1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to publicly oppose any efforts to threaten Greenland's sovereignty and to take concrete action to repair the damage done to our NATO alliance by recent demands for U.S. ownership of Greenland. President Trump's initial insistence on U.S. ownership of Greenland, a territory of Denmark, has caused serious harm to our most important security alliance. As Senator Lisa Murkowski observed after attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, relationships built up globally "were fractured." Professor Aurel Sari of the University of Exeter stated bluntly that "the damage has already been done. NATO is based on shared values and trust. What is becoming very clear to European leaders, and to Canada, as well, is that those values are not shared anymore. And the trust is simply not there." This diplomatic crisis was entirely unnecessary. According to a Danish official, everything the U.S. is now seeking regarding increased military presence, more troops, and bases was available from the start under existing treaties. The only nonnegotiable point for Denmark was that Greenland shouldn't be absorbed by the U.S. We could have achieved our security objectives through normal diplomatic channels without threatening a NATO ally's territorial integrity. The consequences extend beyond damaged relationships. As Senator Chris Coons noted, "Putin is celebrating this misguided effort to extract meaningless concessions that were more about Trump's needs for an abstract win than American national interests." Russian President Vladimir Putin's strategic goal is to disrupt NATO, and these threats to an ally's sovereignty accomplish exactly that. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned at Davos that "the international order of the past three decades has been shaken" and that "the new world of great powers is being built on power, on strength and, when it comes to it, on force." This is not the world order that has kept America safe and prosperous since World War II. I urge you to speak out against threats to allied sovereignty and work to restore trust within NATO through respectful diplomacy that advances genuine American security interests.