Venezuela today. Greenland tomorrow?

Posted: 8th January 2026

Venezuela today. Greenland tomorrow?

During the early hours of Saturday morning, US forces bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro.

The objective, according to US president Donald Trump, was to secure access to Venezuela’s massive oil reserves and assert US domination over the hemisphere, pushing out geopolitical rivals like China, Russia, and Iran.

Venezuelan authorities will soon be “turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality Oil… to the United States of America”, Trump wrote on social media.

The Trump administration also told Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez that “the country must kick out China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba and sever economic ties”, according to ABC News.

Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has repeatedly refused to be drawn on whether the kidnapping of a foreign head of state was a violation of international law.

“Are we willing to risk damaging our most important economic and national security partnerships as a result [of condemning Trump]?”, the prime minister reportedly asked colleagues.

Yvette Cooper, Britain’s foreign secretary, could only bring herself to say that she had “raised the importance of complying with international law” with her US counterpart, Marco Rubio.

Yet pressure is mounting on Starmer’s government to respond in concrete terms to the attack, with UN human rights chief Volker Turk now spelling out its brazen illegality.

“It is clear that the operation undermined a fundamental principle of international law – that States must not threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”, he said in a statement on Wednesday.

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With the dust still settling in Caracas, Trump has now turned his imperial gaze to Greenland, a semi-autonomous Arctic territory of the kingdom of Denmark, which is a member of NATO.

The White House says it has been discussing “a range of options” to acquire Greenland, including military force, referring to the issue as a “national security priority”.

Greenland might seem quite apart from Venezuela in geographical, political, and cultural terms, but the US government has long folded both regions into its designs for hemispheric domination.

After the German invasion of Denmark in April 1940, US secretary of state Cordell Hull declared “Greenland is within the area embraced by the Monroe Doctrine”, an 1823 doctrine which has been repeatedly relied upon to assert US hegemony in the Americas.

During the Cold War, the US army stationed 48 surface-to-air nuclear weapons and air-to-air missiles at Thule air base on Greenland, while a US army research and development facility was established beneath the territory’s icecap.

Washington’s current interest in Greenland, however, has more to do with its location for military purposes, the opening of trade routes in the Arctic Ocean (which will increase in importance amid climate change) and the island’s richness in critical minerals like lithium and cobalt.

While Starmer reserved judgment on Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela, he has signed a joint statement alongside France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Denmark, affirming “Greenland belongs to its people”.

But will Starmer actually take any meaningful action to stand up to Trump? “Nobody’s going to fight the US over the future of Greenland”, said Trump’s aide Stephen Miller on Tuesday. He might just be right.

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