‘He keeps encouraging me … to choose between Europe and the US. That would be a strategic mistake for our country,” Keir Starmer said in response to Ed Davey’s question in the House of Commons last week, about whether a US move against Greenland would mean the end of Nato.
What about Europe, though? As Danish and Greenlandic ministers prepared to face JD Vance in the White House, the question was would Europe finally choose between Europe and the US? Will its leaders have the courage to tell the full truth – that the US isn’t simply abandoning its allies and destroying the international order but is now in the position of active and hostile predation by force – and more importantly, to act on it? To offer Denmark moral and material backing, and Greenland a future of self-determination and membership, rather than subservience to US resource plunder?
Donald Trump has already set the tone by saying the US will seize Greenland “one way or the other”, and no part of the triumvirate around him is trying to hide their imperial intentions any more. Not the nepotists and grifters amassing ever greater private fortunes. Not the white supremacist ideologues drawing inspiration from Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer! to post “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”, via official US government social media accounts. Not the techno-nihilists salivating to mine every bit of Greenland’s mineral resources and rule their own neofeudal city states on its coast.
When Trump says that the only constraint on his exercise of power is “my own morality”, that means there is no constraint. Like Vladimir Putin, he will keep grabbing until someone imposes a limit on him.
The truth is, Maga’s grand design for a new American empire has never been all that hidden. During the final months of the 2024 US presidential election, unfamiliar maps started going viral in the Magasphere. These maps are all in some way derivative of a 1930s movement that sought to create what it called the Technate of America, a union of most of North America and some of South America under US power and control. The “technate” would run south from Greenland, through Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela, stretching all the way to French Guiana (a full French department standing in the way of the “Donroe doctrine”).
So what can Europe do, as this mad historic fantasy comes closer to reality? How do you maintain a space of democracy and the rule of law in a world that is rapidly reverting to imperialism, oligarchy and the rule of power alone? Only by building a protective moat of federalism around it.
If the US actually attacks Denmark by invading Greenland, and declares war on the EU, a treaty-bound defensive alliance, the hand of history will be forced. Europe would need to both expand and restructure to become a defence and intelligence union that absorbs Nato’s non-EU members. Such a situation would demand the seizure of US military bases from Germany to Spain, individual sanctions on a wide range of US government officials, broad sanctions against the US economy, and an unapologetic expansion of the “carbon border tax” across every sector. There would surely be pressure not to stop there, but to use the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument to ban X and other large US tech companies and accelerate the replacement of US-controlled payments infrastructure with European systems and a digital euro.
And if the US doesn’t attack Denmark, Europe’s best chance of surviving as a free and open continent in an imperial world is still to force the rupture with the US, force the consequences, and force the federalism anyway. Whatever comes out of the meeting in the White House today, it is time for Europe to tell the US to leave its European military bases, throw off the yoke of US tech billionaires, begin a concerted push to fund public media as a form of informational defence – and maybe even expand the Erasmus programme into a general purpose European civil service corps. Everything short of actual combat should be considered, because “annexing Greenland” is a symptom of American fascism, and others will follow.
A generous interpretation of how Europe’s political leaders have spent the past year is that they have been playing for time to prepare. A more critical reading is that they naively tried to avoid the costs of a rupture with Trump and now their time is up, and there is no option that is cost free. We can either choose the crisis and the cost of that historic break, or be subjected to the crises and costs that the US will choose for us. But our window to choose is narrowing. Trump, Vance, Steve Bannon and others are explicit that they will boost far right, anti-EU parties into power wherever possible, with the goal (shared with Putin) of detonating the EU from within.
By boldly detaching from the US now, visibly and decisively, Europe might even send a resuscitative shock through the US’s ailing democratic corpus. Only Americans can save their country from a descent into something even uglier and deadlier than what we are witnessing already. But for everyone’s sake, theirs included, Europe must cut the cord now, and not follow them into the storm.
Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir, Generation Desperation, is published this month
