New empire: US President Donald Trump has threatened to grab Greenland. Photo: Doctor Dave
I am not going to lie, I feel a certain schadenfreude at Donald Trump’s threats to “acquire” Greenland against the wishes of Europe.
Trump’s comments, widely dismissed in Europe as absurd or dangerously unserious, nevertheless touched a raw nerve.
Greenland is not just a vast Arctic landmass rich in strategic minerals and shipping routes; it is also a symbol of European sovereignty, embedded within the Danish realm and protected by a dense web of alliances, treaties and international norms.
Reports that France, alongside other European states, has sent troops to Denmark in a show of solidarity underline the depth of unease provoked by even rhetorical challenges to territorial integrity in Europe.
Trump has identified eight European countries opposing US influence over Greenland and warned that they could face a 10% tariff for their stance.
What merits attention, however, is not simply Trump’s brazenness but the shock with which European elites have reacted.
The schadenfreude I feel stems precisely from this reaction. France and Britain, in particular, have behaved no differently toward African countries since the 1960s, when those countries euphemistically became ‘independent.’
For decades, Western powers have assumed an enduring right to intervene politically, economically and militarily in African states, whether to engineer regime change or to keep compliant governments in power.
These interventions have often been justified in the language of stability, development, or humanitarian concern, while masking the pursuit of strategic and commercial interests.
Trump’s threats toward Greenland differ mainly in style rather than substance: they are loud, crude and unapologetic, stripped of the Obama-esque liberal cadence that has traditionally softened similar exercises of power.
This asymmetry in perception reveals a deeper problem in the global order. When coercion is directed outward from the West toward the Global South it is normalised, bureaucratised and framed as responsible governance.
When similar logic is even hinted at within the Western world itself, it is treated as scandalous and destabilising. Yet the underlying principle is the same: power entitles intervention. Trump’s rhetoric simply strips away the moral vocabulary that has long cloaked Western foreign policy.
Jean-François Bayart’s analysis of postcolonial Africa is instructive here. Bayart recalls that in the aftermath of the Second World War, as French colonies began to agitate for independence, a French newspaper warned the public that decolonisation could be ‘faked’ in the interests of capitalism.
The suggestion was brutally pragmatic: it was better to change the name of the empire than to relinquish its substance. Formal sovereignty could be granted while economic structures, political influence and military control remained largely intact.
France has followed this script consistently since decolonisation.
The concept of Françafrique captures this reality. Through a dense network of personal ties, defence agreements, currency arrangements and corporate interests, France has maintained disproportionate influence over its former colonies.
The CFA franc zone, for example, has long constrained the monetary sovereignty of West and Central African states, binding them to French financial institutions and policy priorities.
Military interventions, whether in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002, Mali in 2013, or more recently in the Sahel, have been presented as stabilising missions, yet they also serve to secure French strategic interests, including access to resources and geopolitical leverage.
Britain’s postcolonial record, while often less overtly interventionist than France’s in the decades following independence, reflects a similar logic of managed sovereignty.
As early as 1954, Kwame Nkrumah was forced to decline an invitation to the forthcoming Bandung Conference of 1955 after the British authorities warned that any public anti-colonial statements he made there, particularly of British rule, could indefinitely delay his country’s independence, scheduled for 1957.
The episode illustrates how formal decolonisation was tightly policed, with nationalist leaders constrained by imperial powers even as independence loomed.
In the decades that followed, Britain continued to prioritise strategic and economic interests in its former colonies, supporting compliant regimes, shaping political outcomes during the Cold War and later endorsing structural adjustment programmes that severely curtailed policy autonomy across much of Africa.
Seen in this light, Trump’s Greenland episode functions as a distorted mirror, a mirage. It reflects back to Europe a practice long familiar to those on the receiving end of Western power.
The idea that a stronger state might seek to ‘acquire’ territory for strategic advantage, with scant regard for the wishes of local populations, is not an aberration in modern history; it is a recurring feature of imperial and neo-imperial politics.
What unsettles European leaders is not the logic itself but the fact that it is being applied, however implausibly, to them.
There is also a rhetorical irony at play. European governments frequently lecture African states on sovereignty, good governance and adherence to international norms, even as they undermine those very principles through intervention and conditionality.
Trump’s bluntness dispenses with such hypocrisy. By openly framing Greenland in transactional terms-resources, security, strategic location – he exposes the material foundations of foreign policy that are usually obscured by diplomatic language.
None of this is to suggest that Trump’s proposal was realistic or defensible. Greenland’s status is governed by international law and its people possess the right to self-determination.
Rather, the episode invites reflection on why similar violations of sovereignty provoke outrage in some contexts and indifference in others. The answer lies less in law than in power.
As debates over multipolarity and the decline of Western hegemony intensify, Europe may find itself increasingly subject to the same pressures it once exerted elsewhere.
The discomfort this produces could, in principle, encourage a more honest reckoning with the legacies of empire and the realities of neo-colonial influence.
Whether it will do so remains uncertain. What is clear is that Trump, unintentionally perhaps, has forced a moment of recognition: the rules of the game look very different depending on where one stands.
Kweku Ampiah is a professor in Japanese Studies in the department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.