As he doubled down on suggestions the Trump administration might look to seize control of Greenland from Denmark in an interview on CNN on Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made it clear he believed that in any contest of diplomatic will, the US would prevail.
“We live in a world...that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said, making it explicit that America was too powerful and Europe too weak to resist what the US might want. "These are the laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
History might well be a battle between the weak and strong, but embracing such rhetoric now marks a considerable shift from the approach taken by every US administration since the 1930s.
While the reality of their actions might sometimes have fallen short, previous US presidents have always paid at least lip service to some form of international law and structure.
Even as the second Bush administration looked to circumvent the United Nations for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it presented that country as a rogue state that needed reining in for the global good.
To an extent, the current administration used similar rhetoric in its June air strikes on Iran's nuclear programme. But its more recent swoop against Venezuela and messaging on Greenland appears to reject such framing in favour of something much, much simpler: If the US wants an outcome, it no longer believes there are any genuine rules that should restrain it.
That might be a move the US comes to regret.
The recent Iran and Venezuela actions acted as a clear reminder that the US military retains a sophisticated edge when it comes to penetrating foreign air defences for sophisticated one-off strikes, including on national leadership.
That will once again not have gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing. But when it comes to a potentially much longer war – one lasting months or years – there are plenty in the Pentagon who worry that the advantage may belong to Russia and China, the former with its economy now geared for permanent conflict following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while China’s industries also look increasingly prepared for extended conflict.
Even without that, it looks increasingly likely that while the first half of the 2020s saw heightened confrontation, the second half of the decade might bring them to the brink of actual war.
US officials, particularly Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, say administration actions so far have been intended in part to stop that outcome through “restoring US deterrence” – but not everyone is so confident that is working.
What worries US allies more, particularly following the past few days and weeks, is that President Donald Trump's newly aggressive prioritisation of securing the Western Hemisphere may be seen to be giving a green light to Moscow and Beijing to act similarly in their immediate neighbourhood.
Nor are such worries limited to the Trump administration – there are plenty of concerns that future US administrations may be even more geographically isolationist, just as China and Russia are becoming ever more aggressive.
That underlies a growing consensus that showing weakness might prove fatal.
When a ship sailing from Russia was suspected shortly before New Year of being responsible for the first and only undersea cables being severed in the Baltic in 2025, it took only a matter of hours before commandos from Finland boarded and seized the vessel.
On the far side of the world, China launched some of its largest military drills in recent history to simulate a blockade of ports around Taiwan, prompting what looked like yet another deliberate display of US force as three US conventional missile submarines surfaced simultaneously.
There was less immediate public response to what with hindsight might be Russia’s most significant pre-Christmas piece of military messaging – the announced deployment of its Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile system capable of striking London and other European cities with conventional and atomic warheads in the space of just 10 minutes.
The news flow since, however, has remained relentless – and that appears to be a deliberate White House strategy, at least for the short term.
European nations want to show strength simultaneously to both Washington and Moscow. But they also face what at worst can feel like cognitive overload.
Even as the White House was making threatening noises over Greenland, US administration officials meeting with European leaders in Paris seemed finally to offer at least a limited US pledge to “backstop” any European troops deployed in Ukraine as peace guarantors with US military action if attacked.
Yet more Kremlin posturing seems likely after the US seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker in the Atlantic on Wednesday as well as another in the Caribbean, both accused of flouting US sanctions against Venezuelan oil exports.
Such displays of force have not been limited to larger nations. Among the most obvious examples of that would be one-time allies Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, whose proxy forces have been battling in Yemen throughout December. Saudi Arabia’s military stepped up action further last week with air strikes on UAE-provided vehicles in the Yemeni capital.
For now, there seems little sign that the UAE and the Saudis have much appetite for actual extended military conflict, for all their clear battle for regional influence and irritation with each other.
In that sense, the Saudi strike looked on the surface like a more limited version of other limited military exchanges including last year’s 10-day missile exchange between Israel and Iran as well as the “four-day war” between Pakistan and India.
Both of those engagements took place against a backdrop of much longer-running tensions - in the case of Israel and Iran, engagements in often more extended bloody conflicts including Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Each exchange, though, did a little on its way to tear up the international rulebook – as did Israel with its air strike into Qatar to target Hamas leadership.
For those ordering such actions, the aim can sometimes be to “escalate to de-escalate”, to inflict some short-term pain to drive a foe either back to negotiations or simply to inaction.
That, at least, seemed part of the logic behind the Trump-ordered air strikes on Iran in June, which Pentagon officials made clear were intended not just to inflict catastrophic damage on the existing nuclear programme but deter Tehran from choosing to rebuild its uranium-enrichment capacity.
It was, US Vice President JD Vance told a fundraising event a few days later, very different to the sometimes seemingly endless “forever wars” of the Bush and Obama years.
"Number one: you articulate a clear American interest," he said, adding in this case the US "red line" was that Tehran could not be allowed to gain a nuclear bomb.
"Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem. And number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict."
Whether the US genuinely intends to “get the hell out” of Venezuela now is fantastically unclear.
For all the initial Trump talk of the US “running” the country, there are no US forces remaining after the initial raid to capture President Nicolas Maduro, and the plan seems more to hope to persuade the remaining government of Venezuela to acquiesce to American demands or face further action.
Comments made by US officials so far this week suggest they believe they will be able to persuade those now running Venezuela to follow US instructions – but only time will tell whether that is what really happens.
Similarly, US threats this week over Greenland appear in part a tactic to shape negotiations with the Danish government.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said explicitly that “buying Greenland” had always been Trump’s intent.
Whether the suggestion of US military action to take Greenland helps or hinders that, however, is another question.
Within Europe, there is now talk of putting “tripwire” forces – detachments of troops akin to the NATO Enhanced Forward Presence forces in eastern Europe – in Greenland to offer at least the prospect of military resistance to any US attempt at a unilateral takeover of the autonomous Danish territory.
Nor is it clear that the confrontation over Venezuela is even close to over, while in the Gulf the reported death toll from an Iranian crackdown on rising street protests continues to significantly rise despite warnings from Trump that he might respond by launching military strikes.
The war in Ukraine, of course, remains – like the Iraq and Afghan wars – a savage reminder that a supposedly fast-concluded action like Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” can instead turn into a long, bloody and attritional conflict.
At the time of writing, the year 2026 is less than 10 days old and more frenetic geopolitical activity now seems likely.
Whether that will change the wider picture, further destabilise already messy crises or perhaps counterintuitively prompt a return to slightly more stability is not yet possible to know.
(By Peter Apps; editing by Mark Heinrich)
