Trump’s Deadly Brave New World: Venezuela, Greenland And Iran – OpEd

We might be today living in the worst period of international relations as dictated to by US president Donald Trump.

America has suddenly become more brash and belligerent as it started the New Year of 2026 with kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their home in the middle-of-the-night and forcibly flying them to a New York detention center where he is now being tried under the pretext of drug smuggling. 

This is an incredible folding story the world is still trying to fathom. Maduro has just had his first hearing in a New York court where the judge initialed in the next sitting for 17 March.

But it doesn’t end there. Today, Trump and his cohorts are trying to take over Greenland, a large tundra-laden territory that belongs to Denmark. We need to have it, we must have, Trump barks.

The US Secretary of State Mark Rubio says President Trump wants to buy Greenland even if he has to because it is good for the security of the United States. This is a view that is making Copenhagen and the rest of Europe angry and dismayed at the callous attitude coming out of Washington, a supposed ally and a leader of the western world. Further, it is threatening to crack and maybe even topple NATO.

Despite the protests made by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen who keeps saying that Greenland is not for sale, Trump continues to put the pressure on to the point that it has become boring and irritating to listen to.

The situation is very awkward as Trump comes out as a bully and described as a thug with the Danes saying there is no need for all this because the United States has already a military base in Greenland and if it wants to bolster its presence there, all it needs to do is ask and will get its wishes, save of course from a US takeover.

But no one in the White House is listening. This is not a return to the old Cold War but possibly to Armageddon where the world stands on the point of willful destruction. Today, Iran promises it will not standby and see its government being destroyed and/or changed by outside powers like the United States and Israel. 

Iran

The problem started with the mass protests Iran has been experiencing since the last three weeks over the deteriorating economic situation in the country, the soaring inflation and the loss of the purchasing power of its rial against the dollar which caused mass protests that began in Tehran and spread to the rest of the country.

Soon Trump, who bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, decided to act with up-till-now verbal utterances about military intervention on the side of the protesters. As he says, he is still weighing the situation and will see how to help the protestors.

The Iran demonstrations are nothing like the protests experienced before in 2022, 2019, 2009 or even in 1999 when they were patchy and localized and/or were about rights and gains like demanding not to wear the Hijab after Mahsi Amini died in a police station for not wearing the headscarf in a proper way. It was this that sparked the 2022 protests.

Today however, the protests are widespread and have taken a “violent” turn with around 500 protestors killed and 109 security personnel, and that is only two weeks. The Iranian authorities are bracing themselves for a long haul because they argue the protests are being directed from outside, namely the United States and Israel with credible reports being made like those by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the Mossad is working in Iran to fuel the protestors and may even be working to topple the regime and replaced it with Raza Pahlavi, the long exiled Iranian Crown Prince. Today, he is being groomed for the takeover, that is if it can be pulled off.

Over the past days – as the protests started on 28 December, 2025 – Trump has been abrasive about his next move. Iran’s Prime Minister Masoud Pezeshkian is warning against outside intervention whilst emphasizing the protests are a domestic affair. His Foreign Minister Abbas Araghichi is talking to Steve Witkoff, Trump’s foreign policy envoy, about the situation to try to avert a potential military strike on Iran and bring the region into the unknown.

But the problem with Trump is he follows dual and even multi-dexterous approaches to diplomacy. He did that in Venezuela. Before his daring raid on Maduro, he spent the previous weeks talking to the Venezuelan government. 

Similarly with Iran. Before he bombed it, the US held five rounds of negotiations with Tehran under the auspices of Oman, including a meeting in Rome. And the list goes on. Trump has no problem in talking to his adversaries but he has come out as being so unpredictable while keeping his cards close to his chest as he decides his next move. 

Unlike any American leader, Trump has his mouth where his interests lie. Atlantic and NATO allies no longer mean much to him and may treat European leaders with the same disdain as he would an African and/or South American president, if there is no interest between the two. Today his whole ideological view has been turned upside down with former enemies treated as allies and allies as enemies as in the Russian/Ukraine conflict where Vladimir Putin is pitched and preferred to Volodymyr Zelensky .

His friends are his interests. In Venezuela, the issue very quickly became about oil, US petroleum companies and the fact Venezuela has the largest strategic ‘black’ reserve in the world. Trump wants it all with the US oil companies returning back to dominating the sector there as the previous President Hugo Chavez, the one before Maduro, nationalized the industry in the country.

And again with Greenland, it’s about interests and not security because he already has that through his treaty with Denmark and NATO.  It’s about minerals and strategic resources which Greenland has plenty of. His aim is to get American companies up there to beat the Russians and the Chinese who are claimed to be already there and pitching. 

And finally there is Iran. Although he might not know it, Iran appears to be a different kettle of fish. Although it has been hit for the first time, nobody really knows how badly. It still has a large arsenal of weapons and while it’s regarded as a “nuclear-threshold country” nobody knows for sure how much time it will be before it has the nuclear bomb or indeed if it has something up its sleeve already. 

What’s for sure is its officials are saying it will hit very hard at US military bases in the region and strike at Israel like it did in that June war in 2025. This is making Israel nervous once again and although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hurling the protestors on, at the same time he is restraining himself from forward action because of the even heavier force Israel is likely to face this time around through more ballistic missiles.

Trump is determined to play with fire. There has never been a president that is quite like him, escalating tensions to smithereens while using diplomacy as a ‘smokescreen’ for other objectives he constantly may be thinking about. We are on a roller-coaster to seeing a Brave New World unfolding in the eyes of a very enigmatic president.