Category World News

US President Donald Trump has said “help is on the way” for anti-government protesters in Iran. At a speech in Detroit, he warned those responsible for killing demonstrators would “pay a big price.”

What can small nations do to prevent being gobbled up by bigger, more powerful ones?

This is no abstract question for Greenland right now. It’s very real. And it has no easy answers. Greenland’s autonomy, its future, hangs in the balance.

Greenland is a territory of Denmark. Since 2009, it’s been largely self-governing, and has the right to pursue independence at a time of its choosing. Independence is the wish of all its political parties. But with economic self-sufficiency some way off, it’s sticking with Denmark for now.

Not if United States President Donald Trump has his way. He wants Greenland for the US. Since the bombing of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro, realisation has dawned that he is deadly serious about this. The White House has pointedly refused to take military force off the table, although the real estate mogul-turned-president would likely prefer a simple cash deal.

Europe is in diplomatic crisis mode. Denmark is a NATO member. The idea of NATO’s chief guarantor – the US – annexing territory from a member state seemed preposterous until recently. No longer.

So what can Denmark’s friends do to stop it?

The uncomfortable truth is that if Donald Trump sends in troops, Greenland would likely fall in days, perhaps hours. Trump has mocked Denmark’s forces there as “two dogsleds”. And though this doesn’t meet any truth test, his point holds. Greenland is sparsely defended. Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command in Greenland consists of a handful of warships and search and rescue teams.

The US, meanwhile, already has a major base in northwestern Greenland, under a 1951 pact that also allows Washington to set up more bases on the island. Nearly 650 personnel are stationed at the base, including US Air Force and Space Force members.

Copenhagen is tooling up. It has announced $4.2bn in extra defence spending for the Arctic. And it is buying 16 more F-35 fighter jets (from, of course, the US). But even so, Denmark would have little chance against the full might of the US military.

So a diplomatic united front has been launched. As with other Trump-created crises, Europe’s leaders are adopting an approach that could be called transatlantic judo. Like judo wrestlers, they’re trying to redirect Trump’s energy – his strident, America First unilateralism – and persuade him that the best expression of this is collegiate, transatlantic multilaterism.

Essentially, they’re saying, “Yes, Donald. You’re absolutely right to raise Arctic security as a big problem. We totally agree. While we’re not sure that invading Greenland is the answer, NATO is the solution.”

We’ve heard this message from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in recent days. And the British and German governments have both suggested NATO forces be deployed to Greenland to boost Arctic security. A German delegation was in Washington, DC, before Wednesday’s meeting between State Secretary Marco Rubio and the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers.

While the Europeans try their judo, Donald Trump’s approach is more sumo. Wielding the great geopolitical heft of the US, the president is unyielding. To all entreaties from bewildered Europeans, he remains unmoved.

When they say he can have all the US military presence on Greenland that he wants under the 1951 treaty with Denmark, he says he wants more. When they say a unilateral annexation of Greenland would be the end of NATO, he shrugs as if that might be a price worth paying. When they question his claims that Russia and China are poised to take over Greenland themselves, he just repeats them.

Appeasement or capitulation is possible. If the Europeans were panicked enough, they could lean on Denmark to give Greenlanders the independence referendum that’s been talked about for years. If Greenlanders chose full sovereignty – as a majority ultimately want – Europe could claim Greenland’s fate wasn’t their problem any more. But we’re not in that place yet.

For now, European leaders are united behind Copenhagen and Nuuk. Denmark’s sovereignty is inviolable, they say. And Greenland is not for sale.

Protests are nothing new in Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the sanctions-hit country has been rocked by repeated waves of demonstrations.

However, experts say the current deadly upheaval is unprecedented, due to a potent mix of rising domestic pressures and aggressive threats from the United States – leaving Iran’s leaders with fewer options on what to do next.

What started on December 28 with shopkeepers protesting at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over the Iranian currency’s loss of value quickly morphed into nationwide demonstrations that attracted an unusually broad social coalition.

The record slump in value of the Iranian rial was just the latest in a long line of crises – from water shortages and electricity outages to rising unemployment and rampant inflation that has long swallowed families’ income.

The reimposition of punishing US sanctions in 2018 made daily life harder for millions of Iranians, with many losing confidence in the authorities’ capacity to improve the economy and crack down on mismanagement and corruption.

The situation has been compounded by US President Donald Trump, who, in June, ordered air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and is now loudly threatening to attack Iran again, claiming his aim is to “help” protesters.

“This is a much weaker economic situation, a much worse geopolitical circumstance for Iran, and dissent within the system itself is clearly at a different level,” said Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.

Government stuck

Initially, the government attempted to address the grievances by rolling out a series of economic reforms. The changes included replacing the central bank governor and scrapping a preferential exchange rate for imports of certain basic goods, making a $7 monthly cash transfer instead.

But the moves felt flat. And as the protests widened, the security forces’ response entered a new, more violent phase.

Since January 8, authorities have imposed a near-total communication blackout, while thousands of people have been arrested.

Iran has released no official toll, but authorities say more than 100 security forces have been killed. Opposition activists say the death toll is much higher and it includes hundreds of protesters.

This is not the first time the government has resorted to harsh tactics. The difference, experts say, is that it seems unable to find a path forward, even if it succeeds in quelling the current round of dissent.

“I can’t do anything,” President Masoud Pezeskhian admitted on the eve of the protests, in reference to the country’s economic difficulties.

Past major upheavals have resulted in the government providing some benefits to the Iranians.

After mass protests in 2009, Iran showed flexibility by negotiating a nuclear deal with the West. Following protests driven by the state of the economy in 2019, authorities used the state’s coffers to continue handing out subsidies. And after the women-led mass protests in 2022, authorities loosened some social restrictions.

But today’s options are limited, said Roxana Farmanfarmaian, a professor of modern Middle East politics at the University of Cambridge. “We see that the regime is very isolated and without many options to solve the economic problems, and that translates into a sense that it’s at a dead end,” she said.

Iran is not only facing pressure from within. Its system of allies has been greatly weakened since Israel’s multi-front regional wars starting in 2023, while a 12-day conflict with Israel left the country’s defence capabilities in a diminished state.

With the shadow of a potential US military intervention looming large, Iranian authorities see the protests as more than just an internal matter.

“There is a widespread view within the system that this is being completely coordinated by the US and Israel, that this is the beginning of the next phase of the 12-day war,” said Parsi.

In June, tensions between Iran and Israel erupted into an all-out war, which ended with the US striking key nuclear sites in Iran. Since then, Israel has also made no secret of wanting another round of strikes against Tehran to finally see regime change there.

Venezuela option

The sense of a looming external threat is such that the army – which rarely gets involved in domestic matters, as opposed to the more ideological Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – has issued a statement declaring its support for the government, adding that it will protect the country’s strategic infrastructure.

“The perception from Tehran is that they [Israeli authorities] are [attempting] to soften the ground for another war. That’s why the military is taking a position, because they see it as an existential threat,” Parsi said.

The US has made clear that strikes against Iran are an option. In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi warned the US that his country is ready for war if Washington wants to “test” it.

It is not clear how and if Trump will attack, but his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3 shows he is increasingly willing to attack foreign countries and remove leaders, while leaving regimes largely intact.

“Iran may think that the US may hope that a targeted strike would eliminate the supreme leader or a number of key leaders, and then the US would try to force what is left of the Islamic Republic to do what the leader refuses to do on nuclear or missile issues,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.

“Their reading of Venezuela is that the US… wants to change the game in Iran, but that the US is not about to invade Iran with troops, and the US is not necessarily looking for regime change and nation-building of the kind we saw in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

So far, Iran’s political leadership has remained unified, with no confirmed defections within the armed forces. But squeezed between a structural economic crisis and the threat of external intervention, it seems to have fewer strategic options, said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute.