Even though Russia’s ongoing
invasion of Ukraine was prompting E.U. officials to bolster the union’s
defenses in 2025, U.S. President Trump’s statements early in 2026 in favor of the
U.S. buying or invading Greenland, an “autonomous” part of the E.U. state of
Denmark, triggered defensive rhetoric in that state’s government. I contend
that the rhetoric was largely, though not completely, hyperbolic, and that more
substantial statements could have come from the E.U.’s foreign minister because
the E.U. is, as an empire-scale political union of states, equivalent to the
U.S.[1]
That the E.U. could in principle take on the U.S. is enough to view the Danish
state’s rhetoric as hyperbolic, and thus as not credible enough to dissuade an
American invasion of Greenland.
1. Skip Worden, Essays
on Two Federal Empires: Comparing the E.U. and U.S. (2015)
