The North Atlantic Council is convening in extraordinary session at the request of Denmark, Germany, France and the United Kingdom under Article 4 of the Washington Treaty.
Moment · 19 January 2026, 18:00
Marines land in Greenland
Ospreys touch down at Kangerlussuaq at 17:30 UTC and an amphibious insertion takes the port at Nuuk. Danish Arctic Command offers no lethal resistance under cabinet orders to document rather than die.
The American delegation has left the chamber.
Not adjourned. Left. Picked up their binders and walked out while the vote was being called. Thirty-one ambassadors are still sitting in there.
I have covered this building for nine years. I have watched every kind of disagreement in it.
A diplomat who came out said one sentence to me and went back in: "That was the end of it."
We left the room. Thirty-one countries wanted to vote on what America is allowed to do in America's own hemisphere.
You don't get a vote on us. That was never the deal. A lot of people are finding that out this week.
I have spoken this afternoon with Washington, Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels and London. The Alliance remains in session. Consultation is not optional between allies and it does not end because one chair is empty.
There are helicopters. A lot of helicopters, very low, coming in from the sea. I have never heard anything like this here.
They are American.
They are in the harbour and they are at the government buildings and nobody is shooting. Our people are just standing there watching them. I do not understand what is happening.
image slot
Armoured vehicles on a snow-covered road beside a harbour, photographed from an upper window in low light.
Nuuk harbour road, 18:38
BREAKING: US forces have landed at Kangerlussuaq and taken control of port and government facilities in Nuuk. Danish Arctic Command has not resisted. Cabinet orders were to document, not to engage.
My mum is crying and my little brother thinks it is exciting because of the helicopters.
I do not know how to explain to him that it is not exciting. I do not know how to explain it to me.
I have been driving since 2004 and I have never once pulled over to read the news. I am pulled over.
Greenland. We invaded Greenland. I am sitting in a truck stop in Nebraska trying to make that sentence mean something.
Nobody was hurt. I want to hold onto that tonight because I work in an ICU and I know exactly what the other version looks like.
Nobody was hurt. Everything else can be argued about tomorrow.
Prime Minister Frederiksen to the Folketing:
"This is an act of lawless aggression and unprovoked imperial conquest by our supposed treaty partner."
In Latin America we have a very specific feeling this evening and there is no polite English word for it.
It is not joy. Nobody wants this. It is the feeling of watching someone finally do to a rich friend what they have done to you for a century, and hearing them use the same word for it that you were told was a conspiracy theory when it happened to you.
Frederiksen's voice broke on the word "partner".
I have never had a strong opinion about her. Tonight she is standing in the Folketing saying the thing out loud that all five million of us are thinking in our kitchens, and her voice broke, and I am not embarrassed to say mine did too.
My fellow Americans. This evening, at my direction, United States Marines secured the airfields and the harbour of Greenland. There was no resistance. Not one shot was fired and not one person was hurt, on either side, and I want the country to hear that first.
— Address to the nation, the Oval Office
what was actually happening
The assessment of 3 January had told him exactly what would follow: European Command compromised, base access across five countries endangered, emergency sessions of the North Atlantic Council. All of it happened inside seventy-two hours, in that order. The asset freeze landed before noon the next day.
For the record, because we will be arguing about this for a decade:
Article 5 cannot be invoked. Its machinery runs through a Council in which the attacking party holds a seat and a veto, and it was drafted to describe an attack from outside the Alliance.
There is no clause for this.
"Judge me in a month."
I have covered this alliance for nine years. Six hours ago the delegation walked out of a room in Brussels and four hours ago Marines landed on the territory of a founding ally.
There is going to be a month. I do not think it is going to go the way he thinks it is going to go.
TP
The President of the United States
@POTUS
·19 Jan 2026 · 21:00
My fellow Americans. This evening, at my direction, United States Marines secured the airfields and the harbour of Greenland. There was no resistance. Not one shot was fired and not one person was hurt, on either side, a…
Not one shot fired and not one boy hurt. That is a President.
Say what you want. Eighty years of talking about that island and he went and did it in an evening and nobody's mother got a phone call.
I have voted for this administration twice and I preached for it once, which I regret.
We took another nation's land tonight because we wanted it and because they could not stop us. There is a word for that and it is in the Book, and it is not a word about strength.
I will say this on Sunday. Some of you will leave. Go with God.
"judge me in a month"
buddy i am judging you in real time on my phone in a warehouse break room and it is not going great
Kremlin: no comment.
Foreign ministry: no statement.
State television: fourteen minutes on Greenland, no commentary, footage only.
The Russian milblogger channels are the only ones talking, and they are celebrating. Moscow itself is saying nothing at all, and that is deliberate.
My son enlisted in August. He is nineteen. He is at Bragg.
I am not asking whether this was right. I am asking whether he is going somewhere cold. That is the only question I have and there is nobody to ask it.
Pastor, I have read your post four times.
I do not agree with you. I think you are wrong about the country and I think you will regret saying it from the pulpit.
But you are the first person on this app all night who sounded like they were wrestling with it instead of scoring points, and I wanted you to know a stranger noticed that.
Tanya — nobody can tell you and anyone who says they can is guessing.
What I can tell you: if he is at Bragg he is with the best-drilled people in the world and they take care of the nineteen year olds first. Keep the phone charged. Do not doomscroll at 3am, it does not make the call come sooner.
My grandmother is 84. She said one sentence at dinner tonight and then went to bed.
"So now they have found out what it is like."
She was not being cruel. She has been waiting eighty years for somebody in the west to feel this for one evening.
Ma'am, that is more grace than I have shown anybody today. Thank you.
I would rather be wrong in front of you than right in front of people who are enjoying this. There are a lot of them tonight, on both sides, and they frighten me more than the news does.
Six of my seniors came to me before practice asking about the recruiter.
Six. Last year it was one, and he had already decided.
I do not know what I am supposed to say to a seventeen year old this week. I said finish the season. It was the only true thing I had.
Ireland is neutral. I have said that my whole life like it was a personality trait.
This morning I found out it means "we have no idea what happens to us and no say in it either". Not a great feeling with a superpower going strange nine hundred miles away.