Trump’s Greenland Grab Mirrors Putin’s Playbook: The World Order

On a crisp January morning in Davos, as global elites gathered for their annual ritual of discussing “collaboration” and “shared prosperity,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech that felt less like diplomacy and more like a eulogy. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he declared, warning that great powers now wield economic integration as weapons and tariffs as leverage. What made Carney’s address so striking wasn’t merely its candor about the death of the rules-based international order—it was the unspoken target of his critique. Though he never mentioned Donald Trump by name, everyone understood: the gravedigger of the post-1945 system isn’t primarily Beijing or Moscow. It’s Washington.

The irony is as sharp as it is unsettling. For eight decades, the United States positioned itself as the architect and guarantor of a liberal international order predicated on sovereignty, multilateral cooperation, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. Today, under Trump’s second administration, America is accelerating that order’s collapse with a ferocity that makes Russia’s revisionism look almost modest by comparison. The evidence is mounting: Trump Greenland national security threats that echo Putin’s Ukraine rationale, withdrawal from 66 international organizations, and an explicit rejection of international law itself. The world’s erstwhile hegemon isn’t pivoting—it’s demolishing its own creation.

Trump Greenland National Security: A Familiar Playbook

In late January 2026, President Trump declared that acquiring Greenland was “imperative for national and world security,” repeatedly refusing to rule out military force to seize the Danish autonomous territory. The White House press secretary confirmed that “utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option” in pursuing what Trump frames as a vital strategic objective. His justification? Greenland’s Arctic position makes it essential to defend against Russian and Chinese encroachment. Never mind that the United States already maintains a significant military presence at Pituffik Space Base under a 1951 agreement with Denmark, or that Denmark is a NATO ally bound by mutual defense commitments. Trump’s push for Greenland represents a territorial ambition dressed in the language of security—a rationale that should sound disturbingly familiar.

When Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces into Ukraine in February 2022, he invoked strikingly similar logic. He framed the invasion as a preventive war necessitated by NATO expansion and Ukraine’s growing military cooperation with the West, which he characterized as an existential threat to Russian security. Putin claimed he was conducting a “special military operation to protect the people in the Donbas,” portraying Russia’s aggression as defensive action against Western provocations. The parallels to Trump’s Greenland rhetoric are unmistakable: both leaders invoke national security imperatives to justify territorial expansion, both dismiss the sovereignty of smaller nations as subordinate to great-power interests, and both signal willingness to use military force if diplomacy fails to deliver the desired result.

The structural similarity goes deeper than rhetoric. As scholars analyzing Putin’s preventive war logic have noted, Moscow genuinely feared that Ukraine’s westward drift would shift the balance of power irreversibly against Russia. Trump’s national security advisor reportedly framed Greenland in precisely these terms: critical minerals vital for emerging technologies and national security applications, combined with strategic positioning against peer competitors. Both cases reveal how great powers invoke security to legitimize what earlier eras would have simply called conquest. The Trump administration’s approach differs from Putin’s primarily in degree and presentation—Trump at Davos eventually backed away from tariff threats and pledged not to use force, though his broader posture suggests these were tactical retreats rather than strategic shifts.

Post-American Era: Economic Weaponization and the New Reality

Mark Carney’s Davos speech articulated what allies have whispered privately for years: the post-American era has arrived, and it arrived with American complicity. Drawing on Václav Havel’s essay on life under Soviet totalitarianism, Carney argued that middle powers had long placed metaphorical signs in their windows—participating in the rituals of the rules-based order while politely ignoring the gap between American rhetoric and reality. That bargain no longer works because great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

The economic weaponization Carney describes isn’t hypothetical. Trump has threatened 25% tariffs on European goods unless Denmark cedes Greenland, withdrawn from dozens of international organizations, and explicitly stated in a New York Times interview: “I don’t need international law.” These actions represent a systematic dismantling of the institutional architecture that Washington itself constructed after 1945. When the United States freezes all foreign assistance, blocks judges at the International Criminal Court with sanctions, and contemplates military seizure of allied territory, it’s not reforming the liberal international order—it’s demolishing it.

What distinguishes American norm erosion from Chinese or Russian revisionism is its devastating effect on the order’s legitimacy. Beijing and Moscow have long been external challengers, states that never fully bought into liberal principles and therefore were always viewed with suspicion by the system’s defenders. But when the United States—the order’s founding architect, military guarantor, and self-proclaimed exemplar—abandons multilateralism for transactionalism and sovereignty for spheres of influence, it removes the keystone from the entire edifice. As observers at Chatham House note, Trump’s assertion that he personally determines when the United States should comply with rules that bind others represents a fundamental repudiation of the reciprocity on which international law depends.

Trump Greenland Putin Ukraine Parallels: Great Powers Unchained

The parallels between Trump’s Greenland ambitions and Putin’s Ukraine invasion illuminate a broader pattern: the return of great-power politics unmoored from international legal constraints. Both leaders frame territorial expansion as defensive necessity, both invoke the language of security to mask strategic opportunism, and both signal contempt for the sovereignty of smaller neighbors. Yet the comparison also reveals asymmetries that make the American case more corrosive to global order.

Putin’s Russia, while destabilizing and aggressive, operates largely as expected from a revanchist power still nursing post-Cold War grievances. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, though catastrophic, surprised few serious analysts of Russian strategic culture. The Kremlin has consistently prioritized spheres of influence over sovereign equality, and its use of force, while illegal and brutal, aligns with historical patterns of Russian imperial behavior. International reaction to the Ukraine invasion—sanctions, isolation, unified NATO response—demonstrated that the international community still recognizes and punishes brazen violations of territorial integrity, even when committed by a nuclear-armed permanent Security Council member.

Trump’s America, by contrast, represents something more dangerous: the defection of the system’s hegemon. When the United States threatens military action against Greenland while simultaneously positioning itself as a defender of peace, when it withdraws from multilateral frameworks while demanding allies shoulder greater security burdens, it doesn’t just violate norms—it delegitimizes them. The hypocrisy is the point. By demonstrating that rules apply selectively based on power rather than principle, Washington validates every revisionist power’s cynicism about the liberal international order. Why should China respect freedom of navigation in the South China Sea when America threatens to seize Arctic territory from a NATO ally? Why should Russia accept Ukraine’s sovereignty when the United States disregards Greenland’s self-determination?

Three critical distinctions separate Trump’s approach from Putin’s and make it more systemically corrosive:

Institutional destruction vs. institutional evasion. Russia works around or against international institutions; America is actively dismantling them from within. Moscow violated the UN Charter by invading Ukraine, but it didn’t withdraw from the United Nations or sanction the International Court of Justice. Trump has done both equivalents, leaving a trail of abandoned treaties and defunded organizations.

Alliance betrayal vs. alliance expansion. Putin’s aggression strengthened NATO cohesion and prompted Finland and Sweden to join the alliance. Trump’s threats against Greenland have fractured transatlantic unity and raised existential questions about Article 5 guarantees. When a Democratic Senator observes that NATO countries might need to defend Greenland “against the U.S. if necessary,” the alliance’s foundational logic has collapsed.

Normative leadership vs. normative destruction. Russia never claimed to champion a rules-based order; its revisionism involves no ideological betrayal. America’s abandonment of principles it once preached—sovereignty, peaceful resolution of disputes, multilateral cooperation—represents a betrayal that undermines those principles’ global legitimacy. As analysis from the Carnegie Endowment notes, Trump’s policies signal a shift from American leadership of a liberal order to America operating as just one great power in a post-Western world.

US Undermining World Order: The Venezuela Test Case

If Trump’s Greenland threats represented rhetorical escalation, the January 2026 military operation in Venezuela provided brutal proof of concept. U.S. forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a large-scale raid on Caracas, with Trump declaring the United States would “run” Venezuela and was “not afraid of boots on the ground.” The operation violated every principle of sovereignty, non-intervention, and peaceful dispute resolution enshrined in the UN Charter—principles the United States spent decades promoting as universal norms.

The Venezuela intervention accelerated Trump’s Greenland campaign precisely because it demonstrated that consequences for American lawlessness remain minimal. International condemnation came, predictably, from South America and the Global South. But the muted response from European allies—whose own security depends on American credibility—revealed how thoroughly Trump has inverted the traditional logic of alliances. Rather than America’s allies constraining its behavior through institutional commitments and shared values, Trump has weaponized alliance dependence to extract concessions and silence criticism. When Denmark responded to Greenland threats by deploying elite troops to the territory, Trump threatened tariffs. When those tariffs materialized, European unity fractured.

This is economic coercion masquerading as alliance management, and it represents a profound departure from postwar American statecraft. Previous administrations occasionally pressured allies on defense spending or trade disputes, but they operated within an accepted framework of reciprocal obligations and institutional constraints. Trump has discarded that framework entirely, replacing it with a transactional model where America’s overwhelming power—military, economic, financial—becomes a cudgel for extracting unilateral advantage. The rules-based order assumed that power would be self-limiting, channeled through institutions and constrained by enlightened self-interest. Trump’s foreign policy demonstrates that assumption was always fragile.

Decline of Liberal International Order: Middle Powers and Adaptation

Carney’s speech represented more than elegant critique—it outlined a survival strategy for what he termed “middle powers” navigating the wreckage of American-led order. His prescription: stop invoking the “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised, acknowledge that great powers now pursue unhindered power and interests, and build coalitions among less powerful states to create “a third path with impact.”

This vision of middle-power resilience through collective action offers both hope and warning. Hope, because it suggests the complete collapse into great-power spheres of influence isn’t inevitable—that states between the giants retain agency if they coordinate effectively. Warning, because it implicitly concedes that the universal rules-based order is dead, replaced by a more fragmented, regionalized system where justice and security depend on coalition strength rather than law.

Canada’s response under Carney illustrates this adaptation in practice. Within months of taking office, he signed trade and security agreements across four continents, doubled defense spending, and positioned Canada as a champion of the multilateral system that Washington is abandoning. Other middle powers are following similar playbooks. European nations are accelerating integration and boosting military capacity, recognizing they can no longer outsource security to an increasingly unreliable America. ASEAN states are diversifying partnerships, hedging between Washington and Beijing rather than betting exclusively on either. Even traditional American allies like South Korea and Japan are exploring greater strategic autonomy.

Yet this proliferation of hedging strategies and defensive regionalisms carries its own risks. A world organized around competing regional blocs and ad hoc coalitions may prove more stable than unconstrained great-power rivalry, but it represents a significant step backward from the aspirations of 1945. The postwar order, for all its flaws and hypocrisies, at least established the principle that international law should constrain power—that might shouldn’t automatically make right. When middle powers abandon appeals to universal norms in favor of balance-of-power politics, they validate the very great-power cynicism that necessitated their adaptation.

Rules-Based Order Collapse: The Path Forward

The uncomfortable truth that Carney articulated and Trump embodies is that nostalgia offers no strategy. The liberal international order that emerged from World War II—multilateral institutions, free trade, collective security, democratic solidarity—was always more aspiration than reality, particularly for those outside the Western security community. Its genuine achievements, from unprecedented economic growth to the avoidance of great-power war, coexisted with profound inequalities, selective application of rules, and a persistent gap between universalist rhetoric and particularist practice.

What made the system workable wasn’t perfection but American willingness to embed its hegemony within institutional constraints that at least gestured toward reciprocity and legitimacy. When Washington championed the WTO even when rulings went against it, when it built coalitions rather than dictating terms, when it defended smaller allies’ sovereignty even at cost to short-term interests, it sustained the fiction that rules could constrain power. Trump has shattered that fiction with remarkable efficiency.

The consequences extend far beyond Greenland or Venezuela. Every authoritarian regime now possesses a ready-made justification for territorial ambitions: “If America can threaten to seize allied territory for national security reasons, why can’t we?” Every middle power calculating its security posture must now account for the possibility that American protection is conditional, transactional, and reversible. Every international institution confronts an existential question: what purpose do rules serve when the most powerful player explicitly rejects their authority?

Three scenarios appear plausible for the international system’s evolution:

Fragmented regionalism: The current trajectory, where overlapping regional orders—European integration, Asian hedging, Western Hemisphere proximity to American power—replace the aspiration of universal rules. This is Carney’s “third path,” potentially more stable than pure great-power rivalry but far less protective of smaller states’ sovereignty and far less conducive to addressing global challenges like climate change or pandemic response.

Spheres of influence: Trump’s apparent preference, where great powers divide the world into exclusive zones and police their peripheries without interference. This arrangement might reduce great-power conflict through mutual recognition, but it would formalize the subordination of smaller states and legitimize territorial expansion for security reasons—essentially returning to 19th-century concert politics with 21st-century technology.

System collapse into conflict: The nightmare scenario, where the erosion of institutional restraints and proliferation of territorial grievances creates cascading crises that overwhelm great powers’ capacity for management. This is the path that led from the Congress of Vienna’s breakdown to World War I, and while nuclear weapons change the calculus, they don’t eliminate the risk of miscalculation and escalation.

None of these futures resembles the liberal international order’s promise. None offers the combination of sovereignty protection, economic openness, and collective security that defined postwar aspirations. And crucially, the United States isn’t drifting into these scenarios through inattention or incompetence—it’s actively accelerating toward them through deliberate policy choices that prioritize short-term advantage over long-term stability.

The Greengrocer’s Sign: Legitimacy and the Future

Carney’s invocation of Havel’s greengrocer serves as this moment’s most potent metaphor. For decades, allies participated in rituals celebrating the rules-based order even as they privately recognized its imperfections and hypocrisies. They placed the sign in the window—”Workers of the world, unite” or “Sovereignty matters” or “International law binds us all”—not out of conviction but to avoid trouble, signal compliance, and preserve the system’s veneer of legitimacy.

Trump has removed America’s sign. By explicitly stating “I don’t need international law,” by threatening force against allies, by withdrawing from institutions and agreements, he’s acknowledged what cynics always suspected: that American support for the liberal order was conditional on American advantage, and when that calculus shifted, the principles would be abandoned.

The question now is whether other powers will follow America’s example and remove their own signs, embracing naked interest and power politics, or whether they’ll attempt to sustain some version of rules-based order without American leadership. Early evidence suggests a mixture: some states, particularly in the Global South, are invoking international law more vigorously now that Washington has abandoned it, seeing an opportunity to constrain great powers through collective legal action. Others are pursuing the hedging strategies Carney advocates, building resilience through diversification rather than relying on rules.

What seems increasingly unlikely is a return to the comfortable fiction of the past seven decades—that a benign American hegemon would voluntarily constrain its power through institutional commitments and provide global public goods while asking relatively little in return. That fiction required American buy-in, and Trump has made clear that at least one major faction of American politics views it as a sucker’s bargain. Even if a future administration attempts to restore elements of liberal internationalism, allies will remember 2025-2026 and hedge accordingly.

The great tragedy of Trump’s Greenland obsession and broader assault on international order isn’t that it reveals American hypocrisy—serious observers always knew the gap between principle and practice. The tragedy is that it destroys whatever practical value that hypocrisy once served. When America claimed to support sovereignty while occasionally violating it, at least smaller states could appeal to those stated principles as leverage. When America framed alliances as partnerships rather than protection rackets, at least allies could assume some baseline of reliable commitments. Trump has stripped away the hypocrisy and left only the power politics beneath.

In doing so, he hasn’t made America weaker—the United States remains overwhelmingly powerful militarily and economically. But he has made the world more dangerous, more fragmented, and less capable of addressing collective challenges. And he has ensured that when historians write the story of the liberal international order’s collapse, they will identify not Beijing or Moscow as the primary accelerant, but Washington. The United States, having led the West in building an international order after 1945, now leads it in tearing that order down.

Carney’s warning deserves the final word: “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger and more just.” Whether middle powers can actually construct that better order while great powers pursue unhindered ambitions remains the decade’s defining question. But one thing is certain: they’ll be building it without the United States—or more precisely, despite the United States.