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.
Europe has, of course, reacted like sleepwalkers jolted awake. France, Germany, the UK, the EU, this tragic chorus of diplomatic management consultants hurriedly sent troops to “fortify Arctic security,” calling it “operation Arctic Endurance”, a term that means less than nothing. Everyone pretends to know why soldiers are trudging through the snow, though no one actually does. Trump calls them dangerous; the EU calls it diplomacy. The dance continues, absurdly, as the old liberal world order unravels.
Trump wants to buy Greenland. He’s said it before, but this time it’s not the whimsical rambling of a man who mistakes geopolitics for an episode of The Apprentice. It has the grim, transactional weight of a threat. He will tariff Europe into submission, starting with 10% and then increasing to 25%. Movies, champagne, microchips, now even ice and sovereignty itself, all subject to the same sacred principle that what can be priced can be punished. Europe whispers, it tried flattery, remembers fondly when appeasement still had the dignity of failure. They’ve rolled over before; they might do it again, unless humiliation finally burns them awake. Something seems to have stirred in Europe this time. Trump thinks of the world as something that can be bought. Everything has a price, even things like islands, ice sheets, or people who don’t want to be purchased. So now, the tariffs are back, not as trade policy, but as blackmail notes, tariffs scrawled with demands over Greenland, of all places, as if imperial nostalgia has decided to take some acid and has started hallucinating again.
In Brussels, the bureaucrats are quietly sharpening their knives, or whatever the Eurocratic equivalent of knives is. The EU has an untested thing, called the Anti-Coercion Instrument, which sounds like a gothic device from a Kafka story but is in fact a law: a shimmering, hermetic mechanism that allows the Union to act as one single, 450-million-strong economic beast. It’s never been used. You see, it was not built for the Americans or other allies. It was meant for China or Russia, for the bullies who twist arms over trade routes or phone calls to Taiwan. But here we are again, the liberal world order eating itself.
