Prepared: 23 February 2026
Classification: Open-Source Academic Analysis
Executive Summary
On 22 February 2026, US President Donald Trump announced, via an AI-generated social media post, his intention to deploy a naval hospital ship, the USNS Mercy, to Greenland — ostensibly to address healthcare deficiencies in the Danish autonomous territory. Both the Greenlandic government under Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen rejected the offer within 24 hours. The incident is the latest episode in a sustained campaign of coercive diplomacy toward Greenland that has unfolded since January 2025.
This case study contextualises the hospital ship episode within the broader Greenland Crisis (2025–2026), analyses the mechanics of what scholars have termed ‘hybrid warfare’ as a modality of territorial coercion, and draws out the specific and systemic implications of these developments for Singapore — a small, highly trade-dependent city-state whose strategic and economic viability depends critically on the integrity of the rules-based international order.
- Background: The Greenland Crisis (2025–2026)
1.1 Historical Trajectory of US Territorial Interest
American interest in Greenland is not novel. The United States first attempted to purchase the island from Denmark in 1867, and again in 1946. During Trump’s first administration, a 2019 proposal to acquire Greenland was dismissed by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen as ‘absurd.’ That episode was widely treated as geopolitical theatre. The second Trump administration has demonstrated that this assessment was premature.
Upon returning to office in January 2025, the Trump administration systematically escalated pressure on Greenland through overlapping instruments: diplomatic messaging, personnel deployments, information operations, economic coercion, and — most recently — ostensibly humanitarian gestures. The Danish Defence Intelligence Service, in an unprecedented 2025 development, explicitly named the United States as a security threat in its annual threat assessment.
1.2 Chronology of Escalation
Date Event Significance
Dec 2024 Trump appoints Jeff Landry as informal ‘Special Envoy to Greenland’ Unilateral assertion of diplomatic standing over third-party territory
Jan 2025 Trump Jr. visits Greenland uninvited; Trump threatens tariffs Information operation; economic coercion initiated
2025 Danish Defence Intelligence Service names US as threat Unprecedented; ally-turned-threat classification
Jan 2026 Trump threatens military force; European nations deploy troops Escalation to credible force threat; NATO fracture risk
21 Jan 2026 Davos ‘climbdown’: Trump pledges no military force; NATO framework deal announced Temporary de-escalation; underlying ambitions intact
22 Feb 2026 Trump proposes hospital ship deployment via AI-generated post Resumption via humanitarian framing; latest coercive gesture - Case Analysis: The Hospital Ship Incident
2.1 The Incident in Detail
On 21 February 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social announcing that ‘a great hospital boat’ was being sent to Greenland ‘to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.’ Critically, the post was accompanied by an AI-generated image of the USNS Mercy, a US Navy medical vessel, and the declaration ‘It’s on the way!!!’ The theatrical nature of the announcement — fabricated imagery, exclamation marks, the vagueness of whether the vessel had actually been ordered to deploy — was characteristic of the administration’s broader information-environment strategy.
Within hours, Greenlandic Prime Minister Nielsen responded on Facebook: ‘That will be no thanks from us. President Trump’s idea to send a US hospital ship here to Greenland has been duly noted. But we have a public health system where care is free for citizens.’ The Danish Defence Minister echoed this rejection, noting that Greenlandic citizens receive the healthcare they require, including specialist treatment in Denmark when needed. On the same day, Danish forces evacuated a US submarine crew member to Nuuk’s hospital — a piece of situational irony that illustrated the functional adequacy of existing healthcare infrastructure and its ongoing service to American personnel.
2.2 Analytical Framework: Coercive Humanitarianism
The hospital ship offer represents what may be termed ‘coercive humanitarianism’ — the deployment of ostensibly benevolent acts as instruments of territorial assertion. This technique has antecedents in imperial practice: the establishment of hospitals, schools, and infrastructure has historically served as a vehicle for normalising foreign presence and eroding the claim that a territory is self-sufficient under existing governance arrangements.
In the Greenland case, the offer functions along three vectors simultaneously:
Legitimacy contestation: By publicly claiming that Greenlanders are ‘not being taken care of,’ the Trump administration implicitly questioned the Danish government’s stewardship of Greenlandic welfare — a prerequisite, under international humanitarian norms, for asserting a protective role.
Presence normalisation: A US Navy hospital vessel docked in Nuuk would constitute a visible, tangible American presence on the island, irrespective of whether formal sovereign claims were advanced.
Domestic opinion operations: The offer, regardless of its rejection, creates a narrative for US domestic consumption — and for Greenlandic audiences susceptible to the argument that Copenhagen under-invests in the territory’s development.
The use of an AI-generated image in the announcement is analytically significant. It signals an administration comfortable with operating in the register of spectacle rather than policy — where the performance of intent substitutes for operational reality. This is consistent with what analysts have characterised as ‘hybrid warfare’: a blending of information operations, economic pressure, and diplomatic grey-zone activity designed to advance territorial goals without triggering the formal legal thresholds of armed conflict.
2.3 Pattern Recognition: Incremental Sovereignty Testing
The hospital ship episode must be read not as an isolated provocation but as one node in a deliberate sequence. The Foreign Affairs analysis of a hypothetical Greenland takeover describes a ‘motivated alignment’ strategy involving civilian infrastructure investment, municipal-level economic dependence creation, and technical agreements that ‘quietly shifted local loyalties’ — precisely the architecture that a hospital ship deployment, if accepted, would have begun to instantiate.
Each incremental gesture serves a dual function: it tests the political resilience of Danish-Greenlandic resistance, and it advances the cumulative normalisation of American presence. The Davos ‘climbdown’ of 21 January 2026, in which Trump withdrew the threat of military force and tariffs, should not be read as abandonment of the underlying objective. Rather, it represents a tactical consolidation following pushback, with the hospital ship announcement a mere 32 days later signalling recommencement of the pressure campaign via softer instruments.
- Implications for Singapore
Singapore’s relationship to the Greenland Crisis operates on multiple registers: normative, strategic, economic, and precedential. The city-state’s vulnerability — and its responses — are best understood through the lens of its foundational condition as a small state whose sovereignty is structurally dependent on a rules-based international order that larger powers observe.
3.1 The Normative Dimension: Singapore’s Position and the MFA Response
The Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) addressed the Greenland question directly in written parliamentary replies on 3 February 2026. Foreign Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan articulated Singapore’s position in terms of first principles: ‘As a small country, Singapore has to reaffirm the importance of international law and the principles of the UN Charter. This includes respect for the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all countries, as well as the right to self-determination of all peoples. Consequently, any issues concerning Greenland’s future should be resolved peacefully, in accordance with international law.’
The MFA explicitly situated Singapore’s current position within a consistent historical framework, noting that Singapore had opposed actions contrary to international law by any party, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the United States’ own invasion of Grenada in 1983. This evenhandedness is not merely rhetorical — it constitutes the cornerstone of Singapore’s credibility as a principled small state in multilateral forums.
‘A world order based on might is right is more unstable and dangerous, especially for small states.’ — MFA Written Parliamentary Reply, 3 February 2026
The consistency and directness of this response is notable. Singapore did not equivocate, as might have been expected from a state balancing significant economic and security relationships with Washington. This reflects a calculation that the normative stakes — the precedent set by acquiescence to territorial coercion — outweigh the near-term diplomatic costs of a principled public stance.
3.2 The Strategic Dimension: Precedent and the South China Sea
For Singapore, the most consequential implication of the Greenland Crisis is precedential. If the United States — the architect and for decades the primary enforcer of the post-1945 rules-based order — normalises the use of economic coercion, information operations, and implicit force threats to revise territorial arrangements, the prohibition on territorial conquest loses its principal guarantor. The strategic consequences for Southeast Asia are direct and immediate.
China’s claims in the South China Sea rest on assertions of historical entitlement that the international community has largely rejected, most authoritatively in the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in the Philippines v. China case. Singapore has consistently supported the freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, and has upheld the primacy of UNCLOS. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy of December 2025, however, has been assessed by analysts as ‘no longer interested in containing China’ and open to accepting ‘the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations as a timeless truth of international relations’ — language that resonates uncomfortably with Chinese assertions in the region.
The structural parallel is precise: as the US deploys humanitarian pretexts to advance incremental presence in Greenland, analogous frameworks — development assistance, infrastructure investment, fisheries agreements — have long constituted instruments of Chinese influence-building in island territories across the Indo-Pacific. American legitimation of such techniques, even implicitly through its own practice, narrows the normative space within which Singapore and other ASEAN states have historically contested them.
Dimension Greenland (US) South China Sea (China) Singapore’s Exposure
Territorial claim basis Strategic/economic necessity; historical purchase attempts Historical entitlement; nine-dash line Freedom of navigation; UNCLOS primacy
Coercive instruments Tariff threats; information ops; humanitarian framing Island-building; fishing militia; economic inducements Trade dependency; neutrality credibility
Multilateral response NATO fracture; European unity tested ASEAN disunity; PCA ruling ignored ASEAN centrality undermined
Normative risk Prohibition on territorial conquest eroded UNCLOS enforceability undermined Rules-based order foundation weakened
3.3 The Economic Dimension: Trade Dependency and Tariff Coercion
Singapore is structurally among the world’s most trade-dependent economies, with trade to GDP ratios exceeding 300 percent. The Trump administration’s imposition of a 10 percent baseline tariff on Singapore in April 2025, with threats of escalation to 25 percent for transshipment violations, represents a direct economic pressure instrument. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong declared in April 2025 that the initial tariff announcement marked ‘a profound turning point,’ warning that ‘the era of rules-based globalisation and free trade is over.’
The Greenland Crisis has amplified this vulnerability in a specific way: Trump explicitly threatened tariffs on European states that opposed his territorial ambitions over Greenland, imposing a 10 percent import tariff on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland from 1 February 2026, with threatened escalation to 25 percent absent Danish compliance. This represents the application of trade coercion as a direct instrument of territorial policy — a qualitative escalation beyond its prior use as a commercial negotiating tool.
The implications for Singapore are twofold. First, Singapore’s export sectors — semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and high-value manufacturing — are acutely sensitive to US tariff policy and to the disruption of the global supply chains through which its trading partners operate. Second, and more fundamentally, the weaponisation of trade instruments against allies for geopolitical purposes undermines the predictability and rule-boundedness on which Singapore’s trade-dependent growth model depends.
The MFA’s February 2026 parliamentary reply also addressed US withdrawal from 66 international organisations, including 31 UN entities. While assessing the immediate direct impact as ‘limited,’ the MFA explicitly identified ‘long term impairment of the collective management of the global commons’ — including climate change and pandemic preparedness — as consequential.
3.4 The Diplomatic Dimension: Strategic Autonomy Under Pressure
Singapore occupies a distinctive diplomatic position: a close security partner of the United States with significant defence cooperation, simultaneously a member of ASEAN with deep economic and institutional ties to China, and a principled advocate for international law. This triangulation has historically been Singapore’s strategic asset. The Greenland Crisis places each of its three vertices under stress simultaneously.
The MFA’s 3 February 2026 responses addressed not only Greenland but also the Venezuelan intervention, the US withdrawal from international organisations, and invitations to join new US-led platforms such as the ‘Board of Peace.’ On the Board of Peace, Singapore adopted a characteristically cautious ‘wait-and-see’ posture, signalling neither alignment nor refusal. This reflects Singapore’s consistent approach of maintaining optionality while avoiding actions that would compromise its position as a credible, neutral interlocutor.
However, the space for such neutrality is contracting. As the AEI analysis of May 2025 observed, Singapore faces three distinct scenarios in a post-rules-based order: a transactional America that still values Singapore’s strategic utility; an aggressively acquisitive America that shreds international norms; or an inward-turning America that cedes the field to Chinese dominance in Asia. None of these scenarios preserves the current order on which Singapore’s prosperity and security model depends.
3.5 The Institutional Dimension: ASEAN and Regional Architecture
The Greenland Crisis has demonstrated that even the most robust multilateral institutions — NATO, the EU — are insufficient to deter great-power coercion when one of the great powers itself is the source of the threat. NATO’s founding premise assumes consensual territorial arrangements among its members; the US campaign against a NATO ally’s territory has revealed an unresolved structural contradiction at the alliance’s core.
For Singapore, the relevant institutional framework is ASEAN and the broader ASEAN-centred architecture, including the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus. These institutions are weaker than NATO in formal terms and have historically been tested by the ASEAN disunity that characterises responses to South China Sea disputes. The Greenland precedent, in which a powerful state uses economic coercion to divide a coalition of smaller states — with Trump’s individual tariff threats to European nations fracturing multilateral solidarity — provides a template that China has already applied, with some success, to ASEAN responses to its maritime assertiveness.
Singapore’s interest in strengthening ASEAN centrality and institutional coherence has accordingly taken on renewed urgency. The 2026 ASEAN Chair, the Philippines, has signalled that South China Sea security will be central to its agenda — a prioritisation that the Greenland Crisis renders both more pressing and more fraught.
- Singapore’s Policy Response: Assessment and Recommendations
4.1 Current Response: Principled Minimalism
Singapore’s current policy response can be characterised as ‘principled minimalism’: a clear articulation of first-principle positions — sovereignty, self-determination, peaceful resolution, rules-based order — combined with deliberate restraint in operational commitments. This posture serves Singapore’s interests in several respects: it preserves credibility as a principled small state; it avoids premature alignment in a still-evolving situation; and it maintains Singapore’s value as a neutral interlocutor for both Washington and Beijing.
The MFA’s willingness to explicitly reference US actions — including the Greenland campaign and the Venezuelan intervention — as contrary to international law is itself significant. Singapore has historically been careful to criticise great-power conduct only where the principle at stake is directly material to its own security, and typically in measured, legalistic language. The February 2026 parliamentary responses suggest a recalibration toward greater candour, reflecting an assessment that the stakes for the rules-based order are now sufficiently high to warrant more direct public positioning.
4.2 Strategic Imperatives Going Forward
Several strategic imperatives emerge from this analysis:
Multilateral Institution-Strengthening
Singapore should continue to invest in the credibility of international dispute resolution mechanisms — UNCLOS, ASEAN-centred dispute management, the UN Charter framework — both as a principled matter and as a practical hedge against the erosion of US commitment to these frameworks. This includes active diplomacy to prevent ASEAN disunity in the face of great-power bilateral pressure tactics.
Economic Diversification and Resilience
The weaponisation of trade instruments for territorial-policy purposes reinforces the imperative for Singapore to diversify its economic partnerships and reduce dependency on any single market. Singapore’s extensive FTA network — 19 bilateral and multilateral agreements — provides a foundation, but the administration’s demonstrated willingness to apply tariff coercion to close allies warrants accelerated outreach to the EU, the Gulf, India, and other major partners.
Defence Self-Reliance and Collective Security
Singapore’s investment in defence self-reliance, including its planned acquisition of F-35 aircraft and its significant active foreign military sales relationships with the United States, must be calibrated against a scenario in which US strategic reliability cannot be assumed. Singapore currently has $8.38 billion in active Foreign Military Sales with the US. The Greenland Crisis should accelerate contingency planning for a more independent defence posture and deepen engagement with alternative security partners.
Normative Leadership Among Small States
Singapore is well-positioned to lead a coalition of small and medium states in articulating and defending the rules-based order. The hospital ship episode offers a concrete and legible case study for such advocacy: the use of humanitarian framing as a vehicle for sovereignty erosion should be explicitly documented, analysed, and condemned in multilateral forums, both to establish precedent and to galvanise collective resistance. - Conclusions
The Greenland hospital ship incident of February 2026 is a microcosm of a larger structural transformation in the international order. Its analytical significance lies not in the gesture itself — which was rejected within hours — but in what it reveals about the modalities of coercive diplomacy that the second Trump administration has institutionalised. The incremental, deniable, and symbolically multivalent nature of the offer — simultaneously a healthcare initiative, a presence-assertion, and an information operation — represents a sophisticated hybrid-warfare instrument.
For Singapore, the stakes are not merely academic. The city-state’s entire strategic and economic model depends on a world in which sovereignty is inviolable, trade rules are predictable, and smaller states are not subject to the coercive force of great-power preference. Prime Minister Wong’s characterisation of the current moment as ‘a profound turning point’ and Foreign Minister Balakrishnan’s direct invocation of international law principles in the parliamentary context of Greenland reflect a clear-eyed assessment of this dependency.
The most consequential risk is precedential: if the prohibition on territorial conquest can be incrementally eroded — through humanitarian gestures, economic coercion, information operations, and the occasional show of force — then the entire architecture of norms on which Singapore’s security rests becomes contestable. This is not a hypothetical. It is the operational reality of the Greenland Crisis, and its echoes in the South China Sea are not difficult to hear.
Singapore’s response — principled, measured, and grounded in international law — represents the correct approach for now. The challenge in the period ahead will be to sustain that posture while adapting its operational content to a world in which the rules are no longer guaranteed by the power that wrote them.
References and Sources
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore. Written Replies to Parliamentary Questions by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister for Foreign Affairs. 3 February 2026. Available at: mfa.gov.sg
Wikipedia. ‘Greenland Crisis.’ Last updated February 2026.
Wikipedia. ‘American Hybrid Warfare Against Greenland During the Second Trump Administration.’ January 2026.
Council on Foreign Relations. Fix, L. and Harris, B. ‘Everything but Territory: Europe’s Response to Trump’s Greenland Threats.’ 16 January 2026.
Chatham House. ‘If Trump’s Framework Greenland Agreement Relies on Creating Sovereign Bases, It Would Bring Long-Term Legal Issues.’ January 2026.
Foreign Affairs. ‘How Greenland Falls: Imagining a Bloodless Trump Takeover.’ February 2026.
Foreign Affairs. ‘A Better Greenland Deal.’ January 2026.
American Enterprise Institute. ‘Singapore Thrived in a US-Led World. Now What?’ September 2025.
European Council on Foreign Relations. ‘Arctic Hold’em: Ten European Cards in Greenland.’ 16 January 2026.
Al Jazeera. ‘Is Trump the End of the International Rules-Based Order?’ March 2025.
Fortune. ‘Singaporeans Will Go to the Polls on May 3, as Trump Tariffs Threaten the Era of Rules-Based Globalisation.’ April 2025.
Observer Research Foundation. ‘Trump’s National Security Strategy Puts Southeast Asia on Tenterhooks.’ January 2026.
US Library of Congress / Congressional Research Service. ‘US–Singapore Relations.’ January 2026.
AFP / Yahoo News. ‘No Thanks: Greenland, Denmark Reject Trump’s Hospital Ship Offer.’ 22 February 2026.