When the Greenland crisis erupted in early 2026, it was not just another transatlantic dispute. For many in Europe, it felt like a moment of geopolitical awakening – brutal, disorienting, and deeply humiliating. German and European foreign policy, once proudly framed as values-driven and multilateral, suddenly appeared naked and exposed. For years, Europe had behaved like a small but aggressive lapdog: barking loudly at global rivals, convinced that the American owner standing behind it would always hold the leash. In Greenland, that leash was cut.
Until then, Europe’s role in world politics had followed a clear pattern. Secure in its alliance with Washington, it confronted major powers – China above all – using moral rhetoric and strategic alignment with the United States. It condemned, sanctioned, lectured, and “showed the flag”, from the South China Sea to global trade disputes. This posture carried little perceived risk, because Europe assumed the United States would ultimately shield it from serious consequences. The Greenland crisis revealed how fragile that assumption had become.
The shock was amplified by the realization that the new geopolitical reality was not an invention of Donald Trump. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney articulated what many quietly sensed: the era of comforting narratives about a “rules-based international order” is over. Power politics has returned openly, stripped of euphemisms. States now weaponize interdependence, supply chains, trade, finance, and even climate policy. Positive-sum globalization has given way to zero-sum competition among national power centers.
In this sense, Trump is not an aberration but an accelerant. Long before his return to the White House, the United States – under both Republican and Democratic administrations – had already embraced a more confrontational strategy. Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 explicitly aimed to contain China militarily. His push for US reindustrialization carried an implicit critique of export-driven economies like Germany’s. After the 2008 financial crisis, Washington increasingly pursued aggressive, beggar-thy-neighbor competition.
Trump and Joe Biden alike politicized global supply chains, transforming just-in-time production into a strategic vulnerability. Under Biden, the US sanctioned European firms such as ASML, pressured allies to restrict technology exports to China, escalated the global “chip war”, and imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. The free market was suspended whenever it conflicted with US strategic interests.
Europe followed along obediently. EU leaders convinced themselves that this economic warfare targeted China alone and would spare European interests. Germany’s export model, heavily dependent on Chinese demand, and its social stability, reliant on cheap consumer imports, were quietly sacrificed on the altar of transatlantic loyalty. European officials echoed Washington’s rhetoric, even indulging in public insults toward Chinese leadership, while NATO’s secretary general openly referred to the US president as his “Daddy”.
The shift became official in 2019, when the European Union declared China a “systemic rival”. By doing so, Brussels effectively announced that genuine cooperation with Beijing would only be possible once China’s political system fundamentally changed. Climate crisis or not, ideology trumped pragmatism. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU fully embraced US demands for rearmament. Germany produced its first-ever National Security Strategy, followed shortly by a China Strategy, making clear that Europe’s military buildup was about global power projection alongside the United States, not merely regional defense.
By 2025, European NATO members had accepted Trump’s demand to spend five percent of GDP on military readiness. The consequences were immediate: massive pressure on public finances, accelerating deindustrialization, and cuts to social investment. European leaders believed this display of loyalty would buy protection in trade disputes and strategic negotiations. Instead, it invited contempt.
Trump toyed with Europe openly. In trade conflicts and during the Greenland crisis where the US president did not rule out annexing territory belonging to NATO ally Denmark, European leaders found themselves sidelined, ignored, and publicly humiliated. The same coercive tools that had failed against China worked swiftly and effectively against Europe. Within hours, Washington extracted concessions. Photos from diplomatic meetings showed European officials lined up obediently, smiling stiffly, reduced to props in an American performance of dominance. Two uncomfortable truths emerged. First, the United States can impose its will on Europe in ways it no longer can on China. Power, as political theorist Nicos Poulantzas argued, is revealed in outcomes. By that measure, Europe is not a partner but a subordinate. Second, the United States was never the benevolent guardian Europe imagined. It merely allowed Europeans to bark at the wrong targets, encouraging them to alienate large parts of the world while remaining strategically dependent on Washington.
Ironically, this dependency was always dangerous. Even the Iraq War under George W. Bush – ostensibly about weapons of mass destruction – was fundamentally about controlling energy resources and maintaining US dominance. At the time, the expanding European Union, with its growing internal market and the euro as a potential rival to the dollar, posed a more immediate long-term challenge to US hegemony than China did.
Now, Europe finds itself alone in what some describe as a “wolf world”. Unlike in Jack London’s novels, a domesticated dog does not easily transform into a wolf. As Carney warned, a world of fortresses is poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. While China and the BRICS states have worked imperfectly but deliberately to reduce dependence on the US, Europe has done the opposite.
Canada offers an instructive contrast. Despite being even more geographically vulnerable to US pressure, Ottawa has begun diversifying its partnerships, deepening cooperation with China and negotiating pragmatic trade-offs. Carney openly described China as a more predictable partner than the United States – a statement that triggered immediate retaliation from Washington. Still, Canada’s political and economic elites appear to have grasped the direction of history.
Europe has yet to do so. Talks with Mercosur or India may hint at diversification, but a genuinely cooperative, interest-based foreign policy – especially toward China and the Global South, remains distant. The EU also refuses to use its own leverage, such as taxing US digital monopolies, preferring moral posturing to material power.
The Greenland crisis should have been Europe’s wake-up call. For the first time in years, even conservative German leaders cautiously acknowledged uncomfortable realities, speaking of Russia as a European neighbor and hinting at the need for long-term accommodation. Whether this marks a genuine strategic rethinking or merely rhetorical damage control remains to be seen.
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