Held amid the Greenland dispute, the Davos meetings neither defused nor contained the confrontation. Trump’s proposal to bring the island under US control remains in fact very much on the table, combining public statements, diplomatic interventions, and open threats of economic retaliation. The EU leadership has publicly framed Greenland’s territory as ‘non-negotiable’, while simultaneously preparing an Arctic security package and an investment surge in Greenland, explicitly warning against a transatlantic tariff spiral tied to the dispute. British statements have moved in the same register, condemning coercion while attempting to preserve the ‘special relationship’, even as Trump openly threatens economic retaliation against noncompliant allies.
The most widespread explanations for this development focus on US interests in securing Arctic military routes – the High North as a corridor for surveillance, missile defence, submarines, and power projection as ice cover recedes – and on US access to crucial minerals, including rare earths and other inputs that every imperialist bloc now treats as strategic and therefore too important to be left to market mechanisms alone.
Yet neither of these arguments explains why Washington would suddenly need sovereignty over Greenland to do what, in substance, it already does there. The US can not only extract all the rare earths it wants, but, since the 1951 US–Denmark defence agreement, it has enjoyed extraordinarily broad latitude to operate in Greenland, including running major bases – today the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule – and building out capabilities within a NATO framework. Later arrangements around upgrades to Thule further consolidated this position: Denmark and Greenland would be consulted and informed, but structurally denied any power of veto.
One significant exception to this all-encompassing agreement, however, concerns nuclear armaments. Denmark adopted a declared non-nuclear policy in the 1950s, yet US nuclear operations in and around Greenland seemed to have repeatedly collided with this line, often through deliberate ambiguity and secrecy. The most infamous episode remains the 21 January 1968 crash of a nuclear-armed B-52 near Thule, which dispersed radioactive material across the sea ice and triggered a massive clean-up operation as well as a political scandal later known as ‘Thulegate’. In the immediate aftermath, Denmark pressed Washington for an absolute ban on nuclear overflights and nuclear storage in Greenland.
Whether the current escalation is directly linked to renewed nuclear ambitions remains an inference. Even if it were true, however, the nuclear dimension would not be the primary motor of the confrontation, but rather its most extreme military articulation. The deeper driver lies elsewhere: in the sharpening of imperialist tensions, not only between blocs – above all between the Western powers and the China–Russia axis – but increasingly within the same bloc itself. The Greenland crisis speaks to the erosion of the unity of material interests within NATO, in other words to the fact that the US, locked into a long-term economic struggle with China, is increasingly unable to guarantee its allies a stable and predictable share of imperialist plunder. As the imperialist chain tightens, control becomes more coercive, and alliances more unreliable, while relationships between allies and enemies become less mediated by that hollow fiction known as ‘international law’.
We already pointed to this dynamic in the conclusions of our last statement on imperialism. What lies ahead is not stabilisation, but a radical exacerbation of the crisis, in which war becomes an ever more concrete possibility not only in regions conveniently portrayed as distant from Europe but also on Europe’s own soil.
This is what ‘multipolarity’ looks like under capitalism: not a peaceful rebalancing, and certainly not a liberating defeat of US imperialism, but a generalised turmoil. Multipolarity increasingly resembles nothing but a situation of everyone against everyone, in which the working class everywhere is forced to pay the price through austerity, repression, militarisation, and war, all sustained by an ideological offensive aimed at lining workers up behind ‘their’ bourgeoisie. Greenland, in this sense, is not an anomaly. It is one more symptom of a system entering a phase in which the pressure for profits assumes its most destructive forms.