WASHINGTON, January 10. /TASS/. If American President-elect Donald Trump tries to take Greenland by force, it could activate a provision in the Lisbon Treaty concerning the mutual defense of European Union (EU) member states, Politico reported.
According to Article 42 (7) of the treaty, member states of the association must provide "aid and assistance by all the means in their power" to any EU country that has fallen victim to armed aggression. However, this provision is "meaningless in its current form as there is no genuine military force behind it," the publication quoted Daniel Fiott, head of the Defense and Statecraft research program at the Brussels School of Government, as saying.
If Denmark wants to try to stop Trump from taking Greenland, it should seek EU help, but "there is little question as to which country would win in a fight," the newspaper says.
According to the paper, it remains unclear how Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington in 1949, which enshrines the collective defense principle in NATO, would be applied should the US decide to annex Greenland. "You would essentially have a NATO member annexing the territory of another NATO member. So it would be pretty uncharted territory," believes senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations Agathe Demarais.
During his first term in 2019, Trump said that the United States could buy Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. Marc Jacobsen, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defense College, told the newspaper that Trump’s proposal was part of a US strategy "to get Denmark to spend more of [its] military budget on surveillance of Greenland."
On January 7, Trump suggested again that Greenland should become part of the United States, citing national security concerns and protection from Chinese and Russian threats. Both now and back in 2019, the island and the kingdom dismissed the idea as absurd.
On January 8, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot commented on Trump's statement and said that the EU would not allow other countries to infringe on its borders.