U.S. President Trump Donald recently announced a deal with Denmark giving Washington what he called “permanent control over security, and all other needs” in Greenland — a resolution to a months-long standoff in which Trump had repeatedly refused to rule out taking the Danish territory by force, despite Denmark being a NATO treaty ally.
The Agreement
The agreement, dubbed the “Greenland Accord,” was signed September 22 by the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland. Each government describes it in starkly different terms. Trump calls it “permanent control,” while Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insists it merely “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Denmark and Greenland’s “right to self-determination.” Per NPR, the deal does bar any non-NATO power from establishing bases, a military presence, or “sensitive investments” in Greenland without U.S. approval. The real substance is a veto over Chinese and Russian access to Greenland’s Arctic shipping lanes and mineral deposits, dressed in whichever sovereignty language each capital needs for its own domestic audience.
Securing the Western Hemisphere?
Greenland is the latest data point in a pattern that stretches from the January capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and Chevron’s subsequent multibillion-dollar reentry into Venezuelan oil, to open discussion of expanded U.S. troop presence in Costa Rica, to the “Trump Corollary” language in the 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly reasserting Monroe Doctrine-style primacy across the Western Hemisphere. Traditional overseas commitments (Ukraine, the Middle East, etc.) continue, but the through-line of this administration’s clearest wins has been hemispheric and Arctic — securing choke points, resource deposits, and shipping lanes close to home rather than projecting open-ended global policing power the way Cold War and post-9/11 administrations did.
The Old Technocracy Movement
In all this, the Technocracy movement of the 1930s is being realized. Its founder, engineer Howard Scott, argued that North America should be reorganized as a single continental unit (the “Technate”) governed not by elected politicians but by engineers, using “energy accounting” rather than money to track and allocate resources. Technocracy Inc.’s own study materials called for “specific registration of the consumption of each individual, plus a record description of the individual” — a total accounting of persons and resources across the whole continent. Scott looked at governance as an engineering problem: If you wanted to control something, you had to be able to track it.
The movement collapsed by the 1940s for a simple, practical reason — 1940s America had no technology capable of tracking a continent’s worth of resources and individuals in real time. The relational database, invented in the 1970s, and the current buildout of AI-driven data infrastructure have since closed that gap.
Resurrecting the Technate
While any history of the Technocracy movement implies that it went defunct in the mid-20th century, its ideas were rediscovered in the 1960s when Zbigniew Brzezinski became a professor at Columbia University, where Technocracy first took root. Brzezinski would write Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era in 1970, reviving technocratic ideas.
He would later co-found the Trilateral Commission as a private forum to foster cooperation among leaders from North America, Western Europe, and Japan. As its first director, Brzezinski recruited then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter as a member. He later served as Carter’s principal foreign-policy advisor during the 1976 presidential campaign, and secured the National Security Advisor post after Carter’s victory, a role that many describe as being the second-most powerful position in the executive branch. Decades later, Brzezinski emerged as a foreign-policy mentor to Barack Obama during the 2007-2008 campaign, with many outside skeptics positing that Obama was little more than a “second Jimmy Carter” operating under Brzezinski’s strategic influence.
Fast-forward to 2026. The ideas of Howard Scott (channeled through Brzezinski) have fostered the creation of something looking very much like the Technate: a hemispheric-scale security and resource perimeter, increasingly monitored and coordinated through a continuous, granular-data infrastructure — surveillance, logistics tracking, and AI-driven resource allocation that Scott’s generation could only theorize. Whether by design or convergent pressure, a managerial, resource-and-choke-point-focused hemispheric order is coalescing in roughly the geographic footprint Scott once sketched, this time backed by tools sophisticated enough to actually attempt it.
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