Kuala Lampur, Jan. 21 -- Regardless of what has been said about American designs on Greenland - or even without personalising the issue around President Donald Trump - the underlying reality is far more enduring and troubling.

What we are witnessing is not merely a transactional demand for leverage over Denmark, but the re-emergence of a mindset that many assumed had been buried with the end of the formal empire.

A colonial boomerang is at work, and it is returning with force.

At the Davos Economic Forum, Emmanuel Macron warned that the United States is transforming the world into a new colonial order. The remark sounded provocative, even dramatic.

Yet it touched a nerve precisely because it revealed something uncomfortable: the post-...