Denmark’s foreign affairs minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen sounded surprised and emotional as he addressed a press conference on May 7. He announced he would call in the acting head of the US embassy in Copenhagen, Jennifer Hall Godfrey, over highly charged allegations that Washington has instructed its intelligence agencies to step up espionage on Greenland and Copenhagen.
According to the Wall Street Journal, US intelligence operatives have been asked to collect information on Greenland’s politicians, independence activists and mining interests that could be leveraged in a potential purchase or coerced transfer of Greenland to the US.
Greenland is a semi-autonomous Danish territory that Donald Trump has stated he would like to become part of the US. The US State Department has refused to comment on the allegations and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said she was opening an investigation into leaks of classified information.
This looks like a large powerful nation doing all it can to undermine an ally and fellow member of Nato, which is why the Danes are so affronted.
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The real surprise of the story is that it became so public. But this drama comes at a time of increasingly frosty relations between Denmark and the US, made worse by a visit by US vice-president, J.D. Vance, that didn’t go through diplomatic channels. Even before this, Danish supermarkets were marking US products so consumers could boycott them.
In another case with some parallels to the Greenland spy saga with one ally spying on another, there has been reports of a newly uncovered Hungarian spy ring in Ukraine, collecting military data for Russia. Hungary said the reports were propaganda.
Hungary is, in theory, aligned with Ukraine as a member of the EU and Nato. However, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has expressed sympathy for Russian agendas and has the closest relationship with Moscow of any current EU leader. Orbán has even repeatedly attempted to block EU aid to Ukraine.
The alleged discovery of a Hungarian spy network may ramp up the creeping distrust of Hungary by other EU members and the sense of it becoming even more closely aligned with Russia.
There has even been a recently reported example of spying going on among countries that are loosely considered allies. North Korean spies were recently caught spying on China, for example.
The Greenland and Hungary episodes, particularly, shed light on how the world order is being remade. We are in the middle of this shift, with technology-enabled intelligence playing a significant part. These episodes demonstrate that governments who thought they were allies are quickly discovering they could be adversaries.
Read more:
How Donald Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland really went down in Denmark
Regulation by revelation
The US’s reported efforts at spying on Greenland and Denmark is a window into intelligence business.
Intelligence efforts against allies are generally only curtailed when they become subject to a public scandal. Intelligence historian Richard Aldrich described this as “regulation by revelation”. The inquiries into these operations normally result in a light censure from politicians or judges, pledges not to repeat the offences and subsequent changes to processes.
What will happen in the Greenland case is as yet unclear, particularly when the Trump administration has shown itself to be particularly immune from public, media and political challenge. The most effective challenge to hostile activity against Greenland could be any ramifications for international stock market sentiment, but even that is not guaranteed.
The reliance of the US constitution and international law on participants behaving appropriately now looks strained under the Trump administration. The lack of restraint on US power may cause nations to rely more heavily on their own intelligence capabilities.
Intelligence could, as a policy area, begin to mirror that of tariffs and trade as a way that the US can create further uncertainty among other nations about its foreign policy objectives.
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Technology makes it easy
But another factor in contemporary intelligence is that nations can now spy on each other much more easily. Technical capabilities are getting cheaper and easier to use.
For instance, communications intercepts, satellite imagery and open source data-analysis spying methods are cheaper than ever before. These approaches offer more insight, because of the development of machine analytics and the ready availability of computing power and data storage.
So, allies will continue to spy on allies because they are able to. That ability drives a demand, even in peace time, to know what other national leaders, and their public, are thinking and doing.
Nations will also aggressively spy at the moment because the world is particularly unstable, and on the edge of conflict in many regions. Understanding where conflicts might erupt, why and with what force and consequence is essential to any nation’s defence posture.
Nations only know what equipment to buy, what resources to stockpile and how many people to employ in their militaries with this insight. Intelligence is as much about avoiding surprise as it is creating the circumstances to surprise others. In this sense, intelligence is just another tool of statecraft.
Most nations have spied on their allies for as long as they have been able. During the cold war the US purchased the Swiss encrypted communications company Crypto AG and sold hundreds of secure communications devices with weakened security, which allowed it to listen in on the countries that were using it and gain intelligence
This type of operation was the forerunner of the widespread intelligence practices of the US National Security Agency, which is in charge of collecting information for counter intelligence purposes, in recent years.
For Denmark, the challenges of working with its allies through Nato, while defending Greenland, are increasingly complex. Meanwhile, the EU will also be concerned about what Hungary is sharing with its other “friends”. International allies and alliances are increasingly untrustworthy as part of 2025 tectonic shifts in global geopolitics. The recent revelations are just part of that moving picture.
