The new year could hardly have begun more ominously. Within days, U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration were openly celebrating the unlawful use of force against Venezuela, the abduction of its leader, the killing of more than 100 people, and a cascade of threats aimed at Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and, once again, Greenland. The military operation is a textbook case of what international law defines as a crime of aggression, and followed the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers in open waters. All of this breaches the United Nations Charter—of which the United States was the chief architect—and the most basic international rules designed to protect the world from exactly the kind of lawless, imperial violence that was supposed to be relegated to a bygone era.

At first, Trump and his officials reached for a familiar pretext. The military operation, they claimed, was about halting drugs being trafficked into the United States. But the mask slipped almost immediately. Trump made clear that the U.S. now intended to “control” Venezuela, with the top priority being the return of U.S. oil giants to seize and develop the country’s fossil fuel reserves, estimated to be the largest on Earth. Full exploitation of Venezuela’s oil reserves would be costly for any oil company, but the costs would be astronomical and even existential for people and the planet, as it would greatly accelerate global warming.

There is a Pattern

Trump’s actions in Venezuela are the latest in a long pattern. Trump has made little secret of his determination to secure U.S. control over other nations’ natural resources. His much-vaunted “peace efforts” in Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo followed a similar script: diplomatic pressure dressed up as mediation, explicitly tied to U.S. access to, and profit from, critical minerals. Peace, in Trump’s world, is conditional. Sovereignty is negotiable. International law is disposable. Resources are the prize.

Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro and his regime are responsible for grave crimes. They have brutally crushed dissent, imprisoned and tortured thousands, killed and disappeared many, destroyed the healthcare system, and driven millions into poverty and exile. The International Criminal Court is actively investigating these abuses as possible crimes against humanity.

But two things can be true at once, and two wrongs do not make a right.

When U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared that Trump is a president whose words should be trusted—what Trump says, Trump does—this was not reassurance. It was a warning. And it should have set off air-raid sirens across Europe.

Yet Europe, though visibly shaken by another Trump outrage, barely stirred. European Union leaders and most European governments responded not with moral clarity, but with equivocation, solemnly reminding the world that “under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be upheld,” while refusing to state the obvious: the U.S. had just violated both. U.S. military actions against Venezuela are not primarily about drugs, and certainly not about democracy or the rights of the Venezuelan people. They are all about oil, profit, and control—control of resources, control of territory, control of people.

And That Brings us to Greenland

Trump has repeatedly said that the United States “needs” Greenland and will get it “one way or another.” His special envoy and closest advisers have echoed the threats, including in Stephen Miller’s instantly infamous rant on CNN on January 5 in which he scoffed at the notion of “international niceties,” which presumably include international law and U.S. treaty obligations. On January 6, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt refused to rule out military action to take Greenland.

U.S. officials claim their interest in Greenland is about “national security,” but no security rationale can justify threats of territorial seizure. Nor does the argument survive even minimal scrutiny. The U.S. already has a military presence in Greenland. It once maintained seventeen military facilities there and step by step reduced them to one, the Pituffic Space Base. Any future U.S. military presence expansion could be lawfully negotiated with the governments of Greenland and Denmark, which have indicated a willingness to do so.

But, if the illegal assault on Venezuela is any guide, Trump’s obsession with Greenland has little to do with U.S. national security and everything to do with what lies beneath the ice.

As Greenland’s ice sheet melts at record speed, driven by a fossil-fuelled climate crisis the Trump regime actively accelerates, it will increasingly expose vast deposits of critical minerals that could potentially generate massive profits (though Trump doesn’t seem to understand that most are prohibitively expensive to extract). These minerals fit neatly into Trump’s extractive worldview, where land, nature, and even entire peoples are reduced to assets to be seized.

This is not speculation. It is policy. As the Trump administration’s recently published National Security Strategy makes clear, the Americas and the Arctic are framed not as regions governed by law, consent, and self-determination, but as zones of U.S. entitlement, dominance, and resource control. Countries become obstacles. Law becomes optional. Power is the organizing principle.

Trump is not just a transactional president. He violates international law with impunity. He threatens allies and neighbors alike. He is turbocharging the climate crisis by expanding fossil fuel extraction, blocking renewable energy, and locking in new oil and gas dependencies that devastate the climate system and harm the rights, lives, and livelihoods of present and future generations. He uses the U.S. presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his backers, particularly those, such as fossil fuel giants and tech oligarchs, who have contributed millions to his campaigns or pet projects.

During his presidential election campaign, Trump struck a crude quid pro quo with the fossil fuel industry: their money in exchange for the destruction of environmental and climate protections. He has delivered, repealing laws, defunding agencies, dismissing scientists, withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and international climate cooperation, and now exporting this model of plunder abroad through aggression and force, threats and criminality.

In 2025, the world’s highest court shattered any remaining doubt about states’ obligations in relation to the climate crisis. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its historic advisory opinion on climate change, made clear that states’ continued expansion of fossil fuel production, and their failure to regulate private actors’ greenhouse gas pollution may constitute breaches of international law, including obligations under human rights law, customary international law, and the prohibition on transboundary harm. States, the Court emphasized, cannot knowingly pursue policies that drive climate destruction while claiming compliance with their legal duties.

Trump’s fossil-fuel-first agenda is not just reckless. It is legally indefensible.

Yet, Trump does not merely ignore the ICJ’s determinations. He weaponizes the damage the world’s highest court describes. When climate breakdown melts Greenland’s ice and reveals what lies beneath, his answer is not restraint, but appropriation.

The consequences of failing to stand up to Trump extend far beyond the Americas and the Arctic. In Moscow and Beijing, authoritarian leaders are surely watching with glee. Vladimir Putin is continuing to try to do in Ukraine what Trump has just done in Venezuela. Thus far he has largely failed on the ground, but the moral argument against his brutal crime of aggression and campaign of atrocity crimes is dramatically weakened. Xi Jinping may now feel emboldened to accelerate China’s ruthless threats against Taiwan.

If all of this does not force Europe to wake up and cut through the fog of lies, threats and criminality, and call out the Trump administration’s assault on international law, climate, scientific facts, rights and states’ territorial sovereignty, then nothing will.

The bottom line is this: the international legal order is undermined not only through acts of aggression and other grave violations, but through silence, cowardice, and the refusal of others to call crimes and perpetrators by their name.

The people of Greenland have every reason to be deeply concerned.

The governments of Greenland and Denmark have made it perfectly clear; Greenland is not for the taking and is not for sale. The future of Greenland is for the people of Greenland to decide. Now European leaders have also started to emerge from shellshock and make it clear that they oppose unilateral United States action. But they need to go further. European and democratic nations around the world must name U.S. actions for what they are; defend the UN Charter, international courts, and the rule of law; and make clear that no state, however powerful, is entitled to rule by force, plunder, or threat. The choice could not be starker: defend the international legal order now or watch it be dismantled, piece by piece, by those who believe that power alone confers entitlement. One place to start would be an emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly and the adoption of a strong resolution that lists and condemns U.S. violations of international law, denounces threats of aggression, and reminds those responsible that they will be held accountable and may face justice for serious international crimes.

This month, it was Venezuela. The question is no longer whether Trump and his enablers plan to do it again. The question is: where next? And how will the defenders of the rule of law and basic decency respond?

This is a translated version. See original in Danish here.