The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #254, March 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organisation.
While President Donald Trump's foreign policy initiatives may seem arbitrary and disorganised, they have a clear aim: to reassert the hegemony of American imperialism in a number of areas and territories without any need for the usual formalities. This was evident in the pseudo-offensive against the Europeans which Trump conducted with respect to Greenland.
For several weeks, he had boasted that he was prepared to use every means, including military force, to compel Denmark to cede control. Then on Wednesday 21 January, at the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland, Trump announced that "the framework for a future agreement" on Greenland had been reached with NATO Secretary General, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
So, after all, Trump did not need to deploy an armada to Greenland, and probably never intended to. In response to his threats, however, several European states sent the grand total of forty soldiers to Greenland to show solidarity with Denmark, including fifteen soldiers from France and a similar number from Germany. But these troops didn't even stay for 48 hours. Britain announced the deployment of one single officer!
In response, Trump brandished a new threat: a 10% increase in tariffs starting 1 February, and a 25% increase from 1 June. Seeking to maintain the image of a head of state capable of standing up to Trump, Macron spoke of using the "trade bazooka", a set of retaliatory measures limiting certain imports from the United States and restricting access for American companies to European public procurement markets. But neither Macron, nor the vast majority of his European counterparts wanted an escalation, so they quickly backed down, in the face of American pressure.
After the Davos announcement, tensions subsided as quickly as they had risen. Trump was able to assure everyone that he had never intended to use force and lifted all threats of additional tariffs. Anyway, this tactic of slamming the table before engaging in negotiations is his trademark approach. He doesn't have to be tactful, as leader of the world's greatest power, as he keeps reminding everyone. European leaders may have been offended by the lack of consideration shown toward them, but this is exactly the way they tend to deal with the poorer countries which are dependent on them.
When Trump declares, "We need Greenland for our national security, and we will take it", it's not the whim of a delusional billionaire. This island, the size of Western Europe and populated by only 57,000 inhabitants, has long been an object of American desire.
As early as 1867, US President Andrew Johnson offered to buy Greenland and Iceland from the Kingdom of Denmark for seven million dollars. When the Danes refused, that sum was used the same year to buy Alaska from Russia.
Greenland, the object of US desire
As recently as 1946, under the presidency of Truman, the US offered Denmark $100 million in gold and rights to develop oil fields in Alaska in exchange for Greenland. The offer was rejected.
Greenland owes this persistent interest to its strategic position and its mineral and energy resources. According to a report by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), it contains resources "comparable to those of well-established mining regions such as Australia, Canada and Scandinavia", rare earths, lithium, graphite, titanium and other strategic minerals.
Aware of the challenges posed by mining in extreme conditions, beneath thick layers of ice, GEUS calculates that "declining resources and strong future demand for critical raw materials [would mean that] Greenland's deposits could become more economically viable in the future". As for Trump, while he may deny climate change, he still knows how to capitalise on future opportunities for profit. The melting ice offers hope, in the more or less distant future, for the extraction of these deposits, as well as the opening up of new West-East maritime routes, bypassing the American continent to the North. And this hope is enough to whet appetites and fuel rivalries.
In the case of Greenland, the United States has consistently obstructed other countries from exploiting its resources. In 2007, when an Australian company acquired ownership of the Kvanefjeld rare earth mining project in the South of the island and launched feasibility studies, the US exerted political pressure to try to oust it. When the Chinese company Shenghe Resources became one of the project's largest shareholders, in 2021 the US, citing national security concerns, collaborated with Danish politicians to pressure Greenland into adopting new environmental standards for mining. These standards led directly to the suspension of what was then the largest mining project outside of China.
Such interference is not an isolated incident, but part of a systematic US strategy to prevent competitors from accessing Greenland's critical minerals. Even without the land titles that obsess former real estate developer Trump, US control over the island is very real.
The American military presence
This control has been buttressed by a military presence in Greenland dating back to World War II. American soldiers were deployed there as early as spring 1941, after the signing of an agreement with the Danish government in exile following the German invasion - even before the official entry of the United States into the war.
In 1951, a new agreement authorised the American government to establish an airbase at Pituffik, then called Thule, in the north-west of the island. The Inuit, who had inhabited Greenland long before its colonisation by Denmark, were never consulted. As reported by Jean Malaurie, the geographer and explorer who was there at the time, thousands of men, ships and aircraft landed on the island and within months had erected a military complex on the icy desert, equipped with radar and runways, capable of accommodating, among other things, bombers carrying nuclear weapons. The inhabitants of the village of Thule were deported 150 km further north, to a few barracks hastily constructed by the Danish government.
In the mid-1950s, the Thule site housed up to 10,000 personnel, making it one of the largest American bases outside the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, its military personnel have decreased considerably to as few as 150, but the base remains an important component of the American satellite surveillance system. One of the key issues in the negotiations in Davos was likely to have been the authorisation to build new military installations that would be officially placed under American sovereignty.
Since returning to power, Trump has claimed that Greenland is "vital to the Golden Dome we are building". This "Golden Dome" is an expanded and more sophisticated version of Israel's Iron Dome missile interception system, integrating powerful radar and satellites, intended to protect the entire American continent - a new "Star Wars". It had first been discussed during the presidency of George W Bush and would be astronomically expensive: ~$175 billion, according to the White House, but according to a study by a US Congress research
unit, more likely several trillion dollars!
Beyond Greenland's mineral resources, the USA's interest in this Arctic region is also strategic. Pentagon generals are constantly preparing for the possibility of a future confrontation with Russia and China and their European rivals are expected to comply with American demands in this respect.
European states under constant pressure
Since the Greenland crisis, many commentators have expressed concern that the US leadership might be capable of turning against its European allies to the point of threatening them militarily. In fact, this is not new. Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State between 1973 and 1977, summed up more than a century of American history, punctuated by wars against European states, by declaring: "Being an enemy of the United States is dangerous, being its friend is fatal".
At the end of the 19th century, rapidly-expanding American capitalism clashed with its European rivals over their colonial empires. The United States went to war against Spain in 1898 to seize Cuba and the Philippines, territories over which it imposed its domination without needing to make them colonies in a formal sense.
During World War I, while the United Kingdom, France and Germany fought for control of the world, the United States initially allowed the European powers to kill and weaken each other, contenting itself with trading and lending money to the Anglo-French side. Then, in 1917, after three years of carnage, they intervened against Germany, which seemed to be gaining the upper hand over its adversaries.
This monstrous slaughter, which exhausted European states both in terms of lives and resources, victors and vanquished alike, allowed the United States to establish itself as "the master of the capitalist world", a phrase used by Trotsky in a speech delivered in 1926.
He continued: "What does American capitalism want? ... [it] is seeking the position of world domination; it wants to establish an American imperialist autocracy over our planet. This is what it wants. What will it do with Europe? It must, they say, pacify Europe. How? Under its hegemony. And what does this mean? This means that Europe will be permitted to rise again, but within limits set in advance, with certain restricted sections of the world market allotted to it. American capitalism is now issuing commands, giving instructions to its diplomats. In exactly the same way it is preparing and is ready to issue instructions to European banks and trusts, to the European bourgeoisie as a whole... It wants to put capitalist Europe on rations. This means that it will specify just how many tons, litres and kilograms and just what materials Europe has a right to buy and sell".
When, during World War II, the United States once again went to war against Germany, the real objective was not to "defend democracy against Nazism", but to advance its interests and impose its domination over the entire planet.
The only state they were unable to bring under their control during this period was the Soviet Union. The 1917 revolution in Russia had enabled the working class to seize power, expropriate the bourgeoisie, and build its own state. This state successfully resisted the interventions of all the capitalist powers and the attempts at overthrow they provoked. However, weakened and isolated following the failure of all other proletarian revolutions, it suffered bureaucratic degeneration, and the new ruling layer, with Stalin at its head, had acceptance by imperialism as its main objective. American leaders were thus able to forge an alliance with the USSR in order to win the war against Germany. In its aftermath, they were forced to recognise the USSR's role in maintaining order in the eastern part of Europe, where occupation by the Soviet army had prevented the outbreak of workers' revolutions. But, in reality, the American leadership - acting in their vast capitalist interests - did not accept that any part of the world should escape its control. From 1947 onwards, a "Cold War" was conducted against the USSR. And the allies of American imperialism were obliged to join it.
NATO, the armed wing of the US
Created in 1949, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was, accordingly, the Western bloc's military alliance against the Soviet bloc. To counter it, the USSR established a similar organisation, under the Warsaw Pact, in 1951. While NATO's Secretary General has traditionally been a European since its inception, the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) has always been held by an American general. Nothing in the NATO statutes explicitly provides for this division of responsibility, but the United States has never considered that it should be any other way.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 led to the end of the Warsaw Pact, but not to NATO. On the contrary, NATO welcomed new members after the disintegration of the former USSR's Eastern Bloc. And its policy of gradually enroaching on Russia ultimately led Putin to decide to invade Ukraine in 2022, in an attempt to keep Ukraine within his sphere of influence.
The United States also used NATO to intervene in 1999 against Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, and then from 2001 onward in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of European soldiers were deployed. Trump recently referred to their role with his usual nonchalant inaccuracy declaring: "They stayed out of the fighting". When over 1,600 soldiers from Europe (and Canada) were killed while fighting in the longest war so far waged by American imperialism.
To pander to his mostly isolationist electorate, Trump never misses an opportunity to complain that NATO brings little to the United States. He carefully avoids mentioning the markets that this integrated military organisation guarantees to the American arms industry. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, Trump demanded that Alliance members increase their contributions to 5% of their GDP [gross domestic product] by 2035. These additional billions will hugely swell the order books of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other American arms manufacturers. European leaders readily agreed to this American demand, and all the more so, because they themselves are engaged in a policy of "rearmament" and increased military budgets. When the Spanish Prime Minister expressed the wish to avoid this obligation, he drew the ire of all the summit participants, who unanimously proclaimed that discipline must be respected within the Alliance. European states want to be ready to wage "high-intensity warfare", to use the expression employed by military leaders, but they do not intend to oppose American oversight, and perhaps they cannot.
Europeans reduced to a pittance
The United States is therefore far from disengaging from NATO. Since the recent reorganisation of military positions, made public on 6 February 2026, an American officer is now in command of NATO's naval forces - a position traditionally held by the British Royal Navy. The United States, which already led the land and air forces, has thus further strengthened its control over NATO's whole military apparatus, which it still considers as its instrument, to serve US interests.
The war in Ukraine provided the USA with an opportunity to further reduce the share of the European market which it grants to its competitors. US capitalists were able to seize control of entire sectors of the Ukrainian economy. Its corporations' profits have grown through the supply of weapons and other equipment. And the US took advantage of sanctions on Russian gas and oil to force its European competitors to become dependent on the US for oil and gas instead.
In August 2022, President Biden passed the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), to encourage foreign companies to produce in the United States, by offering them subsidies. The US government sent emissaries to Europe to directly approach major corporations and persuade them to relocate their factories to the US, offering to handle almost all the necessary procedures.
In April 2025, there was a further escalation in this policy when Trump, back in the White House, announced a general increase in tariffs on goods imported into the United States. All countries, as well as the largest corporations, were obliged to send representatives to Washington to negotiate terms of access to the American market, which was a crucial outlet for European capitalists. Some CEOs travelled there in person, like French billionaire Bernard Arnault, who went to plead his case directly with Trump.
After several months of negotiations between the US administration and representatives of the European Union (EU), a trade agreement was finally reached in July 2025. Most EU exports to the United States are now subject to a 15% tariff, but for steel and aluminium, for instance, the tariff is as high as 50%. On their side, European governments took no retaliatory measures, deciding against raising tariffs. Mostly they sighed with relief, since it could have been worse and anyway, they had no choice but to comply with this demanding "ally".
The EU also had to promise $600 billion in investments and $750 billion in energy purchases over the next three years, a symbolic capitulation that allowed Trump to claim victory.
After more than 70 years of a supposed unification process, the European bourgeoisies have been unable to overcome their divisions and create a single bloc, which might have been able to stand up to the US. The European Union remains merely an alliance - hard-won, incomplete, and always subject to challenge - between states that are primarily concerned with defending the particular interests of their own national bourgeoisies.
Competing with one another, the bourgeoisies of Europe are utterly incapable of resisting the diktats of American imperialism, which is more than ever "the master of the capitalist world".
The main enemy is at home
The working class cannot take a side in this confrontation between capitalist powers, for it is the first victim. Everywhere, it is the workers who pay the price for capitalist competition, finding themselves deprived of all resources, of housing, and of healthcare. If the economic war between capitalists leads to a general escalation of military conflict, governments will not hesitate to mobilise young people and send them to die on the battlefields. As in the past, during previous world wars, colonial wars, and military interventions that have bloodied every continent in recent decades, nationalist rhetoric and lies about the need to defend the homeland or democracy will serve to mask the fact that workers and the lower classes will be sent to die for the interests of industrialists, financiers, and arms dealers.
As Trotsky wrote in 1926, the clashes of imperialist interests are "pregnant with wars and with the greatest revolutionary convulsions", and in every country, workers will have to defend their own interests against those of the capitlaists. To put an end to this bankrupt capitalist system, they will have to seize power and expropriate them. The working class will then be able to implement its own program of social transformation in order to build a society organised in such a way as to satisfy the needs of the many, not the few.
19 February 2026