U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn’t cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraftso that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2026. Happy Holidays!
The Trump administration dramatically escalated its campaign to control Greenland in 2025. When President Trump first proposed buying Greenland in 2019, the world largely laughed it off. Now, the laughter has died down, and the mood has shifted from mockery to disbelief and anxiety.
Indeed, following Trump's military strike on Venezuela, analysts now warn that Trump's threats against Greenland should be taken seriously — especially after Katie Miller, wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, posted a U.S. flag-draped map of Greenland captioned "SOON" just hours after American forces seized Nicolas Maduro.
Trump caused further shockwaves when he said in an Atlantic magazine interview that "We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense," adding erroneously that the island is "surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships."
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded quite categorically. "I have to say this very directly to the United States," according to an official statement on Sunday. "It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the United States needing to take over Greenland. The U.S. has no right to annex one of the three countries in the Danish Kingdom."
This came after she used her New Year’s address to signal a hardening stance against Washington’s ambitions, declaring, “Never before have we increased our military strength so significantly, so quickly.”
Trump keeps insisting that the U.S. needs Greenland for national security, even threatening to use military force or economic pressure to get it from Denmark. He has also threatened steep tariffs if Denmark doesn’t hand it over, claiming “people really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up.”
This isn’t the careful diplomacy America used to practice. Trump’s approach has triggered protests from Denmark, and for the first time ever, Denmark’s intelligence service is labeling America a possible security threat.
Trump has appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as his special envoy to Greenland. Landry called it an honor to help “make Greenland a part of the U.S.” Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the appointment “deeply upsetting” and Landry’s comments “completely unacceptable.”
The administration is working every angle to influence Greenland. In January 2025, the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., visited Greenland to shoot video for his podcast. He said he was just a tourist, but many saw it as part of a pressure campaign.
Danish media noticed that a lot of Trump supporters in his videos and photos were actually homeless and “socially disadvantaged” locals who’d been offered free meals and MAGA hats if they’d appear on camera. “They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” one Nuuk resident said.
Then came Vice President JD Vance’s visit in March. Second Lady Usha Vance planned to attend a dogsled race. U.S. representatives went door-to-door, asking if Greenlanders wanted to meet her. The answer, everywhere: “No, thank you.”
After local businesses and residents backed out from meeting with the Second Lady, the Vances had to limit their visit to the remote Pituffik Space Base, far from the rest of the population. There, Vance accused Denmark of failing to protect both Greenlanders and U.S. troops from “very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and from other nations.”
Things got uglier in August. Danish media reported that American operatives were running “influence operations” in Greenland, trying to promote secession from Denmark. That prompted Denmark’s foreign ministry to summon the U.S. envoy for a dressing-down. A White House official said, “We think the Danes need to calm down.” U.S. intelligence agencies had reportedly been ordered to step up espionage in Greenland in May.
Meanwhile, the U.S. consulate in Nuuk is hiring interns who speak Danish and Greenlandic to help “communicate U.S. foreign policy priorities to Greenlandic audiences” on social media. Basically, they want Greenlanders to sell U.S. policy to their own communities.
Greenlanders aren’t having it. In a January 2025 poll, 85% said they’re against joining the U.S., while 6% were in favor and 9% undecided. Most Greenlanders do want independence from Denmark though, about 84%, but nearly half say only if it doesn’t hurt their quality of life.
The March 2025 parliamentary election in Greenland felt like a direct response to Trump’s rhetoric. The center-right Demokraatit party, which has strongly criticized Trump, won. Its leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, called Trump “a threat to our political independence.” According to Danish expert Ulrik Pram Gad, the election results showed that Greenlanders “are pushed away and more reluctant to engage with the U.S.”
After Trump's comments Sunday, Nielsen said in a statement: "When the President of the United States says that 'we need Greenland' and links us to Venezuela and military intervention, it's not just wrong. It's disrespectful."
America’s legitimate security and economic interests can be better served through respectful partnership than aggressive acquisition. Thanks to the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, the U.S. already has broad military rights there.
This framework gives the U.S. access to Pituffik Space Base (previously Thule), a crucial missile-defense area. But when Trump talks about Greenland, he keeps lumping the whole island together with the base, insisting the only way to keep Pituffik safe is to own the land beneath it.
Crucially, Trump's argument for seizing Greenland shows a misunderstanding of Arctic security. When he says, “Russian and Chinese ships are all over the place” along Greenland’s coast, he’s mixing up different parts of the Arctic. Russia and China do send ships into the Arctic, but those ships are nowhere near Greenland. They’re way out in the Barents and Bering Seas, thousands of miles away.
The U.S. Coast Guard has encountered Chinese and Russian warships, bombers, and coast guard vessels operating together off Alaska’s coast. That’s where American attention would be better applied when it comes to Arctic security, not Greenland.
Instead of threatening force or coercion, Washington should focus on deals that benefit both sides and respect Greenland’s right to govern itself. That means treating Greenland’s government as a partner, not a prize.
Denmark’s intelligence service points out that America’s unpredictable approach pushes countries to cut deals with China instead. Ironically, Trump’s push to buy Greenland to counter China could backfire, making Beijing seem like a more stable and reasonable partner compared to Washington’s existential threat.
The administration needs to drop the talk of annexation. Instead, it should work within current agreements, support Greenland’s own development goals, and show that America leads by building strong partnerships, not by issuing ultimatums.
If the U.S. wants access to Greenland’s critical minerals, it can get there through honest business deals and joint ventures that let Greenlandic communities benefit. Greenlanders have made their position clear: “Greenland is open for business but not for sale.”
Within hours of U.S. military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of its leader, Nicolas Maduro, President Trump proclaimed that “very large United States oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Indeed, at no point during this exercise has there been any attempt to deny that control of Venezuela’s oil (or “our oil” as Trump once described it) is a major force motivating administration actions.
One irony here is that even as the White House is proudly embracing fossil-fuel imperialism in global oil, the markets are vastly different. Back in the 1970's and again in the early 2000's, the U.S. was the world’s biggest oil importer, leading to vicious spirals of higher crude prices and a weaker dollar as oil exporters feared they were being paid in a rapidly depreciating currency and sought other assets.
However, the U.S. is now the world’s biggest producer, and the world is sufficiently awash in oil so much that the price of benchmark Brent Crude was close to five-year lows late last week at about $60 a barrel. Conversely, the spike in oil prices to $120 per barrel right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw the dollar strengthen dramatically against the yen and especially the euro. Markets reasoned that besides geopolitics, greater self sufficiency in energy also favored the U.S. over its developed market peers.
In other words, the U.S. geoeconomic position in energy has come a long way since the early 2000s and already has many of the attributes that control over Venezuelan oil would supposedly bolster.
Meanwhile, the combination of supply-demand dynamics in global oil markets and the scale of investment required to restore Venezuela’s oil production has made major oil companies wary about the opportunities supposedly being handed to them. They are unsure about the economics of sinking tens of billions of dollars over several years to restore dilapidated drilling infrastructure in a country that might have the world’s largest oil reserves, but this oil is also expensive to extract and process.
One report has suggested that the administration is telling oil companies that if they want compensation for assets nationalized by Venezuela, they will have to commit to making substantial investments in restoring the country’s oil infrastructure. In effect, private U.S. oil majors are being asked to act in Venezuela more like the state-owned-enterprises elsewhere that play a huge part in global oil production, often disregarding near-term profitability in the service of maintaining or expanding production for political, fiscal, or geopolitical goals.
But it is unclear how much tolerance Wall Street would have for such a posture from energy firms, particularly after the shale industry’s cumulative losses in the 2010s ran close to half a trillion dollars. In this decade, financial markets have been looking for “capital discipline” from oil companies.
More broadly, it seems as though the geopolitical and economic goals of the administration might not be entirely consistent, particularly when it comes to domestic and foreign oil markets. It rejoices over low gasoline prices, and hopes that the overthrow of Maduro in Venezuela will eventually lead to increased production anchored by American companies in that country. At the same time, the White House wants domestic U.S. oil production to rise as well, as expressed by the “drill, baby drill” slogan.
However, good prices for consumers are not necessarily the same thing as good prices for commercially motivated producers, who may react by curtailing investment, i.e., by planning to drill less rather than more. For such producers, the critical threshold is the “break even price,” which has been estimated at an average of about $60 per barrel for American shale. All this is occurring against a backdrop of global oil supply growing faster than demand, with the International Energy Agency projecting global supply increases of 3 million barrels a day in 2025 and a further 2.4 million in 2026, against demand increases of only 830,000 barrels in 2025 and 860,000 in 2026.
The events in Venezuela also suggest other issues that stem from the widely remarked centrality of the Western Hemisphere in the administration’s National Security Strategy. One of the administration’s goals is to install friendly regimes in resource-rich countries (the latter is a description that applies to much of Latin America) to enable both privileged American use of resources and the ability to deny those to competitors.
But this is where issues of the political economy of South America may come into play. The region has in the last few decades seen democratic alternation between left and right wing populisms in several countries, spurred by popular discontent at long-term economic disappointment punctuated by intermittent financial crises. This is arguably in good part a result of excessive reliance on commodity exports (something undoubtedly true of Venezuela, where oil is practically the only export), and the boom-bust cycles associated with the sector.
Electoral cycles in the region currently appear to favor the right (or parties more congenial to Washington), as seen in Bolivia, but there is little guarantee of a structural break in this political pattern as long as the structure of South American economies does not move beyond a dependence on commodity exports. Thus, it is possible that even a “successful” removal of Maduro does not deliver the economic and political transformation needed for the longer-term stability that American investors seek. And the Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela (and the region at large) seems to show little recognition of this.
The economic motivations behind the military intervention in Venezuela thus seem contradictory, grounded in a misunderstanding of America’s role in global energy markets, and oblivious to a central problem of political economy in South America — the continent’s commodity dependence.
The successful seizure and removal of President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela demonstrates Washington’s readiness to use every means at its disposal — including military power — to stave off any diminishment of U.S. national influence in its bid to manage the dissolution of the celebrated postwar, liberal order.
For the moment, the rules-based order (meaning whatever rules Washington wants to impose) persists in the Western Hemisphere. As President Donald Trump noted, “We can do it again. Nobody can stop us. There’s nobody with the capability that we have.”
Put differently, “Team America” is back!
The question is what happens next? How will Washington consolidate its latest victory over Maduro and his regime? The plan seems murky if non-existent.
Presumably, Maduro will be tried and convicted in a U.S. court for drug-related crimes. Meanwhile Trump said Saturday that the U.S. will “take over” during the transition. Can Washington actually set up a new political order that will prevent Venezuela from sliding into civil war, or, more important, from hosting future drug-fueled violence?
President Trump said that opposition leader Maria Machado lacks the political strength to govern Venezuela. So who does that leave? Is there a CIA-preferred comprador for the job, or will Secretary of State Marco Rubio simply govern as an American Viceroy? In any case, can anyone — Venezuelan or American — govern the country without heavy reliance on U.S. Military power?
Meanwhile American firms and corporations are chomping at the bit to move into Venezuela to extract its oil. In addition to the world’s largest reserves (the oil infrastructure is decaying and it will take a long time to rebuild), Venezuela is massively endowed with gold and one of the largest iron ore deposits in the Western Hemisphere. To these must be added significant reserves of natural gas, bauxite, nickel and some rare earths. No doubt the exploitation of these mineral resources will be seen as vital if the current intervention is to avoid the usual catastrophic costs associated with military intervention.
But will Washington now provide a lucrative economic package to lift Venezuela out of poverty and chaos? Will it be at American taxpayers' expense? Shipments of Venezuelan heavy crude constitute most of the Venezuelan economy. Venezuela is in the top 5 exporters of heavy crude, but by total volume, Venezuela barely cracks the top 20.
Protests from Moscow and Beijing notwithstanding, neither the Russians nor Chinese will directly interfere with events in the Caribbean Basin. The fact that Maduro was meeting with Chinese officials just 24 hours before he was captured is no doubt deeply disconcerting to Beijing. China might accelerate its liquidation of American debt with uncertain consequences for the American bond market. But Russian and Chinese leaders will not repeat Western stupidity in Ukraine and challenge American military power on its doorstep. The home court strategic advantage is undeniable.
Whatever happens next, the short-term impact of Maduro’s capture conveniently distracts from the Trump administration’s failed attempts to end the war in Ukraine on terms that might benefit Washington and its allies. In fact, the Trump administration is likely to quietly disengage from these efforts while Moscow turns its attention entirely to ending the war in Ukraine on its own terms.
Meanwhile, the ceasefire Trump brokered with a flourish earlier this year has not halted the destruction of life in Gaza. In the background, Iran’s missile factories are humming again having recovered from the 12-day war in June 2025. U.S. and Israeli strikes have set back Iran's nuclear ambitions but Israel won’t soon forget Iran’s ability to hit back with counterstrikes on Israeli soil. Not surprisingly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now pushes for fresh strikes before Iranian silos swell to 1,000 warheads a year, enough to overwhelm U.S. and Israeli air and missile defenses.
President Trump warns there will be “hell to pay” if Iran rebuilds. The president who promised to “end forever wars” now advocates for the next Middle East war, too.
At home, progress in a range of critical areas from living standards and educational performance to high-tech manufacturing is slow to non-existent. Inflated expectations of faster productivity growth through artificial intelligence are flagging. There is no evidence for any interest in breaking up overgrown, monopolistic media and IT corporations, or stopping mergers aimed at shaping narratives and suppressing free speech.
Still, Americans should cheer up. Congratulations from Trump’s Wall Street donors on the ostensible victory in Caracas are pouring in. The purportedly numerous Hamas and Hezbollah training camps that threaten Israeli national security will now vanish like the morning mist hanging over Venezuela’s jungles. Team America is back!Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
