Venezuela yesterday, Greenland tomorrow
This is a reproduction of an article that first appeared on 66° North. If you would like to read more posts by Lukas Wahden, you can sign up for his blog on Substack here.
As the proverbial dust from the U.S. assault on Venezuela settles, two questions demand urgent answering: First, do the recent events in Caracas mark the practical implementation of the new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), including a military retrenchment of the U.S. to the Western Hemisphere and a corresponding division of the world into spheres of influence controlled by great powers? And second, does this logic imply that Greenland, which is located in said hemisphere and coveted by Trump, will be next in line for an armed attack by the U.S.?
My own answer to the first question is no, whereas my answer to the second question is maybe, but for reasons that have little to do with coherent sphere-of-influence politics.
- Will there be a “tripartite division of the world”?
First, on spheres of influence.
The standard argument runs as follows. The United States, an exhausted superpower constrained by domestic dysfunction and scarred by long wars in the Middle East, is winding down its global military entanglements and retrenching to its immediate neighbourhood, the Americas. This retrenchment, proponents argue, will allow Washington to reduce military spending and redirect resources toward social and economic regeneration at home.
As a corollary, the United States would tacitly accept the emergence of regional spheres of influence elsewhere: China in East Asia, Russia in Europe. In exchange for strategic restraint, Washington would effectively greenlight Beijing and Moscow to impose regional orders in their respective “backyards.” The result, so the theory goes, would be a more stable great-power equilibrium. War between major powers would become less likely, even if the unfortunate borderlands and peripheries would, as the Melian Dialogue goes, “suffer what they must.”
This vision has long guided Vladimir Putin’s approach to U.S. diplomacy, a point that is also underlined by Fiona Hill’s testimony of a bizarre 2019 offer by Russian officials for the U.S. to “trade Venezuela for Ukraine.” It now appears to have been embraced by the Trump administration as well.
Yet while the spheres-of-influence narrative is parsimonious and intuitively appealing, it fails to capture current realities for three reasons:
- It overestimates the coherence of U.S. foreign policy.
- It overstates Russia’s power and capacity for dominance in its neighbourhood.
- It projects Western assumptions about great-power behaviour onto China with potentially unwarranted confidence.
- A chaos theory of U.S. foreign policy
Begin with the question of whether U.S. policy has in fact translated a rhetoric of retrenchment and hemispheric spheres of influence into practice. On one level, the answer appears to be yes. Washington has evidently rediscovered the joys of interventionism in Latin America, and the 2025 NSS explicitly elevates the Western Hemisphere to the primary theatre of U.S. foreign policy.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Trump’s conception of a U.S. sphere of influence is geographically confined to the Americas. In the worldview of the administration, bringing the Western Hemisphere back into line is framed as a corrective to “decades of neglect”. But this corrective is not conceived as a trade-off. Reasserting dominance close to home is not meant to come at the expense of U.S. interests elsewhere, it is imagined as an addition, not a substitution.
Beyond outlining a carrots-and-sticks approach to Latin America, the NSS also articulates an explicitly activist blueprint for the political reordering of Europe along ideological lines favourable to the United States. After a year of putative “peace negotiations,” the war in Ukraine continues with non-negligible American involvement. For Asia, the NSS goes further still. The document commits the United States to “denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” and to preventing “a potentially hostile power” from exercising control over the South China Sea, explicitly through military means, albeit with the help of Japan and South Korea.
Taken together, this does not read like a programme of hemispheric retrenchment, nor like a willingness to abandon the ostensible Russian or Chinese spheres of influence. Rather than withdrawing, the United States is attempting to restructure its influence in Europe and Asia by transforming traditional alliance systems into more openly transactional arrangements. These increasingly resemble relationships of vassalage — or a “Budapest Pact”, in the words of Olivier Schmitt.
A part of the reason for this lies, I believe, in MAGA’s idiosyncratic interpretation of what Rush Doshi calls “allied scale”. The basic idea is that hegemonic competition with China will remain the paramount foreign policy task of the United States for decades to come, and that China possesses a range of inherent advantages because it now out-scales the U.S. on most material power metrics, such as manufacturing capacities, power generation, shipbuilding, steel output and leads on key technologies. But if the resources and capacities of America’s “allies” were to be added to the equation, the balance would suddenly shift back in favour of a hypothetical U.S.-led bloc.
Perhaps this helps explain why, in some of my own discussions with MAGA-adjacent writers, I was surprised to be asked what it would take for a politically rearranged Europe to join an “American-led tech alliance” to compete with China. While I have no answer to these sorts of questions, they nevertheless demonstrate an awareness on the part of pro-Trump figures that Washington would probably not be able to “go it alone” in a confrontation with China. A denial of Russian or Chinese “control” over Asia and Europe will likely remain a significant goal of U.S. policy, in spite of the isolationist rhetoric coming out of the White House.
The U.S. is therefore unlikely to fully retreat, in any meaningful sense, to the Western Hemisphere. It will pair its new interventionism in Latin America with militarised “great power competition” in other parts of the world. In part, this is because the foreign policy agenda of Trump II has so far been marked by competition between various ideological entrepreneurs. While some figures in the administration espouse retrenchment and self-regeneration, others argue for a proactive global projection of U.S. power in protection of American predominance. The tone of documents like the NSS, and U.S. decision-making in practice, often depend on which actor last captured the president’s ear. The outcome has been a foreign policy that tries to implement too many contradictory objectives at once. In 2025, the U.S. bombed seven countries, including the Russian and Chinese allies of Iran and Venezuela — all while speaking the language of great power restraint. This incoherence is understood, and viewed as fraught with risk, in both Moscow and Beijing.
- The shaky foundations of Russian power
A recognition of U.S. volatility helps explain why the assault on Venezuela was met not with glee but with a noticeable glumness in Russia. Spheres-of-influence theories would predict Vladimir Putin running victory laps around the Kremlin, celebrating the dawn of a new era of Schmittian Grossräume. Instead, the Russian president has remained conspicuously silent on Venezuela.
Part of the explanation is straightforward. Nicolás Maduro was arguably a Russian ally and asset. But Putin has also avoided directly antagonising the United States for most of the past year, remaining narrowly focused on negotiations over whether to end his war on Ukraine.
Seen from a broader vantage point, however, Russia’s reluctance likely has deeper roots. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela has not merely illustrated but actively underscored the relative erosion of Russia’s national power, the very foundation on which any credible Russian claim to a sphere of influence would have to rest in a changing international order.
For one thing, the surgical efficiency with which U.S. special forces captured Maduro demonstrated the type of military ability Russia simply does not possess. Russian war bloggers and regime propagandists, including RT head Margarita Simonyan, jealously compared the American operation to Russia’s failed assault on Ukraine’s Hostomel airport in 2022. The capture of the leader of a neighbouring state in his own capital, executed with minimal bloodshed, stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s four-year war of attrition in the Donbas. The idea of Russian-led regime change in Kyiv has long since retreated into the realm of the fanciful. Moscow’s military machine remains a threat to the country’s neighbours, but its capacities for the type of expeditionary interventions required for sphere-of-influence management are much more limited than they were during the intervention in Kazakhstan in early 2022.
Secondly, since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has lost partners not only in places like Syria and Venezuela. It has also seen its political influence in its immediate neighbourhood erode. In the South Caucasus, Russia has alienated Armenia and Azerbaijan, and failed to assert control over Georgia despite the latter’s democratic backsliding. In Central Asia, states have not broken with Moscow, but used additional leverage to seek greater alignment with China, Turkey and Iran. Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics and Finland are all actively hostile to Russia.
But most importantly, Russian commentators have highlighted the potentially catastrophic consequences of the events in Caracas for their own country’s economic model. Venezuela holds the world’s second-largest oil deposits. If U.S. firms were indeed to attain control over oil production in the Caribbean, the resulting price collapse could jeopardise Russia’s budget planning. Moscow needs roughly $65-70 per barrel of oil to sustain its economic model without steadily eroding state capacity. Below that range, the model still plays out, but only by burning buffers, raising taxes, or cutting investment. Moreover, the production costs expected for many of Russia’s more remote deposits are high enough to make their development unviable at low global price levels. Oleg Deripaska, the head of Russian aluminium giant Rusal, warned on Telegram that the U.S. may be able to push oil prices below $50 a barrel, thus endangering Russia’s “cherished state-capitalism” — and with it its ability to pursue an activist and militarised foreign policy in the long term.
While Russia might therefore welcome a shift to a spheres-of-influence model in purely theoretical terms, it will most likely not be equipped to establish itself as a true great power pole within such an order. This would, of course, not prevent Putin from trying. Russia holds much of what Seva Gunitsky calls “agentic power” — a willingness to compensate for economic weakness through a surplus of risk tolerance. It remains a first-rate spoiler and saboteur, and poses a clear and unambiguous military threat to Europe. But any Russian attempt to go beyond tactical confrontation and reestablish itself as a permanent gravitational centre of a wider regional order would likely turn into a rather messy affair, as Moscow would face the stiff resistance of actors surrounding it in virtually any direction.
- China’s odd great power behaviour
Finally, the vision of a world divided into spheres of influence squares particularly poorly with the foreign-policy model of China, the world’s second superpower.
Since the 1979 invasion of Vietnam, Chinese Communist Party leaders have refrained from using the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to interfere in neighbouring states. There is now a striking mismatch between China’s immense economic heft, which Beijing has leveraged to construct dense and far-reaching influence networks, and its comparatively modest global military presence. While the PLA has consistently pushed for ever-growing deployments in China’s immediate periphery, its overseas footprint remains minimal, with only a small number of uniformed personnel stationed at bases in Djibouti and Tajikistan.
From Beijing’s perspective, China’s security outlook remains overwhelmingly inward-facing. This is not to say that the PLA’s current posture is necessarily benign. It poses a serious threat of armed conflict over Taiwan and in the South and East China Seas. Chinese calculations around these conflicts are unpredictable and harbour risks of catastrophic escalation. Yet these potential flashpoints are framed by Chinese leaders not as projects of regional domination, but as domestic or post-colonial issues tied to territorial integrity and “national reunification.” Armed conflict is also seen as risking the introduction of instability into a paranoidly shielded domestic political context. While one certainly does not have to agree with this interpretation, the evidence that it guides Chinese policy-making is strong.
Beyond Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Sino-Indian border, and nearby maritime disputes, it remains unclear to what extent China would be willing to underwrite a hypothetical Sinocentric order in Asia by force. Moreover, the resistance to any such attempt would be formidable, not only by the U.S., Japan and South Korea, but also by a wide range of other Asian states. The reluctance of Chinese military leaders to deploy troops even to highly unstable neighbouring countries like Afghanistan, or turn the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation into anything more than a multilateral law enforcement platform, is well-documented.
It is thus difficult to imagine Beijing departing from its default priorities: domestic stability, regime security, territorial control, and selective, transactional security partnerships abroad. China will continue to prefer economic entanglements and soft coercion over military deployments. These priorities sit uneasily with the kind of activist interventionism typically associated with Russian or American sphere-of-influence behaviour, and offer little evidence of any Chinese willingness to abandon long-standing commitments to territorial integrity and non-intervention in favour of a more openly coercive Raumpolitik.
- The new world order will be a lethal mess
There is therefore neither a discernible master plan for a “tripartite division of the world” among the United States, China, and Russia, nor a configuration in which the actual behaviour and capabilities of those three states correspond to that model of international order in practice.
While Washington proclaims hemispheric retrenchment, it continues to project power in Europe and pursue regional predominance in Asia. Russia aspires to a sphere of influence it lacks the material foundations to sustain. And China, despite posing a grave threat to Taiwan, shows little inclination to adopt the outward-looking security posture required to impose regional hegemony along classical great-power lines.
The result will be a situation where the old world order, alongside its commonly internalised restraints on the use of force and intervention, is gone — but without being replaced by an alternative, stable arrangement, such as a great power concert or solidified spheres of influence. The world order, in short, is entering a period of lethal chaos.
- Where does that leave Greenland?
While “hemispheric control” may currently be riding a discursive wave crest in Washington, there are thus no structural imperatives in international politics that would compel the United States to annex Greenland.
From the far more relevant perspective of regime cohesion, by contrast, the attack on Caracas was likely a straightforward decision for Trump. The blitzkrieg against Venezuela’s Bolivarian regime is one of the rare cases where the competing visions within the administration align.
The limited scope of the intervention will have reassured isolationists such as J.D. Vance, insofar as no U.S. ground troops were committed. For Marco Rubio, military force against Venezuela offered an opportunity to settle accounts with a long-standing bête noire of Latin American diaspora politics. The extraterritorial extension of law-and-order emergency powers in the name of combating crime and migration bears the imprint of Stephen Miller. Pete Hegseth, for his part, is likely to have welcomed the demonstration of American expeditionary capabilities, even in a largely uncontested operational environment. And for Trump himself, the combination of nineteenth-century-style imperial assertion and an oil grab must have looked like a clear political win.
Greenland, by contrast, is a fundamentally different case, both from the perspective of regime coherence and from the standpoint of classical spheres-of-influence logic. An invasion of Greenland would likely be truly pushed by only a narrow subset of actors: Trump, Hegseth, maybe Miller. Other factions might not openly resist such a move, given the president’s dominance over decision-making. But in terms of regime cohesion, and domestic sentiment in a mid-term election year, the rationale behind an armed takeover of Greenland would be much less self-evident than the capture of Maduro.
In terms of Western Hemisphere politics, Venezuela’s Bolivarian leadership — an uncooperative regime that denies military access and partnered with hostile external powers — pose a tangible problem for U.S. control. Greenland and Denmark never did. They are hyper-reliable U.S. allies. The United States already exercises unquestioned security tutelage over Greenland, a role it has repeatedly been invited to deepen. American firms, moreover, are free to pursue resource extraction on the island with minimal obstruction.
According to realist assumptions about sphere-of-influence politics, interventions and annexations are an expensive means of last resort against uncooperative subordinates. It is much cheaper and more convenient to sustain alignment through other forms of pressure, as the United States would evidently also be able to do in Greenland. This is not to mention the enormous costs of a decisive break between the E.U. and the U.S., predominantly for Europe but also for Americans.
What, then, can help explain Trump’s increasingly more assertive designs on Greenland? The answer may be deceptively simple. Territorial control over Greenland appears less as a strategic necessity than as a personal prestige project, which would allow Trump to cast himself as one of the “great” imperial presidents of U.S. history. The broader, harmful consequences of such a move — for the international order, allied cohesion, or principles of international law — may be evident to all involved, yet subordinated to this ambition.
The “chaos theory” of U.S. foreign policy outlined above allows for multiple actors within the Trump administration to compete over direction and emphasis, with rival visions — hemispheric retrenchment, global great-power competition, ideological activism in Europe — surfacing according to timing and circumstance.
But it must also allow for decisions that are not animated by theory at all. Some outcomes may instead be driven by the personal ambitions of the individual at the system’s centre.
It is this contingency, not an emerging system of orderly great-power spheres, that constitutes the real risk to Greenland.
Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arctic Today.
Lukas Wahden is a PhD candidate in International Relations at SciencesPo Paris and Associate Fellow with the Russia Program at George Washington University. He mostly writes about Russia, the poles, oceans and space.
