Is the United States engaging in retrenchment or a new form of hegemony? Venezuela and Greenland are not separate stories but a single thread. A more transactional, more emotional and more coercion-oriented U.S. is taking shape.
Frontpage of the New York Post on January 6, 2025, showing an altered image where Trump highlights the nearby states to the United States. Photo: New York Post (via CNN)
The Venezuela episode engineered by the Trump administration and the renewed talk of “acquiring” Greenland may appear to point in different directions—one targeting a neighboring country in the Western Hemisphere, the other focused on a strategic node in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. One involves an intrusion into another country’s government, the other makes a political claim over territory and strategic assets.
Yet when placed within the broader strategic context of Trump’s second term, the two are better understood as twin expressions of the same underlying logic. The U.S. is scaling back its institutionalized commitments to global order, while increasingly favoring exclusive, coercive and highly visible means to shape outcomes in regions it defines as core security spaces.
For this reason, what some analysts frame as a debate over “strategic retrenchment” versus a “new form of hegemony” is not binary. The two can coexist. What is being rolled back is the stability of responsibility and credibility, while the will and capacity to control key spaces, corridors and assets is reinforced.
The symbolic significance of the Trump administration’s action against Venezuela does not lie in whether it can reshape the country’s political trajectory in the short term but in the way it bundles so-called cross-border law enforcement, military action and political transition into a single coercive package that creates faits accomplis. The signal is clear. Once Washington defines a country or an issue as an extension of U.S. homeland security—or as transnational crime, migration control or regional stability—it is more inclined to resort to quick-impact coercive measures rather than to pursue long-term governance arrangements through multilateral consultation.
Such an approach greatly increases the risk of political spillovers, forces neighboring countries to reassess the stability of sovereign boundaries and encourages more states to accelerate hedging strategies across realms of security, finance, supply chains and diplomacy. As a result, regional order becomes more prone to a vicious cycle of reacting to shocks, and then being hit by renewed shocks.
The Greenland issue pushes the same logic to the other end of the spectrum. What the Trump administration is pursuing is not a short-term operational objective but the contestation of strategic assets over the medium and long term. Straddling the North Atlantic and the Arctic, Greenland constitutes a critical node for U.S. early warning, missile defense and space surveillance systems. Against the backdrop of intensifying competition over critical minerals, its resource potential has also been incorporated into Washington’s “supply chain security” narrative.
More important, Donald Trump’s rhetoric reflects a fundamental shift in America’s conception of order. When it comes to the territorial and sovereign boundaries of allies, the U.S. no longer relies solely on consultation to address its concerns. Instead, it increasingly puts these issues within a transactional framework of security responsibilities, burden-sharing and rights acquisition, even using coercive language to raise the price.
For Europe, what is at stake is not the question of American power per se, but whether U.S. commitments remain credible. Once threats and transactions enter the internal agenda of alliances, concerns grow that existing boundaries of rules could be redrawn. The foundation of trust between the U.S. and Europe is eroded as a result, and the momentum behind Europe’s pursuit of defense autonomy is once again strengthened.
Viewed together, Venezuela and Greenland reveal a more discernible strategic outline. The Trump administration’s “retrenchment” does not amount to a withdrawal from international affairs. Rather, it reflects the compression of long-term, costly and institutionalized global public goods provided by the United States. At the same time, in a limited number of spaces defined as directly linked to homeland security and strategic depth, Washington has shown a greater willingness to employ heavy-handed, more exclusive and even more coercive instruments to secure control.
This amounts to a form of “selective hegemony.” It no longer draws its primary legitimacy from universal rules and stable commitments but derives from controllability under the banner of national security and cost-benefit calculations. In this configuration, the U.S. prefers to project power in self-defined core areas rather than to act as a global custodian of order.
If one asks whether this represents strategic retrenchment or a new form of hegemony, a plausible answer may be that the U.S. is undergoing a remake of the way hegemony is exercised. The traditional model emphasized reducing uncertainty through alliance networks, multilateral mechanisms and rule-making; the current model places greater emphasis on enhancing control through tariffs, sanctions, law enforcement, limited military deterrence and issue-based transactions. What is being reduced is institutional patience. What is being increased is the hardness of instruments. What is being scaled back is long-term external commitment. What is being strengthened is exclusive leverage over key nodes.
Is this shift short-term or long-term? It clearly bears the imprint of Trump’s highly personalized approach, making U.S. policy more impulsive and less predictable in the short run. Structurally, however, it is not merely a matter of individual preference. It is driven by domestic political polarization, fiscal constraints, declining public tolerance for overseas commitments, multi-front strategic competition and growing anxieties over industrial and technological security.
A change of administration may alter the rhetoric and packaging, but it is unlikely to reverse the broader direction toward more conditional commitments, more instrumental rules and greater emphasis on core interests. The U.S. is unlikely to return to an era in which it was willing to continuously underwrite global order. It is more likely to become accustomed to acting first and negotiating later in key domains, using action to set the agenda and leverage to extract burden-sharing.
For regional and international order, this posture of retrenchment combined with coercion will have three major consequences:
First, the securitization of the regional order will deepen; Latin American countries will become more sensitive to external intervention and sovereignty risks; Europe will grow more concerned about the transactional nature of alliance rules; and the Arctic will move more rapidly from a zone of cooperation to one of competition.
Second, the declining stability and predictability of rules will accelerate hedging behavior. More countries will prepare multiple options across supply chains, financial settlement systems, critical infrastructure and diplomatic partnerships, further fragmenting the global system and making stable consensus harder to sustain.
Third, major-power competition will become more fierce. When countries underestimate the costs of coercive action, the risks of miscalculation increase and the space for crisis management is squeezed.
All this means that in the period ahead, the central challenge for the international community is not whether the U.S. will withdraw from regional and global affairs but how it will participate in them. The U.S. remains powerful, but the way it provides order is changing. The key is not to judge whether America is retreating or expanding but to understand how this new model operates. In which spaces will Washington act more forcefully? Which issues are most likely to be securitized? In which domains will rules become weapons? Only by answering these questions can risk management be pursued in a more systematic and long-term manner in an environment where competition and cooperation coexist.
Venezuela and Greenland are not two separate stories but a single thread. A more transactional, more emotional and more coercion-oriented U.S. is taking shape, and the world must learn to identify new sources of stability in the context of this transformation.
