Will the US military obey a Trump order to take Greenland?

Every American soldier is allowed a moral conscience under the US constitution. But the line between conscience and disobeying an order has become increasingly blurred under the current commander-in-chief. If President Trump were to order troops to invade and seize Greenland which is part of the Nato family, how would the top commanders react, and would the lower ranks stand fast against their leader? Under the 1951 Uniform Code of Military Justice, soldiers are obliged to refuse an illegal order. This goes back to the Nuremberg trials after the second world war when it was ruled that obeying orders to commit war crimes was not a defence in law. Could Trump’s chosen commanders, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff down to the heads of the individual services, resign if ordered to seize Greenland? Theoretically, they could. But it would lead to such a constitutional upheaval, that, were Trump to get wind of it, even he might have second thoughts about attacking Greenland, a move that would be in direct violation of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty covering all members of the Nato alliance. However, it has long been the case that lawyers pore over the operational details of a planned military campaign to give commanders in the field the legal cover for taking action. Although a US military invasion of Greenland is deemed to be both unlikely and wholly unnecessary, a former American defence official said Justice Department lawyers would be studying whether there could be lawful justification “for mounting any form of coercive action against an ally”. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was “lawyered” and approved because of the perceived threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction. However, several American officials, military and diplomatic, resigned or retired early out of opposition. Operation Absolute Resolve, involving the seizure on January 3 of Venezuela’s then leader, President Nicolas Maduro, by the US Army’s Delta Wing commandos, was legally justified as a law-enforcement act to remove an accused drugs trafficker threatening the lives and security of the American people. No one resigned. However, there was one setback for the White House. Admiral Alvin Holsey who was commander of US Southern Command, responsible for Trump’s top-priority Western Hemisphere region, suddenly took early retirement after just one year in the job, and departed three weeks before Absolute Resolve was launched. He would have been in the loop about the plan to capture Maduro and bring him to New York for trial. As Trump was threatening to attack Venezuela, Senator Mark Kelly, a democrat from Arizona, was one of a group of fellow senators, all with military or intelligence careers behind them, who posted a video in November reminding service personnel that under their oath of enlistment they had to reject “illegal orders”. Both Trump and Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, condemned Kelly and other participants in the video. Hegseth described it as “seditious”. “There is nothing more American than standing up for the constitution, that’s what we were doing. The president didn’t like it, so now he calls for us to be hanged,” Kelly told CNN at the time. Kelly is now being investigated by the Pentagon for breaching codes of service as a former naval officer on a pension.