Denmark’s military intelligence service for the first time suggested it sees the United States as a possible threat, amid deepening concerns surrounding the Trump administration’s shifting stance toward European allies.
In its annual forecast published on Wednesday, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service raised doubts about the U.S.’s commitment to Europe’s security. The intelligence report came after the Pentagon recently released a new national security strategy that cast Washington’s relationship with the continent in a more transactional light, stating, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” Denmark’s report said, in a reference to President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and his threats to take over Greenland, a Danish territory, for national security purposes.
The U.S. is increasingly prioritizing its own interests and “currently uses its economic and technological power as a tool of influence over allies,” the assessment added. “At the same time, uncertainty has arisen about the role of the United States as a guarantor of European security, and this will increase Russia’s willingness to intensify its hybrid attacks against NATO.”
The report marks the latest reaction to the Trump administration’s stance that long-term U.S. commitment to European security must no longer be taken for granted, as articulated in the Pentagon’s recent update to the national security policy.
The new policy outlined the foreign policy ramifications of the Pentagon’s philosophical redirection, framing historic U.S. global leadership as putting foreign partners over national interests, and suggesting that the efforts of the previous administrations to promote American ideals abroad lacked merit. The Trump administration, in the new document, committed itself to a “predisposition to non-interventionism,” appeared to cast a distinction between the U.S. being the greatest country in the world and the U.S. being the world’s leader, and said its approach to Europe is now to “promote European greatness.”
“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” it read.
After the White House released the new national security strategy earlier this month, European leaders warned that the foundations of the security order established after the Cold War are being splintered, as the U.S. splits alliances in favor of perceived national interests.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Tuesday that while parts of the document were understandable, “some of it is unacceptable for us from the European point of view.”
“In my talks with the Americans, I say: ‘America first’ is fine, but ‘America alone’ can’t be in your interest. You need partners in the world, too,” he added.
SENATE DEMOCRATS SETTLE ON THREE-YEAR OBAMACARE SUBSIDY BILL, DRAWING GOP JEERS
Thomas Ahrenkiel, head of the Danish intelligence service, added that smaller, more vulnerable countries are now facing a world where there is more “law of the jungle than rules-based world order.”
“We now see that the three major military powers, the U.S., Russia, and China, in their different ways, do not support that world order,” he told the newspaper Berlingske, according to European media.
