During the recent spat over Greenland’s political status, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, Stephen Miller, boasted that nobody would stop the United States if it used military force to seize the Danish territory. Miller was right. But properly understood, this is actually a reason to drop the unhelpful talk about the United States “needing” to acquire Greenland now, during peacetime.
While it might be crass to say such things aloud, the reality is that America is hegemonic in the Western Hemisphere. Even if the United States does not have untrammeled influence over its neighbors in North and South America, it towers over them in economic and military terms. Those who live in Washington’s shadow don’t need reminding of this fact—they are acutely aware.
In the past, leaders in Washington ordered military interventions in the Western Hemisphere with some regularity, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. They have been less eager to use overwhelming power so close to home in recent years (prior to Trump’s raid against Venezuela, the last time a U.S. president used force in the Americas was President Clinton’s humanitarian intervention in Haiti in 1994, more than 30 years ago). But the background threat of a U.S. intervention has never gone away.
The bottom line is this: Regional hegemons like the United States always have the outside option of intervening militarily in their weaker neighbors’ affairs. Miller was only stating the obvious when he applied this truism to Greenland.
Read at London School of Economics
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