ON 17th January, Donald Trump announced that he would hit the UK and seven other European countries with extra tariffs rising to 25% unless they agreed to support his ambition to acquire Greenland.
The new tariffs threaten a sharp escalation of global tensions at a time of geopolitical instability, with tens of thousands of Danes and Greenlanders protesting against American threats to take control of the Arctic island.
Yet from the kidnapping of Maduro in Venezuela to Trump’s annexation plans for Greenland, there is nothing new about US imperialism in which Britain and the European Union have always been complicit anyway.
After the illegal attack on Venezuela, European leaders (with the exception of Spain’s Pedro Sanchez) trotted out bogus arguments that the Trump’s action was justified because Maduro was not a legitimate president. The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz even attempted to justify the unprovoked US war of aggression with the assessment that ‘the legal classification of the US operation is complex.’
On Greenland, as with Venezuela, Trump makes hardly any effort to justify violating international law. (In a New York courtroom, the Kafkaesque accusation that Maduro is a member of a drug cartel has already been revised.) Indeed the US claim that Russian and Chinese ships are currently surrounding Greenland bypasses fact altogether. In the respective cases, it’s neither drug trafficking nor national security that concerns Trump but the seizure of another country’s oil or rare minerals that help to fuel the US economy and its military-industrial complex
Greenland is the largest island in the world. It has a population of around 57,000 but not its own military. Already, by dint of a 1951 agreement, the United States is allowed to station an unlimited number of troops in Greenland. And Denmark, which has sovereignty over the island, would give America all the military bases it needs anyway, as well as access to Greenland’s critical minerals. So there is no strategic case for US annexation beyond a wish to consolidate the platform for launching an imperialist conflict with Russia and its main rival China.
But instead of sending troops, Trump’s preference is to coerce the Danes into selling Greenland. There is even talk that he would be prepared to bribe Greenlanders with $1 million each to become Americans. But even that would represent an unprecedented act of aggression against an ally – which Nato would struggle to survive.
‘No member should attack or threaten another member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation,’ Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk claimed recently. ‘Otherwise, Nato would lose its meaning.’
However, some Nato members would probably try to keep a zombie alliance going, even if America did invade Greenland, reckoning that they they still need US protection from Russia. Doing so would be a dangerous error. The Nato treaty, which helps to secure US hegemony in Europe, only protects the alliance’s territory, not member states from one another, as Greece and Turkey can testify.
Yet the Trump administration seems incapable of grasping that – whatever people think of Maduro or Danish sovereignty over Greenland – few Venezuelans or Greenlanders welcome an invasion of their country by the United States.
‘We don’t want to be Americans,’ Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four other party leaders said in a joint statement. ‘We don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders.’
The question of who’s actually in charge is therefore crucial in Venezuela – and could soon become so in Greenland. The answer in the first scenario came from Trump: ‘We are going to run Venezuela until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.’ But Trump is caught in a cleft stick. His MAGA base doesn’t favour sending American troops to be killed in foreign countries. That was a key theme of the campaign he waged against the Democrats and the old Republican elite over Afghanistan and Iraq. And it was notable, for instance, that his Vice-President J. D. Vance, who served in Iraq but who has since been one of the loudest critics of American interventionism, was apparently excluded from the Mar-a-Lago cabal of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and CIA director John Ratcliffe who met with Trump to green-light the Delta Force raid on Caracas.
The kidnapping of Maduro and Trump’s tariff-rattling over Greenland have shocked even the most ardent supporters of the Western capitalist fairy-tale. Talking of which, Britain has long ridden on the coattails of US imperialism. The much-talked about ‘special relationship’ amounts to nothing in international policy terms beyond a slavish adherence to US hegemony. So the only thing the Alliance for Green Socialism and other comrades can do is to continue our efforts to build an anti-imperialist movement based on true internationalism. Such internationalism is not a thing of the past. It lives on in the global fight against inequality, genocide and climate change.
Photo by Annie Spratt/Unsplash
Alliance for Green Socialism 