Donald Trump declared last week that the U.S. would act on Greenland “whether they like it or not,” a remark that sparked European concern over Danish sovereignty. However, a Chinese scholar argues that the Greenland episode is inseparable from developments in Venezuela, reflecting the same strategic logic that shaped U.S. behavior during his second term.

In a recently published article published on the China Going Global think tank’s (中国走出去智库) WeChat channel, Sun Chenghao, a research fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, points out the common debates over whether the U.S. is undergoing “strategic retrenchment” or constructing a “new form of hegemony.”