You wake up in the morning—there’s a seven-hour time difference with Washington, after all—and the first thing you hear is that the Great President of the Great Superpower has, say, set his sights on your country. That is, quite plainly, terrifying.
For now, thankfully, we don’t seem to have pinged on his radar—or on the radar of some relative or associate of his. But who knows?
Because whether it’s a country blanketed in snow from end to end or a “golden-green leaf tossed into the sea”, it makes little difference to President Trump. To him, it’s all business. Business, politics, geopolitics—and a taste for brute-force domination.
The United States has always practised power politics, but at least it used to keep up appearances. It would exhaust the diplomatic playbook first, and only then—if that failed—shift tone and tactics.
Suddenly, the people of Greenland—though not for the first time—were told that they were… up for sale. Not to interested buyers, mind you, but exclusively to the United States. There is already an American presence there, via the Pituffik Space Base. They didn’t propose deeper cooperation or an upgraded partnership. They went straight for the ultimatum: sell it, or we’ll take it by force.
And the problem is this—Trump isn’t bluffing. He means what he says in public. And why would a man behave any differently when, after being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, he formally notified the world that he no longer felt obliged to think exclusively about peace, but was now free to think about “what is good and right for the United States”?
Never mind that he happily pocketed the… frame of the prize, gifted to him by its holder, María Corina Machado. The Venezuelan opposition figure met him recently not just to flatter and placate him, but to signal her submission to the emperor—the self-styled ruler of the planet.
At first, many people laughed at his remarks, at the gestures, the theatrics. But he’s not joking. He has no time for international law or multilateral cooperation. The childishness, the camera-hogging showmanship, may delight the ravenous media—but the situation is deadly serious.
In an article for the New York Times (reprinted in Kathimerini), the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Alain Berset, warned under the headline “International law will either apply universally—or mean nothing at all” that we are witnessing “the return of an old strategic reflex: a Cold War mentality, in which geography is treated as destiny and influence as a zero-sum game, while independence is seen as a strategic risk rather than a democratic choice…”.
Trump—or rather the Americans, since no meaningful reaction has been heard to what he says and does—want Greenland. They’re sketching plans to turn the flattened ruins of Gaza into a Riviera of the Eastern Mediterranean. They want to wrap up Ukraine, fast and on their terms. So who’s next? Who will Trump decide to turn into a colony?
Against this unprecedented backdrop, the leaders of the EU’s 27 member states are meeting tomorrow in Brussels to assess the new reality as it’s taking shape. The stated aim: de-escalation, and avoiding an all-out crisis with the US over Greenland. At the same time, they’ll weigh their response to the tariffs Washington has slapped on Europe—retaliation already looks like the only option.
One thing is clear. If the EU loses the Greenland fight, it consigns itself to a permanent role as the butler in the ruler’s palace. But if it stands its ground—with dignity, political will and real resolve—it could yet emerge as a genuine global pole of power. What comes next will show what place the EU will have—or whether it will have one at all.
