The U.S. raid in Venezuela on January 3 was not just a wake-up call for Nicolás Maduro and his wife; it was a wake-up call for the international system as a whole. While much of the focus this week has been on what it means to “run” Venezuela, I want to step back and focus on some of the broader implications of the emergent “Trump Doctrine.” (If you’re looking for a deep dive on Venezuela, I urge you to read the extensive military, political, and legal analyses put forth over the past week by leading CFR experts.)
Let’s start with perhaps one of the clearest statements yet of the Trump Doctrine from Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor. As Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Miller is, of course, right that for most of human history, those were the rules of the game. Then we had two world wars, wiped out a couple of generations of young men, and witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust. It might be fashionable these days to deride the global rules-based system, but its creation was not accidental or a naive embrace of “international niceties”; it reflected a concerted decision to move away from the “iron laws” that had caused such calamities. Now, though, it appears we are moving away from a world in which U.S. interests were understood to be best served by a system of rules—which, imperfect as it was, might have constrained the United States but certainly constrained our competitors and adversaries—to one in which might makes right.
But, in the words of Senator William J. Fulbright, the trouble is that “power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.” We generally view the United States as being virtuous; it’s part of our narrative of American exceptionalism. Few Americans lamented the destruction of Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility or the rendition of Maduro, though there has been some pushback against the Trump administration’s broader Venezuela agenda, including in Congress. The question at this point is how far the administration intends to push this new doctrine. Ironically, the next major test of the viability of the postwar order might emerge in the most unlikely of places—the world’s largest and least populated island: Greenland.
I’ve been to Greenland. We don’t want it. No offense to the Greenlanders, who are lovely people, nor to the Danes, one of our closest NATO allies, but taking Greenland would provide very little economic upside for the United States. Indeed, it is more likely to cost us money than make us rich, and we can secure what we need in terms of a ramped-up military presence without the burdens of ownership.
Last year, I had the opportunity to lead a delegation of some twenty CFR members to Greenland. We met with political leaders, U.S. and allied military officers, businesspeople, civil society representatives, and local citizens. As Trump noted, Greenland’s strategic geographical location is becoming a new focus of national security and economic competition. The island could play a significant role in our stated national security objectives of enhancing surveillance and undersea-domain awareness across the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, reinforcing the monitoring of Russian submarine traffic moving into the North Atlantic, and controlling emerging maritime trade and military corridors in the Arctic as polar ice caps melt.
My visit reaffirmed that the Danes and Greenlanders are not only happy, but eager to work with the United States without us having to fire a shot or write a check. At one point, we had 17 military facilities on Greenland. Now, by choice, we only have one of our own. Moving forward, the Greenlanders and Danes would be delighted to work with the United States to expand its military presence on the island, and a robust 1951 security cooperation agreement with Denmark already provides a mechanism for doing so.
There has also been talk about Greenland’s potential critical mineral opportunity. “Potential” is the right word. Our delegation left Greenland with the distinct impression that it would be one of the last places on Earth one would want to mine, given its harsh conditions, isolated geography, and skeletal infrastructure. There might be opportunities in industries that could take advantage of the island’s expanding hydropower production, but unlike the president’s rationale for interceding in Venezuela’s oil sector, Greenland is not going to make anyone rich.
Indeed, to maintain a basic standard of living, Denmark subsidizes Greenland to the tune of $600 million each year. Trump’s enthusiasm for “owning” Greenland might be somewhat tempered when he learns that, in real estate terms, it’s akin to a money pit. Of course, above all else, the greatest cost of invading or coercing Greenland could be the splintering of the NATO alliance itself.
Europe is up in arms over all this loose talk about taking Greenland, and in every capital, governments are talking about what this moment means for them. If the rules-based system was challenged before the United States took action in Venezuela, it is now on life support, at risk of being usurped by a presumption of rugged self-determination. This is not an academic concern; it may prove the single most consequential implication of the Donroe Doctrine—and one that will be studied intensely and potentially exploited by Beijing and Moscow.
We can debate the extent to which China and Russia have adhered to the rules of the international system heretofore. Russia certainly engaged in self-judging in its claims over Ukraine, and China has tested the margins of the old order with grey-zone activities against Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, and just about all of its maritime neighbors. This is not new behavior; it predates this president. But, in prior periods, it led to condemnation and efforts to isolate the perpetrators. The question now is whether we have created a permission structure that normalizes other countries acting unilaterally in pursuit of their self-defined interests—at least within their spheres of influence—as we have.
Indeed, one of the most striking developments since the issuance of the National Security Strategy, the rendition of Maduro, and the discussion of taking Greenland is how little focus there has been, at least publicly, on China. Once the pacing threat for U.S. national security policy and one of the few areas of policy garnering bipartisan consensus, China is barely mentioned by the administration, and there is a lot of uncertainty and speculation about where Trump himself stands heading into a year that could see two head-of-state summits. Arguably, the U.S.-China relationship is the most important in the world, and we are closer to a G2 world than we have ever been. Yet nearly all the attention is elsewhere: Russia and Ukraine, the Middle East, and of course, the Western Hemisphere.
One thing is clear: if we are living in a “might makes right” world, we must do everything we can to be as mighty as possible. The mere exercise of power is not self-sustaining. For the last eighty years, we’ve presided over a remarkably resilient economy, been a magnet for global talent, and harnessed pools of risk capital and our deep capital markets to forge the most innovative ecosystem in the world.
Looking ahead, to maintain our might, there is work to be done to modernize our military capabilities, including dealing with the integration of new technologies and the dependencies of our supply chains. We should also deal with other vulnerabilities that could damage our capacity to project power: investing in basic research and development and the critical institutions that do that work; strengthening our alliances, including by getting our partners to contribute more to our collective security; maintaining the rule of law, which has made the United States the destination of choice for global investment; and dealing with the issue that gets almost no serious political airtime: the unsustainability of our fiscal trajectory.
If we don’t, we might find that the strength, force, and power that Miller referred to as being central to the iron laws of the world might elude us and lie in the hands of others.
Let me know what you think about the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy so far this year and what this column should cover next by replying to president@cfr.org.
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What I’m tuning into this week:
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My weekend appearances on Fox News and MS NOW, and Wednesday’s interview for NPR’s All Things Considered
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Analyses written by my colleagues Shannon O’Neil, Elliott Abrams, Max Boot, Roxanna Vigil, David Sacks, David Scheffer, Charlie Kupchan, and Brad Setser for CFR.org on Venezuela’s future, implications for China-Taiwan, legal parallels with the Noriega case, Trump’s military interventions to date, and the country’s oil production
- Gita Gopinath’s piece “Don’t Be Fooled — Everything Has Changed for the Global Economy” for the Financial Times
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Elliott Abrams on the New York Times’ Interesting Times podcast to discuss U.S. intervention in Venezuela
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Ray Takeyh and Reuel Marc Gerecht’s article “Can Iran Hold the Line Against Its Protesters?” for the Wall Street Journal
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Will Freeman’s “The Shock Waves of Venezuela: How Maduro’s Capture Could Transform Latin America” for Foreign Affairs
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The Washington Post Editorial Board’s “Greenland Isn’t Worth Destroying NATO Over”
