Enabling Fascism shouldn't be a Policy Option

The Transatlantic relationship is probably over

The Greenland crisis might make you laugh if it weren’t so grubby. Once upon a time, buying territory was a genteel matter: a few men in top hats and cloaks squinting at a map, the indigenous dispossessed, and a treaty was signed with a flourish, and voilà, Louisiana, Alaska, the freshly minted real estate of a parvenu empire. But Trump’s America doesn’t buy; it grabs. In this new American doctrine of geopolitical property rights, to annexe means to manifest destiny by sheer volume of noise. Greenland is not a place, not a people; it is a hostage to Trumpian rapacity, a lump of ice suspended between humiliation and farce. According to Trump, America has been “subsidising Denmark and all of the European Union for centuries,” which might come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever paid €9 for a Carlsberg in Copenhagen or €10 for a Guinness in Dublin. The orange colossus of chaos insists that “World Peace is at stake,” though, as always, he didn’t specify whose world or what kind of peace.

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