{"id":"f-86c21c4f86-114fbeb7-7b24-5039-934b-bff79bb76e7b","title":"Moor’s last sigh: The grand strategy behind Trump’s Venezuela raid and Greenland grab","description":"President Donald Trump’s coercive actions might be the hegemon’s final throw of the dice to bend to its will a system that is slowly going out of America’s control","timestamp":1768492963,"category":"international","headline":"Moor’s last sigh: The grand strategy behind Trump’s Venezuela raid and Greenland grab","modifiedHeadline":"Trump's Venezuela, Greenland Strategy?","subCategories":["scid_afe28127"],"region":"IN","bundleMetaData":{"bundleId":"1bfabe6b-695a-4fbe-92e1-db426e6ba232","bundleTitle":"Tracking Trump","cardData":null},"iabCategoryId":"386","fcSummary":"Trump's actions in Venezuela and Greenland tighten screws on China, securing US dominance amid a shifting global power balance. He aims to control oil, challenge petrodollar decline, and counter China's growing influence in trade and military presence.","summary":"Trump's aggressive moves on Venezuela & Greenland: A desperate gamble to salvage US dominance as its grip on global power weakens.","ctaUrl":"https://trends.glance.com/newz/news/IN/en/firstpost/f-86c21c4f86-114fbeb7-7b24-5039-934b-bff79bb76e7b","sourceUrl":"https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/moors-last-sigh-trump-venezuela-greenland-grand-strategy-13968856.html","bannerImage":"https://g-mob.glance-cdn.com/public/fc/image/OKQNP3tQWNr0.webp","content":"There are more theories in circulation about why Donald Trump raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolás Maduro (or why he is fixated on icy Greenland) than the hours it took for the US military to complete the operation. Let me add mine. Fair warning to readers. I am going to confer grand strategic motives on the chaotic actions of a unique American President.\n\n
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\n Readers of this column and those who follow me on social media would have noted my harsh criticism of Trump. He is a disruptor, and a severe one at that. Trump has lowered the dignity of his office through frequent lies, insults and exaggerations. An unprincipled megalomaniac, Trump operates on pure id.\n
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\n Yet that shouldn’t take away from the fact that his seemingly uncoordinated, impulsive moves and cavalier ways camouflage a strategist who can see the big picture. While the world sees America’s predatory overreach under a President drunk on raw power, Trump is clear-eyed about the threats and opportunities, understands the game of leverages and has an intrinsic grasp of power politics. He better, because America is haemorrhaging power. The post-Second World War scaffolding that underwrites America’s global supremacy, its economic and even military power, is under tangible threat.\n\n
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\n What Trump’s moves over Venezuela and Greenland have done, apart from triggering high-octane news cycles that he typically revels in, is thoroughly tighten the screws on China. Trump gets a crucial point that most analysts, policymakers and even global leaders miss. China, for all its claims and status as America’s peer competitor, is not interested in an open conflict with the United States.\n
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\n In fact, just as Trump is supremely confident that America possesses the greatest and the most powerful military in the world – he is planning to set the defence budget \neven higher – Xi Jinping suffers from a lack of confidence in the military force that he commands. Check the number of purges carried out in the PLA last year alone. The Chinese President has got rid of almost the entire senior leadership.\n
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\n That gives Trump a key insight. Xi would rather use trade as the weapon for dominance. Beijing might decisively win the battle over supply chains and manufacturing over which China has, over the years, developed an iron grip but Xi will not be provoked into openly confronting the United States or displaying military brinkmanship that Beijing typically reserves for lesser powers.\n\n
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\n This gives Trump a window to impose his will on the intensifying geopolitical and geo-economic trends – and he is going at it with all the might at his command. If we look at the developments in Venezuela and Greenland from this lens, everything including Trump’s actions, motivations and hurry become clear.\n
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\n On Wednesday, Trump doubled down on his claims over Greenland notwithstanding the pushback from Denmark and Europeans. He wrote, “The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security. It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building. NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!...”\n\n
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\n Trump also shared the link of a news article in his social media post that reports on an assessment released last month by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS) “warning of Russian and Chinese military ambitions toward and expansion around Greenland and the Arctic.”\n
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\n The ‘Intelligence Outlook 2025’ by the Danish intelligence agency warns that “China is preparing for a military presence in the Arctic” and that “China’s long-term Arctic interests include Greenland.” The news report mentions that “Chinese air-based, seaborne, and submersible activities in the Arctic” have intensified.\n\n
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\n Trump posted the link to the article with a quip: “NATO: Tell Denmark to get them out of here, NOW! Two dogsleds won’t do it! Only the USA can!!!”\n
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\n Look beyond the petty insults and the hard geopolitical realities become apparent. It is no secret that China has been eyeing Greenland’s vast reserves of untapped mineral wealth, fossil fuels and strategic ports even as global warming makes Greenland’s riches more accessible. Beijing is fixated on the Arctic Circle. In 2018, it declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and revealed plans of developing a ‘Polar Silk Road. It operates in conjunction with or via Russian proxies to exploit marine resources, establish shipping corridors or lay underwater \nfibre-optic cables.\n
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\n As Financial Times observes, “to exploit these resources and strategic aims, both countries are mapping the area in more detail, often using sonar technology, which is much more accurate than satellite.”\n
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\n As the ice sheet in Greenland continues to erode, a paper published by U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2019 points out that China is turning Greenland in a “major hub” of REE (rare earth elements) mining.\n
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\n The Kvanefjeld Project in southern Greenland, one of the largest in the world, has as its second-largest shareholder a Chinese rare earth mining company named Shenghe Resources. In 2018, the company in a joint venture with an Australian firm signed an MoU in 2018 to extract minerals from the site. Another Chinese firm China National Nuclear Corporation also joined as a partner. The mining never began, however, because the site over the years remained mired in litigation.\n\n
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\n Nevertheless, a 2025 CSIS Study observes, “Over the past seven years, China has attempted to grow its footprint in the region through scientific research expeditions, infrastructure investments, and natural resource acquisitions… While China has yet to build a Polar Silk Road of geopolitical significance, China’s dominant position in rare earth separating and processing offers it an advantage in accessing Greenland’s rare earth resources via processing offtake agreements.”\n
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\n While Chinese and Russian naval and military activity rises in the High North, and Beijing increases research and coast guard patrolling in the Arctic seas, it has also developed an intricate trade relationship with Greenland’s coastal economy that relies on fisheries. The protectorate of Denmark exports nearly half of its marine products to China.\n\n
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\n On the other hand, since the collapse of the USSR, the US has shut down all but one of its military sites in Greenland. The almost 6,000-person presence was withdrawn except the Pituffik Space Base in Thule where about 200 personnel are stationed for ballistic-missile early warning duty.\n
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\n Trump likely sees the securitization of Arctic as existential, as it renders America’s eastern seaboard vulnerable.\n
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\n Europeans grappling with Trump’s threats on acquiring Greenland weren’t paying attention to this \nWhite House’s National Security Strategy where it has been spelt out quite clearly that “Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades. The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”\n\n
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\n To quote US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”\n
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\n To make sense of Trump’s raid on Venezuela and toppling of Maduro, we must understand the centrality of petrodollar system to the American empire. America’s superpower, in reality, is the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency.\n
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\n It is the economic might that underwrites American hard power, the super structure that sustains America’s three unique abilities. One, the ability to borrow at concessional rates to create the fiscal space necessary for a global military footprint. Two, the capacity to externalize inflation that ensures domestic costs of this expansion are diluted across the global economies, and three, the weaponization of the financial network that enforces compliance within this order.\n\n
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\n Since 1974, when Henry Kissinger facilitated the US pact of offering military aid and protection to Saudi Arabia in exchange for the Kingdom investing its oil profits back into US Treasuries, it created a cycle that cemented the dollar’s global dominance by ensuring constant demand for both dollars and US debt.\n
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\n Consequently, the US has been able to run large, persistent external imbalances by importing more goods and services than it exports without facing the balance-of-payments crises that would cripple any other economy. A country running such chronic and massive current account deficits, for instance, would see its currency depreciate and borrowing costs go through the roof. The US has experienced the opposite: as its deficits have grown, the world’s appetite for US debt has increased.\n\n
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\n If the US were required to finance its global military commitments through taxation, the domestic political cost would unseat any president. The electorate would be forced to choose between ‘guns’ and ‘butter’ – expansive foreign military interventions and social welfare. The reserve currency status allows the US to evade this trade-off by financing the warfare through debt monetization that is readily absorbed by global markets. Thus, the costs of US empire are borne by foreign creditors.\n
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\n De-dollarisation, therefore, is perceived as an existential crisis for the American empire, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. Washington has clinically and ruthlessly eliminated anyone who tried to adopt or suggest an alternate global monetary mechanism. Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, if alive, would have testified. Maduro cannot be allowed to become an exception.\n\n
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\n Saddam’s decision to sell Iraqi oil in exchange for euros under the UN’s Oil-for-Food Program presented a symbolic yet significant challenge to the dollar’s dominance in global oil trade, allowing Iraq to bypass sanctions and gain euros for vital supplies. He paid for his ‘sin’ with his life.\n
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\n Gaddafi, the leader of Libya, a country rich with gold and mineral reserves, advocated for a new African currency backed by gold to be used for oil sales and intra-African trade, directly challenging the dollar’s central role in global finance. The American empire struck back. Gaddafi was eliminated and his country turned into a wasteland. As Hillary Clinton had (infamously) said in reaction to Gaddafi’s killing, “We came, we saw, he died”.\n\n
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\n Anand Teltumbde sums it up in The Hindu, “De-dollarisation, in short, threatens not American prosperity alone but American imperial behaviour. This explains the ferocity with which even symbolic challenges are crushed. The US does not need the dollar to collapse to feel threatened; it needs only to see alternatives becoming normalised.”\n
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\n Maduro’s actions were forced by necessities, but he ended up in the same space. His decision to sell oil through alternative payment mechanisms such as Chinese yuan and cryptocurrencies was perceived as a dire threat to the American monetary hegemony.\n\n
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\n Following severe sanctions, Maduro announced in 2017 that Venezuela would “free itself” from dollar dependence by pricing oil exports in currencies including Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, Russian rubles and euros. State-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) began listing weekly oil prices in yuan.\n
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\n Maduro framed this as part of a broader ambition to “end the US imperialist system” and establish “an economy free from US financial control”. A part of the settlement was done through cryptocurrencies such as stablecoin. This created a closed-loop system: Venezuela sold oil to China; China paid in Yuan or stablecoins, Venezuela used these funds to purchase Chinese goods or convert them on non-SWIFT exchanges. This loop completely excluded the US dollar from the transaction cycle.\n\n
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\n By 2025, yuan settlement evolved from experiment to operational. Reuters reported in July last year, quoting shipping data, that Venezuela exported 844,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude and fuel in June, an 8% increase from the previous month as the loss of the US and European markets was offset by more cargoes sent to China.\n
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\n By the end of 2025, around 75-85% of Venezuelan crude was exported to China, some of it through Malaysian or Brazilian transshipment hubs involving ship-to-ship transfers to evade enforcement of sanctions. The payment was settled in Chinese currency with money deposited into yuan accounts controlled by intermediaries or a complex \nloan-for-oil mechanism. Venezuela was also the largest buyer of Chinese weapons in Latin America.\n
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\n While Venezuela’s production in 2025 had fallen to approximately 1 million barrels per day (bpd) due to disrepair, mismanagement and sanctions, the country’s ‘reserve potential’ posed a long-term existential threat. Venezuela sits on 303 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia.\n
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\n The strategic anxiety in Washington was not driven by current flows but by future capacity. If China was allowed to institutionalize yuan-denominated pricing for such a massive reserve base, it would establish a viable ‘petro-yuan’ standard, potentially threatening the petrodollar. Venezuela’s yuan-denominated oil trade, while modest in absolute volume, carries disproportionate symbolic and structural weight in the broader contest over dollar dominance.\n\n
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\n Once Maduro challenged the dollar hegemony, his fate was effectively sealed.\n
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\n Washington would have also noted that some of the privileges that were its exclusive domain – borrowing at lower yields – was being replicated by China. In November 2025, the Chinese government issued $4 billion of bonds in Hong Kong, with the three-year bond paying a coupon rate of 3.625 per cent, on a par with US Treasury equivalents, and priced to yield 3.646 per cent, compared with 3.628 per cent for 3-year US Treasuries, reported Financial Times.\n\n
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\n Meanwhile, IMF data reveals that US dollar reserve holdings declined from 65.3% in 2016 to approximately 59.3% by 2024. According to People’s Bank of China, the RMB (Chinese yuan) is now the world’s second largest trade finance currency \nand third-largest payment currency.\n
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\n JP Morgan in its research report points out that de-dollarization is unfolding in central bank forex reserves, where the share of USD has slid to a two-decade low in tandem with its macro footprint.\n
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\n If you are in the Oval Office, all signals are flashing red. It wasn’t a coincidence that Maduro was captured by the US on the very day he met China’s envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, in Caracas.\n\n
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\n By taking control of Venezuelan oil, in one fell swoop, not only has Trump ensured American control over nearly 40% of global oil output, he has also guaranteed for himself “an economic and geopolitical lever no US president has had since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s,” as Javier Blas points out in Bloomberg.\n
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\n Going into negotiations with China on trade, Trump now has better leverage and more control over the flow of Venezuelan oil into Chinese refineries. Beijing may opt for Canadian heavy oil, but at a much higher price. It also exemplifies the vast gap between America and China’s hard power. Beijing would be hurting but it can do little else beyond diplomatic protests.\n\n
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\n Trump has also ensured that the narrative of petrodollar decline will be challenged. Control over Venezuelan reserves not only gives Trump access to a vast sea of oil and feeds America’s heavy refineries on Gulf coast, but more importantly, it brings another major producer back into the dollar mechanism.\n
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\n Trump’s coercive actions might be the hegemon’s final throw of the dice to bend to its will a system that is slowly going out of America’s control. We shall know in proper time.\n
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(The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)","readDurationInMinutes":"27","author":{"name":"Firstpost","logo":"https://glance-mob.glance-cdn.com/public/bubble/png/28d65284-7c7e-4e74-a1da-84b4daef1e4c.jpeg"},"ism":false,"analyticsResponses":[{"measurementId":"DUMMy","type":"GA"}],"pointerSummary":["Trump sees China as hesitant to militarily confront US, favoring trade dominance.","Trump eyes Greenland for security, countering Chinese & Russian Arctic ambitions.","Maduro ousted for challenging the petrodollar system with yuan-oil trade."],"tags":["DonaldTrump","Venezuela","Greenland","China","USForeignPolicy","Geopolitics","Petrodollar","DeDollarization","NicolsMaduro","XiJinping","Arctic","RareEarthElements","USChinaRelations","EnergySecurity","NationalSecurity","GlobalCurrency","TradeWars","AmericanHegemony","Russia","NATO","DanishIntelligence","PDVSA","Yuan","EconomicWarfare"],"consent":true,"redirectionEnabled":false}

Moor’s last sigh: The grand strategy behind Trump’s Venezuela raid and Greenland grab

SUMMARY