Welcome to Davos, the high-altitude refuge where the global elite gather to burn carbon at record rates while lamenting the fate of the planet they are systematically dismantling. It is a place where self-importance is the only currency that hasn’t suffered from inflation, and this week, the spectacle reached a fever pitch of performative indignation. Emmanuel Macron, the man who possesses the uncanny ability to look like he’s posing for a marble bust even while drinking coffee, took to the stage to play his favorite role: the last defender of the 'civilized' world. The target of his disdain? The crude, transactional impulses of the American administration and its renewed, bizarrely persistent obsession with purchasing Greenland.

Macron’s warning that Europe will not yield to 'bullies' is a masterclass in the kind of toothless grandstanding that has become the hallmark of the European Union. It is intellectually exhausting to witness. On one side, we have the American President, a man who views the entire Earth through the lens of a 1980s real estate developer, convinced that if he can just put a gold logo on a glacier, he’s won. On the other, we have the French President, a man who treats the concept of 'Europe' as a personal accessories line, using the Davos stage to posture against 'bullying' as if international relations were a secondary school playground and not a brutal, nihilistic fight for dwindling resources. To Macron, words are weapons, which is unfortunate given that he is currently bringing a dictionary to a knife fight.

Not to be outdone in the department of sternly worded nothingness, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, chimed in with her own 'unflinching' response. One has to admire the linguistic gymnastics of the Brussels elite. 'Unflinching' is the word you use when you have absolutely no intention of actually doing anything but want to sound like you’re starring in a political thriller. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of a glare; it might make the recipient uncomfortable for a fraction of a second, but it does nothing to stop the underlying movement of the tectonic plates. The EU’s defense of Greenland—a territory that isn’t even technically in the EU—is a fascinating exercise in jurisdictional overreach fueled by sheer, unadulterated spite toward the American ethos.

Let’s be clear about the reality of the situation: none of these people actually care about Greenland. To the American side, it is a strategic asset, a collection of rare earth minerals and a nice spot for a radar dish, wrapped in the ego of a man who wants to be remembered for the biggest land deal in history. To the European side, Greenland is a convenient stick with which to beat the 'bully' across the Atlantic. It is a symbol of 'sovereignty' that they only care about because someone they dislike wants to buy it. If the Greenlandic people have an opinion on being treated like a poker chip between a French philosopher-king and an American casino mogul, nobody in Davos seems particularly interested in hearing it.

This entire charade highlights the terminal absurdity of modern diplomacy. We are living in an era where 'leadership' consists entirely of choosing which brand of hypocrisy you find most palatable. Do you prefer the American brand—loud, obnoxious, and transparently greedy? Or do you prefer the European brand—refined, condescending, and wrapped in the suffocating plastic of 'multilateral values' that only apply when they’re convenient? Macron speaks of bullies, yet his own domestic record is a tapestry of top-down mandates and a refusal to acknowledge the grievances of his own citizenry. He is a man who loves the 'people' in the abstract but finds them rather inconvenient when they’re wearing yellow vests.

Meanwhile, the world watches as the ice in Greenland actually melts, a physical reality that renders the entire debate over its ownership somewhat moot in the long run. By the time the legal dust settles on whether a country can be bought like a distressed shopping mall, the 'prime real estate' in question might be several fathoms underwater. But the Davos set doesn't care about the long run; they care about the news cycle. They care about the 'message.' And the message this week is that Europe is 'standing firm.' Standing firm against what, exactly? A tweet? A hypothetical real estate transaction? It is a battle of ghosts, a war of press releases conducted in a vacuum of actual consequence. They are all grifters, every single one of them, fighting over the right to tell us how to feel about a world they are collectively driving off a cliff. Macron gets his headline, Trump gets his controversy, and the rest of us get to foot the bill for their private jets and their 'unflinching' delusions of grandeur.