Trump’s return to the Monroe Doctrine His sabre-rattling betrays a new foreign strategy

Unsurprisingly, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen gave Trump’s proposal short shrift, stating, “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders”. But all the love bombing comes amid a rising independence movement in the former Danish colony that became self-ruling in 1979. “It is now time to take the next step for our country,” Greenland’s premier Múte Egede said. “Like other countries in the world, we must work to remove the obstacles to cooperation — which we can describe as the shackles of the colonial era — and move on.” He also floated the idea of a possible referendum, a development that could potentially play into Trump’s expansionist aim.

It would be easy to laugh off Trump’s annexation claims as little more than political trolling aimed at stirring up his MAGA base and usefully diverting attention from more pressing issues, such as the lack of a clear strategy for managing the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There is, though, more to this story that just Trump shooting off his mouth. In fact, Greenland has long been a serious obsession for the former and future president, who first made a bid to purchase the island in 2019.

But why is Trump so keen on this huge, icy rock where living conditions are so extreme that the tiny population (60,000) of mostly indigenous communities has to rely on fishing and hunting for its livelihood? In fact, it’s pretty straight-forward. For starters, Greenland is rich in natural resources, including rare earth minerals, which are critical for America’s high-tech industries and green technologies.

More important is its position at the doorstep of the geopolitically invaluable Arctic Ocean. Not only does the region hold vast untapped reserves of oil and gas, but as ice caps melt, previously inaccessible maritime pathways are opening up that could significantly alter global trade dynamics. Chief among these is the Northern Sea Route, along Russia’s coast and through the Baring Strait, which could cut transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40%, bypassing traditional routes through the Panama and Suez Canals.

Trump surely knows that Russia, with its extensive Arctic coastline, is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the region’s potential. Indeed, the Northern Sea Route is the lynchpin of Moscow’s new energy strategy; it has constructed ports, terminals and icebreaker fleets aimed at leveraging the new shipping routes to export oil, LNG and other resources from the Arctic regions to global markets, particularly Asia. It has also expanded its military presence. China, meanwhile, is also heavily present: having designated itself as a “near-Arctic state” in 2018, it has since been investing in the region through its Polar Silk Road initiative, aiming to integrate Arctic shipping into its broader Belt and Road framework.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s statements take on a more serious note. Far from being idle musings, they underscore the idea that Greenland is a vital part of the longstanding US ambition to strengthen its Arctic foothold and thereby counter the encroaching presence of Russia and China. In this sense, Trump’s talk of annexation and even military intervention, neither of which are likely to happen, risks being a distraction from the wider geopolitical dynamic at play: the scramble for the Arctic, one of the new “Great Games” of the 21st century and one that is already playing out.

To play this game, the US doesn’t actually need to seize physical control of Greenland. It already wields significant influence there under a 1951 treaty with Denmark: it bears substantial responsibility over Greenland’s defence, and operates a major base on the island — Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) — a critical component of its missile defense system. Any push to expand its military presence would face little resistance from Denmark, given its Atlanticist alignment and wariness of Russia. An independent Greenland would be even weaker against US demands — despite its premier claiming that Greenland “will never be for sale”.

In short, Trump’s empty talk of military intervention shouldn’t blind us to the very real fact that the Arctic is about to become a flashpoint in the rivalry between America and the China-Russia axis. The rhetoric is useful, though, as it indicates his administration’s potential foreign policy direction. Taken with his other recent expansionist claims, which also include the Panama Canal and even Canada, his Greenland message points to an attempt to deal with America’s declining global status and unsustainable imperial overreach. It all suggests the recalibrating of US priorities toward a more manageable “continental” strategy — a new Monroe Doctrine — aimed at reasserting full hegemony over what it deems to be its natural sphere of influence, the Americas and the northern Atlantic.

This approach would attempt to balance those imperialist tendencies still very much present among the US establishment (and in Trump himself) with a more “realist” understanding of the world’s multipolar dynamics. It might also explain why Trump’s Greenland ambitions resonated with some Russian commentators. TV pundit Sergey Mikheyev, for example, said that Trump’s proposal is in accordance with “the American mindset” that his predecessors attempted to “disguise and hide”. “Trump simply says it straight — we are everything and you are nothing”, Mikheyev noted. “This is especially interesting because it drives a wedge between him and Europe, it undermines the world architecture, and opens up certain opportunities for our foreign policy”, he added, arguing that if Trump “really wants to stop the third world war, the way out is simple: dividing up the world into spheres of influence”.

Stanislav Tkachenko, an influential academic at the St Petersburg State University also voiced his support and said that Russia should “thank Donald Trump, who is teaching us a new diplomatic language. That is, to say it like it is. Maybe we won’t carve up the world like an apple, but we can certainly outline the parts of the world where our interests cannot be questioned.”

These statements could be dismissed as wishful thinking, failing as they do to account for the heightened risk of military tensions where spheres of influence collide — as they do in the Arctic. Furthermore, US-Russia relations hinge on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, where significant obstacles remain on the path to lasting peace. Nevertheless, Trump’s remarks provide insight into how tensions between the US and Russia (and China) might evolve, even if they don’t subside. Of course, a world where weaker nations are treated as mere pawns to be “peacefully” divided among imperial powers — assuming this is the direction we are heading — is hardly the kind of multipolar order most people envision. Nor is it the order that Russia and China ostensibly advocate for, leaving open the question of how they might respond to Trump’s overtures.

But one place remains woefully unprepared — politically, intellectually and psychologically — to navigate these troubled waters: Europe. In a world poised to be divided into spheres of influence dominated by the United States, Russia and China, the Old Continent faces the prospect of becoming even more geopolitically weakened and vulnerable than it is now. And yet it continues to cling desperately to the myth of the transatlantic relationship, despite America’s increasingly apparent disregard for its sovereignty and prosperity, exemplified most recently by Trump’s Greenland ambitions. Indeed, it is bitterly ironic that Europe, after vassalising itself to the United States in an effort to counter a largely imagined Russian threat, now finds one of its territories being threatened not by Russia — but by the US itself.

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Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

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