From the seizure of Venezuelan oil assets to tariff threats against European allies over Greenland, a coherent pattern is emerging in US foreign policy that transcends mere unpredictability. Washington is constructing an international order in which state coercion and resource control supplant multilateral rules, corporate monopolies merge with nationalist objectives, and economic leverage functions as a weapon of geopolitical dominance. Understanding this transformation — and whether it can be resisted — requires examining both its historical antecedents and its structural roots in the failures of the global economic system it seeks to replace.
From Davos Sheriff to Global Enforcer
The January 2026 World Economic Forum served as a deliberate staging ground for Washington’s new posture. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared from Davos that “capitalism has a new sheriff in town”, a statement that functioned less as rhetoric than as a policy announcement. In the weeks surrounding the summit, the administration escalated threats against Denmark over Greenland’s sovereignty, citing the need to control critical minerals essential for military and high-tech production. European allies found themselves targeted with escalating tariff threats — starting at 10 percent and climbing toward 25 percent — unless they accommodated American demands for access to Arctic resources.
This coercive approach extended well beyond the transatlantic relationship. The military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent assertion of control over Venezuelan petroleum exports demonstrated a willingness to use direct force for resource acquisition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s reported demand that Caracas submit monthly budgets for US approval signaled an ambition not merely to influence but to administer the economic affairs of sovereign nations. Simultaneously, an ongoing tariff war with major trading partners reinforced the message that Washington would weaponize market access to enforce compliance across every dimension of international commerce.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the significance of this shift in his own Davos address, characterizing it as “a rupture, not a transition.” The international order that had delivered stability to allied economies — however imperfect and hypocritical — was not simply being modified. Its foundational premise, that even powerful states operate within a framework of negotiated rules, was being discarded in favor of a system where power alone determines outcomes.
Resource Control as Grand Strategy
The seemingly erratic character of recent US foreign interventions obscures a strategic logic rooted in great power competition. The administration’s interest in Greenland, Venezuela, and the broader reshaping of global trade flows reflects a worldview in which physical control over strategic resources — energy, critical minerals, semiconductor supply chains — constitutes the decisive variable in geopolitical rivalry. The Atlantic Council has noted that Greenland ranks eighth globally in rare earth reserves, making it a focal point for competition over the materials essential for military hardware, electric vehicles, and advanced computing.
Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest proven in the world, represent a different dimension of the same calculation. Though some energy firms have shown reluctance to invest in a post-intervention environment, the strategic value of denying these resources to competitors — particularly China — outweighs immediate commercial considerations. The Lawfare Institute has analyzed how the administration’s approach to Venezuelan petroleum echoes earlier American resource acquisition campaigns while introducing novel mechanisms of direct state control that go well beyond traditional sanctions or market manipulation.
This resource-centric worldview treats international law and multilateral institutions as obstacles to be circumvented rather than frameworks to be maintained. The governing assumption is that in a world of intensifying rivalry — particularly with Beijing — the nation that physically controls strategic supply chains will prevail, regardless of what legal or institutional structures nominally exist. The implications of this logic extend far beyond any single bilateral relationship, pointing toward a fundamental restructuring of how economic power operates globally.
The Historical Parallels of Corporate-State Fusion
The current transformation bears structural resemblances to earlier periods when concentrated economic power merged with aggressive state nationalism. The late nineteenth century “robber baron” era produced a globalized free-market system dominated by a small cadre of industrialists and financiers whose empires worked in concert with nation-states to expand markets, often through military force. The collapse of that order into world war and, in several countries, into fascism, offers a cautionary template that contemporary analysts are increasingly invoking.
The historical parallel is not one of simple repetition but of structural rhyme. Fascist economies of the twentieth century were characterized by the fusion of state power with corporate monopolies, the mobilization of industry for nationalist expansion, and the suppression of democratic oversight over economic decision-making. Today’s configuration shares key features: the explicit use of state power to enrich favored corporations, the integration of private enterprise into nationalist geopolitical projects, and the subordination of market rules to political will. Oxfam’s January 2026 research documented that global billionaire wealth surged by over 16 percent in 2025 alone — reaching $18.3 trillion — while the organization’s analysis found that an estimated 60 percent of that wealth derives from inheritance, cronyism, or monopoly power rather than productive innovation.
What distinguishes the present moment is the bidirectional nature of the corporate-state relationship. Rather than simply serving corporate interests, Washington is actively reshaping how business operates, pressuring firms to align with nationalist objectives and penalizing those perceived as ideologically noncompliant. This dynamic mirrors — without precisely replicating — the pattern of earlier authoritarian-capitalist formations in which political leaders did not merely serve business elites but recruited them into an overarching state project.
Europe’s Dilemma: Retaliation or Structural Reform
The EU’s response to American economic coercion has surfaced a debate with implications far beyond tariff policy. When Washington threatened European allies over Greenland, Brussels weighed activation of its Anti-Coercion Instrument, a mechanism adopted in 2023 that gives the bloc retaliatory powers extending well beyond traditional counter-tariffs. The so-called “trade bazooka” would permit restricting US corporate access to European procurement contracts, suspending intellectual property cooperation, and imposing targeted regulations on American financial and technology firms operating within EU jurisdictions.
The German Marshall Fund has analyzed how this instrument represents a qualitative shift in Europe’s defensive economic toolkit. Yet the broader strategic question — articulated by Carney’s call for a coalition of “middle powers” to reduce dependence on the United States — remains unresolved. The middle power proposal, while politically significant, risks reproducing the core deficiency of the system it aims to replace if it merely substitutes one form of deregulatory free-market globalization for another. The structural conditions that generated the current crisis — extreme wealth concentration, democratic erosion, environmental destruction driven by unchecked corporate power — cannot be addressed through additional trade liberalization agreements, however multilateral in character.
Alternative frameworks would require fundamentally different priorities: directing public investment toward productive capacity rather than speculative finance, establishing democratic accountability over economic decision-making, and building what economic sovereignty advocates describe as systems where the needs of ordinary citizens take precedence over corporate concentration. These are not merely theoretical propositions. Several of the retaliatory measures discussed in the EU’s Greenland response — procurement restrictions, technology regulation, financial oversight — would represent preliminary steps toward precisely this kind of structural reorientation, suggesting that the crisis is generating policy space that did not previously exist.
Systemic Failure, Not Individual Aberration
The most consequential analytical error available to observers of the current moment is treating it as an anomaly produced by a single political figure rather than as a symptom of deep structural failures within the global economic system. Decades of neoliberal capitalism produced historically unprecedented levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and democratic decay. Project Syndicate has observed that the administration’s posture represents not a departure from these dynamics but their logical intensification — a stage in which the concentrated power that eroded democratic institutions from within now openly captures the state apparatus and directs it toward resource extraction and geopolitical dominance.
This framing carries an uncomfortable but important implication: the forces driving the current transformation will outlive any individual presidency. The structural incentives — control over scarce resources, weaponization of economic interdependence, fusion of corporate and state power — are embedded in the architecture of global capitalism itself. Waiting for an electoral correction to restore the previous order misunderstands both the depth of the crisis and the degree to which that previous order’s own contradictions created the conditions for what has replaced it.
Meaningful resistance, on this analysis, requires not a defense of the status quo ante but the construction of genuinely democratic economic alternatives — systems in which public investment, environmental sustainability, and equitable distribution of resources function as design principles rather than afterthoughts. The current moment, for all its dangers, may also represent the first time in decades that the political space for such alternatives has opened, precisely because the old system’s defenders can no longer credibly claim that it was working.
Original analysis inspired by Nick Dearden from Al Jazeera. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
