Fun fact: there is no real difference between these two countries, except US President Donald Trump wishes to see one. And at this point, it seems that he and his merry crew of hemispheric pirates are in the mood to treat Venezuela and Denmark in essentially the same manner: namely by doing whatever they want to them in the pursuit of raw materials and geopolitical location advantage. Trump himself has reiterated his belief that Washington “needs” Greenland. Which, in his world, is the same as “has a right to take.”
Stephen Miller, one of Don Trump’s famiglia’s many aggressive and sinister sidekicks, has claimed that Denmark’s Greenland really belongs to the US anyhow (totally false) and that there won’t be any military resistance if Washington seizes it (most likely correct). Miller’s wife Katie had already posted a map of Greenland covered in the American flag and the caption “soon,” even before her husband laid down the law – or rather its absence for the Americans: “We live in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
That, fundamentally, Denmark is getting no more respect than Venezuela is ironic, obviously, because Venezuela has a history of resisting the US, whereas Denmark has a history of submitting and is a member of two clubs of US vassals, NATO and the EU. And yet, Washington is openly threatening to take over a massive slice of legally Danish territory with the same total disregard for laws and rules it has displayed while assaulting Venezuela.
Sure, the American campaign against Venezuela has been much more vicious and bloodier than a US takeover of Greenland is likely to be. Notwithstanding her safely rhetorical resistance to Trump’s equally verbal (for now) sallies, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has good chances not to be kidnapped in blindfolds and handcuffs, while her guards are massacred by the dozen, as happened to Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Last but not least, Denmark’s leftover-colonialist claim to Greenland is much less impressive than Venezuela’s clear right to sovereignty, its own resources, and, last but not least, peace, all of which the US has trampled on.
Yet there it is: under Trump, the old hierarchy between Global-North US allies (really, clients at best, vassals most of the time) and US victims pure and simple – mostly in the Global South – has become unreliable at best. In the bad old days, countries such as Germany, Britain, France, and Italy always had to obey Washington when the chips were down (witness, for instance, the massive CIA intervention in Italy kicking off furiously with the elections of 1948, the British-French Suez fiasco of 1956, or the stationing of US intermediate-range missiles in the early 1980s). But they were allowed a little posturing – as under France’s De Gaulle and Chirac and Germany’s Brandt and Schroder, for instance – and could reasonably expect to be spared the most brutally lawless and lawlessly brutal side of American domination as long as they kept complying when it mattered.
With Washington now demanding a big piece of what is – officially and legally – Denmark and threatening to take it by force if it’s not handed over, the US is signaling that these (mostly) European Global-North privileges have become extremely fragile. That’s why some Europeans have been shocked to wake up one day and find out they are “allied” to the world’s worst bully: German figurehead president and born-again Russophobe Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for instance, has discovered the US is turning the world into a “robber’s den.” Congrats, Frank-Walter, the fastest brain in Germany, and now off with you to the end of the line behind the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Iranians, the Guatemalans (really, all of Latin America, of course), at least half of Africa… simply, almost everyone outside the Global North.
Mostly, however, the Europeans have done what they always do when receiving a fierce kick up the backside from their American masters: show disunity and, insofar, as there is any consensus, then it is not to fight back but ‘negotiate’. With negotiation, of course, by now a code for full-fledged, shameless capitulation, as demonstrated when the EU’s de-facto despot Ursula von der Leyen sold out Europe’s national economies at the Trump gulf resort. Except ‘selling out’ is technically incorrect, because she got exactly nothing in return for total surrender.
Yet, to be fair even to Trump, Washington stripping the Europeans of their relative privileges is a bipartisan development. It was under Democrat Joe Biden, after all, that the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up in a massive assault on Germany’s – and the EU’s as a whole – vital energy infrastructure. Whatever the precise role of a group of Ukrainian terrorists in this crime, there is no doubt that the US have also been involved, even if successive Berlin governments have twisted themselves into pretzels not to acknowledge that fact.
The degrading of the European clients and vassals has not, then, begun under Trump. Indeed, if only Germany and the rest of NATO-EU Europe had reacted normally to the Nord Stream assault, maybe, just maybe, the US – even under Trump – would feel a little less certain that it can do whatever it wants with its underlings in the Old World. But, as thing are in reality, the perverse response to the Nord Stream attack stands for a longer trend of European self-demotion. It is really since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s that Western Europe has not only failed to emancipate itself from Washington. It has become submissive as never before.
That is why Denmark’s Frederiksen is wrong when she warns that a US takeover of Greenland would finish NATO. Of course, it would be brutal proof that NATO does not constrain its dominant member, the US, which is ironic because the Europeans have just obsequiously agreed to ruin themselves by spending far too much on it.
But the destruction of NATO has been a protracted process. Its main drivers have been the reckless overstretch into Eastern Europe since the 1990s, which is now about to end in the West’s defeat in Ukraine; a series of ‘out-of-area’ fiascos and crimes; and last but not least, the European policy of appeasing the US.
This is the ultimate irony that vassal minds simply cannot grasp: if only the Europeans had asserted themselves against the US – for instance, by resisting or at least setting limits to expansion and by opting out of the insane proxy war against Russia in Ukraine – then Washington might now be less emboldened and less prone to seize a fellow NATO member’s territory. And as a result, NATO would be less endangered.
Yet, ultimately, one cannot deplore the fact that Washington’s Global-North ‘allies’ are losing their privileges or that NATO may be shown up as the absurdity it is. In a world where the Gaza genocide is being committed by Israel and the West together and Venezuela is subjected to violent robbery in broad international daylight, let the Europeans face some reality as well. Maybe that will concentrate some minds and help the successors of German chancellor Merz, for instance, to see through the ‘complexity’ that so befuddles him at this moment when it comes to Venezuela (not to speak of his two blind eyes concerning Gaza). Until then, of all the victims of the US, it is the Europeans who deserve no pity, for two reasons: because they usually are accomplices, and when Washington targets them, too, they only have themselves to blame.
