Because it has fewer inhabitants than a mid-sized American town and almost no arable land, Greenland might seem like the last place anyone should care about. Yet this otherwise liminal space—formally part of the Danish realm yet functionally suspended between Europe, North America, and the Arctic—is suddenly at the centre of a geopolitical realignment that threatens to destroy the last vestiges of the Cold War mentality.
To desire Greenland is to desire the future under the sign of the past. This vast, empty territory condenses climate change, resource extraction, military logistics, and the romance of frontiers into a single frozen mass.
Trump’s fixation was never simply about land; it was about the pleasure of imagining sovereignty as a deal, borders as negotiable, and history as a property transaction waiting to be renegotiated. Greenland isn’t just crucial because of its location, but also because it provides a way to return to the language of acquisition and possession, translated into the idiom of twenty-first-century geopolitics.
When the president started talking about Greenland again after defeating Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, it was tempting to file the episode under the familiar category of Trumpian whimsy: a mixture of real-estate bravado, cable-news provocation, and the half-remembered lore of American expansionism. Like so many of his obsessions, however, his interest in Greenland has proven less trivial than it first appeared.
Greenland now functions as a synecdoche for a broader neo-imperial imaginary, one that is increasingly echoed, refracted, and distorted within European politics itself.
The old reflex of treating Donald Trump as an American aberration, a carnival barker temporarily installed in the Oval Office, has worn thin. In its place has emerged a more unsettling recognition: that Trumpism develops tendencies already present within liberal democracies, tendencies that can be amplified, normalised, and repurposed far from Washington.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the recent statements by Manfred Weber, the long-standing figurehead of Europe’s centre right and president of the European People’s Party. Weber’s admonition that European centrists must “move to the right” to stem the advance of populism was meant as a pragmatic intervention, a sober acknowledgement of electoral realities. Yet it also revealed how deeply the gravitational pull of Trump-style politics has penetrated the European mainstream.
The centre, once imagined as a space of moderation and procedural reason, is now devoted to a tactical imitation of its supposed adversaries. The logic is simple enough: if the populists are winning, it must be because they are saying something the people want to hear. The conclusion follows with brutal efficiency: say it louder, but with better manners.
This is where the Greenland fantasy returns, no longer as a literal proposal but as a symptom.
Trump’s neo-imperial rhetoric has supplied European politics with a new grammar of power, one that emphasises territorial control, civilisational boundaries, and the primacy of force over law. It is not that European centrists have suddenly embraced annexation or conquest. Rather, they have begun to speak as if politics itself were once again a zero-sum contest between bounded collectivities, each struggling for survival in a hostile world. Within this pitiless framework, liberal norms are luxuries, and compromise is a liability.
Ironically, centrists invoke this attitude in the name of defending liberal democracy. Weber’s argument, like many similar pronouncements, rests on the belief that the far right can be defanged by adopting its themes without its excesses. Migration must be controlled more strictly, borders defended more assertively, and national cultures reaffirmed more loudly.
What goes unexamined is how this strategy quietly accepts the populist premise that politics is fundamentally about identity and exclusion, rather than mediation and plurality. In borrowing the language of strength, the centre also borrows the underlying vision of a world divided into friends and enemies.
Here, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt casts a long shadow over the European debate, whether it is openly acknowledged or not. His insistence that the essence of the political lies in the distinction between friend and enemy has long haunted discussions of sovereignty, crisis, and exception.
Trump’s worldview, with its transactional alliances and open contempt for multilateral norms, is basically a vulgarised version of Schmitt’s thinking. He believes that law is subordinate to power, and that political order ultimately rests on the capacity to decide, unilaterally and decisively, who belongs and who does not. When European centrists echo this sensibility—when they speak of defending “our way of life” against diffuse external threats—they are not merely borrowing rhetoric. They are reactivating a conception of politics that liberal Europe once claimed to have overcome.
The war in Ukraine has intensified these tendencies, giving them a moral urgency that is difficult to contest. Faced with Russia’s invasion, the European Union and its member states have been forced to confront the reality of hard power in a way they had long avoided. Military budgets have swollen, strategic autonomy has become a mantra, and the language of deterrence has returned with a vengeance.
In this context, Trump’s neo-imperial gestures appear less outlandish than prophetic. His blunt insistence that power matters, that security guarantees are conditional, and that territory remains the ultimate stake of international politics now aligns, however uneasily, with European anxieties.
Yet the convergence is deeply paradoxical. Trump’s vision of empire is profoundly indifferent to Europe’s survival as a political project. His flirtation with abandoning NATO, his admiration for strongmen, and his transactional approach to alliances all point toward a world in which Europe is, at best, a secondary player. Nevertheless, elements of his style have been internalised by European actors who see no alternative to mimicking his assertiveness. The result is a kind of ideological ventriloquism: The EU leadership speaks in Trump’s accent while hoping to avoid his fate.
This dynamic is particularly visible in debates over Ukraine. Support for Kyiv is often framed as a defence of sovereignty and international law, yet it is increasingly articulated through the language of civilizational struggle. Ukraine becomes the frontier of “the West,” a bulwark against barbarism, rather than a complex society with its own contradictions and aspirations. In this narrative, compromise appears as betrayal, and diplomacy as weakness. The friend–enemy distinction hardens, leaving little room for ambiguity or dissent. To question strategy is to risk being depicted as an enemy within.
What drops out of view is the more subtle, unsettling lesson of Russia’s war on Ukraine: that sovereignty today is less a stable attribute than a precarious process, constantly reshaped by economic flows, technological infrastructures, and ecological constraints. The fixation on territory—on who controls which piece of land—obscures the extent to which power now operates through networks rather than borders.
Trump’s Greenland fantasy is instructive here not because it is realistic, but because it is anachronistic. It imagines that owning land confers control, as if sovereignty were still a matter of flags planted in ice. The danger is that Europe, in responding to Trumpism, adopts the same anachronism.
One need not invoke continental philosophy by name to see how this obsession with fixed identities and territorial solidity misreads the contemporary condition. Power today is mobile, adaptive, and often impersonal. It flows through supply chains, data centres, financial instruments, and logistical corridors. To confront it with the blunt tools of nineteenth-century geopolitics is to fight a ghost with a sword. Yet this is precisely what makes the neo-imperial imaginary so appealing: it offers the comfort of clarity in a world of diffuse threats. Greenland, Ukraine, borders, walls—these are tangible objects onto which anxiety can be projected.
Manfred Weber’s call for centrists to move rightward should be read against this backdrop. It is not merely a tactical adjustment but a symptom of a deeper unease about how to govern in a world where traditional levers of control prove increasingly inadequate. By leaning into the rhetoric of strength and exclusion, centrists hope to reassure voters that someone is still in charge. The risk is that, in doing so, they hollow out the very democratic norms they claim to defend. Politics becomes a performance of decisiveness, as Carl Schmitt articulated it, rather than a practice of deliberation.
This is where the irony of Europe’s response to Donald Trump is most cruel. The European Union was founded, in part, as a response to the catastrophic consequences of friend–enemy politics on the continent. Its legalistic, bureaucratic character was meant to tame sovereignty, to bind it within procedures and shared norms.
Today, under pressure from populism and war, those same procedures are increasingly portrayed as obstacles. The language of exception—of emergency, necessity, and inevitability—creeps back in. Decisions must be made quickly; dissent must be managed; unity must be enforced. The centre becomes a chameleon, increasingly resembling what it fears.
Trump’s obsession with Greenland thus serves as a distorted mirror. It reflects Europe’s own unresolved tensions between law and power, integration and sovereignty, pluralism and identity. To laugh his power play off as a joke is to miss its significance. To imitate it, even in diluted form, is to risk repeating the very history Europe desperately wishes to have left behind.
The challenge, then, is not simply to resist Trumpism as an external influence, but to confront the conditions that make it so resonant. This would require acknowledging that security cannot be reduced to territorial control, that democracy cannot be preserved by mimicking authoritarian gestures, and that solidarity cannot be built on exclusion alone. It would also mean rethinking the war in Ukraine not only as a clash of states, but as a symptom of a global order in transition, one in which the old categories of empire and sovereignty no longer suffice.
Admittedly, this approach is less viscerally satisfying than the fantasy of buying Greenland or drawing harder lines on a map. It lacks the lure of decisive action. But it could be the only way to avoid a future in which the European Union, having moved ever further to the right in the name of survival, wakes up to find that it has won the argument and lost itself.
In the end, Trump’s greatest influence on Europe may not lie in any specific policy, but in the way he has normalised a particular style of thinking: a politics of acquisition, confrontation, and spectacle. The task for Europe is not to outdo him on these terms, but to refuse the game altogether. Whether its centrists are willing—or able—to do so remains an open question, suspended somewhere between the ice of Greenland and the trenches of eastern Ukraine.
Photograph courtesy of the European People’s Party. Published under a Creative Commons license.
