Last summer, on a day when temperatures outside climbed into the high thirties, I stepped into the cool interior of that historic place once more.
The hall is small and quiet. Portraits of the negotiators line the walls. These were men who had experienced what happens when order collapses and who chose, in their exhaustion, to build something better.
The system those diplomats created was imperfect. Still, it is often treated as a turning point in the long, uneven evolution of the sovereign state. The hard legal guardrail against conquest came much later, with the United Nations Charter banning the threat or use of force against another state’s territorial integrity.
I thought of that hall last week, watching Stephen Miller on Fox News explain not just why Trump wants Greenland but, much more emphatically, why Denmark has no right to own Greenland.
Miller is not just any cable news pundit. He is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. His job is to turn presidential instinct into executive action. And he declared, as though stating settled law, that a nation’s sovereignty requires three things: the ability to defend its territory, improving that territory, and inhabiting it. Denmark, he concluded, fails on all three counts. Therefore, according to Miller, its claim is void.
This echoes the doctrine of effective occupation, the logic that once justified Europe’s scramble for Africa and the colonial concept of terra nullius. Land belongs to those who can demonstrate power, presence and extraction. Miller thus dusted off nineteenth-century imperialism and presented it as common sense.
Not long ago, this might have sounded like bluster. Then American forces struck Caracas and extracted President Maduro on 3 January. Trump has refused to rule out force against Greenland. Last Saturday, via a Truth Social post, he announced tariffs on Denmark, France, Germany and five other European allies until Denmark agrees to sell.
The norms governing territorial sovereignty, painstakingly negotiated over centuries, can now apparently be rewritten between golf rounds from Mar-a-Lago.
To be sure, Greenland is strategically important in a warming Arctic. The United States already treats it as vital to missile warning and North Atlantic defence. American forces operate Pituffik Space Base there under long-standing agreements. But none of this overrides the legal framework that governs territorial sovereignty.
Seen from Australasia, we might be tempted to think this has little to do with us. America, Greenland and Denmark are far away. But what Trump and Miller are eroding is the legal principle of secure sovereign borders. That has direct ramifications for us here.
Australia claims forty-two per cent of Antarctica, the largest slice of the frozen continent. Like all Antarctic claims, its status sits in legal limbo under the Treaty system. It is recognised by only a handful of states.
Does Australia inhabit this territory? A few dozen scientists do not constitute a population. Can it defend it against a serious power? Under the ‘Miller Doctrine’ (let us call it that), Australia’s claim looks as “unfair” as Denmark’s claim to Greenland.
The Antarctic Treaty was designed to pre-empt exactly this kind of argument. It freezes sovereignty disputes and restricts militarisation. But that means Australia cannot satisfy Miller’s “defend it” criterion without tearing down the treaty first.
Canberra finds itself in a trap: playing by the rules makes it vulnerable to those who no longer recognise them.
New Zealand’s position is different but no more comfortable. Wellington claims the Ross Dependency, a wedge of Antarctica. It also has sovereign rights over resources in an Exclusive Economic Zone covering more than four million square kilometres. That is roughly fifteen times its land mass.
New Zealand does not inhabit these waters. It patrols them with a navy that, just a few years ago, had to tie up a third of its fleet due to crew shortages.
Yet these claims should not be legally tenuous. They rest on the Law of the Sea and a body of precedent. As the Permanent Court of International Justice, the forerunner of today’s International Court of Justice, held in the Eastern Greenland case nearly a century ago, title in remote territory turns on intention and an actual exercise of authority adapted to conditions. Which means: You do not need soldiers on every iceberg.
But Miller is not interested in precedent. He is reasserting the older logic, that legitimacy requires force.
Australia sensed this shift coming before Trump’s return to office. One way to read AUKUS is as an early hedge, trading some strategic autonomy for deeper American protection in case the rules stop holding.
New Zealand has made a different bet. Wellington insists on its independent foreign policy and its nuclear-free principles, wagering that the rules will continue to matter. Whether that reflects principled commitment or comfortable complacency is never quite clear.
Perhaps the rules still matter. But Miller has made clear that Washington no longer thinks so. And when the guarantor of the post-war order becomes its greatest threat, small nations face a reckoning.
For more than seven decades, the system anchored in the United Nations allowed countries like ours to flourish. They did not need large militaries because great powers had agreed, more or less, to leave one another’s territories alone.
That arrangement is ending. Not with a formal repudiation, but with a shrug. The Miller Doctrine does not bother to argue against Westphalia or the UN Charter. It acts as if these rules never existed, as though ‘might-makes-right’ were simple common sense.
Australia and New Zealand are now entering a world that the negotiators at Münster would have recognised: one in which small states survive by finding protectors or by making themselves too costly to swallow. If the rules weaken further, both countries will need either thicker capabilities of their own or deeper alliances with others. Preferably both.
The men in those portraits on the walls of Münster’s town hall lived through catastrophe. They decided, against all odds, to try something different. Their system held, imperfectly, for nearly four centuries.
They would certainly recognise the world now emerging. It is precisely the nasty, brutal one they were trying to overcome.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
The system those diplomats created was imperfect. Still, it is often treated as a turning point in the long, uneven evolution of the sovereign state. The hard legal guardrail against conquest came much later, with the United Nations Charter banning the threat or use of force against another state’s territorial integrity.
I thought of that hall last week, watching Stephen Miller on Fox News explain not just why Trump wants Greenland but, much more emphatically, why Denmark has no right to own Greenland.
Miller is not just any cable news pundit. He is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. His job is to turn presidential instinct into executive action. And he declared, as though stating settled law, that a nation’s sovereignty requires three things: the ability to defend its territory, improving that territory, and inhabiting it. Denmark, he concluded, fails on all three counts. Therefore, according to Miller, its claim is void.
This echoes the doctrine of effective occupation, the logic that once justified Europe’s scramble for Africa and the colonial concept of terra nullius. Land belongs to those who can demonstrate power, presence and extraction. Miller thus dusted off nineteenth-century imperialism and presented it as common sense.
Not long ago, this might have sounded like bluster. Then American forces struck Caracas and extracted President Maduro on 3 January. Trump has refused to rule out force against Greenland. Last Saturday, via a Truth Social post, he announced tariffs on Denmark, France, Germany and five other European allies until Denmark agrees to sell.
The norms governing territorial sovereignty, painstakingly negotiated over centuries, can now apparently be rewritten between golf rounds from Mar-a-Lago.
To be sure, Greenland is strategically important in a warming Arctic. The United States already treats it as vital to missile warning and North Atlantic defence. American forces operate Pituffik Space Base there under long-standing agreements. But none of this overrides the legal framework that governs territorial sovereignty.
Seen from Australasia, we might be tempted to think this has little to do with us. America, Greenland and Denmark are far away. But what Trump and Miller are eroding is the legal principle of secure sovereign borders. That has direct ramifications for us here.
Australia claims forty-two per cent of Antarctica, the largest slice of the frozen continent. Like all Antarctic claims, its status sits in legal limbo under the Treaty system. It is recognised by only a handful of states.
Does Australia inhabit this territory? A few dozen scientists do not constitute a population. Can it defend it against a serious power? Under the ‘Miller Doctrine’ (let us call it that), Australia’s claim looks as “unfair” as Denmark’s claim to Greenland.
The Antarctic Treaty was designed to pre-empt exactly this kind of argument. It freezes sovereignty disputes and restricts militarisation. But that means Australia cannot satisfy Miller’s “defend it” criterion without tearing down the treaty first.
Canberra finds itself in a trap: playing by the rules makes it vulnerable to those who no longer recognise them.
New Zealand’s position is different but no more comfortable. Wellington claims the Ross Dependency, a wedge of Antarctica. It also has sovereign rights over resources in an Exclusive Economic Zone covering more than four million square kilometres. That is roughly fifteen times its land mass.
New Zealand does not inhabit these waters. It patrols them with a navy that, just a few years ago, had to tie up a third of its fleet due to crew shortages.
Yet these claims should not be legally tenuous. They rest on the Law of the Sea and a body of precedent. As the Permanent Court of International Justice, the forerunner of today’s International Court of Justice, held in the Eastern Greenland case nearly a century ago, title in remote territory turns on intention and an actual exercise of authority adapted to conditions. Which means: You do not need soldiers on every iceberg.
But Miller is not interested in precedent. He is reasserting the older logic, that legitimacy requires force.
Australia sensed this shift coming before Trump’s return to office. One way to read AUKUS is as an early hedge, trading some strategic autonomy for deeper American protection in case the rules stop holding.
New Zealand has made a different bet. Wellington insists on its independent foreign policy and its nuclear-free principles, wagering that the rules will continue to matter. Whether that reflects principled commitment or comfortable complacency is never quite clear.
Perhaps the rules still matter. But Miller has made clear that Washington no longer thinks so. And when the guarantor of the post-war order becomes its greatest threat, small nations face a reckoning.
For more than seven decades, the system anchored in the United Nations allowed countries like ours to flourish. They did not need large militaries because great powers had agreed, more or less, to leave one another’s territories alone.
That arrangement is ending. Not with a formal repudiation, but with a shrug. The Miller Doctrine does not bother to argue against Westphalia or the UN Charter. It acts as if these rules never existed, as though ‘might-makes-right’ were simple common sense.
Australia and New Zealand are now entering a world that the negotiators at Münster would have recognised: one in which small states survive by finding protectors or by making themselves too costly to swallow. If the rules weaken further, both countries will need either thicker capabilities of their own or deeper alliances with others. Preferably both.
The men in those portraits on the walls of Münster’s town hall lived through catastrophe. They decided, against all odds, to try something different. Their system held, imperfectly, for nearly four centuries.
They would certainly recognise the world now emerging. It is precisely the nasty, brutal one they were trying to overcome.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
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