This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Even the Canadians are drawing up plans for how they might respond to a U.S. invasion. That’s how spooked global leaders are right now about an unhinged flare of contempt from their typically allied counterpart in the United States. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “You’ll find out,” Trump said Tuesday when asked how far he was willing to go to control Greenland, the semi-autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark that Trump seems intent on annexing. The surreal moment has created the impression that NATO is living on borrowed time. Denmark is a founding member of NATO, thus meaning its security pact provides cover for Greenland. Put simply: any U.S. military action to take Greenland would trigger every other NATO nation, with each of them forced to choose between defending its neighbors against a member nation, or admitting that Trump was correct when he said the whole alliance hinges on American power. Asked repeatedly at a press conference to mark the one-year anniversary of his return to Washington about the future of Greenland and NATO, Trump did not provide a direct answer, instead opting to take a roundabout path to hint, at best, at indifference. “I think that we will work something out where NATO’s going to be very happy and where we’re going to be very happy,” he said. That binary choice is one that could spell the doom…
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