From Caracas to Greenland: The Return of Raw Resource Imperialism
When the Chinese state broadcaster’s former interpreter warns that his country “will not allow you to fire the second shot,” we should perhaps stop pretending this is normal diplomatic theatre. When the President of the United States threatens military force to seize Greenland while his special forces kidnap a sovereign head of state for the crime of nationalising oil that was, in living memory, his country’s own property, we might consider that something fundamental has shifted.
The question is not whether we stand at a dangerous juncture. The question is what kind of danger we face. Is this the prelude to a third world war between nuclear powers? Or is it something potentially more insidious: the emergence of a new global order in which the major powers, having tired of the pretence of international law, simply divide the world into spheres of influence whilst working-class communities in every nation bear the costs?
The facts are stark enough. On 3 January, American forces conducted Operation Absolute Resolve. Over 150 aircraft launched from 20 sites. Missiles struck civilian neighbourhoods in Caracas. At least 24 Venezuelan security personnel died, along with 32 Cubans. President Nicolás Maduro was extracted to New York to face charges under American law for the temerity of running a government Washington dislikes. Trump’s press conference removed any doubt about motive: Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, are now American targets. His adviser Stephen Miller was more explicit still, promising American companies would “run” Venezuela.
This is not a counter-narcotics operation. It is resource imperialism, conducted with the precision of a well-rehearsed military exercise and the legal fig leaf of an indictment issued by a Manhattan court. The costs to Venezuela’s people, the destruction of their infrastructure, the deaths of their soldiers: these are externalities in a balance sheet calculated in barrels per day.
Meanwhile, Trump refuses to rule out military force to acquire Greenland. Not lease. Not negotiate access to bases. Acquire. The Danish territory holds rare earth minerals essential to modern military technology. It offers strategic positioning for Arctic control. Denmark, a NATO ally, finds itself threatened by another NATO member. The Danish Prime Minister warns this would mean “the end of everything.” She is not exaggerating. When alliances become meaningless in the face of resource competition, the post-1945 order has collapsed.
The European Union’s response to this crisis reveals much about its true nature. European leaders issue stern statements defending Denmark’s sovereignty. They speak of international law and territorial integrity. Yet this is the same institution that has spent decades systematically stripping national sovereignty from its member states, transferring democratic decision-making to unelected commissioners in Brussels, binding nations through treaties and directives that override popular will.
The EU presents itself as a defender of small nations against American imperialism. In truth, it is another layer in the architecture of elite control, a bureaucratic pyramid scheme that can only sustain itself by continually swallowing new members, each bound tighter by lawyers and regulations, each surrendering more democratic authority to a technocratic centre that serves corporate interests over working-class communities.
Greenland itself illustrates the pattern. Technically outside the EU but associated through Denmark’s membership, it exists in that twilight zone the Brussels machinery adores: subject to EU influence without representation, bound by arrangements made by distant bureaucrats, its resources and strategic position treated as assets to be managed rather than sovereign territory of its people. Now Washington threatens to seize it outright, and Brussels discovers that international law matters when American imperialism is the threat, but can be conveniently overlooked when the EU itself expands eastward, absorbing nations into a neoliberal straitjacket that forbids the kind of economic nationalism that might actually serve working people.
China watches these developments with interest. Its military exercises around Taiwan have crossed new thresholds, entering Taiwan’s contiguous zone for the first time, simulating a full blockade of the island. Over 100,000 passengers faced flight disruptions. The drills deliberately left three air corridors open, what analysts describe as “humanitarian corridors” for foreign evacuations during a future blockade. This is not sabre-rattling. This is rehearsal.
Victor Gao, speaking for Beijing’s strategic establishment, issues warnings of extraordinary directness. China will not fire the first shot, he says, but it will not allow a second shot. Any war against China, conventional or nuclear, will result in mutual destruction. Taiwan’s status is non-negotiable. The semiconductor industry that powers the world’s technology, concentrated in Taiwan, sits at the epicentre of potential nuclear conflict.
Japan openly prepares for what it calls a “survival-threatening situation.” Its westernmost island sits 110 kilometres from Taiwan. American bases in Japan would be essential to any defence of Taiwan. Tokyo knows it would be targeted in any conflict. Prime Minister Takaichi states plainly that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute grounds for collective self-defence. Beijing responds with threats against individual Japanese politicians. The rhetoric escalates whilst military capabilities expand.
Russia grinds on in Ukraine, now in its fourth year of attritional warfare. NATO countries pump billions into Kyiv’s defence whilst Trump pressures for territorial concessions. The pattern is clear: frozen conflicts, permanent militarisation, resources diverted from social spending to defence contractors. Ordinary Ukrainians and Russians die whilst the machinery of war enriches those who supply it.
And here the EU’s role becomes particularly instructive. Brussels has poured billions into Ukraine, not primarily to defend Ukrainian sovereignty but to prevent a precedent that might threaten the European project itself. If Russia can successfully detach territory from a European neighbour, it raises uncomfortable questions about the permanence of EU expansion. The bureaucratic empire cannot tolerate the notion that nations might leave, that borders might change, that popular will might override treaty obligations.
Yet this same EU has no qualms about imposing austerity on Greece, overriding Irish and French referendums, or threatening Poland and Hungary when their elected governments resist Brussels directives. Sovereignty, it seems, is sacred when Russia threatens it, negotiable when it conflicts with neoliberal economic policy or the federalist project.
The machinery functions through layers of obfuscation. Commissioners and council meetings, qualified majority voting and co-decision procedures, directives and regulations that render democratic accountability nearly impossible to trace. Working people in member states find their wages suppressed by free movement of labour that serves capital’s interest in cheap workers. They watch their public services privatised under competition law. They see their industries gutted by rules written to favour German manufacturing and French agriculture. And when they vote against this system, they are told either to vote again until they get it right, or that their elected governments must respect treaty obligations signed by previous administrations.
This is not democracy. It is managed technocracy, designed to insulate economic policy from popular control. The Lisbon Treaty, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, was simply repackaged and forced through parliamentary votes that avoided referendums. The European Central Bank, answerable to no elected body, dictates monetary policy for nations that cannot devalue to protect jobs. The Commission, whose members are appointed rather than elected, initiates all legislation. The Parliament, the only directly elected institution, has no power to propose laws, only to amend or reject what the Commission offers.
And here we must turn to an uncomfortable question. Who benefits from this emerging order? Who has been planning for it?
Sir Keir Starmer, now Prime Minister, served on the Trilateral Commission whilst Shadow Brexit Secretary. He did not inform Jeremy Corbyn’s office. The Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller in 1973, brings together political and business elites from North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Its 1975 publication, “The Crisis of Democracy,” argued that excessive democracy posed governance challenges. Too much participation from ordinary citizens, it suggested, created problems for effective management.
The EU represents the Trilateral vision made concrete. A structure that removes economic decision-making from democratic control, that treats popular sovereignty as an obstacle to efficient governance, that binds nations through legal mechanisms designed to be effectively irreversible. The Commission’s membership reads like a Trilateral roster: Goldman Sachs alumni, former competition commissioners, central bankers whose careers span both EU institutions and private finance.
Starmer sat alongside former CIA directors on the Trilateral Commission. He spoke at events with former heads of MI5 and GCHQ. This is the network that shapes policy across borders, that views democracy as something to be managed rather than empowered, that sees working-class aspirations as obstacles to efficient governance. The same network that designed the EU’s governing structure, that pushed the euro despite warnings it would create permanent crisis, that insists on austerity whilst corporate profits soar.
The pattern they have long advocated now takes material form. A multipolar world, yes, but not one of genuine sovereignty for smaller nations. Rather, a system of spheres of influence controlled by major powers and their corporate interests, mediated through international institutions designed to limit democratic control.
The Americans take Venezuela’s oil and eye Greenland’s minerals. China asserts control over Taiwan’s semiconductors and shipping lanes. Russia holds Ukrainian territory. The EU expands its regulatory empire, swallowing the Balkans, eyeing Ukraine itself as a future member to be bound by Brussels directives and ECB monetary policy. Each major power tolerates the others’ resource grabs, provided the fundamental architecture of elite control remains intact.
Consider the choreography. European leaders condemn American threats against Greenland whilst preparing to increase military spending that will enrich the same defence contractors. They express concern about Taiwan whilst negotiating trade deals that deepen dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They support Ukraine against Russian aggression whilst imposing economic policies on their own populations that mirror the kind of external control they claim to oppose.
The EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, now activated in response to potential American action against Greenland, reveals the system’s true priorities. It can impose tariffs, ban services, exclude American companies from procurement. These are weapons that could be used to defend workers’ rights, to resist corporate tax avoidance, to protect public services from privatisation. Instead, they gather dust until a threat emerges to the geopolitical order that keeps the European project afloat.
This is not the New World Order of conspiracy fantasy. It is something more banal and more dangerous: the institutionalisation of might makes right, dressed in the language of national security and strategic necessity, administered through bureaucratic structures designed to shield decision-makers from democratic accountability.
The working class in every nation will pay. British workers will fund increased defence spending whilst the NHS crumbles, bound by fiscal rules that prohibit the kind of public investment that might actually improve their lives. American workers will see their sons and daughters deployed to protect corporate interests dressed as national security. Chinese workers will labour under increased militarisation. Venezuelan workers will see their resources extracted under foreign control. European workers will find their wages suppressed by competition rules and free movement policies designed to benefit capital, their public services privatised under directives from Brussels, their democratic choices overridden by treaty obligations.
George Orwell warned of a world divided into three great power blocs, perpetually at war, perpetually diverting resources from civilian welfare to military capacity. The war need not be total. Indeed, it is more useful if it remains controllable, a permanent state of emergency that justifies surveillance, austerity, and the suppression of dissent. The EU’s contribution to this vision is its insistence that economic policy must be insulated from democratic control, that working people cannot be trusted with decisions about their own economies, that technocratic management serves everyone’s interests better than popular sovereignty.
We face two possibilities, both grim. The first is that miscalculation or wounded pride triggers a genuine conflict between nuclear powers. Victor Gao’s warnings are not bluster. China’s military exercises show operational preparation for war. Japan prepares for battle. Russia maintains nuclear readiness. The mechanisms of deterrence that kept peace through the Cold War may not hold when multiple flashpoints burn simultaneously.
The second possibility is that the major powers reach an accommodation. They carve up spheres of influence. They enforce a kind of stability through managed competition and the threat of force. America controls the Western Hemisphere’s resources. China dominates the Pacific and its trade routes. Russia holds its near abroad. The EU administers Europe through bureaucratic control rather than military force, but control nonetheless. This is perhaps the more frightening prospect, for it suggests permanence. A new global architecture in which working people everywhere lose twice: first to their own elites who strip social provision to fund militarisation, and second to supranational structures like the EU that transfer economic sovereignty to institutions designed to serve corporate interests.
Either way, ordinary people in every nation are being asked to pay for conflicts that serve elite interests. The Venezuelan people did not vote to have their president kidnapped. The Greenlandic people do not wish to be annexed. The Taiwanese people did not ask to be the flashpoint of great power competition. The Ukrainian people did not choose to be the battleground for NATO-Russia confrontation. The Greek people did not vote for their pensions to be slashed to satisfy ECB creditors. The British people voted to leave the EU and found their democracy subordinated to a parliament that spent three years trying to overturn the result.
Yet they will all pay. Just as British workers will pay through higher defence budgets whilst waiting lists lengthen and infrastructure crumbles, bound by fiscal rules that forbid the public investment that might actually help them. Just as American workers will pay through endless deployments whilst their communities decay. Just as Chinese workers will pay through increased militarisation whilst social protections erode. Just as European workers from Athens to Warsaw watch their living standards fall whilst being lectured about the importance of structural reforms and fiscal discipline.
The elite consensus spans supposed ideological divides. Starmer’s Labour differs little from the Conservatives on defence spending, NATO commitment, and respect for EU treaty obligations even outside formal membership. Trump’s resource imperialism finds echoes in Beijing’s sphere of influence doctrine and Brussels’ regulatory imperialism. The Trilateral Commission’s vision of managed democracy and corporate globalisation takes material form not through conspiracy but through the aligned interests of those who benefit from permanent conflict and resource extraction, mediated through institutions like the EU that insulate economic policy from popular control.
The EU’s defenders will say it keeps the peace, that it prevents European nations from warring as they did in the past. This is the founding myth, endlessly repeated. In truth, NATO kept the peace through deterrence. Economic integration served corporate interests by creating a single market with harmonised regulations that favour large firms over small, mobile capital over rooted communities, financial services over manufacturing. The peace is a happy side effect of arrangements designed primarily to facilitate capital accumulation and limit democratic economic management.
Now that architecture faces its greatest test. When America threatens a NATO ally, when China rehearses blockades, when Russia wages attritional war on Europe’s borders, the EU’s response reveals its priorities. Not democratic sovereignty for nations or communities. Not protection of working-class living standards. Not even genuine resistance to American or Russian imperialism. Instead, preservation of the bureaucratic structure itself, defence of treaty obligations that bind member states to fiscal rules and competition policy whilst allowing military escalation and corporate profiteering to proceed unchecked.
This is the choice before us. Accept a world of perpetual militarisation, of resources diverted from human welfare to military capacity, of working-class communities everywhere bearing the costs whilst elites profit. Accept supranational institutions like the EU that claim to defend sovereignty whilst systematically transferring it to unelected technocrats. Accept a system where democracy exists only insofar as it ratifies decisions already made in conference rooms, where economic policy serves capital regardless of which party wins elections, where international law applies selectively to justify the actions of allied powers whilst condemning identical behaviour by designated enemies.
Or recognise that the real division is not between nations but between classes, between those who make decisions in conference rooms and those who die implementing them, between those who extract profit from conflict and those who pay its human cost. Recognise that the EU is not a bulwark against this system but a component of it, a mechanism for enforcing neoliberal economic policy whilst providing a democratic veneer through a parliament stripped of meaningful power.
The Chinese official warns there will be no second shot. The American president threatens force against allies. The British prime minister, schooled in elite networks that span the Atlantic and encompass both Brussels bureaucrats and intelligence operatives, prepares the public for sacrifice. The European Commission activates its Anti-Coercion Instrument not to defend workers or democracy but to preserve the architecture of managed globalisation. The patterns converge. The machinery of war engages. The bureaucratic empires expand.
And we are left to ask: is this the most dangerous moment since 1945? Perhaps. But the greater danger may be that it becomes the new normal, the foundation of an order in which might makes right, supranational technocracy replaces democracy, and working people everywhere learn to accept permanent emergency and bureaucratic control as the price of stability. That would be the real victory for those who gather in closed rooms at Trilateral Commission meetings and European Council summits to plan our collective future whilst excluding us from its decision.
The carve-up has begun. The pyramid schemes need fresh territory. The bureaucratic empires expand whilst claiming to defend sovereignty. The only question is who gets what…
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