By mid-morning on Saturday, the language being used about Caracas had already started to harden into something dangerous: ‘capture’, ‘removal’, ‘operation’. On Truth Social, President Donald Trump claimed that US forces had taken Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody and flown them out of Venezuela. In the vacuum that followed, Venezuela’s own vice-president admitted she did not know where Maduro was, or even whether he was still alive.
In London, Keir Starmer chose his words with the caution of a man walking on ice. ‘Fast-moving,’ he said, and insisted Britain was not involved. He reached for the one phrase that, in the past decade, has increasingly sounded like a plea rather than a principle: ‘we should all uphold international law’.
That single morning matters far beyond Venezuela, not only because of what may prove true about events on the ground but because of what it signals about the appetite for coercion at the centre of the world’s most powerful military alliance. The question is not merely whether Washington has crossed an ‘unacceptable line’, but whether it has normalised crossing it.
If you want a place where that shift has immediate consequences, look north.
Greenland: more than a chessboard
Greenland has long been treated in British political debate as a remote Arctic chessboard: a slab of ice, a runway, a radar dome, a map in a briefing pack. Yet the island is home to roughly 56,000 people, with its own parliament and a constitutional route to independence. While Denmark still controls foreign and defence policy, the people who live there have spent years being told by larger powers that the Arctic is becoming ‘strategic’. They have also learned what that word can conceal.
Donald Trump’s interest in Greenland is not new. In 2019, he confirmed he was considering trying to buy the island. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, responded with a sentence that was as much a boundary as a rebuke: ‘Greenland is not for sale. Greenland belongs to Greenland.’
After Trump returned to office, the rhetoric escalated. In January 2025, he told reporters: ‘I think we’re going to have it,’ claiming Greenlanders ‘want to be with us’. In March, he promised Greenlanders wealth and told a US audience that America would acquire the island ‘one way or the other’. Crucially, he refused to rule out using military force to seize control.
Since then, Washington has started formalising the obsession. In late December, Trump appointed Louisiana governor Jeff Landry as ‘special envoy’ to Greenland, a diplomatic innovation that reads, to Denmark and Nuuk alike, as a claim staked in bureaucratic form.
The mineral question
These are not idle remarks floating above reality. They are occurring in a Greenland whose economic future has become entangled with the most combustible sector in modern geopolitics: critical minerals. Reuters has reported that Trump administration officials discussed taking an equity stake in Critical Metals Corp, tied to the Tanbreez rare earths project, giving Washington a direct interest in a major Greenlandic resource play.
The pattern is familiar: when a state frames supply chains as national security, investment stops being a commercial act and becomes a lever. Greenland is full of potential levers. A 2025 survey found 25 of 34 EU-defined ‘critical raw materials’ present on the island. The EU has moved accordingly, signing a strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials.
But legal partnerships are paper; bases are concrete.
The US is already inside the house
The military reality makes Greenland different from most places that become objects of great-power desire. The United States is already inside the house. Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, is the northernmost US installation and hosts early warning capabilities that sit close to the core of US strategic planning. It exists under a defence agreement with Denmark dating back to 1951.
As Dr Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen of the Royal Danish Defence College has observed, the US strategy is constrained by the fact that it ‘cannot simply dispense with the Danes and Greenlanders through a “large real-estate deal”’. Instead, securing the American position involves complex negotiations to ensure Chinese economic influence cannot undermine the US presence.
The fear is that Trump will skip the negotiations entirely. When you already have aircraft, personnel, runways and a legal scaffold for access, the threshold for ’temporary’ escalation is lower than it would be elsewhere.
What Venezuela changes
This is where today’s Venezuela shock reverberates.
The Trump administration has, since late 2025, run an expanding set of maritime and strike activities in the region under the name ‘Southern Spear’. Saturday’s strikes and the claim of Maduro’s capture are the largest escalation yet, and the first that looks, from the outside, like regime removal by force.
Dr Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, has previously described Trump’s approach to the region as designed to ‘strike fear’ into military leaderships, noting that the administration views the threat of force as a primary leverage tool. If the Venezuela operation is indeed a ‘proof of concept’ for this maximum pressure strategy, the message to Nuuk is chilling: sovereignty is secondary to American security.
Even if parts of the story prove contested, the political effect is immediate: it demonstrates willingness to act first and fight about legality later. Starmer’s instinct to ’establish the facts’ before condemnation is understandable; it is also a preview of the bind Nato leaders may face if a similar crisis erupts closer to home.
The Nato question
Greenland is, legally, not a grey zone within Nato. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty defines the geographic scope for collective defence as including ’the islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer’. Greenland fits that description. A straightforward armed attack on Greenland would be hard to square with any narrative of alliance solidarity.
So does that mean the risk is imaginary? No. It means the risk shifts away from an overt Normandy-style invasion and towards coercive tactics that exploit ambiguity, time and internal politics.
Start with money. In early 2025, the Guardian reported that Trump had made economic threats in a call with Frederiksen and that targeted tariffs were discussed. Whether or not you accept every detail, the direction of travel is clear: Denmark’s vulnerability is not military but economic. A US administration willing to strike Venezuela and absorb global condemnation is also an administration that may not fear a trade fight with Copenhagen.
Then consider the diplomatic bypass. Greenland’s politics are not Denmark’s politics. The constitutional path to independence is real and the independence movement is an active force. It is not difficult to imagine a White House offering direct aid, infrastructure finance or mineral-linked investment to Nuuk while portraying Copenhagen as an obstacle. Greenland’s own foreign minister has publicly said the territory wants more out of its defence relationship with the US. That is not an invitation to annexation, but it is an acknowledgement of a truth: Greenland’s future will be shaped by who can offer credible prosperity without humiliation.
The third vector is ‘security’ itself. In March 2025, US vice-president JD Vance visited Pituffik, the most senior US figure to do so, in the midst of heightened tension about Greenland’s status. That kind of visit can be ordinary alliance management. It can also be read as a reminder of who holds the operational keys.
Marc Jacobsen, an Arctic security expert, has warned that the US presence often oscillates between ‘friend, competitor, or a potential enemy’ in the local debate. The Greenlandic government has been clear on where it stands: ‘We are not for sale and will never be for sale,’ Prime Minister Múte B. Egede said recently. But the tragedy of small states in this new era is that their agency evaporates when the great powers move.
Credibility, incentives, and burden
What, then, does Venezuela change?
It changes credibility. For years, Trump’s Greenland comments were treated as a blend of provocation and fantasy, an auctioneer’s instinct applied to a map. But credibility is built from precedent. A US president who publicly claims to have captured a Latin American head of state after airstrikes has demonstrated, at the very least, a tolerance for extreme action and for the diplomatic fallout that follows.
It also changes the incentives inside Greenland. The more Washington looks willing to use raw power, the more Greenlandic leaders may hedge by tightening links with Europe, or by accelerating the push for independence to remove Denmark as an intermediary.
Finally, Venezuela changes the burden on Britain and Europe. The UK is not a bystander in Greenland’s future. Under Nato, the legal geography draws us in; under politics, the US expects alignment; under economics, Denmark is a close European partner. Article 5 is supposed to simplify decisions. Coercive, ambiguous pressure is designed to make them harder.
The crisis that never looks like war
The most sobering possibility is that Greenland becomes the stage for a crisis that never looks like war until it is too late to unwind. A ’temporary’ US surge to Pituffik justified by an asserted Russian or Chinese threat. A ‘protective’ administrative step around ports, airports or customs. A referendum narrative driven by money and fear rather than self-determination. None of these need a shot fired. Each could leave Denmark facing a fait accompli and Nato facing an argument about definitions rather than a unified response.
If that sounds alarmist, look at the language already on the record. Trump has said the US would take Greenland ‘one way or the other’. He has refused to rule out force. He has installed an envoy whose brief, by definition, treats Greenland as something Washington is entitled to negotiate over. And now, after today, he can point to Venezuela as proof that he will act on his worldview.
None of this makes coerced acquisition inevitable. Denmark has agency. Greenland has agency. Europe has economic weight. But those guardrails are only as strong as the political will to use them.
Britain’s duty
The first duty for Britain is intellectual honesty: to stop treating Greenland as a curiosity. The second is diplomatic preparation: to make clear, in private and in public, that alliance does not mean acquiescence.
When Starmer says he wants to ’establish the facts’, he is speaking into a world where facts are often delayed, contested and weaponised. But the broad fact pattern is already visible. A US president who frames geography as property has met a world where geography is becoming more valuable by the month. The Arctic ice is retreating. Mineral demand is surging. Great-power competition is hardening. In that world, the line between ‘strategic partnership’ and ‘strategic possession’ can narrow with alarming speed.
Greenland is not for sale. The fear is that it may be treated as if it is.