A week ago, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Prime Minister of Greenland (which has had its own parliament and government for 47 years, while remaining linked to Denmark as ‘Crown Territory’) uttered words that would have been unthinkable in the past.

“If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark, here and now, then we choose Denmark. Let us choose NATO, the Danish Crown and the European Union.”
He added, then, that “one thing must be clear: Greenland will never be owned by the United States. It will never be ruled by the United States, it will never be part of the United States. We choose the Denmark that we know now, and that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark’.

The prevailing will among the island’s 55,000 inhabitants, as is well known, would be to complete the breakaway from Copenhagen as well. Independents have long been in the majority, and they are only divided on when and how to become a separate nation.

But the second Trump presidency has turned their tables. At a time when the Americans, who claimed to be the guardians of a world order based on the self-determination of peoples and the prohibition of moving borders by force, have turned into predators who candidly declare that they ‘need’ to annex the island, Nielsen and his constituents have found themselves in a dilemma: to separate from Copenhagen now means exposing oneself to conquest by Washington.
Which, in turn, justifies itself by arguing that a Greenland left to its own devices would soon be occupied by Beijing or Moscow.

Return to reality

And so we were reminded of a brutal but elementary truth: security and independence, which in the bubble of the liberal order between 1945 and 2025 we had grown accustomed to combining and claiming together for every people, outside that bubble unfortunately become two values to be weighed. Rarely can a people enjoy both, and often must give up one to have the other.

If in our lifetimes this has not happened, at least in Western Europe and the Americas, it has been thanks to the United States, which for a few generations has used its military might to secure, rather than demolish, the right of nations not to be annexed by one another. (The intervention in Vietnam itself, with the trail of atrocities that marked it, was after all born out of this commitment, as was the first intervention against Iraq).

But if now, as it seems, Donald Trump considers that phase of American policy to be over and considers armed conquests against other countries to be legitimate again, the bubble will burst and we will be back to the normal workings of human history, where countries that are too small and have too aggressive neighbours are forced to choose the lesser evil and the least intrusive ruler.

Moldova no longer resists

It is true in the Arctic ice, but it is also true in Central Europe, where Maia Sandu, the Moldovan president, had spoken similar words to Nielsen just two days before him.

“If we held a referendum, I would vote for reunification with Romania,” he said. “Look at what is happening around Moldova today. Look at what is happening in the world. It is becoming more and more difficult for a small country like Moldova to survive as a democracy and as a sovereign nation, and of course to resist Russia.’

Sandu, who in two years has rejected two attempts to install in her place a regime loyal to Putin similar to those in Georgia and Belarus, was quick to add that she is well aware of the orientation of most of her fellow citizens, two-thirds of whom are still hostile to reunification.
His hope is that by joining the EU, the Moldovans can enjoy military and economic integration with Bucharest even without disappearing from the map.

Europe as a loophole

She too, like Nielsen, therefore trusts the European Union as a ‘soft’ system that offers protection without taking away freedom.
The good reputation of Brussels, thanks to this real or supposed quality, has never been higher: even in Canada, after Trump threatened to make it his ’51st state’, there is less and less joking talk of associating itself in any way with the Union, with the Quebec region already having joined the European Committee of the Regions (an EU body that only has advisory functions, but is nevertheless an EU body).

Of course, it would be nice if this trust were well placed and Europe really managed to preserve, at least among its member states, the climate of peaceful coexistence in which we, our parents and most of our grandparents grew up. Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball to find out in advance whether it will succeed.

But so far, from the troubles in Greenland and Moldova, we can at least draw an important lesson on how to read past history more honestly, framing the phenomena of ‘colonisation’ and the formation of European empires in the true context in which they took place, instead of pretending (as has often been done over the past 80 years) that they took place in a liberal order that was unimaginable at the time.

The context of “colonialism”

Rereading Nielsen’s speech, it seems to all intents and purposes a description of how the so-called ‘colonisation’ of a non-European territory by Europeans took place in very remote times.

Before the liberal order, in fact, even if we struggle to imagine it today, the combination of independence and security was by no means the basic condition in which a people lived, it never was and no one claimed it to be.

The tendency to attack was as natural as the fear of being attacked. Indeed, it makes one smile that our school textbooks naturally speak of ‘Macedonian expansion’, ‘Arab expansion’, ‘Mongol expansion’ and then all of a sudden ‘European colonisation’, as if it were an abnormal and unnatural action compared to the others.

European empires, like those of other civilisations, were also mostly formed by incorporating minor principalities or tribes that invoked the help of the newcomers against their historical enemies, or that chose between two newcomers the one that offered better conditions.
It was thus, for example, that the Spaniards conquered Mexico, Peru and other regions of the Americas with a few hundred men: one ‘ If we have to choose here and now’ after another, one ‘It‘s getting harder and harder to survive‘ at a time.

Starting with the bases

Greenland is said to have proposed a ‘Cypriot solution’ to Trump, i.e. direct US sovereignty only over small portions of the island to be used as military or commercial bases: well, those familiar with history know that this is how ‘colonisation’ most often began in the pre-liberal world.
The Genoese and the Venetians did it in the Middle Ages, the Portuguese and the Dutch in the early modern age, the French and the British threw their bridgeheads into India and black Africa centuries before they were able to explore the hinterland.

Of two things, then: either everything is done to maintain the liberal order that existed from 1945 to 2025, or there is no point in being indignant about imperial expansion phenomena that are inevitable outside that order.

And speaking of temporary ‘bases’ placed under the sovereignty of the Europeans, there is another island that has had them for most of the last millennium: Taiwan.
Taiwan which therefore, in the modern era, has never been ‘one with China’, as Xi Jinping claims today to justify his possible attack.

Taiwan, which today, faced with the knowledge that the US might no longer protect it as an independent state, is also mentally preparing itself to ‘have to choose here and now’: and here it is that, on the social profiles of millions of citizens, ‘Taiwan, Japan‘ appears as a nationality.