December 30, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - All under the guise of “pursuing peace” in a proxy war the US itself engineered and is for all intents and purposes fighting against Russia simply through its Ukrainian proxies, the US continues setting the stage for wider and more dangerous escalation - both in terms of expanding an emerging global maritime blockade against Russian, Iranian, and even Chinese maritime shipping, as well as in terms of preparing Europe to feed itself into Washington’s proxy war as Ukraine’s fighting capacity collapses.
Continued (and now renewed) US interest in seizing Greenland from Denmark serves to accomplish both of these objectives.
A New Base for Wider Proxy War with Russia
Existing US military bases in Greenland are located closer to Moscow than any other US military base outside of mainland Europe (including Turkiye) and the UK.
Assuming that open US plans to have Europe “double down” on supporting Ukraine, including expanding military industrial production and arms shipments to Ukraine as well as preparing “European and non-European troops” to actually enter into Ukraine proceed, all under a US-led “division of labor,” US military facilities across mainland Europe and the UK would run the risk of dragging the US itself into any resulting Russian-European conflict.
This would defeat the purpose of this “division of labor.” Thus the US either reducing its military presence across mainland Europe and the UK or relocating essential operations to Greenland allows the US to provide close, but technically indirect support for European forces fighting Russia in the same way the US is currently providing close, but technically indirect support for Ukraine as it fights Russia.
Greenland could serve as a base of operations for continued and essential US ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) support, without which neither America’s Ukrainian nor its European proxies could effectively fight and successfully overextend Russia.
With the US operating outside of most of Europe, it could project the illusion of plausible deniability amid a Russian-European conflict enough to give itself and Russia the ability to avoid escalation into a direct US-Russian conflict - an escalation both Washington and Moscow presumably seek to avoid.
For the US, the entire purpose of waging this proxy war is to have US proxies pay the full cost of the conflict while the US enjoys the full benefits of it. For Moscow, the Ukraine conflict expanding into a European-Russian war backed by the US is still a lesser evil than a direct US-European-Russian war.
The US Preparing a Global Blockade
For years, prominent US corporate-financier funded think tanks have published policy papers planning blockades to strangle all peer and near-peer adversaries into submission. Chief among these adversaries is China.
A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” describes not only a strategy to cut China off by imposing a maritime blockade, but examines all potential ways in which China would seek to circumvent such a blockade and proposes measures to take (which have since been implemented) to prevent China’s success in doing so.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - a network of land routes that allow China to circumvent many of the key maritime chokepoints the US has invested decades of military expansion to threaten - is identified as one of these possible means of circumvention. The paper suggests targeting and destroying these routes, using the Myanmar-China oil pipeline as an example.
Since the paper was published, US-backed militants have actually begun physically targeting this pipeline (and more recently here). The paper itself suggests that amid any potential open US-China conflict, the US itself could conduct military strikes against such infrastructure.
US-backed militants have also attacked Chinese BRI infrastructure in Pakistan - particularly in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan region where US policymakers have sought to eliminate BRI projects since as early as 2011.
The 2018 paper also mentions Russia as a key partner of China, sharing a long land border and already exporting huge amounts of energy across it to China. Russia presents a formidable challenge to US plans to strangle China through maritime blockades. Since the 2018 paper was published the US has since begun its proxy war with Russia itself - and more specifically - targeting both Russian energy production itself and Russian energy exports.
Nominally “Ukrainian” maritime drones have begun targeting Russian energy exports far beyond just the Black Sea and have now carried out attacks in the Mediterranean Sea, the Caspian Sea, and even off the coast of West Africa.
The New York Times itself, in a March 2025 article titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit:
…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.
The implication is that the US is both supplying the maritime drones being used to attack Russian vessels, as well as “supporting the drone strikes” themselves through deep CIA involvement. More recent “Ukrainian” maritime drone strikes far beyond the Black Sea are almost certainly the product of US support being only possible leveraging America’s global network of military and covert action facilities.
Not only do these strikes on Russian energy production undermine Russia’s own economic stability, it fulfills a primary objective in preparing the ground for a successful maritime blockade of China itself - eliminating or severely reducing Russia’s ability to support China in the event of a US-imposed blockade on China in coordination with strikes on China’s BRI infrastructure.
More alarming still are reports that the US’ current and widening covert and overt maritime blockade being carried out worldwide, has targeted ships bound for China - specifically off the coast of Venezuela in Latin America.
As the US ramps up covert/overt maritime seizures and blockades worldwide, the US expanding its presence in Greenland essentially “corks” the Russian-Chinese Northern Sea Route - a sea route that connects the Bering Strait to the Norwegian Sea via Arctic waters and has remained relatively out of reach of the US and its proxies.
Beyond simply examining maps and speculating about US motives, the current US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has admitted that controlling Greenland is directly tied to controlling shipping lanes along the Arctic.
In a January 2025 interview published on the State Department’s official website, Secretary Rubio explicitly stated:
“…the Arctic Circle and the Arctic region is going to become critical for shipping lanes, for how you get some of this energy that’s going to be produced under President Trump – these energies rely on shipping lanes. The Arctic has some of the most valuable shipping lanes in the world. As some of the ice is melting, it’s become more and more navigable. We need to be able to defend that.
So if you project what the Chinese have done, it is just a matter of time before – because they are not an Arctic power. They do not have an Arctic presence, so they need to be able to have somewhere that they can stage from. And it is completely realistic to believe that the Chinese will eventually – maybe even in the short term – try to do in Greenland what they have done at the Panama Canal and in other places, and that is install facilities that give them access to the Arctic with the cover of a Chinese company but that in reality serve a dual purpose: that in a moment of conflict, they could send naval vessels to that facility and operate from there. And that is completely unacceptable to the national security of the world and to the United – to the security of the world and the national security of the United States.”
While Secretary Rubio attempts to frame US actions as responding to a supposed Chinese threat, the purpose is clearly to close off any potential alternative to the maritime chokepoints the US has already poised its military forces across the Asia-Pacific region to close.
The BBC in a more recent article cited US President Donald Trump and his specific mentioning of “Chinese and Russian ships as potential threats in the nearby seas.”
While theories abound of why the US is targeting Venezuela and Greenland - mainly centered on a US “retreat” from global hegemony - in reality the US is targeting both as part of an accelerated pursuit of Russia and China’s encirclement, containment, and ultimately, primacy. Not only does Venezuela factor into a growing global maritime blockade the US and its proxies are incrementally imposing, its elimination through military-imposed regime change further isolates its Russian, Chinese and also Iranian allies.
Greenland’s seizure by the US allows the US to not only expand its maritime blockade to target the Northern Sea Route, it also allows the US to fully implement its “division of labor” in Europe regarding its continued proxy war with Russia from a relatively safe distance.
Only time will tell whether or not Russia, China, and the rest of the aspiring multipolar world are able to counter these accelerated US ambitions or will be fooled by disingenuous “peace deals” and feints of a “retreat” to the Western Hemisphere. The sooner these US ambitions are exposed and checked, the sooner they can be stopped, and the less damage they are able to inflict on the world.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
