There is a particular kind of oxygen deprivation that occurs only in Davos. It is not merely the altitude of the Swiss Alps, which is admittedly taxing on the lungs of the global elite, but the crushing weight of collective self-importance. In this thin, expensive air, we recently witnessed the latest act in our planetary theater of the absurd: Donald Trump, the orange-hued personification of the American id, standing before a room full of people who believe they have ‘solved’ poverty through the medium of networking, to discuss his latest real estate obsession—Greenland.

To the uninitiated, or perhaps the mercifully lobotomized, the notion of an American president attempting to purchase a sovereign territory of the Danish Realm sounds like a discarded plot point from a mid-tier 1980s sitcom. Yet, here we are. Trump’s appearance at the World Economic Forum was less of a diplomatic envoy and more of a hostile takeover bid presented to a board of directors that already hates the CEO. His speech was a masterclass in the transactional nihilism that defines our age. While the Davos crowd prefers their imperialism wrapped in the soft, recycled paper of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘strategic partnerships,’ Trump prefers the blunt force of a bill of sale. He looked out upon the sea of cashmere scarves and see-through ethics and reminded them that, in the end, everything is just dirt and the minerals beneath it.

The tension with Washington’s European allies has reached a pitch so shrill it could shatter the crystal at a state dinner. The Danes, possessing that quaint, old-world notion of ‘sovereignty,’ reacted to the Greenland proposal with the kind of bewildered dignity one displays when a stranger asks to buy your shoes while you are still wearing them. But at Davos, Trump didn’t offer an olive branch; he offered a price per acre and a side-eye toward the melting ice caps. It is the ultimate irony: while the WEF attendees wring their hands over the climate catastrophe with performative grief, Trump sees the retreating permafrost and thinks only of the untapped potential for a golf course or, more accurately, a strategic strip mine.

The European response has been, predictably, a chorus of tut-tutting and bureaucratic sighs. They are offended not by the greed, but by the lack of subtext. In the halls of Brussels and Berlin, one does not simply demand to buy a country; one slowly absorbs it through trade agreements, regulatory harmonization, and the slow, agonizing drip of neoliberal policy. Trump’s crime, in the eyes of the ‘intellectual’ class, is his refusal to pretend that diplomacy is anything other than a series of threats delivered in a gold-plated room. He treats the North Atlantic Treaty Organization like a protection racket because, in his mind, that is exactly what it is. And the most painful part for the gathered technocrats is the nagging suspicion that he might be right.

Watching the faces of the European delegates during Trump’s address was a study in repressed trauma. They are the guardians of a status quo that is currently being dismantled by a man who views the map of the world as a brochure for a distressed asset sale. The Greenland fixation is merely a symptom of a deeper malaise—the realization that the post-war order, with its polite fictions and choreographed handshakes, is being replaced by the raw, unfiltered logic of the bazaar. Trump isn't interested in ‘Western Values.’ He is interested in the Northwest Passage and the mineral rights to whatever lies beneath the ice that the Davos crowd is supposedly trying to save.

As I sat observing this farce, I couldn’t help but admire the symmetry of it all. On one side, you have the bureaucratic elite, who have spent decades perfecting the art of saying nothing with a great deal of gravity. On the other, you have a man who says everything with absolutely no gravity at all. Both are equally convinced of their own righteousness, and both are equally blind to the fact that the theater is on fire. The Greenland spat is not a diplomatic crisis; it is a comedy of manners for a world that has forgotten how to behave. We are witnessing the final, gasping breaths of the ‘Liberal International Order,’ and it turns out its eulogy is being delivered by a real estate developer looking to expand his portfolio into the Arctic circle. It is tragic, it is cynical, and if you haven't started laughing yet, you simply aren't paying attention. I told you this would happen, but as usual, the world was too busy checking its stock portfolio to listen.