up new equity markets for economic security purposes, taking equity stakes in critical companies, or inking offtake agreements to induce additional U.S. domestic capacity in a given sector.

Full-scale decoupling from the United States remains highly unlikely and would be painful and expensive, given the decades-long advantage U.S. providers maintain in key technologies like advanced semiconductors and cloud services. However, recent examples of European decoupling from Russian gas and Chinese decoupling from U.S. semiconductor technologies demonstrate that sufficiently motivated large markets can mitigate deep strategic dependencies. Sustained EU tech de-risking could cause U.S. market share in the European Union to atrophy, reducing opportunities in a bloc with 450 million people and a GDP of over $22 trillion.

Conclusion
Europe has the agency to change the current tech dynamic. What steps Europe takes next could catapult it into a geopolitical powerhouse built on European ingenuity, or it could flounder under the weight of burdensome processes and misallocated investments. But the evolving diplomatic row over Greenland has crystallized a fundamental shift: Europe's push for digital sovereignty has become a core component of European strategic independence, driven by the sobering recognition that alliance relationships built over decades are only as strong as the laws that underpin them.

Emily Benson is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Programs & Projects

Commentary by Emily Benson and Federico Steinberg - December 4, 2025