Welcome back to the annual festival of high-altitude narcissism known as Davos, where the air is thin, the champagne is overpriced, and the hypocrisy is thick enough to stop a tank. I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours watching the world’s most expensive puppets dance for our collective misery, and frankly, I’m exhausted. The latest act in this theater of the absurd features Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s chief bureaucratic finger-wagger, and Donald Trump, the sentient gold-plated bulldozer currently threatening to treat international diplomacy like a contested security deposit on a rent-controlled apartment.

At the heart of this week’s tantrum is Greenland—that massive, frozen slab of rock that nobody in Washington cared about until someone told the orange-hued real estate developer in chief that he couldn't buy it. Now, because the Danes had the audacity to suggest that people are not for sale like a failing Atlantic City casino, we are looking at the prospect of Greenland-inspired tariffs. It is, quite possibly, the most moronic hill for a civilization to die on, but here we are.

Ursula von der Leyen stood before the gathered globalist elite and uttered the words, 'A deal is a deal.' She questioned Trump’s trustworthiness with the kind of performative shock usually reserved for Victorian widows. Give me a break. To watch a career politician from the EU lecture anyone on the sanctity of 'deals' is like watching a shark complain about a lack of etiquette in the water. These people live for backroom bargains, sub-clauses, and the kind of legalese that ensures the poor stay poor while the Davos crowd maintains their carbon footprint of a small nation-state.

Let’s analyze the absurdity here. Trump, a man whose entire philosophy of life is based on the idea that rules are suggestions for the weak, is using tariffs as a blunt instrument because his feelings were hurt over a frozen island. It’s not about trade; it’s about ego. It’s the behavior of a toddler who wasn't allowed to play with a specific toy, so now he’s going to break everyone else’s toys. On the other side, we have the EU, an organization that manages to combine the efficiency of a DMV with the arrogance of a French waiter, pretending that international trade is governed by some sacred code of honor.

'Trustworthiness' in international relations is a myth fed to school children to make them believe the world isn't run by sociopaths. Does Ursula truly believe in the 'deals' she signs? Or does she just believe in the power of the status quo to keep her and her colleagues in business? The EU is terrified because Trump has figured out the one truth they try to hide: the entire global system is a house of cards held together by nothing more than the mutual agreement to pretend it works. When someone stops pretending, the whole thing starts to wobble.

Trump’s proposed tariffs over Greenland are a masterclass in petty spite. It’s the ultimate expression of 'if I can't have it, nobody can have anything else cheaply.' It ignores the reality of supply chains, the needs of consumers, and the basic laws of economics in favor of a schoolyard grudge. But let’s not pretend the EU are the heroes here. They are simply the other side of the same debased coin, desperate to maintain a rules-based order that they themselves bend whenever it suits their agrarian subsidies or tech regulations.

Watching them bicker in the Swiss Alps is a perfect metaphor for our times. While the planet experiences whatever climatic disaster is currently in vogue, these people are fighting over who gets to dictate the terms of our collective bankruptcy. The 'trust' Ursula is worried about isn't the trust between people; it’s the trust between creditors. She’s worried the game is being exposed. If a US President can just decide to tax everything because he didn't get to buy a country, then the illusion of the global 'market' evaporates.

I find the whole spectacle nauseatingly predictable. Trump will tweet something incoherent, the EU will issue a strongly worded press release that sounds like it was written by a depressed poet, and the stock market will fluctuate just enough to let a few insiders make another billion. Meanwhile, Greenland remains exactly where it was—cold, largely empty, and utterly indifferent to the fact that it has become the catalyst for the next round of transatlantic posturing.

In the end, 'a deal is a deal' only if you have the power to enforce it. The EU doesn't, and Trump doesn't care. We are witnessing the slow-motion collapse of the post-war consensus, and the only thing these people can think to do is gather in a luxury ski resort and complain about each other's manners. I’d say we should be worried, but that would require a level of hope I haven't possessed since the turn of the millennium. Grab your popcorn, folks; the world isn't ending with a bang, it's ending with a dispute over a frozen rock and a set of tariffs that would make a mercantilist blush. It’s all just noise, and frankly, I wish they’d all just shut up and let the ice melt in peace.