This editorial does not aim to forecast concrete military scenarios, nor to engage in opportunistic geopolitical speculation. It begins from an older and deeper concern: the actual resilience of the Euro-Atlantic order when confronted with its own internal contradictions. The Greenland case, recently brought back into public debate through explicit political statements by the former U.S. president, offers a rare opportunity to test that resilience not theoretically, but conceptually and normatively [1–4].
Beyond its seemingly spectacular nature, the issue is far from marginal. It functions as a stress test for an order that claims to rest on rules, institutions, and reciprocal constraints. What is at stake is not only the cohesion of the North Atlantic Alliance, but the capacity of the entire Euro-Atlantic architecture to manage the persistent tension between power and norms, between interest and rule.
Greenland is not merely a strategic territory, however relevant it may be geographically or militarily. In the current context, it becomes a systemic indicator. Through it, one can observe (almost experimentally) the fault lines between sovereignty, international law, security alliances, and power asymmetries. Even a purely theoretical hypothesis of a NATO member using force against the territory of another ally would produce a rupture that would be not only political or military, but profoundly conceptual. In such a moment, the alliance would cease to function as a mechanism of collective security and would be reduced to a formal arrangement devoid of normative coherence and political legitimacy.
For this reason, the real stake is not Greenland itself. The stake is the point at which the liberal order can absorb unilateral power behavior without dissolving from within. The post–Cold War international order was built on an essential assumption: that dominant states would exercise power within institutionalized frameworks, accepting normative constraints in exchange for systemic stability [5]. That assumption was never guaranteed, yet it worked well enough to sustain the Euro-Atlantic architecture for decades.
Within this framework, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty is more than a legal clause. It is a strategic trust commitment. It presupposes predictability, solidarity, and a minimal respect for reciprocal sovereignty. Above all, it presupposes acceptance of the idea that security cannot be defined unilaterally at the expense of an ally. If this principle is relativized, even at the level of rhetoric, the alliance’s core guarantee is hollowed out. NATO would not collapse legally in such a scenario, but it would unravel as a credible political commitment, becoming an alliance functional largely on paper.
This fragility does not emerge in a vacuum. It is amplified by broader trends in U.S. foreign policy that point to a renewed valuation of unilateral action at the expense of multilateral constraints. Certain recent extraterritorial operations conducted by the United States outside the Euro-Atlantic space and justified through national security imperatives have fueled persistent concerns among allies and other international actors. Beyond the legal merits of each case, these episodes have contributed to a troubling perception: that norms may become contingent, applied selectively, according to the interests of the dominant actor [6].
The relevance of such precedents to the Greenland case is not circumstantial. It is structural. The issue is not direct analogy, but an emerging logic of exception, in which rules are invoked, reinterpreted, or suspended depending on context. In an order that claims to be rule-based, such a logic is deeply destabilizing. It erodes trust in institutions and stimulates defensive responses, including tendencies toward strategic autonomization.
Denmark’s firm reaction and the resonance it has found among other European states should be understood in this register. What we see is not a simple bilateral dispute, but the expression of a structural anxiety: the fear that security guarantees may become negotiable, conditional, or subordinated to the conjunctural interests of the dominant actor. This anxiety reflects the fundamental tension between order and power in contemporary international politics.
For small and mid-sized states, the consequences are immediate. A perception of heightened vulnerability takes hold, and confidence in existing guarantees erodes. From this perspective, the debate on European strategic autonomy should not be read as an attempt to replace the transatlantic alliance, but as a response to an increasingly visible uncertainty regarding the predictability of the dominant ally’s behavior.
In this context, appeals to security risk becoming instruments for legitimizing exception. The Greenland case is sensitive precisely because it involves the territory of an ally covered by Article 5 guarantees. It compels an uncomfortable but necessary question: can collective security still function when central actors reserve the right to define the exception unilaterally?
It is important to note that the probability of an extreme scenario materializing remains low. Domestic institutional constraints and the associated strategic costs are considerable. Yet in international relations, rhetoric is not neutral. It is performative. It generates expectations, repositioning, and, over time, behavior.
For the academic community, this moment calls for more than conjunctural reactions. It calls for a calm, rigorous reflection free of simplifications. We are not merely witnessing a diplomatic controversy, but a symptom of a transition toward a more fragmented international order, in which rules are increasingly put into competition with the logic of force. The Greenland case should not be treated as an anomaly, but as a possible precedent.
Our journal assumes the role of a critical space for this reflection. We invite contributions that analyze not only the events themselves, but the structural mechanisms that make them possible and their long-term consequences. Only through lucid, interdisciplinary, and intellectually honest analysis can we understand whether we face a temporary rhetorical crisis or the beginning of a profound reconfiguration of the Euro-Atlantic order.