Greenland: A "Northern Front" of Inter-Imperialist Rivalry

By Nikos Mottas 

The developments surrounding Greenland should not be treated as a diplomatic anomaly or as the product of individual political choices. 

They are a concentrated expression of the contemporary phase of imperialism, in which the sharpening competition among capitalist powers drags strategic regions and smaller peoples into conflicts not of their own making. 

The pressure exerted by the United States on Greenland and on Denmark — through political coercion, economic threats, and intensified military planning — is not a deviation from a supposedly “rules-based order” (aka “International Law”) but a manifestation of its real content. When strategic interests are at stake, imperialist diplomacy rapidly sheds legalistic language and reverts to open power relations. The Arctic, long considered marginal, is being transformed into a central field of competition as melting ice opens new transport routes and access to critical resources.

Greenland’s importance is therefore not social or humanitarian. It is geopolitical and economic. It is treated as a platform: for military infrastructure, surveillance systems, missile defence, control of Arctic sea lanes, and future exploitation of raw materials. In this framework, the needs and will of the population are secondary. What matters is position within the broader architecture of imperialist planning.

The ideological cover for these developments is the familiar invocation of “security threats,” usually linked to the activities of other major imperialist centers, namely Russia and China. Such narratives are not neutral assessments of danger. They function as political tools that legitimise militarisation and strategic expansion. The Arctic is not being militarised because it is unsafe; it is presented as unsafe because it is being militarised.

At the core of the Greenland issue lies a mechanism analysed with particular precision by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he emphasised that once the world is fully divided among the major powers, imperialist conflict no longer concerns the seizure of “empty” spaces, but the struggle for redivision: “The characteristic feature of the period under review is the final partition of the globe — final, not in the sense that a re-partition is impossible; on the contrary, re-partitions are possible and inevitable — but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories of our planet.”

This insight is decisive for understanding why pressure intensifies even among allies, why bargaining turns into coercion, and why Greenland becomes a focal point. It is not an ownerless territory entering history, but a claimed space whose strategic value grows under new conditions, provoking efforts to revise existing balances.

For this reason, the confrontation cannot be reduced to unilateral US actions or to frictions within NATO. It must be understood within the framework of inter-imperialist rivalry. The United States, the European Union, Russia, and China all pursue their own interests in the Arctic, shaped by the needs of monopolies, energy strategies, transport corridors, and military doctrines. Their antagonisms do not represent different “civilisations” or alternative paths of development; they are competing expressions of the same capitalist system.

This reality exposes the falseness of multipolar illusions. The emergence of multiple centres of power does not restrain imperialism; it sharpens its contradictions. Competition becomes more intense, alliances more fragile, and pressure on smaller territories more direct. Greenland is not threatened because imperialism is weakening, but because it is being reorganised through harsher rivalry over already divided space.

The reaction of European states confirms this. Denmark’s insistence on sovereignty, supported by the European Union, reflects the defence of a specific imperialist role within the transatlantic framework, not a principled defence of peoples’ rights. Institutions such as NATO do not transcend these contradictions; they manage them temporarily. As Lenin pointed out in his analysis of imperialist alliances:

“Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations.”

Alliances, therefore, do not abolish rivalry. They regulate it until conditions change and conflicts sharpen again. Smaller peoples are not protected by such arrangements; they are integrated into them as variables within strategic calculations.

Greenland’s formal autonomy highlights another fundamental contradiction of imperialism. Legal self-government coexists with decisive external control over military presence, economic orientation, and long-term development. This gap between political form and material reality is not accidental. Under capitalism, sovereignty is often hollowed out while being formally preserved, allowing domination to operate behind institutional façades.

Climate change further intensifies these processes. The environmental destruction produced by capitalist development becomes a driver of new rivalries. Melting ice is treated not as a warning but as an opportunity: new routes, resources, and investment possibilities are incorporated into imperialist planning, while ecological and social costs are shifted onto peoples and future generations.

The Greenland standoff therefore offers lessons that extend far beyond the Arctic. It demonstrates how the language of “security” conceals class interests; how alliances among capitalist states are inherently unstable; how smaller peoples are subordinated to strategic competition; and how no imperialist centre can offer a path toward peace or genuine self-determination. The choice presented to peoples — alignment with one bloc or another — is a false one.

For communists, the task is not to interpret such developments through geopolitical sympathies, but to expose their system logic. Greenland shows with particular clarity that inter-imperialist competition is not an exception but the normal mode of operation of imperialism today. As long as capitalism prevails, strategic territories will be contested, militarisation will advance, and peoples’ interests will be subordinated to the needs of capital.

This understanding does not lead to calls for a “fairer” balance of power or a reformed alliance system. It leads to a sharper conclusion: the struggle against imperialist confrontations is inseparable from the struggle against the system that generates them. Only by breaking with the logic of capitalist competition can peoples secure real sovereignty, peace, and social development.

* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.