© Molly Riley / The White House
In the blink of an eye, the attention of a world on edge has shifted from Venezuela to Greenland. On 3 January, in a military operation, the United States captured dictator Nicolás Maduro in his stronghold in Caracas, opening a period of uncertainty about the country’s political future and control of its oil resources, which Donald Trump assured would be made available to American companies. Just three days later, while Maduro was appearing before a judge in New York, Trump declared that Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, was essential to ensuring [his] country’s security and should therefore become part of the United States, without ruling out the use of force to achieve this. We are living in fast-paced times, but the early days of 2026 are testing our capacity to thoroughly process the sequence of events, with little help from historical precedents: Maduro is not Noriega 2.0, because the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the arrest of its dictator took place in a hegemonic context of Pax Americana; and Trump’s threat over Greenland is very different from Truman’s purchase offer in 1946, because at the dawn of the Cold War, the United States’ relationship with Western Europe was unquestioned, unlike today.
Whereas Ukraine and Gaza have been ambiguous episodes, with Trump swinging to and fro between Putin and Zelensky while supporting both Israel and conservative Arab regimes, Venezuela and Greenland clearly implement the National Security Strategy published in December, which puts priority on the American continent, reviving the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 under the humorous name ‘Donroe.’ The blatant wielding of military power, reminiscent indeed of ‘gunboat diplomacy,’ is in fact the instrument through which a new world order is being imposed, which, disregarding international norms and institutions, establishes the continental spheres of influence of the major nuclear powers. And in that geographical distribution, America is the territory of the United States, which can exercise its will, without restrictions, from Cape Horn to an Arctic Ocean no longer accepted as Russia’s; a control of the hemisphere administered with no other guide than strategic interest, and no longer requiring rhetorical respect for sovereignty or the rule of law. La Rochefoucauld famously wrote that “hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,” and one can only lament that hypocrisy is another victim of the new order.
The fate of Greenland – which the United States already controls militarily through its base in Pituffik – is important to Europeans, given that it affects a country on the continent that is also a member of NATO; and the future of Venezuela – like that of other Caribbean nations hit by this geopolitical tsunami, from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Colombia to Panama and even Mexico – is of particular interest to Spain, where so many exiles reside and with which it has so many historical and cultural ties. I cannot resist mentioning that my first visit to the country was back in 1988, to give a seminar on ‘Architecture, Body, and Language’ in Maracaibo, and since then – before and after its conversion into the Bolivarian Republic – I have had the opportunity to see a bit of the admirable Caracas of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, El Ávila hill, and the Cota Mil. But my most vivid memory is of the country’s oil capital, Maracaibo, whose lake was reached in 1499 by Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci, who found the stilt houses that still stand in the Sinamaica Lagoon and inspired the apt moniker ‘little Venice’. No less fitting is ‘Greenland,’ and hopefully these names bode well for the people of a tropical nation and an arctic one both now in the eye of the storm.
