the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
February 19, 2026
The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #254, March 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.
While President Donald Trump’s foreign policy initiatives may appear disorganized, they clearly follow a plan: to reaffirm the hegemony of American imperialism in a number of areas and territories without any need for formalities. This was evident in the offensive to bolster his claims to Greenland by opposing the Europeans.
For several weeks, Trump asserted that he was prepared to use all means, including military force, to compel Denmark to cede control of Greenland. Following these threats, Trump was able to announce on Wednesday, January 21, at the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland, that “the framework for a future agreement” on Greenland had been reached with NATO Secretary General, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
The United States therefore did not need to deploy an armada to Greenland, and probably never considered doing so. In response to Trump’s threats, several European states did send a total of around forty soldiers to Greenland to show their solidarity with Denmark, including about fifteen soldiers from France and a similar number from Germany. But these troops didn’t even stay for forty-eight hours. The United Kingdom announced the deployment of a single officer.
In response, Trump brandished a new weapon by threatening these states with a 10% increase in tariffs starting February 1, and a 25% increase from June 1. Seeking to maintain the image of a head of state capable of standing up to Trump, Macron spoke of using the “trade bazooka,” a set of retaliatory measures consisting of limiting certain imports from the United States and restricting access for American companies to European public procurement markets. But neither he nor the vast majority of his European counterparts wanted to engage in an escalation, and all sought instead to de-escalate the situation. This episode demonstrated once again how powerless European leaders were in the face of American pressure.
After the Davos announcement, tensions subsided as quickly as they had risen. Trump was able to assure everyone that he had never intended to use force and lifted all threats of tariffs, but his usual tactic of slamming the table before engaging in negotiations is part of his typical approach. As leader of the world’s greatest power, he doesn’t care about tact. Ultimately, European leaders may have been offended by the lack of consideration shown toward them, with a brutality reminiscent of the treatment they themselves display toward the poorest countries.
When Trump declares, “We need Greenland for our national security, and we will take it,” it’s not the whim of a delusional billionaire. This island, the size of Western Europe and populated by only 57,000 inhabitants, has long been the object of American desire.
As early as 1867, U.S. President Andrew Johnson offered to buy Greenland and Iceland from the Kingdom of Denmark for seven million dollars. When the Danes refused, that sum was used that same year to buy Alaska from Russia.
As recently as 1946, under the presidency of Truman, the United States offered Denmark 100 million dollars in gold and rights to develop oil fields in Alaska to exchange for Greenland. The offer was rejected.
Greenland owes this persistent interest to its strategic position and its mineral and energy resources. According to a report by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), it contains resources “comparable to those of well-established mining regions such as Australia, Canada and Scandinavia,” rare earths, lithium, graphite, titanium and other strategic minerals.
Aware of the challenges posed by their exploitation in extreme conditions, beneath thick layers of ice, GEUS is betting that with “declining resources and strong future demand for critical raw materials, Greenland’s deposits could become more economically viable in the future.” As for Trump, it’s worth adding that while he may deny climate change, he still knows how to capitalize on it for opportunities and profit. The melting ice does indeed offer hope, in the more or less distant future, for the development of these deposits, as well as the opening of new maritime routes bypassing the American continent to the north. And this hope is enough to whet appetites and fuel rivalries, because controlling a territory can prevent a competitor from doing so in the future.
In the case of Greenland, the United States has consistently obstructed other countries’ exploitation of its resources. To take just recent history, when an Australian company acquired ownership of the Kvanefjeld rare earth mining project in the south of the island in 2007 and progressed with feasibility studies, the United States repeatedly exerted political pressure to try to oust it. When the Chinese company Shenghe Resources became one of the project’s largest shareholders in 2017, the United States, citing national security concerns, collaborated with Danish politicians to pressure Greenland into adopting new environmental standards for mining in 2021. These standards directly led to the suspension of what was then the largest mining project outside of China.
Such interference is not an isolated incident, but part of a systematic U.S. strategy to prevent competitors from accessing Greenland’s critical minerals. Even without the land titles that obsess former real estate developer Trump, U.S. control over the island is very real.
This control is accompanied by a military presence in Greenland dating back to World War II. Following the signing of an agreement with the Danish government, in exile after the German invasion, American soldiers were deployed there as early as spring 1941, even before the official entry of the United States into the war.
In 1951, a new agreement authorized the American government to establish an airbase at Pituffik, then called Thule, in the northwest of the island. The Inuit, who had inhabited Greenland long before its colonization by Denmark, were never consulted. Within a few months, as reported by geographer and explorer Jean Malaurie, who was present at the site, thousands of men, ships, and aircraft had erected a military complex on the icy desert, equipped with radar and runways, capable of accommodating, among other things, bombers carrying nuclear weapons. The inhabitants of the village of Thule were deported 150 kilometers further north, to a few barracks hastily constructed by the Danish government.
In the mid-1950s, the Thule site housed up to 10,000 personnel, making it one of the largest American bases outside the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, its personnel numbers have decreased considerably, now limited to approximately 150 military personnel, but it remains an important component of the American satellite surveillance system. One of the key issues in the negotiations underway in Davos could be the authorization of the creation of new military installations that would be officially placed under American sovereignty.
Since returning to power, Trump has declared that Greenland is “vital to the Golden Dome we are building.” This phrase refers to a missile interception system inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome, integrating powerful radars and satellites, intended to protect the entire American continent. This new version of “Star Wars,” first discussed during the presidency of George W. Bush, would be astronomically expensive: 175 billion dollars, according to the White House, and more likely several trillion dollars, according to a study by a research service of the U.S. Congress.
Beyond the issue of Greenland’s mineral resources, the United States’ interest in this Arctic region is also part of the military capacity-building plans developed by Pentagon generals in preparation for a confrontation with Russia, and especially with China. But the United States’ European competitors are also being asked to comply with American ambitions.
Since the Greenland crisis, many commentators have expressed concern about the attitude of American leaders, capable of turning against their European allies to the point of threatening them militarily. In fact, this is not new. Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State between 1973 and 1977, summed up more than a century of American history, punctuated by wars against European states, by declaring: “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
At the end of the 19th century, rapidly expanding American capitalism clashed with the colonial empires of its European rivals. The United States went to war against Spain in 1898 to seize Cuba and the Philippines, territories over which it imposed its domination without needing to make them colonies in a formal sense.
During World War I, while the United Kingdom, France, and Germany fought for control of the world, the United States initially allowed the European powers to kill and weaken each other, contenting itself with trading and lending money to the Anglo-French side. Then, in 1917, after three years of carnage, they intervened against Germany, which seemed to be gaining the upper hand over its adversaries.
This monstrous slaughter, which exhausted European states both in terms of lives and resources, victors and vanquished alike, allowed the United States to establish itself as “the master of the capitalist world,” a phrase used by Trotsky in a speech delivered in 1926. He continued: “What does American capitalism want? … [it] is seeking the position of world domination; it wants to establish an American imperialist autocracy over our planet. This is what it wants. What will it do with Europe? It must, they say, pacify Europe. How? Under its hegemony. And what does this mean? This means that Europe will be permitted to rise again, but within limits set in advance, with certain restricted sections of the world market allotted to it. American capitalism is now issuing commands, giving instructions to its diplomats. In exactly the same way it is preparing and is ready to issue instructions to European banks and trusts, to the European bourgeoisie as a whole.… It wants to put capitalist Europe on rations. This means that it will specify just how many tons, liters and kilograms and just what materials Europe has a right to buy and sell.”
When, during World War II, the United States once again went to war against Germany, the real objective was not to “defend democracy against Nazism,” but to advance their interests and impose their domination on the entire planet.
The only state they were unable to bring under their control during this period was the Soviet Union. The 1917 revolution in Russia had enabled the working class to seize power, expropriate the bourgeoisie, and build its own state. This state successfully resisted the interventions of all the capitalist powers and the attempts at overthrow they provoked. However, weakened and isolated following the failure of all other proletarian revolutions, it suffered bureaucratic degeneration, and the new ruling layer, with Stalin at its head, had as its sole objective to be accepted by imperialism. American leaders were thus able to forge an alliance with the USSR to prevail against Germany. In the aftermath of the war, they were forced to recognize the USSR’s role in maintaining order in the eastern part of Europe, where occupation by the Soviet army prevented the outbreak of workers’ revolutions. But, in reality, the American leaders did not accept that any part of the world could escape their control. From 1947 onward, it was the “Cold War” against the USSR. The allies of American imperialism had to fall under its control.
Created in 1949, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was the Western bloc’s military alliance against the Soviet bloc. To counter it, the USSR established a similar organization, the Warsaw Pact, in 1951. While NATO’s Secretary General has traditionally been a European since its inception, the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) has always been held by an American general. Nothing in the NATO statutes explicitly provides for this division of roles, but the United States has never considered it any other way.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 led to the end of the Warsaw Pact, but not NATO. On the contrary, NATO welcomed new members from the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. This policy of gradually encircling Russia ultimately led Putin to decide to invade Ukraine in 2022, in an attempt to keep it within his sphere of influence.
The United States also used NATO to intervene in 1999 against Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, and then from 2001 onward in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of European soldiers were deployed. Trump recently referred to their role with his usual nonchalance, declaring: “They stayed out of the fighting.” But approximately a thousand of them died participating in the longest war waged by American imperialism.
To pander to his mostly isolationist electorate, Trump never misses an opportunity to declare that NATO brings little to the United States. He carefully avoids mentioning the markets that this integrated military organization guarantees to American arms industries. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, Trump demanded that Alliance members increase their contributions to 5% of their GDP [gross domestic product] by 2035. These additional billions will largely swell the order books of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other American arms manufacturers. European leaders readily agreed to this American demand, all the more so because they themselves are engaged in a policy of “rearmament” and increased military budgets. When the Spanish Prime Minister expressed a desire to evade this obligation, he drew the ire of all the summit participants, who unanimously proclaimed that discipline must be respected within the Alliance. European states want to be ready to wage “high-intensity warfare,” to use the expression employed by military leaders, but they do not intend to oppose American oversight, and perhaps they cannot.
The United States is therefore far from disengaging from NATO. Since the recent reorganization of military positions, made public on February 6, the command of naval forces is held by an American officer, whereas this position had traditionally belonged to a representative of the British Royal Navy. The United States, which already led the land and air forces, has thus further strengthened its control over NATO’s military apparatus, an organization it still considers a military instrument serving its interests.
The war in Ukraine provided the United States with an opportunity to further reduce the market share granted to its European competitors. Its capitalists were able to seize control of entire sectors of the Ukrainian economy. Its corporations grew wealthy through the supply of weapons and other equipment. And the United States took advantage of sanctions on Russian gas and oil to force its European competitors to become dependent on U.S. sources.
During the same period, in August 2022, U.S. President Biden passed a 400 billion dollar plan, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), to encourage foreign companies to produce in the United States by offering them subsidies. The U.S. government then sent emissaries to Europe to directly approach major corporations and persuade them to relocate their factories, offering to handle almost all the necessary procedures.
A further escalation occurred in this trade war when, in April 2025, Trump, back in the White House, announced a general increase in tariffs on goods imported into the United States. All countries, as well as the largest corporations, sent representatives to Washington to negotiate their terms of access to the American market, a crucial outlet for European capitalists. Some even traveled there in person, such as the French billionaire Bernard Arnault, who went to plead his case directly with Trump.
After several months of negotiations between the U.S. administration and representatives of the European Union (E.U.), a trade agreement was finally reached in July 2025. Most E.U. exports to the United States are now subject to a 15% tariff, and even 50% for steel and aluminum. For their part, the Europeans took no retaliatory measures and decided against raising tariffs. For the most part, they expressed satisfaction, essentially believing that it could have been worse and that they had no choice but to comply with this decidedly demanding ally.
The E.U. also had to promise 600 billion dollars in investments in the United States and $750 billion in energy purchases over the next three years, a symbolic capitulation that allowed Trump to claim victory.
After more than 70 years of a supposed unification process, the European bourgeoisies have been unable to overcome their divisions and create a single state. The European Union is merely an alliance—hard-won, incomplete, and always subject to challenge—between states that remain primarily concerned with defending the particular interests of their national bourgeoisies. Competing with one another, the bourgeoisies of Europe are utterly incapable of resisting the dictates of American imperialism, more than ever “the master of capitalist humanity.”
The working class should not support either side in this confrontation between capitalist powers, for it is the first victim. Everywhere, it is the workers who pay the price for capitalist competition, finding themselves deprived of all resources, of housing, and of healthcare. If the economic war between capitalists leads to a general escalation of military conflict, governments will not hesitate to mobilize young people and send them to die on the battlefields. As in the past, during previous world wars, colonial wars, and military interventions that have bloodied every continent in recent decades, nationalist rhetoric and lies about the need to defend the homeland or democracy will serve to mask the fact that workers and the lower classes will be sent to die for the interests of industrialists, financiers, and arms dealers.
As Trotsky wrote in 1926, the clashes of imperialist interests are “pregnant with wars and with the greatest revolutionary convulsions,” and in every country, workers will have to defend their own interests against those of their bourgeoisie. To put an end to this bankrupt capitalist system, they will have to seize power and expropriate the bourgeoisie. The working class will then be able to implement its program of social transformation and build a society organized in such a way as to satisfy the needs of the greatest number.