There are historical moments when a power does not act out of strength, but out of panic. Not out of cold calculation, but out of strategic anxiety. The obsessive insistence of the United States on Greenland belongs to that category. It does not respond to an immediate threat from China or to Russian military expansion in the Arctic—both exaggerated in public discourse—but to something deeper and far more dangerous for Washington: the possibility that Europe, faced with its own existential crisis, may understand the power it holds, stop behaving like a vassal, and begin to act as a geopolitical subject.
The interview of economist Richard Wolff with Glenn Diesen, conducted in late January 2026, offers an exceptional key to understanding this moment. Not because it speaks directly about the Arctic, but because it lays bare the underlying logic that explains why Greenland has become an American obsession today. Wolff does not analyze conjunctures: he reconstructs the historical architecture of Western power and shows where it fractures.
“The most important phenomenon is not Mr. Trump, nor that the United States has gone astray,” Wolff states at the outset. And here it is worth pausing, because this sentence dismantles one of the most frequent alibis of liberal analysis: personalizing collapse. Trump is not the cause; he is the symptom. The problem, Wolff says bluntly, is China. Not as a military enemy, but as an irreversible historical fact. China has altered the world order in a way for which the West was not prepared, could not imagine, and does not know how to respond. Everything that has been attempted to stop it over the last seventy-five years has failed, and there are no indications that it will work in the future.
This point is essential, because it shifts the axis of the conflict. We are not facing a classic territorial dispute, but the collapse of a historical promise: the unipolar promise.
Wolff reconstructs with surgical precision how the United States conceived of itself as the natural heir to the British Empire. Since the nineteenth century, it competed with Germany for that role. The First World War, and then the Second, not only destroyed European and Japanese rivals, but also left the board clear. Europe was left devastated, Japan annihilated as an autonomous power, and only the Soviet Union remained as an uncomfortable obstacle. The Cold War was, in that sense, the recognition that there was one last adversary that could not be eliminated by force because of nuclear deterrence.
When the Soviet Union collapses between 1989 and 1991, what Wolff describes as a moment both hysterical and historical takes place. The United States enters the fantasy of the unipolar moment. The idea of manifest destiny—with its explicit religious undertone—is reactivated: the entire world becomes a legitimate inheritance. Neoliberal globalization, incubated since the 1970s, fully takes off in the 1990s. Manufacturing is outsourced; dirt is exported. Asia, Latin America, and later Africa will produce; the United States will reign.
Even the terrorism following September 11 reinforces this narrative. The West conceives of itself as a space of rationality and civilization; the East as a place of cheap production, irrationality, and violence. Everything seemed to fit into a stable hierarchical scheme.
Until it no longer does.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Wolff says, the dust settles and the real obstacle appears. It is not Europe. It is not Russia. It is not Japan. It is China. An economic power growing faster than any of the previous ones and frustrating all U.S. expectations of reaping the fruits of the neoliberal order. Every attempt at containment has failed. And that failure is not only economic: it is existential.
This is where the turn occurs that connects directly with Greenland.
When a power discovers that it can no longer expand outward as before, it begins to drain inward. U.S. foreign policy over the last decade—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has become extractive toward its own allies. Tariffs, energy blackmail, demands for military spending, forced industrial relocation, political subordination in exchange for “protection.” This is not leadership; it is plunder among partners.
Europe is the space where this logic becomes most dangerous for Washington. Because Europe is not weak for lack of resources, but for lack of strategic awareness. And Greenland is the point where that awareness could crystallize.
Contrary to the dominant discourse, neither China nor Russia today represent an immediate threat of Arctic control that would justify American urgency. Russia has historical and logistical presence along its Arctic coast; China invests pragmatically in routes and ports. Neither seeks direct confrontation with the United States in that region. The real risk for Washington is another: that Europe understands that Greenland is not a marginal appendage of Denmark, but a central piece of the global chessboard.
Greenland concentrates strategic resources, key maritime routes, and a geographic position that redefines the relationship between Europe, America, and Asia. Under Danish sovereignty, and by extension European sovereignty, it represents an unprecedented possibility: that Europe cease to be merely a market and become a full geopolitical actor. That it negotiate. That it choose. That it articulate its own interests.
From this perspective, U.S. interest in “buying” Greenland—from Truman to Trump—ceases to appear eccentric and reveals itself as a desperate gesture. It is not about preventing a nonexistent Chinese invasion, but about preventing Europe from awakening.
A unified Europe, pressured by the energy crisis, forced deindustrialization, and the erosion of Atlantic vassalage, could use Greenland as a platform for autonomy. It could redefine its relationship with Russia in pragmatic, not ideological, terms. It could negotiate with China without U.S. mediation. It could, in short, break the architecture of dependence built after the Second World War.
That is what is intolerable.
That is why U.S. rhetoric insists on exaggerating external threats while silencing the true fear: that the center of gravity shifts. That the world ceases to be organized around Washington. That the unipolar moment has not only ended, but is recognized as such by those who sustained the order.
Trump, in this framework, is not an anomaly. He is the unfiltered expression of a structural anxiety. He says what others administer through technical language. He threatens, demands, buys, pressures. Not because he has a master plan, but because the margin is shrinking.
Wolff suggests it bluntly: when empires enter this phase, they do not reform, they react. And reacting often accelerates decline.
Greenland, then, is not the objective. It is the symptom. The point where U.S. exhaustion and European possibility intersect. The place where it is decided, silently, whether the twenty-first century will truly be multipolar or whether the United States will once again manage to postpone the inevitable by draining those who still depend on it.
The question is no longer whether China is a challenge. That is settled. The question is whether Europe will continue to behave as if it had no options. And it is precisely that question that explains why Washington looks north today with such nervousness.