If you listen closely, past the static of your own desperate attempts to find meaning in a world devoid of it, you can hear the distinct sound of the post-war global order cracking. It’s not the sound of artillery fire or the grandiose boom of a nuclear detonation. No, that would be too dignified for this timeline. Instead, the eighty-year alliance between the United States and Europe is disintegrating to the sound of a cash register dinging in an empty room. The subject of this geopolitical suicide pact? Greenland. An island of ice, rock, and fifty thousand people who just want to be left alone, now serving as the wedge driving the final nail into the coffin of Western civilization.

I sit here, rubbing my temples, trying to process the sheer magnitude of the stupidity required to reach this point. We are witnessing a diplomatic crisis that feels less like a clash of titans and more like a dispute between a predatory time-share salesman and a homeowner’s association that lost its bylaws in a fire. On one side, we have the American executive branch, currently operating under the philosophy that international relations is simply a real estate deal that hasn’t closed yet. The President of the United States looks at a sovereign territory—a semi-autonomous constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark—and sees a distressed asset. He doesn't see culture, history, or strategic nuance; he sees a parking lot for nuclear submarines and potential golf courses that will eventually melt into water hazards. The audacity to attempt to "coerce" European leaders into selling a landmass is so grotesque, so profoundly vulgar, that it almost loops back around to being impressive. It is the ultimate expression of American capitalism: if it exists, it can be bought, and if you won't sell it, we will make your life a bureaucratic hell until you do.

But let us not waste all our venom on the crude merchant mentality of the American Right. That would be too easy, and frankly, too boring. Let us turn our weary gaze toward the feigned shock and horror of the European elite. The news tells us that European leaders are "pondering the unthinkable" and wondering if the alliance is doomed. Doomed? You people have been riding the coattails of American military hegemony for eight decades, outsourcing your defense budgets so you can afford superior healthcare and smug attitudes about American barbarism. Now, the moment the barbarian at the gate asks to check the price tag on the drapes, you faint on the chaise longue? The hypocrisy is suffocating. The European Union has treated sovereign debt crises in Greece and Italy with the compassion of a loan shark, stripping nations of their dignity for the sake of the Eurozone. Yet, when the transactional nature of global power is reflected back at them by an American President who says the quiet part out loud, they act as if the sanctity of nationhood is being violated for the very first time.

This is why I despise them all. The Americans are too stupid to realize that you cannot buy a country in the twenty-first century like you’re picking up a foreclosure in Atlantic City. The Europeans are too arrogant to admit that their "alliance" was always a business arrangement, and business arrangements are subject to renegotiation by the craziest partner in the firm. We are watching the breakdown of the Atlantic bond not over human rights, not over climate change—despite the irony of fighting over a melting ice sheet—but over a botched acquisition attempt. It highlights the utter vacuity of modern leadership. There are no statesmen left. There are only grifters and managers, and they don't speak the same language.

The tragedy isn't that the alliance might end. The tragedy is that it is ending over something so fundamentally absurd. If NATO collapses because the US President threw a tantrum over not being able to buy Greenland, then NATO deserves to collapse. It means the foundations were made of papier-mâché and wishful thinking all along. We are supposed to believe that this relationship is the bedrock of global security, the firewall against tyranny. Yet, apparently, that firewall can be dismantled by a lowball offer and a bruised ego. It proves that our entire geopolitical reality is held together by nothing more than polite fiction. The moment someone stops being polite, the fiction evaporates, leaving us staring at the naked, ugly truth: nations have no friends, only interests, and currently, the American interest is manifest destiny with a checkbook.

So, let them ponder the unthinkable. Let the diplomats scurry around Brussels and Washington, whispering in hushed tones about "norms" and "traditions." It’s all theater for the plebeians. The reality is that we are governed by children playing Risk with real lives and real economies. One child wants to buy the board; the other child is crying because the rules say you can't do that. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck in the room with them, watching the temperature rise, waiting for the ice to melt, and realizing that there is no adult coming to save us. The alliance isn't doomed because of Greenland. It's doomed because it’s run by people who are intellectually incapable of navigating a world that requires more than greed and performative outrage.