NATO Fractures From Within
From Venezuela’s empty escrow to Greenland’s frozen pipe dream. Russia watches. The World Cup wobbles. Article 5 burns.
ExxonMobil looked at Venezuela’s oil fields and called them uninvestable.
Three weeks after the raid, no major company has committed a dime. The White House talks about controlling future oil revenues through some Treasury escrow account. Slight problem. The refineries are rusted. The wells need billions in rehab. There are no revenues to control.
But the swagger. Oh, the swagger was real.
Grab Maduro in thirty minutes, and suddenly every problem looks like it can be solved the same way. Including an ice sheet with almost no roads.
Here’s the thing about Greenland that nobody in Washington seems to care about.
The big rare earth deposit at Kvanefjeld sits on top of uranium. Greenland banned uranium mining in 2021. Can’t get one without disturbing the other. So the administration calls this environmental regulation a national security threat and figures sovereignty will fix it. Just buy the island, override local law, impose federal mining rules.
Even if that worked politically, the logistics are absurd.
The deposits aren’t accessible by land. No deep-water ports. A short summer drilling window that shuts everything down for nine months. Icebreakers that don’t exist in the numbers needed. This isn’t a prize to seize. It’s a generational infrastructure project. Patient capital. Stable governance. The kind of environment that tariff threats and annexation talk tend to destroy.
Venezuela assumed grabbing the asset meant controlling it. The empty escrow account says otherwise.
Greenland would be worse.
And then there’s the World Cup.
Germany’s CDU floated a boycott as a last resort. Nearly half of Germans support it. England’s LGBTQ+ supporters group already said they won’t travel. Called the environment unsafe and unacceptable. A tournament without Germany, France, England, Spain? That’s most of the broadcast value walking out the door.
FIFA is panicking.
The visa ban makes it worse. Suspended processing for fans from dozens of countries. Qualifying nations whose supporters might not even be allowed in. Emergency meetings. Crisis talks. The Summer of Sport feeding itself into the same shredder as the transatlantic economy.
Russia, obviously, is thrilled.
Komsomolskaya Pravda running headlines about Canada becoming the 51st state. Russian commentators misquoting Lincoln to justify imperial expansion. The narrative writes itself. Great powers absorb smaller neighbors. Resistance is futile. Ukraine should take notes.
Decades of American credibility on territorial integrity. Gone in seventeen days.
The real irony is NATO itself.
Operation Arctic Endurance put French, German, British, and Swedish troops in Greenland to reinforce Danish sovereignty. The stated goal was to establish a more permanent military presence to meet burden-sharing targets. The exact thing Washington has demanded for years.
The White House called them forces journeyed for purposes unknown. A threat.
So. Compliance with American demands is now hostile provocation. The moment it inconveniences territorial ambitions.
Article 5 doesn’t mean much when the threat comes from the country that wrote it.
Timeline of the Crisis (Jan 2026)
Jan 3: Operation Absolute Resolve extracts Maduro from Caracas.
Jan 5: Trump states “we need Greenland” for national security.
Jan 14: Rasmussen/Motzfeldt meet Vance/Rubio; talks collapse.
Jan 15: NATO allies (Operation Arctic Endurance) deploy to Greenland.
Jan 17: Trump announces tariffs on 8 European nations via Truth Social.
Jan 18: EU leaders hold emergency summit; German boycott proposed.
Jan 19: EU prepares Anti-Coercion Instrument; FIFA holds crisis talks.
That about sums it up! 🤯