After a shopping excursion for marble and onyx for the future White House ballroom, followed by dinner on the patio of his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, US President Donald Trump gave the order to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro shortly before 11 p.m. on January 2. Later, in the early hours of January 3, he watched live as US Delta Force soldiers dragged Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, from their residence to waiting helicopters in a long-prepared, complex military operation that involved at least 150 US aircraft in the skies above Caracas.
On January 5, Maduro appeared in front of a court in New York City, accused of drugs and weapons charges.He pleaded “not guilty” and said he was kidnapped. Trump, meanwhile, announced that the US would now “run” the country for the time being, and US oil companies would be on hand to exploit the country’s vast oil reserves, which at an estimated 303 billion barrels are even larger than Saudi Arabia’s (267 billion barrels).
While there are many precedents for US foreign policy acting ruthlessly and without regard for international law in Latin America (think Chile in the 1970s or Panama in 1989/90), Trump’s actions are, in essence, no different from what Russian President Vladimir Putin tried, and failed, when he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The aim then was to “decapitate” the elected Ukrainian leadership, starting with President Volodymyr Zelensky, and hence forth “run” the country, which had tried to join NATO and the European Union. Worse, Greenland, a territory belonging by US NATO ally Denmark, seems to be high on Trump’s list, in addition to Cuba and Colombia (whose left-leaning president, Gustavo Petro, Trump advised to “watch his ass.”)
Like most of the rest of the world, Europeans have been watching events with a certain sense of unreality—and helplessness. The leaders of the European Union and its member states have gone out of their way not to criticize Trump too openly. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for instance, has described the assessment of what happened as “complex.” However, EU leaders and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer seem prepared to draw a line when it comes to Greenland. “Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark must determine the future of Greenland, and no one else,” Starmer said on January 5. A group of European leaders, including Starmer, Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Poland’s Donald Tusk, and Italy’s Georgia Meloni, followed suit the next day.
All this makes strengthening “Europe” (in its various manifestations), the focus of our cover section, even more urgent. As Almut Möller writes in this issue, Europe in this moment needs “architects” of the stature of a Jacques Delors, who forged the EU’s single market, not only to create a new security order, but also wider political structures for the continent with the aim of making Europeans players rather than bystanders. Think tankers across the continent, including Nicolai von Ondarza, Linn Selle, Nathalie Tocci, Alice Ekman, Minna Ålander, and Auréa Molto, share their ideas for how to advance the EU. And William Drozdiak, a biographer of Emmanuel Macron, had a chance to discuss the EU’s future with the French president once described as Europe’s “think-tanker-in-chief.”
Elsewhere in this issue, we welcome a new columnist: Francesca Ghiretti is now regularly reporting for IPQ from the GEOECONOMIC FRONT LINES, with her first article looking into the possibility of the EU and the Trans-Pacific Partnership of Indo-Pacific states (and the United Kingdom) linking up. As Francesca suggests, the time for Europeans to think bigger has clearly come.
Henning Hoff is executive editor of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY.
