Kissinger's Question Inverted: Distributed Power and Escalation Dominance in the Greenland Crisis

The alliance confronting President Trump's Greenland demands spans six EU members (Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland) plus two non-EU NATO allies (UK, Norway), creating the fragmentation that analysts have identified as Europe's weakness. President Trump's threat of 10 per cent tariffs rising to 25 per cent exploits this, targeting eight separate countries rather than "the EU" as a bloc. Standard Escalation Dominance theory suggests this should enable President Trump to separate individual states through bilateral pressure, fracturing collective response.

Henry Kissinger's question—"Who do I call if I want to call Europe?"—has epitomised this weakness for decades. The inability to identify a single decision-maker is reckoned to imply that Europe cannot act as a coherent entity. When unified responses determine escalation outcomes, this institutional labyrinth ought to have proved fatal. President Trump appears to weaponise this logic, imposing country-specific tariffs that exploit Europe's fragmented trade architecture. Moreover, there is a phone number to call: Copenhagen. Denmark, with Greenland's parliament, holds the ultimate decision on ceding the territory. Denmark's GDP (at less than 3% of the US level) probably cannot withstand punitive US tariffs plus military pressure in isolation. On paper then President Trump should possess Escalation Dominance against this single, vulnerable target.

Yet the Greenland crisis reveals a paradox: calling Copenhagen activates a distributed defence system that transforms Denmark's decision calculus. Other European nations hold an existential stake in Danish non-surrender. If Denmark can be coerced into ceding territory, the principle that European territory cannot be seized by external powers collapses in ways immediately apparent to the European public. What then of French Guiana, Spanish territories, or Polish borders facing Russia? As French President Macron wrote on X: "No intimidation or threat will influence us—neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations." The Greenland question becomes a referendum on European territorial integrity itself. This is precisely the point of European unity: without the capacity to defend member territory against coercion, some may ask what is the point of EU solidarity? 

The distributed architecture operates through multiple mechanisms that effectively embed Denmark's decision within a broader European security framework. European NATO members deployed troops to reinforce Greenland's security—not at Denmark's sole request, but as a collective decision. The eight nations issued a joint statement declaring they "stand in full solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland." France threatened activation of the Anti-Coercion Instrument restricting US access to the single market. The EU prepared €93bn in retaliatory tariffs. This creates a counter-pressure structure: Denmark's capacity to resist equals Denmark's resources plus network resources, whilst cost to President Trump equals not merely pressuring Denmark but confronting collective European retaliation.

Denmark's decision is embedded in this architecture in ways that fundamentally alter the bilateral pressure President Trump attempts to exert. Visible European solidarity raises domestic political costs of surrender for the Danish government; thousands of Danes protested American threats fortified by the knowledge that Denmark stands backed by Europe. As Danish MP Rasmus Jarlov stated: "Every insult, threat, tariff and lie that we receive strengthens our resolve...We will never hand over Greenland." The economic pressure Denmark faces from President Trump is offset by economic and security support from other Europeans. The reputational stakes extend beyond Denmark: surrendering Greenland would demonstrate that European nations cannot defend their territories, undermining the foundational principle of collective security that smaller European states depend upon.

Europe's structural disunity paradoxically enhances rather than compromises its Escalation Dominance against coercive threats. President Trump cannot achieve breakthrough because while Copenhagen may decide Greenland's fate, that decision triggers responses from eight other capitals. France can threaten maximum retaliation (the Anti-Coercion Instrument) whilst Italy explores compromise, creating multiple negotiating tracks that deny President Trump clarity about European resolve. The UK's targeting despite its compliance demonstrates that bilateral deals provide no protection, diminishing defection incentives. The complexity that frustrates American demands—emergency summits, ambassador meetings, parliamentary votes—consumes time, allowing President Trump's threats to lose credibility as US markets react and Republican opposition emerges.

The institutional labyrinth creates additional obstacles to President Trump's coercion. The European Commission controls trade policy, the European Parliament must ratify agreements, and member states retain implementation authority. Securing Italian Prime Minister Meloni's sympathy cannot overcome this distributed authority structure. Even if Meloni mediates successfully, she cannot dictate European trade policy, European Parliament ratification, French compliance, or German industrial cooperation. The very fragmentation that appears as weakness in cooperative contexts becomes a defensive fortification in coercive contexts. No single leader can surrender "Europe" because no single leader commands the institutional architecture necessary to implement surrender.

American disunity compounds President Trump's difficulties in ways that undermine his apparent Escalation Dominance. Markets have punished his extreme tariff threats in the past; the business and security establishment views rupture with Europe with horror; Supreme Court may yet challenge his tariff authority; polling shows thin public support for Greenland action. Unlike Putin commanding Russia's apparatus, President Trump must build domestic coalitions whilst navigating European institutional complexity and eight separate governmental responses operating simultaneously. The distributed nature of both American and European decision-making creates a paradoxical balance where neither side can achieve the unified, decisive action that traditional Escalation Dominance theory privileges. Yet this analysis must confront the most significant potential weakness in Europe's position: the fear of losing American support for Ukraine.

The Ukraine dimension reveals the fundamental incoherence of President Trump's coercive strategy and exposes the failure of Europe's 2025 approach to dealing with the White House. Some European governments may fear that resisting over Greenland risks losing US support for Ukraine against Russia. Yet this fear itself illuminates the contradiction: President Trump is threatening the territorial integrity of a NATO ally (Denmark) in ways not dissimilar to what Russia is doing in Ukraine. If the United States will not respect Danish territorial integrity, why would Europeans believe it will defend Ukrainian—or Polish, or Baltic—territorial integrity? 

As one senior EU diplomat stated when asked about trusting President Trump's Ukraine security guarantees: "You can't trust him, unless you suspend reality." The Greenland crisis therefore exposes what the newspaper reporting describes as Europe's "shattered illusions that its strategy of appeasing the US president was working." The 2025 approach of accommodating President Trump on trade to maintain his Ukraine engagement has demonstrably failed—the UK made a deal yet was targeted anyway, appearing "incredibly exposed" and "foolish" to other Europeans. 

President Trump's Greenland demands reveal his true position: This President does not view European territorial integrity as inviolable. This creates a perverse strategic clarity. European governments that might contemplate forcing Danish surrender to preserve American Ukraine support would be trading a certain loss of territorial integrity (Greenland) for worthless future guarantees from a president who has just demonstrated he considers European territory negotiable. The distributed defence architecture gains strength from this revelation: there is no "good deal" available because President Trump's actions prove that compliance purchases nothing. 

The Greenland crisis thus vindicates a distributed defence strategy over the 2025 appeasement approach. Denmark cannot be isolated because every European government now understands that appeasement merely invites further demands. The Ukraine vulnerability that might fracture European unity instead reinforces it by demonstrating that only collective European defence of territorial integrity—with or without American support—offers credible security.

The Ukraine dimension illustrates this broader principle. The Greenland crisis illuminates a theoretical distinction obscured by Kissinger's famous question: the difference between cooperative and coercive diplomacy. In cooperative diplomacy, fragmented European decision-making prevents efficient agreement. Multiple vetoes, institutional complexity, and distributed authority frustrate partnership-building. The absence of a single phone number represents genuine weakness when coordinating alliance strategy or negotiating arms control. In coercive diplomacy, however, these same features prevent efficient surrender. President Trump can call Copenhagen, but doing so activates a network defence system that changes Denmark's cost-benefit calculation through economic support, political solidarity, security deployments, and retaliatory capacity against the United States. The inability to impose will through a single pressure point transforms from liability into asset.

Escalation Dominance traditionally assumes unity enables credible threats across the escalation ladder. The Greenland case suggests this holds for offensive escalation but inverts for defensive escalation against territorial coercion. Distributed architecture creates resilience: no single point of capitulation exists, multiple paths for graduated responses remain available, strategic ambiguity prevents adversary calibration, and time works against the threatener as institutional process consumes momentum. Kissinger's question reveals its own answer—the necessity of asking it demonstrates Europe cannot be coerced through singular pressure. When the objective is not European agreement but European submission, fragmentation becomes fortification. Does conventional wisdom on the Unity-Escalation Dominance nexus break down when defending rather than projecting power?

Analysts should monitor whether European unity holds once tariffs are implemented, whether President Trump's domestic opposition intensifies to constrain him, whether Danish and European resolve more generally persists under economic pressure, and whether the distributed response architecture runs down President Trump's threat timeline whilst maintaining collective support for Danish territorial integrity. 

The critical indicators include Danish domestic polling on resistance versus accommodation, concrete European economic support for Denmark beyond rhetorical solidarity, maintenance of NATO troop deployments in Greenland, actual preparation then operationalisation of the €93bn retaliatory tariff package, and Greenlandic public opinion given the territory's self-governance rights. 

The test is whether the principle that European territory cannot be coerced away survives contact with American economic power, whether distributed European architecture proves more resilient than unified American pressure, and whether emergent disunity on the American side bites. All of this matters now. 

For strategists contemplating longer-term implications, the Greenland crisis demands reconsideration of foundational assumptions about power, unity, and coercion. Escalation Dominance theory emerged from Cold War bipolarity where adversaries were clear and alliances stable; it privileges unity for both offensive and defensive contexts because it assumes coherent actors projecting power against coherent adversaries. That framework may require revision for a world where great powers coerce nominal allies through economic warfare. In cooperative contexts, unity enables efficient agreement; in coercive contexts, however, fragmentation prevents efficient surrender. 

The twenty-first century may therefore require not Kissingerian centralisation but distributed architectures resilient enough to resist powers too large to balance, too erratic to trust, and too willing to coerce allies whose only defence lies in their inability to be commanded. The distributed power structures that frustrated Kissinger—multiple vetoes, fragmented decision-making, institutional labyrinths—may prove more resilient than the unified architectures that traditional theory privileges, precisely because what cannot be called cannot be commanded to surrender.

Simon J. Evenett is Founder of the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity Through Trade, Professor of Geopolitics and Strategy at IMD Business School, and Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Trade & Investment Council.