COLOMBO – I arrived in Sri Lanka more than a month after a devastating cyclone that claimed many lives. Despite the loss, the administration had moved quickly to restart the country. The airport was overwhelmed—tourists flooding in, corridors clogged. On the drive into Colombo, my Uber driver spoke with unexpected optimism, praising the government’s resilience amid continuing economic hardship.
Curious, I asked about Donald Trump and the recent U.S. operation in Venezuela that had dominated global commentary.
“What a great leader,” he said. “He made his country proud. That illegitimate leader was removed.”
I raised the familiar concerns—international law, protests, global backlash.
He waved them away. “Our protest was led by politicians who couldn’t even physically stand up due to their age. Useless communist nonsense. This is a new world—they don’t understand it.”
Then he spoke of his daughter, now settled in Canada. He drives Uber, earns enough to survive. “She would have stayed,” he said quietly, “if previous regimes hadn’t looted everything.”
What resonates in Washington and what is felt in Colombo are not the same. Yet across regions and classes, a recurring sentiment is visible: many people are drawn to disruption—not despite its risks, but because the old order failed them.
Against this backdrop, a recent U.S. military operation—reported and dissected across diplomatic and strategic circles—altered the rhythm of global politics. Conducted with precision and minimal visibility, it resulted in the removal of a sitting head of state in Latin America. It was not an assassination. It was an extraction. That distinction mattered. At 2:01 a.m. local time in Caracas, while the capital slept, the country’s head of state—Nicolás Maduro—and his wife were removed by the most powerful military force ever assembled.
The episode conveyed two clear messages. First, that U.S. political leadership, when it chooses to act, is prepared to subordinate international legal ambiguity to perceived national security imperatives. Second, that American military superiority—across intelligence, cyber, and operational coordination—remains unmatched. Many powers are modernizing rapidly, but none have yet demonstrated this level of precision across domains.
Soon after, references to Greenland and Iran followed. The implication was unmistakable: this was not an isolated episode, but part of a broader strategic posture.
In geopolitics, timing matters as much as strength. Hesitation grants rivals something more valuable than territory: time. Time to consolidate power, refine doctrine, harden alliances, and convert ambition into irreversible momentum. Strategic patience, when misjudged, becomes strategic paralysis. The recent U.S. posture reflects an effort to interrupt that process—to slow emerging powers before they reach critical thresholds.
This was not change for its own sake. It was disruption as a strategy.
The Venezuela episode was never only about Venezuela. It signaled a break from post–Cold War assumptions that prioritized restraint, multilateralism, and crisis management over deterrence through dominance. More pointedly, it was directed at a rising civilizational power in Asia—China—which increasingly views itself as the natural successor to U.S. leadership, a shift I examine in Winds of Change (2026). The message was blunt: succession will not be uncontested.
What distinguished this operation was not excess, but control. A leader protected by adversaries of the United States was removed alive. The symbolism was reinforced through an unusually blunt diplomatic tone, underscoring that deterrence today is communicated as much through psychological signaling as through doctrine.
Attention then turned north, toward Greenland, and toward a deeper logic embedded in U.S. strategic thinking: hemispheric defense.
Guntram B. Wolff of Bruegel has argued that Greenland’s security cannot be guaranteed by Denmark alone and requires structured European cooperation. Yet a deeper question remains: why risk diplomatic friction when existing agreements already allow extensive military presence?
The paradox is clear. The United States does not need to annex Greenland to dominate it. During the Cold War, nearly 10,000 American troops were stationed there under the 1951 defense agreement, which still obliges both Denmark and the United States to defend the island. Expanded presence is legally possible.
Yet advocates of a harder line argue that leases impose constraints while ownership eliminates ambiguity. Control, in this view, signals permanence. Whether one agrees or not, this logic reflects a belief that credibility in deterrence depends on clarity of commitment.
Two maps circulated widely among strategic analysts (See Maps). One illustrated intercontinental missile trajectories across the Arctic toward North America. The other highlighted the GIUK Gap—Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom—the critical maritime corridor through which Russian and potentially Chinese vessels could access the Atlantic and, by extension, the Western Hemisphere. This theater is strategic, not symbolic.
This concern is not new.
In 1944, Frederick Sherwood Dunn opened The Geography of the Peace by observing that national security was the field in which statesmen had proven most inadequate. The book’s author, Nicholas John Spykman, argued that geography is not a backdrop to politics—it is its foundation. Based on a 1942 Yale lecture, Spykman emphasized distance, chokepoints, and access routes. He warned that reliance on the Atlantic and Pacific as natural buffers was insufficient.
Spykman identified a third frontier: the polar route.
He died in 1943 before completing his work. Reconstructed from notes and maps—fewer than sixty pages, with fifty-eight maps—the book remains strikingly relevant. Today’s renewed emphasis on hemispheric defense reflects this older logic, echoing a modern adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine grounded less in ideology than in geography.
Spykman referred to the Arctic as the “Polar Mediterranean.”(See map) Eight decades later, this is precisely the space returning to strategic focus. In parallel, I have argued for the growing importance of an “Asiatic Mediterranean”—a maritime and continental theater central to China’s ambitions.
The Arctic, once frozen and peripheral, is becoming navigable. Melting ice is opening sea lanes, shortening missile trajectories, and altering the strategic map. Russia has extensively militarized the region. China, describing itself as a “near-Arctic state,” has invested heavily in polar research, icebreakers, and infrastructure. What was once a barrier is becoming a corridor.
Seen through this lens, Greenland is less about resources than security. The polar route undermines the two-ocean buffer that defined American strategic comfort for over a century. A third frontier is no longer theoretical. It is emerging.
From this perspective, recent U.S. actions appear less impulsive and more structural. Geography, long neglected, has reasserted itself. The question is not whether Greenland matters—it clearly does—but whether unilateral action ultimately strengthens or destabilizes the order it seeks to protect.
Power exercised without consensus carries costs. Power deferred in the face of structural change carries risks of another kind. Ice melts regardless of summits, statements, or alliances.
The liberal international order was built during an era of stable geography. That stability is eroding. As routes open and buffers dissolve, old assumptions collapse with them. Iran, another pivotal geography, now faces internal pressure from a population demanding economic and social dignity. Whether external intervention helps or harms remains contested.
What is clear is that neglect can be as dangerous as excess. Between the two, history tends to choose its own course—and geography, indifferent to intention, often has the final word.
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is the Foreign Affairs Editor at Global Strat View. He is the Executive Director of South Asia Foresight Network(SAFN), Washington, D.C., and the author of Winds of Change: Geopolitics at the Crossroads of South and Southeast Asia, published by World Scientific(2026).
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