To Achieve Its Material Reality

Aaron Bastani writes:

Take Back Control. The phrase condensed the spiritual argument for Brexit: that Britain’s destiny must lie in its own hands, with supreme power residing at Westminster rather than Brussels or Strasbourg. For Leavers like Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, indeed, sovereignty was the reason Britain should leave a block it had belonged to for over four decades. “Who governs Britain?” was the question Stanley Baldwin put to voters in 1931, a dividing line revived by Ted Heath in 1974, as he called an election and took on striking coal miners. For Brexiteers, the pugnacious clarity of that challenge still resonated. Unlike Heath, they prevailed.

If sovereignty was the backbone of the mainstream campaign for Brexit, independence was the cry of its populist tribune. Acknowledging his triumph on the night of the vote, Nigel Farage declared that 23 June would go down in history as “our independence day”. The constitutionalism of Gove and Johnson recalled Dicey and Bagehot, while the then Ukip leader came closer to Tom Paine or John Wilkes — the 18th-century rabble-rouser and MP. More than a restoration, Brexit was something radical. The country was unshackled and free.

The allure of such lofty rhetoric is understandable, particularly for a country that had so recently turned much of the globe pink. And even as the empire crumbled, Britain was a serious player. In 1951, when the European Coal and Steel Treaty, the predecessor body to the EEC, was signed, Britain exported more cars than any other nation. If the country had done extraordinary things before submitting to the Continent, the thinking went, it could accomplish great things after. In contrast to such rarefied ambition, the Remain camp’s arguments felt insular and bloodless. In the 21st century, they intoned, sovereignty was pooled, furnishing the country with more, not less, agency to act in an unpredictable world.

This may have been intellectually coherent, and potentially even right, but it had the drawback of sounding like a footnote in a legal textbook. As is so often the case, progressives brought a knife to a gun fight; facts to combat vision. Nor is any of this just history. Ten years after the referendum, these debates around sovereignty, independence and self-government feel more relevant than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Such matters are no longer the province of political theory, or electioneering, but integral to the life and death of nations.

So what is sovereignty in our own time? Beyond a monopoly on the legitimate use of force at home, it includes the capacity to defend one’s borders against military threat. Syria is not, therefore, a properly sovereign state. Nor is Venezuela, Lebanon or Georgia. Qatar’s sovereignty is certainly in doubt given it was bombed by two countries that were previously bombing each other: Israel and Iran. Particularly noteworthy about the Qatari example is that Washington seemingly permitted a strike against a country under its suzerainty. Precisely what that counts for with the Trump presidency is less clear by the day, as Denmark is now discovering. Despite spilling blood in the “liberation” of Iraq, and recently spending treasure to purchase 41 F-35s (total cost: $4.5 billion), the White House is openly talking about acquiring Greenland from Copenhagen — by force if necessary.

Given the increasingly ad hoc nature of the US umbrella, it feels like the basis of real sovereignty, in this new world, is nuclear weapons. When I spoke to Ukrainian historian, Serhei Plokhy, late last year, his sense was that nuclear proliferation was close to inevitable over the decades ahead. If the United States couldn’t guarantee the safety of Japan, for instance, or sought to depose a government in Brazil or Mexico, perhaps these countries might look to acquire the bomb. Two nations in particular underscore this point: Ukraine and North Korea. For a brief moment in the early Nineties, the former possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, something it renounced in exchange for security guarantees from Moscow. North Korea, meanwhile, developed an impressive nuclear and ballistic missile programme, and is yet to receive the same treatment meted out on Syria, Iran, Libya, and now Venezuela.

Besides nuclear weapons, there are other markers of sovereignty as we enter 2026. Technological autonomy is one. In 1994, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei told Jiang Zemin, then the CCP’s General Secretary, that “a country without its own programme-controlled switches is like one without an army”. In other words, national independence was impossible without an advanced industrial base. Zhenfei’s reported words were oddly reminiscent of Charles De Gaulle, who wrote in his memoir that, “there is no independence without power, and no power without modern means”. Rather than being divided by ideology, then, perhaps we should look at both men as economic nationalists forged by struggle and misfortune. De Gaulle, after all, led a government in exile, while Zhengfei cut his teeth as an engineer building jets on the Vietnamese border to support the war effort in the Sixties.

If there is one great or middle power which has not acted according to such principles in recent decades — perhaps because it has been spared such calamities — it is Britain. Think, for one thing, about technology. Far from seeing high-tech autonomy as key to the country’s status, successive governments have claimed that greater globalisation was the yardstick they wished to be judged by. “Globalisation is not something you can hold back,” Tony Blair informed the Labour Party Conference back in 2000. “It is driven by technology and communications and it is the key to future prosperity.”

Five years later, as BT sought to spend £10 billion to refit the country’s digital networks, eight companies were selected for the job: and not a single one was British. “No other advanced country would allow such a strategic investment decision affecting its national infrastructure,” lamented Peter Skyte, an officer for the union Amicus. By the standards of Blair, and much of the country’s political and media class, those were the complaints of a throwback failing to keep up. Later that year Marconi, one of the British firms that had failed to win a contract, and whose history stretched right back to 1897, was snatched up by Ericsson. Today, Britain has no domestic companies capable of building 5G infrastructure. To paraphrase Zhengfei, how powerful is an army without the technology suppliers to match? Britain may have F35s, but it can’t make microprocessors. Meanwhile Algeria and Kazakhstan produce more steel, and Tajikistan and Bosnia more aluminum. When it comes to machine-tool production we lag behind Switzerland and the Czech Republic, let alone Germany. France, meanwhile, has a lead in cutting-edge fields from sovereign cloud to first stage rockets.

It’s a similar story with our nuclear deterrent. For De Gaulle, it was pivotal that his republic maintain its own capability. “France must possess the means to defend itself by itself,” he said in 1959. Britain, meanwhile, was moving in the other direction, signing up for the American Polaris system in 1963. Rather than admit a new-found dependence on Washington, Whitehall heralded the shift as a tribute to the “‘Special Relationship”. We no longer have the Polaris system — it was replaced by Trident in the Eighties — but this most critical of technologies remains “interdependent”: while Britain builds its nuclear submarines, and fabricates its own warheads, the missiles are leased from a “shared pool” held by the Americans. Let’s not forget those missiles can only be serviced on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,000 miles away in Georgia.

Economically, too, Britain increasingly resembles a vassal state. Heritage brands such as Boots, Clarks, Weetabix and Cadbury all have American owners. If you fancy a coffee you’ll likely plump for one of Costa, Starbucks or Cafe Nero. While it may not be obvious, all three have American ownership. Indeed, US corporations employ more people in Britain than in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Sweden combined. But it’s at the level of basic infrastructure that things become especially pernicious. Most Government departments, and even our security services, rely on Amazon Web Services for their internet servers. In extreme circumstances, there is no guarantee that US pressure — political or legal — won’t affect the access and oversight of London. Is that really “taking back control”?

As our Government struggled to respond to Trump’s attack on Venezuela, perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that political clarity came from a politician with whom I agree on very little: Marine Le Pen. “There is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States has just brought about in Venezuela”, she wrote on X the day of Maduro’s capture. “The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, their power, or their continent. It is inviolable and sacred.” Today it might be Venezuela, Le Pen pronounced, tomorrow it could be a little closer to home. Whatever else, she heralds from a political-historical tradition in French politics that extends beyond Left and Right, and which stands for domestic sovereignty. Compared with Britain’s “podcast Right”, which unthinkingly cheers on everything the White House does, this intellectual heritage at least has the advantage of being coherent.

With America’s potential withdrawal from Europe, and the collapse of NATO now possible, it is ever more apparent that France’s post-war approach was the pragmatic one and Britain’s which was driven by ideology. Rolling over for the global hegemon and presuming we’ll forever dine at the top table feels presumptuous, now more than ever. Ironically, some of the most vociferous champions of British sovereignty over the Brexit years suddenly appear indifferent on the matter — with “global Britain” backers, like Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, to name but two, seeming to aspire to little more than subordinate status to Washington.

This is an attitude which, ironically, reflects the reasoning of many pro-Europeans before 2016. They wanted issues such as trade and migration to remain at Brussels, not because they necessarily believed in such a settlement, but because it made domestic politics far easier. After four decades, Westminster had lost the muscle memory to conduct trade deals — as we have since discovered. Returning such competences to Britain was always the difficult choice — which is why much of the establishment resisted it. The same is arguably true here. Surely it’s easier, as a patriotic Right-winger, to simply talk about Britain’s leading role in world affairs rather than trying to achieve its material reality.

Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organisation that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security.

Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments.

Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights.

And Thomas Fazi writes:

Stephen Miller is not one for gentility. “Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Trump’s aide asserted brashly on CNN a few days ago, just hours after Maduro’s kidnapping by US forces. But if Miller’s pugnacious style was familiar, European reactions told a different story: they were scattered, confused and deeply revealing. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, rebutted America’s annexation claims and warned that US aggression against Greenland would effectively mark the end of Nato, while in a joint statement, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK and Greenland itself reaffirmed their commitment to the Atlantic Alliance while stating that Greenland belongs to its people and that decisions regarding the island are for Denmark and Greenland alone.

Conspicuously absent, however, was any response from the EU’s institutional leadership. The same Brussels officials who routinely issue dire warnings about the alleged Russian threat to Europe declined to comment on an explicit US threat against European territory. And only hours earlier, most European leaders had offered either tepid or implicitly supportive responses to Trump’s unambiguous aggression against Venezuela. If there was a logic, it was to avoid confrontation with Washington at all costs. And yet ironically those same leaders quickly found themselves facing the prospect of similar US action directed against a European country.

A direct US military seizure of Greenland remains unlikely, though not unthinkable. A more probable scenario is an “association agreement” modelled on Washington’s arrangements with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Under these agreements, the US exercises sweeping authority over defence and security in exchange for financial assistance. The states involved remain formally sovereign, but in practice are tightly bound to US strategic priorities. An analogous arrangement with Greenland would offer Washington the advantage of consolidating control while formally respecting Greenlandic self-rule, all while weakening Denmark’s position. A 1951 agreement already allows the US to station unlimited numbers of troops on the island; today, only one active base remains, but the legal framework for expansion is firmly in place. 

The ambiguity is intentional. Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the use of the US military was “always an option” as Trump and his advisers reviewed different annexation scenarios. Whatever path the administration chooses, it is determined to resolve the matter swiftly. And European leaders, judging by their response so far, are likely to acquiesce. How can one account for the seemingly irrational, and indeed outright suicidal, posture of Europe’s political leadership? By acknowledging a simple fact: European elites are deeply embedded in the transatlantic system from which they derive their power and legitimacy. They perceive that system as under threat and are prepared to defend it at almost any cost, even if that cost includes European sovereignty or territory.

After all, Europe has already sacrificed its core economic and security interests to US imperial diktats. It has joined a proxy war against Russia that has devastated Ukraine and hollowed out European industrial competitiveness. It has imposed sanctions that inflicted far greater damage on European economies than on Russia. It has remained conspicuously silent following the destruction of Nord Stream, a critical piece of European energy infrastructure — an act probably carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknowledge by some European governments themselves. If European leaders were willing to accept all of this, acquiescing to US control over Greenland — whether through military pressure or pseudo-legal arrangements — would not represent a radical departure.

So much for Europe’s much-vaunted “strategic autonomy”. The reality is that beneath the rhetoric of independence, European governments have systematically appeased Trump — from increased Nato military spending, much of which will flow directly into US defence contractors, to punitive trade conditions to accepting financial responsibility for sustaining the war in Ukraine.

From the perspective of Europe’s governing classes, Nato and the proxy war in Ukraine are less about security or prosperity than about preserving an imperial architecture in which they can play a subordinate but privileged role. This is why Nato would likely survive even a US move against Greenland, albeit stripped of any remaining illusions of sovereign equality among its members.

This dynamic also helps explain a seeming paradox. Globalist European leaders openly despised by Trump — figures such as Emmanuel Macron or Friedrich Merz — have been more supportive of US aggression against Venezuela than Right-populist forces openly favoured by Trump, such as Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orbán, who have adopted more cautious or critical positions. EU institutions, in particular, have been notably supportive of Washington’s actions — the bloc is not a counterweight to US power, rather one of its central pillars.

It is therefore plausible that elements of the EU establishment are coordinating closely with factions of the US national security apparatus — or even with the Trump administration itself. After all, while it is true that Trump has abandoned any pretence of transatlantic unity and increasingly treats Europe in openly transactional, even neo-colonial terms, Europe’s political class has demonstrated its willingness to comply. Once one understands that Europe’s current leaders long ago ceased to think in terms of national or even “European” interests, and have instead become beholden to a single objective — the preservation of a dying system of Western hegemony, or the so-called “rules-based order”, and the benefits they derive from it in their sub-imperial role — their seemingly irrational behaviour begins to make sense.

What should alarm Europeans is not the prospect of US “abandonment” or Nato’s collapse — developments that could, in principle, create space for genuine autonomy. In fact, it’s the opposite: the likelihood that Europe remains locked into a subordinate role precisely as Washington adopts an increasingly aggressive and lawless posture.

This is the broader context in which Trump’s attack on Venezuela and threats against Greenland must be understood. The events are revealing about the evolving nature of US foreign policy. While some analysts interpreted the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), along with Trump’s attempts to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and his calls to scale down commitments in Europe, as evidence of a sober acceptance of multipolarity, Venezuela suggests a very different conclusion. Far from abandoning hegemony, the US is attempting to preserve it through new means, by globalising a proxy-war strategy that targets weaker links in the rival system. While avoiding direct military containment of China or Russia, confrontation is displaced onto peripheral theatres and sustained through permanent destabilisation. In this model, even the most elementary rules of international coexistence are discarded.

This shift is a reaction to a deep crisis of US hegemony. Its economic dimensions are well known: ballooning public debt, unsustainable private leverage, a financial system increasingly detached from productive activity, extensive deindustrialisation and the gradual erosion, however partial, of the dollar-centric system. In short, this is a specific crisis of both US capitalism and the broader post-1945 imperial order.

The US response to this is not to accept Washington’s role within a new global arrangement — one in which America could continue to prosper as a powerful but “normal” state — but to aggressively reassert its dominance. This reassertion increasingly takes the form of naked imperialism or neo-colonialism: not merely economic coercion, but the direct seizure of resources, the control of shipping lanes and supply chains, and even the open claim to foreign territory. Trump’s declaration that Venezuela will be “run” by the United States, coupled with the threat of further “kinetic” action should a future government resist, is thus emblematic.

This orientation is stated openly in the National Security Strategy. The document declares that the US will deny non-hemispheric competitors control over strategically vital assets, condition aid and trade on political alignment, discourage governments from cooperating with rival powers such as China or Russia, and use financial, technological and security — including military — means to ensure compliance. In practice, this strategy is already being implemented, well beyond the Western Hemisphere. Over the past year, the US has conducted bombing operations in seven countries — as varied as Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — none authorised by the UN Security Council and none credibly justified as acts of self-defence under the UN Charter. In parallel, Trump has issued direct threats against a growing list of other states.

In purely empirical terms, there is nothing new about the US resorting to violence to defend its economic and strategic interests; this has been a constant feature of US policy, even and especially under the so-called rules-based order. Across Latin America in particular, Washington has repeatedly intervened, covertly and overtly, whenever governments pursued land reform, resource nationalism or independent development paths that challenged US interests. What is new is the abandonment of even the pretence of legality or humanitarian concern. This is what domination looks like without hegemony: power exercised openly and coercively.

And it is precisely this nakedness that makes the current moment so dangerous. By signalling that no rules remain, not even rhetorically — Washington is effectively legitimising a world of unrestrained power politics — one that is arguably already a reality, but which the West, until recently, at least claimed to oppose. This is particularly destabilising given that US actions against Venezuela and Greenland should not be understood solely in economic terms; they are also strategic moves directed against China, and to a lesser extent Russia. Contrary to the idea that Washington is willing to divide the world into stable spheres of influence, the goal appears instead to create platforms from which US power can be projected more aggressively, ultimately to confront China before the balance of technological and economic power shifts irreversibly.

This is a gamble rooted in the assumption that sustained military and economic attrition can at least delay a tectonic shift in the global order. It is a position inherited from an older colonial worldview which saw non-Western development itself as an existential threat. In this sense, as one commentator insightfully put it, time itself is being weaponised. American elites are engaged in what might be called governance by delay: prolonging conflict and maintaining instability in the hope that some external shock — let’s say a technological breakthrough, an internal crisis among rivals — will restore lost leverage.

The irony is that this strategy is profoundly self-defeating. The more openly coercive US behaviour becomes, the faster it erodes the very structures that once underpinned American hegemony. After 1945, US dominance was not built through territorial annexation, or pure military power, but through administrative architecture: a dense web of alliances; the dollar-backed financial system; global trade regimes; standards bodies; technological ecosystems. This networked hegemony made integration with US-led systems the path of least resistance for most states — though, of course, the threat of violent reprisal was always there and often used.

Instead, when a hegemon instead behaves like a caricature of imperial power, it encourages states to seek alternatives — which now, unlike even just a decade ago, actually exist. To rephrase, Trump is incentivising other nations to further diversify reserves, reduce dollar exposure, explore new payment systems and forge new security partnerships. Indeed, many countries, from South Africa to Brazil to India, are already pushing back against Trump’s bullish tactics. Thus, the primary beneficiaries of Trumpian aggression are precisely those Washington seeks to contain. China, and Russia too, have spent years advocating for an alternative framework for global cooperation based on sovereign equality and multipolarity. Each act of US lawlessness strengthens their appeal. After the illegal assault on Venezuela, expect the queue of countries seeking closer association with BRICS (and similar groupings) to grow longer, even as the US responds by escalating threats against those who do.

Europe, meanwhile, risks guaranteeing its own decline. By clinging to a subordinate role in America’s fraying imperial system, European elites are sacrificing the continent’s long-term autonomy for the prospect of their continued access to power. Yet this also means aligning themselves with a hegemon that governs through naked violence and coercion, at precisely the moment when adaptability and restraint are most needed. In doing so, they expose their own societies to escalating risks — economic, political and military — without any increase in security or influence. While the future of the global order remains uncertain, Europe’s own fate seems sealed.