Hands off Greenland! Abolish NATO!

Nearly 90 percent of Greenland’s 60,000 people are of indigenous Greenlandic Inuit heritage. Trump’s utterly despicable threats show in all its ignominy the racism and setter colonial mentality that infuses every fiber of the man and which he and his followers glorify.

Donald Trump’s threats to seize Greenland during the first weeks of the new year remain menacing. Seen early in his second term either as a joke or as an attempt to “negotiate” with Europe, today the threats are no joke. Before he climbed down off the precipice, there was palpable fear, most immediately in Greenland and also in Europe, North America, and really, the entire world, that Trump would actually start another world war. He has now ratcheted down the military threat, but only after an astonishing bout of saber rattling at the Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Trump backed down after declaring that he had been given “everything we want” in talks with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte in Davos on Jan. 21. The terms of the “framework of a future deal” are still murky, although they would reportedly grant ownership of military bases in Greenland to the United States and certain rights to mine minerals there. On Jan. 25, a top official from Greenland, Naaja Nathanielsen, insisted that her government had not been “presented with anything” as yet, and that Greenland’s “giving up sovereignty is not on the table for now.”

Make no mistake, the threat against Greenland remains, although we can very easily imagine that the ever-erratic Trump wakes up one day and decides to do a 180. As with Trump’s attack on Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Celia Flores, the threats against Greenland show that U.S. imperialism has become increasingly dysfunctional, more personalized, and, consequently, more dangerous.

U.S. imperialism has always been a threat to the world

There is still a lot of liberal nostalgia about a supposedly better prior era of U.S. imperialism, though liberals would use words like “rules-based order” instead of “imperialism.” Below, we discuss how the MAGA and far-right version of U.S. imperialism is increasingly taking a qualitatively different trajectory in comparison to past iterations. Here, however, we must pause to emphasize that Native Americans and the peoples of countless Black and Brown-majority countries on every continent would point out that the United States has always had no problem violating national sovereignty and massacring millions to serve the interests of U.S. capitalism.

As with previous exercises in brute U.S. imperialism, the leaders of the administration in this case, are ultimately motivated by material and political interests. Here too, they openly talk about the mineral wealth of both Venezuela and Greenland, and about fossil fuels and “rare” earth minerals in enormous quantities. Secretary of State Rubio’s threats of regime change in Cuba are an escalation of the siege that Yankee imperialism has imposed on the island nation for the past six-plus decades.

Another continuity is the attempt to secure U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Even the Council of Europe’s general secretary, Alain Berset, not a person inclined to be critical of language about “Western values” and “the importance of the NATO alliance,” recently admitted as much in a New York Times op-ed: “The fear is that an independent Greenland might one day drift toward Russia’s or China’s orbit, placing their weapons at America’s doorstep. It would be an Arctic repeat of the Bay of Pigs.”

Is it different this time?

Here’s that same old U.S. paranoia about any country, especially one with a majority Indigenous population, even contemplating independence. But it would also be strategically foolish to dismiss the differences between the current expression of U.S. imperialism and previous ones. While there are continuities in terms of the content of US imperialism under Trump, the difference in form is of major importance.

This is related to the deep crisis of that imperialist project. Previous U.S. presidents rarely if ever failed to cloak their predatory actions in the language of higher purposes: promoting democracy, making the world more “peaceful” or “free,” “liberating brown women from brown men,” etc. This time, the president and his close associates openly admit the truth of what they’re doing.

More importantly, as the new national strategy documents released in late 2025 envision, the U.S. now sees the world in terms of Schmittian or social Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” As the administration’s most openly fascist ideologue Stephen Miller said on a CNN interview in early January, “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” In other words, the U.S., unable to maintain its global hegemony, will now more increasingly resort to the hard side of its power.

A recent article by Erwin Freed in Workers’ Voice sums up well the implications of these documents: “Taken together, the three reports paint a picture of U.S. imperialism’s international standing falling from uncontested dominance to being compelled to game out its place in a new world order. While the United States retains economic and military superiority, the large strides made by Chinese technological advancements and control of strategic sectors are quickly closing the gap. All of the reports point to an economic world system facing stagnation and ever-sharper conflicts between the great powers.

NATO in crisis; Chinese imperialism to the fore

What is also new and deeply disturbing is the language of war—both trade wars and literal or “kinetic” ones—between NATO allies. Before Trump walked back his military threats, European officials were openly discussing sanctions on U.S. tech firms. Boycotts of U.S. goods and services are becoming the norm among everyday people in Europe and Canada.

The U.S. historian and blogger Heather Cox Richardson also noted the following in her daily newsletter, dated Jan. 18: “For all of Trump’s bluster about U.S. trade, the world appears to be moving on without the U.S. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada visited Beijing this week, the first visit of a Canadian prime minister to China since 2017. On Friday, Canada broke with the U.S. and struck a major deal with China, cutting its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for China’s lowering its tariffs on Canadian canola seed. Carney posted on social media: ‘The Canada-China relationship has been distant and uncertain for nearly a decade. We’re changing that, with a new strategic partnership that benefits the people of both our nations.’”

This was shortly followed by Carney’s speech at Davos, in which he bluntly talked about a “rupture” in the NATO alliance caused by Trump’s malignity and called on “middle powers”—those secondary powers traditionally under the hegemony of either the U.S., China, or Russia—to unite and to propose an alternative to MAGA-fascist and Chinese imperialist domination. However, Carney’s politics, which promote finance capital and Canada’s fossil fuel industry, are unable to address—let alone resolve—the contradictions that generate the escalating crises and toxicities of our time. Only a mass, international, socialist struggle against imperialism can do that. But the degree to which the speech indexed a deep, probably irreparable rift within Western imperialism was striking if unsurprising.

Self-determination for Greenland

Often lost in the discussions about NATO, Trump, the U.S., Europe and China, is the fact that nearly 90 percent of Greenland’s 60,000 people are of indigenous Greenlandic Inuit heritage. Trump’s utterly despicable threats show in all its ignominy the racism and setter colonial mentality that infuses every fiber of the man and which he and his followers glorify. But Denmark’s softer tone belies its own history of colonialism.

Denmark’s colonization of Greenland goes back to the early 18th century. For most of that time until the present, the former treated the latter in a manner typical of settler colonialism, including, into the 1990s, a program of forced contraception of hundreds of Greenlandic women. Despite an official apology from the Danish government and an attempt at compensation of the victims of this crime, Greenlandic communities still live with the trauma and physical harm that this caused.

The Greenlandic independence movement pushed the Kingdom of Denmark to grant Greenland autonomous status in 1979. In 2024, right before Trump’s threats, the independence movement was polling at 60 percent of the population in favor. The past year, and especially the past few months, have seen a retreat for the call for full independence, with a majority of Greenlanders now saying that if the choice is between the U.S. and Denmark, they would rather choose Denmark, with its social safety net and predictability in international affairs.

The idea of full independence, for now, is on the back burner, as Greenlanders conclude quite reasonably that their small population and practical lack of defensive capability would make them easy prey for the insatiable colonial U.S. beast.

For an emancipatory, working-class abolition of NATO

If the current moment means the existential crisis of NATO, we as revolutionary socialists won’t lament this imperialist coven of gangsters. Founded as an alliance of imperialist countries with the objective of pushing back the Soviet Union—and more broadly, a socialist alternative—after World War II, NATO’s true role over the past 80 years has been as the world’s foremost anticommunist organization. It has put its stakes in the ground as the implacable foe of emancipation among the colonized and formerly colonized peoples of the world, as a stalking horse of U.S. imperialism.

So, while we fight alongside anyone fighting Trump and his far-right MAGA movement, we also make clear that we support the abolition of NATO. But the abolition of NATO can only avoid sinking the world into even more cycles of violence and war if it is led by mass movements from below as part of an emancipatory, socialist vision for society. If the collapse of NATO is allowed to happen in the Trumpist way, this will simply mean accepting the carving up of the world into “spheres of influence.” This is not a lesser evil in relation to the status quo, it means exacerbating the worst parts of it.

As we argued in our call for NATO abolition at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “just as the working class is the only class that produces the wealth of society, it is the only social force that can permanently end wars.”

Hands off Greenland! Hands off Venezuela! For the abolition of NATO!

Photo: A boy holds a crossed out map of Greenland topped by a hairpiece symbolizing U.S. President Donald Trump, during a protest against Trump’s policy towards Greenland in front of the U.S. consulate in Nuuk, Greenland on Jan. 17.  (Evgeniy Maloletka / AP)

First published here by Workers’ Voice