Writing in X that he has ‘nothing against the American annexation of Greenland‘ and even‘against a war between the United States and the European Union‘, Putin philosopher Alexander Dugin actually offers a brutal summary of how the imperialists read the world. “Eurasia (including Ukraine) belongs to us,” Dugin writes, invoking a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine: “Eurasia to the Eurasianists.”

There is a temptation in Europe to dismiss Dugin as a talk show folklore, a social network Rasputin. This is a mistake. Not because Dugin is a ‘secret advisor’ to the Kremlin – this formula is often journalistic and inaccurate – but because he is one of the most coherent interpreters of contemporary Russian nationalism, and because his vocabulary (civilisational clash, anti-liberalism, empire as destiny, Ukraine as an ‘organic’ part of Russia) has for years entered the air in Russian power circles and in that of the Kremlin’s Western puppets. This is well described in a long profile in the New Yorker a few months ago, which reconstructs its trajectory and the centrality of Ukraine in its imperial vision.

Dugin is the man of neo-eurasianism: a doctrine that opposes an ‘Atlantic world’ (America, Anglosphere, liberalism) to a ‘Eurasian world’ led by Moscow; not a simple geopolitics, but a political theology: identity versus rights, empire versus pluralism, destiny versus choice. His most cited work, Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), has become famous for the way it treats the post-Soviet space as a natural area of Russian expansion and for its obsession with the fracture of the West. Here is an analysis of it, proposed by Hoover Institution researcher John B. Dunlop for The Europe Center at Stanford University.

The phrase about the ‘Russian Monroe’ is a common thread in Dugin’s speech, which he has made explicit several times over the years. In other words: the US claims its hemisphere; Russia claims its continent; China does likewise. It is a partition proposal, disguised as ‘realism’.

And this is where Greenland comes in. In Dugin’s interpretation, the eventual American annexation would not be an accident, but a precedent: the consecration of the principle ‘might makes right’. If Washington – which for eighty years has been asking the rest of the world to respect borders, sovereignty and alliances – were to break that bank in the name of ‘Arctic security’, Moscow and Beijing would have a golden argument: no longer just propaganda (‘the West is hypocritical’), but a school case. The politics of spheres of influence, once rehabilitated, becomes contagious.

The contagion is already visible in the lexicon. Trump justifies his sights on Nuuk by evoking alleged Russian and Chinese ‘threats’ around Greenland. This is an intellectually dishonest argument, because Chinese attempts to get a foothold in the Greenlandic economy (which have emerged in recent years also thanks to the acquiescence of the island’s former independence government) and Sino-Russian activism along Arctic routes, already monitored also by the Biden Administration(US Arctic Strategy 2024), do not call for annexation, but for more cooperation between Nuuk and Denmark, with the US, the EU and NATO.

The logic of annexation to ensure security, on the other hand, is an unhoped-for gift to Beijing, because it provides Xi Jinping with the best possible argument to invade Taiwan and any islands in the South China Sea, including those of Japan and the Philippines (i.e. two countries allied with the West).

Dugin, with his brutality, explains the equation that autocracies love: if the great democratic power becomes imperial again, the empire becomes respectable again.

The herbivore Europe among carnivores

What to do, then, so that Europe is not a ‘herbivore among carnivores’? First of all, stop thinking that the choice is between moralism and cynicism. The choice, more prosaically, is between protected sovereignty and acted sovereignty. Defending Greenland (and with it the integrity of NATO) does not mean defying the United States; it means taking the temptation to resolve a strategic issue with a colonial act off the table.

These days, with this very aim in mind, London, Paris and Berlin are discussing an increased military presence and a possible NATO (or NATO-flavoured) mission in Greenland and the Arctic – a way of demonstrating that the security of the High North can be guaranteed with the Alliance, not against it. Meanwhile, outspokenly, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot stated that his government is working with European partners on a plan in case Washington attempts unilateral moves.

The political sense of these steps is simple: take away Trump’s ‘Arctic security’ argument as an annexationist pretext and, at the same time, signal to Russia and China that the Arctic is not a power vacuum. It is deterrence, but also institutional hygiene: preventing the most important military alliance on the planet from being turned into a condo squabble with threats of expropriation.

Of course, to be credible, Europe must do what it often puts off: invest in real capabilities (surveillance, anti-submarine, Arctic logistics, satellites, dual-use infrastructure), coordinate with Copenhagen and Nuuk without paternalism, and present Washington with a proposal that is both firm and useful: ‘more NATO in the Arctic, not less Greenland‘. If America wants ‘title’ to something, let it seek it where it deserves it: in the leadership of an alliance, not in the cadastre of an island.

Dugin, meanwhile, will continue to offer poisoned moral contracts: you take Greenland, I’ll take Ukraine; you rewrite geography, I’ll rewrite history. This is precisely the kind of pact that Europe must make impossible. Not for idealism, but for survival. In a world of carnivores, the herbivore does not become wise: he becomes dinner.