If you listen closely to the rarefied air of the Swiss Alps right now, past the gentle hum of idling Gulfstream jets and the clinking of crystal flutes filled with vintage Krug, you can hear a sound distinct to the twenty-first century. It is the sound of the European establishment collectively wetting its tailored trousers. The World Economic Forum is in session, that annual pilgrimage where the global elite gather to pretend they care about the climate while emitting more carbon in a weekend than a mid-sized industrial nation does in a decade. But this year, the scent of expensive cologne is overpowered by the stench of fear. Donald Trump is dominating the conversation, and the technocrats in Brussels are trembling in their loafers.

Euronews, in a desperate bid to monetize this existential dread, has launched 'Europe Today,' a morning program promising to condense the collapse of Western civilization into a digestible fifteen-minute segment. How thoughtful of them. Nothing says 'we are serious journalists' quite like reducing the potential sale of a sovereign landmass and a trade war that could cripple the global economy into a soundbite sandwiched between the weather report and a segment on sustainable yogurt production. They want to bring you 'up to speed,' as if the speed of our descent into madness isn't already fast enough to give us all whiplash.

The headline act of this tragicomedy is, of course, the renewed chatter about Greenland. Yes, Greenland. We are back to this absurdity. The former leader of the free world—and potential future landlord of the Arctic—wants to buy an autonomous territory like one might purchase a distressed asset in Atlantic City. The sheer, unadulterated hubris of treating a geopolitical entity as a piece of real estate on a Monopoly board is almost admirable in its transparency. It strips away the veneer of diplomacy and reveals international relations for what they truly are: a garage sale for megalomaniacs.

The Europeans, naturally, are scandalized. They clutch their pearls and mutter about sovereignty and international law, as if those concepts haven't been eroding faster than the ice sheets they pretend to save. But beneath the outrage is a palpable panic. They know that in the current timeline—a timeline that seems to have been written by a drunk nihilist—everything is for sale. The indignation is performative; the fear is that the check might actually clear. The idea that the United States could simply annex a chunk of the Danish Kingdom via a wire transfer is the logical conclusion of the hyper-capitalism celebrated in the very halls of Davos. You created this monster, gentlemen. Do not act surprised when it tries to eat the furniture.

Then there are the tariffs. Ah, the trade wars. The bureaucratic equivalent of throwing sand in the gears of a machine that is already on fire. The anxiety in Davos over looming tariffs is the only genuine emotion in the room because it threatens the one thing these people actually care about: their portfolios. They sit in their panels, discussing 'stakeholder capitalism' and 'global resilience,' while terrifyingly aware that a single mood swing from across the Atlantic could wipe out their quarterly projections. The irony is delicious. The same globalists who spent decades hollowing out the working class for cheaper supply chains are now terrified that the populist backlash they engineered is coming for their profit margins.

And let us not forget the setting of this farce. Davos is a town where a hot dog costs forty dollars and the attendees pay tens of thousands to listen to Bono explain poverty. It is a vacuum of self-awareness. To watch them scurry around, terrified of Trump, is to watch a group of arsonists complaining about the heat. They are not worried about the people of Greenland, nor are they worried about the factory worker impacted by tariffs. They are worried that the unpredictable nature of a populist disruptor makes it harder to rig the game.

So, by all means, tune into your new morning show at 8 am Brussels time. Get your fifteen minutes of 'news.' Absorb the panic. Let the talking heads explain to you why the sky is falling. But remember, as you watch the footage of snowy peaks and serious faces, that none of these people have the answers. They are just the managers of the decline, arguing over who gets the window seat as the plane goes down. Trump wants to buy the ice; the Europeans want to tax the meltwater; and the rest of us are just trapped in steerage, waiting for the crash.