Trump has stated since his first term that he wanted NATO member states to spending more on their defense budget. He was laughed at by the Europeans at the time.
And Trump is not completely wrong. For years, Europe has been able to save on defense spending to provide high wage and welfare for its citizens while maintaining competitiveness as a major exporter region.
The US national security state has been trying to get Europe to militarize since. Biden’s Ukraine war succeeded in pushing European NATO member states into re-militarization, using Russia’s invasion as a potent threat.
Trump is simply perpetuating the same strategy (and it would have been the same under the Democrats) to push the Europeans, at every step, into a corner. Greenland seems like the perfect candidate in this respect - just enough to threaten their sovereignty, but an economy small enough that it wouldn’t push anyone into overreacting.
The militarization of Europe is going to break the EU apart. The Maastricht criteria simply does not allow the EU to increase their deficit spending on military while maintaining its current economic advantage. So it will be austerity and recession, which will further push the region towards militarism (think 1930s Germany).
Similarly, Trump’s tariffs are diverting China’s vast industrial capacity to dump their cheap goods onto Europe, and this is especially painful because Chinese EVs and green tech are already overtaking their European counterparts in both quantity and quality. It is killing Europe’s economic transition through green technology.
Following that, Europe will be coerced to de-industrialize itself and play the role of a net importer for American goods - essentially reversing the position between the US and the EU. Trump will get to boast about reducing trade deficit, dollar depreciation against the euro, and the partial re-industrialization will allow the US to placate the growing dissent and suppress the rise of populist sentiment against the establishment, all while maintaining its global financial hegemony.
Because what did Marx say? The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
To understand history, we must start with class analysis. The root of all these problems came from the contradictions of the American capitalism itself - which is to maintain its global hegemony while years of de-industrialization have exacerbated wealth inequality and worse, the entrenchment of social class. The dream of “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” is evaporating right in front of most Americans, especially after the 2008 crash.
The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2015 was the watershed moment for American capitalism. The last 10 years starts to make sense when seen in this perspective.
Honestly, in another timeline the headlines could have easily been “How Europe secured a future of energy and raw resource for itself by brilliantly exploiting US sanctions against Russia”.
In my opinion, the Europeans made two critical miscalculations:
Indeed, they were expecting a repeat of the 1990s USSR collapse. The European Union and the eurozone were only made possible because Europe was able to monetize the vast amount of Soviet industries into financial capital as the union fell apart.
In a slightly different universe, they could have succeeded in carving up Russia and ended up in a better position than the US, by simply leveraging the might of US economic sanctions.