Tensions flared between Exxon Mobil and the White House after CEO Darren Woods cast doubt on Venezuela’s appeal as an investment destination during a closed-door meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and other oil executives last week, according to Reuters.

Woods argued that without sweeping legal and regulatory changes, the country could not support major foreign investment, describing its current system as “uninvestable.”

Trump had convened the meeting only days after U.S. forces removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in an overnight operation and urged the industry to commit as much as $100 billion to rebuilding Venezuela’s energy sector. Instead of gaining momentum, the talks were quickly overshadowed by Woods’ skepticism.

Reuters writes that Trump publicly voiced his frustration on Sunday while returning to Washington aboard Air Force One. “I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” he said. “I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.”

Exxon has long been entangled in Venezuela’s oil history. Along with ConocoPhillips and Chevron, it was once a leading foreign partner of the state firm PDVSA before nationalizations under Hugo Chavez forced Exxon and ConocoPhillips to exit the country and pursue arbitration. Court rulings later ordered Venezuela to pay more than $13 billion collectively to the two companies for seized assets.

Woods reminded Trump of that history, saying, “We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here.” He also stressed that investment protections and reform of the hydrocarbons law were essential, adding, “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela today, it’s uninvestable.”

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance echoed the caution, telling Trump his company was the largest non-sovereign creditor in Venezuela and calling for a broad overhaul of the country’s energy system and debt structure. Trump replied that ConocoPhillips would recover much of what it was owed but insisted the future would begin anew. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past because that was their fault,” he said.

The president also made clear that Washington would control which companies are allowed to operate in Venezuela. “You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela,” he said.

Recall, last week Trump met with leaders from Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Continental, Halliburton, HKN, Valero, Marathon, Shell, Trafigura, Vitol Americas, Repsol, Eni, Aspect Holdings, Tallgrass, Raisa Energy and Hilcorp. 

Trump has argued that Venezuela’s vast oil reserves could help revive its economy while also benefiting U.S. consumers and energy companies. In a recent interview, he said he wants companies to commit at least $100 billion to “rebuild the whole oil infrastructure” in the country.

The administration has tightened pressure on Venezuela through a new oil “quarantine,” including the seizure of another tanker Friday, the fifth such action in recent weeks. Rubio said the strategy gives the U.S. “tremendous leverage” and that Washington plans to sell up to 50 million barrels of sanctioned crude on the open market, with the proceeds under U.S. control.

Shortly after a solid 3Y auction, the first of the year, priced just through the WI by 0.1bps, moments ago we got the first sale of benchmark 10Y paper for 2026 in what was another solid auction.

Today’s sale of $39BN in 10Y paper priced at 4.173% just after 1pm ET. This was barely changed from the 4.175% in December in what appears to be duration paralysis. And with the When Issued trading at 4.180%, the auction stopped through the WI by 0.7bps, this was the strongest 10Y auction since September. 

More paralysis: the bid to cover was 2.554, virtually unchanged from last month’s 2.550, and just above the six-auction average of 2.51. As one can see in the chart below, we are now about a decade into the BtC being within 10-20bps of 2.50% in what may be the biggest autopilot trade in the US.

Turning to the internals, Indirects took down 69.7% of the auction, just a hair below last month’s 70.2% (and just above the 69.5% recent average). Directs took 24.5%, up from 21.0 in December and the highest since 2014. This left Dealers with just 5.8%, the second lowest on record with justs the 4.2% in Sept 25 lower.

Overall, this was a strong 10Y auction, and a solid start to the year for coupon issuance. 

By Rabobank

2-year Treasury yields closed 4.4bps higher at 3.53% on Friday after December non-farm payrolls showed the unemployment rate falling to 4.4% and wage growth accelerating despite slower-than-expected hiring. Fed-dated OIS has seen a modest upward re-pricing in the market-implied path of the Fed Funds Rate, though two 25bp cuts by the end of the year remain in the curve with the first fully priced by June.

Breaking news that the Fed has just been issued subpoenas by the Department of Justice relating to statements made by Powell in testimony to Congress could see further recalibration in expectations of the future rate path. Powell has made a statement saying that concerns over his congressional testimony is simply a pretext and that “the threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Fed setting rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.”

In essence, Powell is correct, the real target of the administration is central bank independence which renders the price of money immune to the democratic process and to coordination with other levers of national policy to achieve national policy goals. Independent central banking is a neoliberal shibboleth, but the neoliberal era is clearly over. For further evidence of that (as if it was necessary), look no further than the US’s recent moves towards capital controls and financial repression such as the ban on dividends and stock buybacks for weapons manufacturers, the banning of international wire transfers for welfare recipients, the proposed capping of credit card interest at 10% and the $200bn purchase of mortgage-backed securities designed to pressure lending rates lower. We’re sensing a pattern…

This week will bring the release of the December CPI report on Tuesday. That will give markets another chance to play the game of “up a little bit, down a little bit” even while the global economic and security architecture is being re-made around us in real time. Following comments from President Trump that the United States intends to acquire Greenland “the easy way” (i.e. by buying it) or “the hard way” (via military annexation), Danish PM Mette Frederikson said on Sunday that “we are ready to defend our values – wherever it is necessary – also in the Arctic. We believe in international law and in peoples’ rights to self-determination.”

Frederiksen’s comments recall Mark Twain’s observation that “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” In this case, some might argue that the international law that Denmark believes in is a polite fiction and that it has only been a thing in the past to the extent that it was enforced by the weight of US arms. Volodymyr Zelenskyy articulated as much at the United Nations last year when he said “…that’s the reality. Not international law, not cooperation – weapons decide who survives”. How can international law conceivably be enforced against US arms rather than by them? Who will do the enforcing?

So, while Frederiksen might say that Denmark is ready to defend its values, the reality is that it is not ready to defend Greenland. If the United States is truly determined to acquire the territory one way or another, it will ultimately prove successful. Frederiksen said last week that a US annexation of Greenland would spell the end of NATO, which is probably correct. This then becomes a problem for the entire European Union, who arguably need NATO much more than the Americans do. Are France and Germany happy to run that risk so that Denmark can keep Greenland?

Only a few short years ago the idea that the United States would be willing to risk what Zbigniew Brzezinski called its “democratic bridgehead” on the Eurasian continent by threatening the collapse of NATO seemed unthinkable. However, the critical tone taken towards Europe in the US’s new national security strategy and the ongoing evidence of appetite for rapprochement with Russia in an effort to isolate China calls those old assumptions into question.

So, is the US just playing Europe hot and cold or has something really changed? Europe’s lack of military and monetary sovereignty (see yesterday’s FT here) means that it cannot afford to gamble one way or the other, so the probability of capitulation to Trump over Greenland in a similar manner to how Europe capitulated over tariffs should not be dismissed. With EURUSD still trading above 1.16 at time of writing on a somewhat superficial rearmament narrative, it would seem to me that these risks are not in the price.

While the US plays hardball with Europe over the future of Greenland, the potential for a new democratic bridgehead on the Eurasian continent is appearing. Pro-democracy mass demonstrations in Iran are continuing despite reports that government crackdowns have resulted in the deaths of more than 500 protesters. President Trump has repeatedly warned the Iranian regime that the US may seek to intervene if protestors are harmed and the Wall Street Journal today reports that Trump will be briefed on Tuesday about possible US actions that could include distributing Starlink systems to counteract a shutdown of the internet, or even military intervention. Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian Crown Prince in exile, has called for protestors to continue to occupy public spaces and hinted at a return to the country. Did anybody have the restoration of the Shah on their 2026 bingo card?

The Iranian turmoil and developments in Yemen have contributed to a rise in oil prices in recent days that has more than wiped out the price falls that came in the aftermath of the US’s capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. While this is mostly short-term market noise, the impact of US actions on supply chains is much more substantive.

Economics students are told that economics is the study of scarcity and taught to solve constrained optimization problems. However, these problems are generally academic abstractions, and by the time students finish their PhDs and head off to work for Treasury or a central bank they seemingly forget about real factor constraints and proceed to make simplifying assumptions that supply will be available when needed. In reality, the detail surrounding the availability (or otherwise) of physical stuff matters. Denmark will discover this if they care to test the theory that Greenland can be defended without the presence of physical military materiel.

Craig Tindale excellently describes this dawning realization for Western policymakers as ‘the return of matter’. Our own Michael Every has articulated the idea as “what is GDP *for*”. In a nutshell, what is being described is supply chain sovereignty and this will continue to be the conversation going forward as Western powers pivot away from financialization and back toward industrialisation. Once more for the people in the back: *the neoliberal period is over*.

In the case of Venezuela, we find expression of this idea in the fact that it isn’t the size of the country’s oil reserves that is most critical, but the fact that those reserves are of a heavy grade suited to US gulf refineries and now prevented from flowing to Chinese refineries that were established on the assumption that supply would be forthcoming. This raises the prospect of Chinese refineries becoming stranded assets – threatening China’s energy security. That threat is compounded if supplies from Iran – where ~90% of oil exports go to China – are also interrupted by changes on the geopolitical chessboard.

So, while it is certainly a worry that the United States may appear content to burn the democratic bridgehead in Europe to suit its own interests, it is also burning China’s bridgeheads in the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East. Is this net bullish or bearish for Pax Americana? The answer to that question ought to be helpful in directing capital flows in 2026.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in an interview on Jan. 11 that “hundreds more” federal officers will be sent to Minneapolis on Jan. 11 and Jan. 12 to carry out immigration-related operations in the city.

“We’re sending more officers today and tomorrow, they’ll arrive, there’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

DHS recently sent 2,000 federal immigration agents to the city. Noem said the operation is needed to go after illegal immigrant criminals in the Twin Cities area amid allegations of widespread fraud involving federal entitlement benefits.

Protests erupted after a Jan. 7 incident in which an ICE officer fatally shot a protester as she hit him with her car in an apparent attempt to flee.

Local Democrats, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have criticized Noem and ICE for the shooting and suggested that the federal government cease immigration operations in the city. Frey and Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said in separate interviews on Jan. 11 that state authorities should be included in the shooting investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.

“How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiassed investigation, without prejudice, when at the beginning of that investigation they have already announced exactly what they saw—what they think happened,” Smith said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Frey told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Jan. 11 that local officials should be involved, saying: “Let’s have the investigation in the hands of someone that isn’t biased.”

The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot the protester in her car, saying that he was protecting himself and fellow agents. Video footage of the incident, which occurred in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, shows a woman in an SUV parked across the road and blocking traffic while honking her horn. Another video shows officers telling the woman to get out of the vehicle. She then lurches the vehicle forward, hitting an officer, in an apparent attempt to drive off, and he fires his gun, hitting her.

In response, Noem wrote on Jan. 11 an accompanying post on X that what happened in Minneapolis was a “domestic terror attack” targeting ICE agents and a “direct consequence of sanctuary politicians, like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, who constantly demonize and vilify our brave officers.” She included video footage of similar comments to CNN.

“Sanctuary politicians are allowing situations around the country to become volatile, they’re not doing their jobs, and they haven’t for years,” Noem said. “In the interest of public safety I would encourage them to grow up.”

Noem and DHS have said that attacks on ICE agents have increased by 1,300 percent, with vehicular attacks increasing by 3,200 percent, on a year-over-year basis. In October 2025, a man armed with a rifle killed two ICE detainees at a federal office in Texas before shooting and killing himself.

The officer involved in the Minneapolis shooting was doxxed by people online and has been receiving death threats, according to White House border czar Tom Homan, who said in a Jan. 10 interview that the threats have extended to his family members.

Anti-ICE demonstrations erupted on Jan. 9 as a demonstration turned into a riot, with people throwing rocks, ice, and other objects at federal officers. Thousands of people marched in Minneapolis on Jan. 10 in response to the shooting.

Google and artificial-intelligence chatbot startup Character.AI have agreed to settle a wave of lawsuits brought by grieving parents who claim AI chatbots emotionally manipulated – and ultimately destroyed -their children.

Court documents filed this week show the companies have reached settlement agreements in cases from Florida, Colorado, New York, and Texas, all alleging that Character.AI’s chatbots harmed minors through sexually charged conversations, emotional dependency, and encouragement of self-harm. The specific terms of the settlements remain secret and must still be approved by federal judges, ABC News reports.

The Florida case, the first and most explosive of the lawsuits, centered on the death of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who killed himself in February 2024. His mother, Megan Garcia, alleged that her son was pulled into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with a Character.AI chatbot.

According to the lawsuit, the chatbot was modeled after a fictional character from HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones – and over time, the teen became increasingly detached from reality, isolating himself from family and friends while spending hours interacting with the AI.

In the final moments of his life, screenshots included in the lawsuit show the chatbot telling the boy it loved him and urging him to “come home to me as soon as possible.”

Garcia’s lawsuit accused Character.AI of deliberately designing bots that blurred the line between fantasy and reality, exploiting a child’s vulnerability for engagement and profit. A federal judge rejected the company’s attempt to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds – a key ruling that opened the door to similar lawsuits nationwide.

Those lawsuits soon followed.

Families in multiple states filed complaints alleging that Character.AI chatbots normalized self-harm, encouraged suicidal thinking, and fostered emotional dependency in children who lacked the maturity to understand they were interacting with a machine.

Google was named as a defendant because of its deep ties to Character Technologies, which intensified after the tech giant rehired Character.AI’s co-founders in 2024 and entered into an AI partnership that critics say gave the startup credibility, infrastructure, and reach.

While Google has maintained that it does not operate Character.AI’s platform, plaintiffs argue the company played a critical role in enabling the technology that allegedly harmed their children.

The settlements arrive amid broader legal pressure on the AI industry, including lawsuits against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, over claims that its technology has encouraged self-harm or failed to intervene appropriately during mental-health crises.

In response to the growing backlash, Character.AI has rolled out new safety measures, including age restrictions and content moderation tools. But for families who say the damage has already been done, the changes come too late.

Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

I never cared about the food pyramid.

Not once. Not when it hung in classrooms, not when doctors repeated its logic, and not when federal agencies insisted that grains outranked everything else.

I grew up in a family where food wasn’t a recommendation—it was our economy and our culture. There was always a garden, always bulk bins of staples, always bread baked by hand. We preserved, canned, and stored what we could from the soil and orchard—cherries, apples, seasonal fruit—long before “farm-to-table” became a career path people marketed instead of lived.

As I got older, even when I lived in immaculate golf-course communities, I kept returning to the same truth: Food should be grown, handled, and circulated locally. My chickens earned HOA violations. My vegetable beds violated CCRs. Planting fruit trees in my front yard went against neighborhood covenants. But nourishment was always my compass—not their rules.

That compass shaped my career. I built restaurants around farmers and relationships, not federal charts. Even when I was vegan, we sourced what made sense for the place—apples from nearby growers, cherries when the trees gave them, vegetables from people we knew by name, like our friends at Anna Ayala Farms when I lived in California.

Later, when I tried to transition my restaurants toward regenerative meat, dairy, and vegetables, it didn’t succeed financially. But it was always true to me. My conviction didn’t begin with MAHA. It began with lineage, instinct, motherhood, and feeding people well, even when the market resisted it.

So yes, when the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030 were released in January 2026, and the food pyramid was finally inverted, many of us saw it as a long-overdue win. And it is a win.

But any hunting culture could have told you long before 1992 that the original pyramid was flawed. Traditional hunting cultures always prioritized the most calorie-dense, nutrient-rich foods—fat, protein, organs, energy that lasts. Ancient wisdom didn’t fear calories—it revered them. Survival depended on them, which means we should have known. And we did know. The guidance was flawed from the beginning, had anyone bothered to cross-check it against nature or history.

But gratitude for the correction doesn’t erase the larger question: Who is accountable for the harm?

Nutrition policy doesn’t stay on posters. It becomes school lunch standards, federal food programs, and medical talking points. For decades, the federal model warned against fat, elevated grains, and left the door open for processed foods to dominate institutional feeding environments.

Critics have long argued that the original USDA pyramid—and later the MyPlate model, which didn’t restrict processed carbohydrates or added sugars—reflected strong food industry lobbying and agricultural commodity interests rather than biological science.

Nutrition historians note that the 1992 pyramid’s recommendation of 6 to 11 daily servings of grains was widely criticized, even at the time, by experts, including researchers at Harvard, for ignoring metabolic science and traditional dietary knowledge.

In the meantime, the country got sicker. Childhood obesity rose sharply after the 1990s. Type 2 diabetes began appearing in adolescents by the 2000s. Metabolic dysfunction was normalized as inevitable aging, rather than the biological debt of policy error and corporate influence.

I watched it happen from the outside, insulated by the way I grew up. But millions of kids learned what food looked like from a cafeteria built on that inverted logic. They were conditioned to crave refined starches and sugar-loaded convenience foods—meals engineered for profit, not nourishment.

And those kids are now adults, carrying inflammation, disease, and addiction to processed carbohydrates into young adulthood and middle age: diabetic charts, cardiac events, cancer diagnoses, and bodies trained to mistrust their own instincts instead of their lunches.

I know marriages that were destroyed by unscientific COVID-19 policies. I lived the collapse of my own businesses under decisions made far from communities and far from human biology. And when those policies tore families, livelihoods, and health trajectories apart, no one had to sign their name publicly or carry responsibility for the fallout.

This is where I stop applauding and start asking for receipts. Because accountability isn’t optional when the consequences span generations. When bureaucrats, agencies, and corporate interests make decisions that shape national feeding environments, who answers for the harm? Who signed the papers that allowed ketchup to count as a vegetable? Who approved school meals that trained children toward metabolic dysfunction? Who carries responsibility when public policy serves corporate profit over public health?

The inverted pyramid is exciting. I hope the ripple effect of the new model becomes equally immeasurable—a turning tide toward real nourishment, local food economies, and restored trust in instinct. But we cannot pretend that late corrections erase the need for accountability.

Because here’s the truth, stated plainly: The ripple effect of the previous food pyramid is immeasurable, and the wake of metabolic dysfunction it left will take at least 50 years to repair. And we all know this isn’t the only place where bureaucrats, three-letter agencies, and corporate interests are harming the people.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

*  *  * GRAB SOME SEEDS! 

Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

Senior Department of War officials have told President Donald Trump they need more time to consolidate American troops deployed to the Middle East before the US launches an attack on Iran. 

According to The Telegraph, “Trump has been warned that the US military needs more time to prepare for strikes against Iran.” Military commanders in the Middle East stated they need to “consolidate US military positions and prepare defenses” in anticipation of an Iranian retaliatory attack. 

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said that if it attacks Iran, the Islamic Republic will strike Israel and US bases in the Middle East. 

Trump has threatened Iran several times in recent weeks. “If Iran [shoots] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump said earlier this month.

Demonstrations began in Iran two weeks ago, and some protests have escalated into riots. Some groups report that 200 people have been killed during the demonstrations, including over 40 members of Iranian security forces. 

Iranian authorities have reportedly used live ammunition to break up protests, and Tehran has cut off internet service in an attempt to quell the movement. 

Israel Hayom spoke with American officials who said the White House is preparing a range of actions against Iran, including using Starlink to provide protesters with internet access, a cyber attack, new sanctions, and kinetic military action. 

Signs of the US taking precautions and sending additional assets?

“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories [Israel] as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate targets,” said the former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Two American C-17A military transport planes departed Germany and appeared to be heading for the Middle East on Saturday evening, as speculation mounted about a potential strike.

The Telegraph reports that potential targets of US strikes include non-military targets in Tehran and Iranian security forces.  

How can anyone possibly believe that the US or Israel is motivated by freedom in Iran??

The US’s closest allies are the most savage regimes: Saudis, Egypt, UAE, Jordan, etc.

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy said the US doesn’t care if other countries provide freedom.👇 pic.twitter.com/ctSewzrRor

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 11, 2026

At the end of last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to the US to lobby Trump to restart the war with Iran. In June, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran that ignited a 12-day war. 

During the conflict, Trump ordered American bombers to strike three Iranian nuclear sites. The Islamic Republic responded by striking a US military base in Qatar. The Iranian response was viewed as symbolic, and a ceasefire between the US, Israel, and Iran was reached shortly after. 

Apple shares moved up 1% in the morning U.S. cash session after CNBC reported that Apple will partner with rival Google to power key artificial intelligence features, including Siri, later this year.

In a statement cited by CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Apple said it selected Google after a competitive review, calling Gemini “the most capable foundation” to support its AI roadmap and unlock new user experiences.

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models, and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple wrote.

We previously reported that Apple was tapping Google’s Gemini model to overhaul Siri. This development is particularly alarming for Apple, as it shows how heavily the company relies on external AI technology.

The Apple-Google partnership has made Wedbush’s research team, led by Dan Ives, look like superstars this morning, as it was one of their top three predictions for 2026.

Dan Ives’s top 3rd prediction for 2026 was just realized with the AAPL/GOOGL partnership https://t.co/mIBHmaQIcF

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 12, 2026

View the rest of Ives’ predictions here.  

President Trump’s Friday’s remarks to reporters Friday made clear he is willing to take control of Greenland – even if it’s the “hard way” – and this sent the Europeans scrambling over the weekend to come up with plans or strategies for quickly de-escalating inter-NATO tensions.

“I’m not talking about money for Greenland yet. I might talk about that. But right now we are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not,” the President had said, adding: “I would like to make a deal. You know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”

In the wake of this, NATO member Denmark responded firmly in the face of the US threat to its colony. Such a scenario as a US military move on Greenland would be the collapse of NATO, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has made clear. Among the remarks from last week, Frederiksen said, “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end.”

“The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO, the world’s strongest defensive alliance – all of that would collapse if one NATO country chose to attack another,” the Danish PM added. But he missed the irony in the fact that country after country that refused to play by the so-called “democratic rules of the game” got bombed or overthrown by NATO and the West – with Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran and others lying in ruins and societal fragmentation.

Warner: “We’ve had American intervention in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Venezuela, maybe Greenland where he would blow up NATO. Did you see the Brits and Germans are putting troops in Greenland because they want to send a message. How is this leading to price stability,… pic.twitter.com/kLF5eWENJL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 12, 2026

 But now, as Bloomberg reports, European countries are seeking to seize on Trump’s talking points about Greenland being strategically crucial for Arctic security, as rival powers like Russia and China allegedly seek to move in.

“A group of European countries, led by the U.K. and Germany, is discussing plans for a military presence in Greenland to show U.S. President Donald Trump that the continent is serious about Arctic security and to try to tamp down American threats to take over the self-ruling Danish territory,” reports Bloomberg.

So this seems all about creating a fresh NATO joint mission to appease Trump, soften the rhetoric, and take away one of his main geostrategic justifications for a Greenland takeover.

Bloomberg continues, “Germany will propose setting up a joint NATO mission to protect the Arctic region, according to people familiar with the plans.”

This includes backing from Britain, with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer having separately called on allied nations to strengthen their security footprint in the far north. Pre-planning discussions have been held with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The topic is likely to be broached when German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul meets with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week.

“Because security in the Arctic is becoming increasingly important, I also want to discuss on my trip how we can best bear this responsibility in NATO — in view of old and new rivalries in the region by Russia and China — together,” Wadephul said in a statement Sunday. “We want to discuss this together in NATO.“

It will be interesting to see whether the White House pursues this as an off-ramp, dropping the Greenland project, or whether Trump will read this as a ploy to co-opt forward momentum.

Selling a counter-plan based on running with the exaggerated threat and lie…

The US will defend Greenland from the US?
– Trump said that Russian and Chinese ships are around Greenland as an excuse for annexation. The Europeans know this is not true, but hope that Trump will believe his own lie to elevate the relevance of NATO? pic.twitter.com/XHr7pqSro6

— Glenn Diesen (@Glenn_Diesen) January 12, 2026

Trump has said on outright seizing it, “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland. And we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.” But there have also been other creative solutions offered – such as paying each Greenlander something like $1 million in exchange for US sovereignty over the mass which could be the size of a continent. 

Currently, each citizen of Greenland is a full citizen of Denmark and of the European Union, and so many locals might not want to swap this out for being an American. However, many would likely be very attracted to some kind of huge single sum payout.