At no stage in the past 45,000 years have humans lived voluntarily on Alexandra Land. At 80 degrees north it is just too cold. The fish in its surrounding seas sustain polar bears, walrus, whales and kittiwakes; its permafrost soil can just about support moss.
But on the island’s northern tip there is now a structure big enough to be seen from space: the “Arctic Trefoil”, a giant military installation in the form of a three-pointed star, which is the centrepiece of Russia’s Nagurskoye Airbase, built more or less from scratch since 2017.
This is no mere listening post. It houses anti-ship missiles with a range of 300km. Its runway has been extended to handle surveillance aircraft, long-range bombers and tankers. It is a core part of the military apparatus Russia would need if it wanted to strike the US’s space base at Pituffik, in Greenland.
Nagurskoye has become the visual symbol of Arctic militarisation, and is one of six new or enhanced military complexes ranged across the snowy archipelagos between Norway and Russia’s border with Alaska. Together, these bases give Russia the power to sink any ship passing through the newly opened sea route to Asia, and to assert its claim to the seabed beneath.
Spin the globe to the Western hemisphere and the contrast is obvious. The only Arctic territory belonging to the US is Alaska. Its single remaining base on Greenland is essentially defensive: a space control, listening and early warning radar system; likewise, the string of US radar installations strung across northern Canada.
As for Europe, its single Arctic offshore territory is the archipelago of Svalbard, which has been demilitarised by treaty since 1920 and, after the USSR signed that treaty in 1935, open to Russian civilian mining operations and, more recently, ostentatious Russian nationalist parades.
These are the facts behind Donald Trump’s demand to annexe Greenland, and behind the tacit counter-offer from European leaders at Davos – to create their own military counterweight to Russian hard power in the High North.
But the Greenland crisis was about more than where to position fighter jets and radars. It is a symptom of the rapid breakup of the rules-based order and the scramble for critical minerals it has triggered. For if China is emerging as a superpower to rival the US, and controls half of all proven deposits of Rare Earths, what lies beneath the permafrost and the seabeds of the Arctic becomes crucial to the outcome of the global power game.
Trump’s conduct over Greenland in the past two weeks was the clearest signal yet that, for the three countries whose Great Power status in the mid-21st century is certain – the US, China and Russia – Europe is increasingly seen as a “non-playing character”.
That is why, when the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen declared that any American seizure of Greenland would be the “end of Nato”, that prospect was not greeted with dismay by parts of the US far right.
As the focus of great power competition swivels to the Arctic, Nato, whose front line with Russia and Belarus has been the focal point for Western attention since the invasion of Ukraine, risks becoming a sideshow.
That, in turn, poses existential questions for the UK, which has shaped its national security strategy around Nato membership, and for the Labour Party, whose geopolitical instinct over the past 70 years has been shaped by the view set out by foreign secretary Ernest Bevin in the late 1940s: that we must keep America invested in the defence of Europe.
Reading what Trump is up to is easy, because he says what he wants: to exploit the critical minerals of Greenland. He also wants the Europeans to spend a lot more on their own defence, he wants to drive Chinese commercial interests out of the Americas and to overthrow European liberal democracies, replacing them with replicas of his own, racist authoritarianism. And when the complexities of the world thwart these infantile desires, he tends to spit the dummy.
But Trump is also operating as a chaos engine – attacking then retreating, making outrageous threats and claims and then withdrawing them, mixing minor vendettas with strategic gambits. What he does, and what the American corporate and security elite are trying to achieve, can be different.
That is why, despite the position of weakness from which it was made, Mark Carney’s Davos speech was so refreshing. Alone among western leaders Carney has realised that, for the liberal political ethos to survive, it must do so within an architecture, not a cage fight. To the extent that the US is unwilling to sustain such an architecture, Canada must begin to build it through the “Coalition of the Willing” over Ukraine, through the European SAFE initiative, which provides a multilateral borrowing mechanism for defence, and through bilateral deals with China.
But Carney, for all his clear-sightedness, is not in a position to answer the question Keynes and his American counterpart Harry Dexter White posed in the depths of the Second World War: “what does the world look like when we win?”
Indeed, because the rise of a non-European superpower is unprecedented in the industrial era, it is possible that no single country or alliance will possess the power, as the Allies did in 1945, to shape a replacement for the rules-based system.
It may be, as the US historian Michael Beckley argues, that China has peaked too early to reshape the global system around its values and interests, and that India will never achieve great power status because the era of industrialisation is over.
If so, there is only one question around which British geostrategy should be formulated: can Europe emerge as a fourth world power, with its Enlightenment values and its welfare models intact, and with enough trading partners to avoid continental autarky? And what role should we play in helping it do so?
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When Trump made his threat to seize Greenland, backed by tariffs on countries that sent troops to the symbolic exercise staged in its capital Nuuk, Nato’s traditional opponents were quick to announce that the alliance was finished.
Though his party’s official policy is to support Nato, the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, called on the government to withdraw from the alliance, shut US military bases, abandon British nuclear weapons and form a new security alliance with Europe and parts of the global south.
Unfortunately, as the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote, and the enemy’s designs are focused on destroying UK social and political stability, atomising Europe as a player in global security, seizing the Arctic and destroying Ukraine.
Polanski’s proposal would, if taken seriously, aid Russia in that aim. It would remove us from the UN Security Council, strip us of the intelligence sharing that protects the lives of countless British citizens, and forfeit the early warning radar system that protects us from Russian ICBM strikes. Not surprisingly, it has been echoed across circles opposed to support for Ukraine.
But the default geopolitical stance of the Labour Party – Bevin’s view of the importance of the US – also looks undermined: not by the emergence of Great Power competition per se but by the arrival of US isolationism and Trump’s transactional approach to all security questions.
Keir Starmer has been right not to commentate, grandstand or resort to gestures when dealing with Trump, and to accentuate what remains of the relationship. At the operational level, Anglo-US collaboration remains strong both within Nato’s HQs, the nuclear weapons programme and the separate NORAD early warning system, part of which operates from RAF Fylingdales. So maybe Starmer’s approach can endure for the remaining three years of Trump. But it is not a strategy.
As a Labour activist steeped in the tradition laid down by Bevin, I have to consider at least the possibility that – like the Edwardian colonialism it replaced – it has been superseded by events. And to explore that possibility we must go where few social democrats of the post-war era have been prepared to venture: into theories of capitalism and imperialism.
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Vladimir Lenin got many things wrong. But one thing he got right was that the economic form of capitalism in the mid-20th century would determine the behaviour of its major states. In Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) he predicted that states dominated by monopolistic corporations that were strongly interpenetrated with the military, and heavily reliant on colonial empires, were doomed to go to war with each other regardless of the intentions they expressed at the Versailles peace conference, and regardless of the pacifism of their populations.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism could not survive the emergence of the rules-based order in the 1940s, and was dead and buried during the era of globalisation.
But with the emergence of great power competition, between states with radically different economic models, and amid a technological revolution just as deep as that which gave us the automobile and the aeroplane, it is worth asking the same question Lenin asked: how is the changing economic model of western capitalism likely to change behaviour in geopolitics?
In a research note published last week, the Rabobank economist Michael Every described what’s happening to the US economy as “Reverse Perestroika”. Just as Gorbachev tried to move the Soviet economy away from state control and militarism towards markets and consumption, Trump is trying to force the US down the opposite path.
If Trump gets his way, says Every, the US will see its economy and national security systems fused; the Federal Reserve will lose its independence and become subservient to the Treasury; trade will be state controlled and unequal; the state will have stakes in key parts of the private sector and will use capital controls, and indeed coercion, to force foreign direct investment into the US productive economy.
The geopolitical effect of that strategy would be to transform Nato into a transactional alliance of convenience for the US, to be used only where it furthers the economic goals outlined above, and not to achieve collective security for Allied states in the Nato area. European leaders were horrified by the Greenland gambit precisely because they saw it as a demonstration of this logic.
Amid the noise over Greenland, the quieter story is that US operational commitments to Nato and European defence have recently solidified. When they first joined Nato, Finnish and Swedish troops allocated to the alliance were placed under the command of its HQ in Brunssum.
But in December 2025 they moved under the control of JHQ Norfolk, in Virginia, which Nato has been developing from a maritime-focused HQ, designed to keep the Atlantic open to allied ships and closed to Russian submarines, into a “multi-domain” power centre whose job will be to thwart Russian aggression in the Arctic.
No matter how isolationist Trump’s rhetoric is, the fact is that the defence of the US against Russian aggression still begins in Europe, and that the accession of Finland and Sweden means Russia is more likely to attack along the Nordic coastline, to menace Svalbard and to stage forays into the completely demilitarised (and scarcely inhabited) east coast of Greenland.
Nato military thinking has, for a long time, allocated at maximum a brigade-sized force of US marines to the defence of the sea gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK. So the Americans need the Europeans to be strong across the entire region, even if only from the point of view of self-interest and US security in the Atlantic.
It may be that sections of the MAGA elite fantasise about “doing a deal” with Russia, which shuts Europe out of the Arctic, trades Ukraine for Venezuela and secures the US from trans-Polar Russian aggression. But no section of the US intelligence or military leadership would see it as anything other than a disaster – because it would leave America strategically weakened.
So, for now we are not facing the death of Nato but the challenge of managing it towards outcomes that benefit Europe. And it is here that Keir Starmer faces his toughest challenge. Because in the end, geopolitical clout in Europe comes down to money.
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When Bevin persuaded the USA to form Nato in 1948 it marked both the fulfilment of one dream and the death of another: British leadership of a “Western Union” of countries that would allow the UK to maintain its own great power status.
This, in fact, had been Bevin’s primary objective in the immediate post-war period – but fell apart when faced with the collapse of consent for a colonial empire, US financial pressure and finally the Cold War.
So there is nothing “un-Bevinite” about the UK reverting to the goal of exerting security leadership in Europe, so long as we realise that we are entering an entirely unprecedented era, calibrate the risks and adjust our finances to the costs.
Right now, Britain is finding it hard to exert leadership in European Nato, because though we are spending 2.3% of GDP on defence, and on course to achieve maybe 2.7% by the end of the decade, Germany is rearming much faster, with an industrial base much bigger than our own, and aims to achieve 3.5% by 2030.
France, meanwhile, is feeling vindicated in her longstanding refusal to share intelligence and slot into the Nato nuclear command structures. And though president Macron has pledged to “Europeanise” the French nuclear deterrent – i.e. offer an explicit nuclear umbrella to European allies – it is unlikely that policy will survive even his replacement by a mainstream Republican, let alone by the FN.
The Polanski doctrine would be geopolitical suicide. It would leave the whole of Europe reliant on a French nuclear deterrent whose use is uncertain; Poland and most likely Ukraine would then seek nuclear weapons; and it would deprive the UK of Five Eyes intelligence, nuclear maintenance facilities and early warning systems at the very moment the our armed forces were trying to fill gaps left by a departing US military.
But the status quo is not sustainable either. To achieve leadership in Europe, the UK has to commit more to the economic project, and free itself from the peacetime straightjacket that Rachel Reeves and the OBR’s insane economic modelling practices have imposed on defence spending.
By some form of exemption from the debt target for defence spending, together with a hypothecated tax on corporations reliant on infrastructure only the government can protect, the UK should aim to achieve the same position as Germany by 2030 – spending 3.5% on Defence and a further 1.5% on hardening energy, transport and cyber infrastructure against Russian attack.
You don’t need to subject the central bank to Treasury control to do that. But if the western economic model is moving away from fiscal frugality and central bank dominance, towards state-led industrialisation and onshoring, then being the last holdout for the old system is a mistake.
Though the Greenland crisis has subsided (for now), it provides the British government with the opportunity to stage a legitimate rethink of spending priorities and fiscal rules.
Britain remains, by reputation, a “Day One” military power. Our status in the world depends on the folkloric certainty that we will “turn up” when asked. Today we’re being asked to turn up from Estonia to Cyprus, the Atlantic Ocean, the Donbas and the northern tip of Norway. Anyone who tells you such commitments can be funded at 2.5% of GDP is wrong.
Nato is not dead. But it is morphing into a transactional alliance in which European states will seek greater solidarity with each other, greater joint procurement and greater firepower. Just as the future of Nato depends on Trump’s propensity to make bad decisions, it also depends on the UK’s willingness to take brave ones.
