Nothing is more fitting to signal the ‘return of history’ than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’ invocation of the Czech dissident Václav Havel and his seminal 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless, to describe the moribund state of the Western alliance. Havel wrote this piece a decade after Soviet tanks crushed Prague Spring under the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed the principle of “limited sovereignty” and asserted the USSR’s divine right to intervene whenever it deemed its interests threatened. History would later show such belligerence was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet bloc as a genuine alliance of nations.

Except today it was the United States replaying the role of an unabashed hegemon. Carney’s eulogy of the Western alliance came as the United States, in a move of breathtaking audacity, coerced Denmark, a member of the NATO alliance, into accepting the transformation of American bases in Greenland into sovereign U.S. territory, akin to the U.S. bases in Guantanamo Bay. The deal could be further used for the absorption of up to sixteen World War II-era military sites after their reactivation, effectively controlling all the coast of Greenland. While the European Union breath the sign of relief as America has refrained from taking over all the Greenland, the retreat is nothing but tactical, all signals by logic and sentiment points towards an eventual incorporation, by force if necessary.

Regardless of the final settlement, the damage to the Euro-Atlantic relationship is permanent. The Greenland episode has ushered a violent rupture of EU-U.S. relationship similar to the Sino-Soviet split of the 1950s. Then, a triumphant but deeply insecure Soviet Union, fearing the latent power of its junior partner, demanded that China cede control of its navy, which was tantamount to handing over China’s entire eastern coast. Chairman Mao’s refusal, his defiance in the face of such fraternal blackmail, marked the beginning of the end for the monolithic communist cause in the 20th century. The American demand of Denmark today is a mirror image of this imperial overreach, a demand so profound that it forces allies to confront the uncomfortable truth that their sovereignty is, and has always been, conditional.

However, to consider the Greenland gambit as an “absurd” real estate proposition is to betray a profound ignorance of American history. The acquisition of American territories held by European powers during crises on the continent is not an anomaly but one of the most consistent and successful strategies of U.S. foreign policy. This playbook was first established during the Napoleonic Wars, when United States seized the opportunity of France’s all-consuming continental struggle to purchase the Louisiana Territory, doubling its size overnight. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the newly appointed U.S. envoy to Greenland is the governor of Louisiana in a symbolic nod to this foundational act of opportunistic expansion.

The pattern repeated itself over the next two centuries. In the 1860s, the Russian Empire, economically shattered after its defeat by British and French forces in the Crimean War, was forced to sell its vast North American territory of Alaska. During World War I, as a neutral Denmark faced the existential threat of German invasion and economic collapse, Washington leveraged its financial power to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands, securing a critical naval outpost in the Caribbean. In the darkest days of World War II, with Britain standing alone against the Nazi war machine, the “Destroyers for Bases” agreement, which leased British bases in the Caribbean for 99 years to America, effectively dismantled the last vestiges of the British Empire in the Americas. In exchange for fifty aging warships, a desperate Churchill ceded strategic footholds from Newfoundland to British Guiana, assets that would underpin U.S. hemispheric dominance for the next century.

Today, as the war wages on in Ukraine, the European Union, bled dry by this proxy engagement that the United States initiated, and facing a future of deindustrialization and economic stagnation, is ripe for another dismemberment of its strategic assets. Even before Donald Trump came to power, the Biden administration used the Ukraine war to cement American energy dominance over Europe by ensuring the permanent demise of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Under this bipartisan consensus on leveraging European dependency to advance American interests, the MAGA Republicans and the so-called internationalist Democrats are merely two sides of the same imperial coin.

The acquisition of Greenland also has profound strategic consequences that is widely underappreciated. With 2.16 million square kilometers and almost the same size as India, this vast and empty landmass is the ultimate geopolitical asset. Moored at the nexus of the American, European, and Russian landmasses, Greenland is the biggest and the most perfect “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” Moreover, as America learned in Okinawa, the push for absolute sovereignty, rather than mere basing rights, is critical because it removes all political constraints on the deployment of America’s most vital military hardware. Sovereign territory allows for the permanent stationing of strategic bombers like the B-2 and B-21. The flight distance from Greenland to Tehran, the capital of America’s archnemesis Iran, is approximately 6,900 kilometers, compared to over 11,000 kilometers from the bases in Missouri. This geographic advantage eliminates the need for complex and vulnerable mid-air refueling operations, drastically reducing flight times and increasing sortie rates for any future conflict in the Middle East or beyond.

But the most vital role of Greenland lies in the grim theater of nuclear deterrence. The Arctic is the shortest flight path for intercontinental ballistic missiles traveling between the great powers. As the arms control architecture of the Cold War, from the ABM Treaty to New START, has been systematically dismantled, and new nuclear states like North Korea show that controlling the atomic bomb is vital for security, especially compared to the fate of Ukraine after renouncing its arsenal in 1994, we are witnessing the death of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation regime and potentially the beginning of a new global nuclear arms race. Such reality grants the control of this polar real estate existential imperative. Washington anticipates that Greenland to be the keystone in the “golden dome” of its revitalized missile defense and first-strike architecture. In addition, Greenland also provides a forward base for the deployment of a new generation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which, freed from the constraints of the now-defunct INF Treaty, capable of holding the entirety of European Russia at risk from the difficult-to-target silos across the vast landmass.

While the military logic is rooted in the Cold War’s past, the economic logic is fixed on the 21st century’s future. Greenland is also a high-stakes gamble on climate change. As the ice caps recede at a rate that consistently outpaces scientific predictions, the fabled Northern Sea Route (NSR) is rapidly transforming into a potential primary artery of global trade. Currently navigable for approximately three months a year, climate models project that by 2050, the route could be open for six months or more without the need for specialized icebreakers. Such changes would drastically lower the insurance premium of using such routes and constitute a fundamental reordering of the world’s logistical map.

For trade between East Asia and Europe, the NSR, which cuts the journey by around 40% compared to the Malacca/Suez Canal route, can save weeks of transit time and millions in fuel costs. For commerce between Asia and the U.S. East Coast, it offers a viable alternative via Alaska to the chronically congested Panama Canal. By controlling both Alaska and Greenland, the United States will bracket the two main entry and exit points of the NSR in the Western Hemisphere. It will be positioned to become the logistical gatekeeper of the Arctic, a northern “Singapore” controlling the chokepoints, port access, and ultimately the pricing of this new global highway. The bid for Greenland is therefore also a move to establish a quasi-monopoly over the most important new trade route of the 21st century.

This strategy acquires even greater urgency in light of Russia’s anticipated post-war pivot. A Russia isolated by the West after the war in Ukraine will likely seek to reduce its reliance on raw energy exports and transform itself into a pivotal trading nation, leveraging its vast Arctic coastline that makes up the NSR. Moscow is already making moves to assert control over the Svalbard archipelago, a Norwegian territory strategically positioned near Greenland, as a future hub for NSR traffic.

As the melting polar ice makes the NSR viable, it could also make the Northwest Passage (NWP), which runs from the northern Alaskan coast to Canada’s North, a competing trade route. Greenland, which sits at the end of the NWP, could be poised for further strategic importance. However, Greenland alone is not sufficient for NWP control; it would require a far grander geopolitical project: the consolidation of the entire North American Arctic under U.S. control. The strategic logic is simple: the vast Canadian Arctic coastline, which forms the route’s southern boundary, must also be secured for America to exert the same kind of control that Russia does over the NSR.

Greenland therefore stands as the beginning of the eventual domination of Canada, the logical and necessary target in this continental consolidation. Such geopolitical imperative is supercharged by a demographic pressure cooker. The United States, with a population of roughly 350 million, currently looms over Canada’s 41 million. But this is about to change. Canada has ambitious plans to grow its population to 100 million by 2100 via immigration. This long-term growth will be the biggest change in the strategic calculus of the Western Hemisphere in centuries. Canada, unlike Brazil and Mexico, is the only advanced economy in the Americas other than the United States. A Canada with 100 million population is therefore not a potential partner but a rival. Thus, the current 9-to-1 population advantage provides a window of opportunity for the United States to act decisively.

With Alaska to its west and a sovereign U.S. Greenland to its east, Canada is now strategically encircled. This is perhaps the reason why Carney referenced Czechoslovakia, another country encircled by bigger powers from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. With separatist sentiment already simmering in energy-rich provinces like Alberta, the tools for political destabilization and fragmentation are readily available for the United States to exploit. Should this subjugation occur, the new continental entity would cover approximately 19.8 million square kilometers, dwarfing Russia’s 17.1 million and creating the largest single nation-state on Earth, an undisputed master of the Western Hemisphere and the Arctic Circle.

Many observers, witnessing America’s abandoning of the alliance it built and institutions it created, have concluded that this marked a return to a classical sphere-of-influence world. Some even go back further to suggest this is a return to the era before the Treaty of Westphalia, when European royals fought over personal fortunes rather than national interests. Although Donald Trump’s ambition to build a political dynasty and aggrandize foreign policy for personal gains are unmistakable, this analysis is dangerously incomplete. The grand strategy taking shape best resembles the Nixonian pivot of the Cold War, which was a tactical retrenchment designed to set the stage for a more advantageous future confrontation.

In a close mirror to today, Nixon saw that 1970s America’s overstretched global commitment left the Soviet Union, its principal rival, poised to secure dominance over Europe. To manage the relative decline of the United States, he pursued détente that recognized the Soviet Union had reached parity with the United States. Then, America went on a series of efforts to close its flanks. In 1972, Nixon ruthlessly secured the hemisphere by orchestrating the coup against Allende in Chile, a move echoed by recent interventions against Venezuela’s Maduro. In 1973, Nixon concluded the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam to set the beginning of U.S. withdrawal from the unwinnable war in Vietnam, a position echoed by America’s peace efforts in Ukraine. Most crucially, the U.S. executed a stunning diplomatic rebalancing with China to isolate the Soviet Union. Today, the roles are reversed, with a potential rebalancing with Russia being used to isolate China, America’s only peer competitor.

This is why China is not taking the proclamation of “G2” condominium or any grand bargain treaty seriously. American diplomacy, especially in Trump’s realist incarnation, respects only strength. The détente Nixon initiated with the USSR lasted less than a decade before the United States, having reset its strategic posture and recovered from the Vietnam syndrome, escalated into the Second Cold War under Reagan. For an opportunist like Trump, or any successor who adopts this realist framework, the period of truce may be even shorter. Any détente with China could well resemble the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, a cynical, temporary truce designed to allow the United States to consolidate its power base and lull its adversary into a false sense of security before turning on it with full force.

For America, the ideal scenario would be to lure China into a false picture of a strategic window and embark on a series of costly entanglements, an “Afghan Trap” for the 21st century. This is why, despite the retreat from the Atlantic, Washington remains firm over the Pacific, encouraging allies in Asia, particularly Japan and the Philippines, to adopt more aggressive postures, hoping to bog China down in proxy conflicts over Taiwan, in the South China Sea, or with non-allied states like Vietnam and India. China is keenly aware of this reality. Its counter-strategy is a twin focus of disciplined patience and asymmetric action. On one hand, China is using the window of American retrenchment to secure the goodwill of Washington’s increasingly nervous allies, further cementing China’s status as the nodal core of global trade. In January 2026, a record number of Western leaders from France, Britain, Canada, and South Korea have visited China. On the other hand, China is ensuring a reverse Kissinger strategy on Russia does not materialize by respecting Russian core interests in Central Asia, a task made easier by Moscow’s own preference for multipolarity.

The ultimate irony of this new era is perhaps the validation of the Thucydides Trap. When this analogy first became popular in the last decade, it was widely considered ahistorical by casting a rising China as the democratic Athens, challenging the established totalitarian power of Sparta, which the United States does not resemble. But today’s reality is now proving this analogy more correct than ever. The United States, facing relative economic decline and a hollowing industrial capacity, is indeed behaving like Sparta, a military power resorting to coercion and force to maintain its position in a world where it no longer writes all the economic rules. China, meanwhile, has become the new Athens, a global trading powerhouse, the world’s largest manufacturing nation, whose influence expands not through conquest but through commerce, binding the world to it through supply chains and investment.

But the lesson of the Peloponnesian War is a brutal and unforgiving one: Athens lost. Its economic dynamism, its cultural brilliance, and its governance ideals were ultimately no match for the disciplined, militarized society that saw its preeminence threatened. Economic power, detached from military dominance and the will to use it, proved to be fatally vulnerable. This is perhaps the most profound lesson being absorbed in Beijing today, which motivates its systematically purging of the “peace disease,” beginning from its military. As the betrayal in the Arctic has made it clear that in the 21st century, as in the 5th century BC, it is better to be Sparta. The Athenians, after all, ended up as slaves.

Editor: Charriot Zhai