Welcome to the annual congregation of the world’s most sanctimonious parasites. Welcome to Davos, the high-altitude playground where the global elite gather in a cloud of private jet exhaust to lecture the peasantry on the virtues of eating bugs and owning nothing. It is here, amidst the thin air and even thinner moral fibers of the Swiss Alps, that the American President has arrived to remind the European collective that the world isn’t a community of nations—it’s a foreclosure auction. The 'deep worries' currently permeating the Alpine breeze aren’t about human rights, global stability, or the impending heat death of the planet. No, the global power-brokers are in a state of collective cardiac arrest because Donald Trump decided he wanted to buy Greenland.

In the mind of the American President, the world is not a complex tapestry of historical grievances and diplomatic nuances. It is a Monopoly board where someone forgot to put hotels on the big white space at the top of the map. The European alliance, that fragile construct of post-war guilt and mutual economic desperation, is currently reeling. They have spent decades building a 'liberal world order' based on 'norms,' 'values,' and 'polite consensus,' only to realize that their primary guarantor of security treats sovereign territory like a distressed asset in Atlantic City. The panic is palpable. It is the sound of thousands of overpaid bureaucrats realizing that their rulebooks are being used as coasters for a man who thinks the Art of the Deal applies to tectonic plates.

The Greenland saga is the perfect microcosm of our modern idiocy. On one side, you have a real estate developer who views a semi-autonomous Danish territory as a strategic fix-er-upper. On the other, you have the Danish government and the broader European Union, who are absolutely appalled—not necessarily by the naked greed, but by the lack of decorum. They would be perfectly happy to exploit Greenland’s vast mineral resources themselves, provided it was done through a three-year committee study, six rounds of focus groups, and a series of politely worded environmental impact reports. Trump’s sin, in their eyes, isn’t wanting the land; it’s being loud about it. He has committed the ultimate Davos sin: he has said the quiet part out loud.

This 'all-hands effort' to de-escalate tensions is perhaps the funniest diplomatic theater of the century. Imagine the absurdity of world leaders, people who supposedly control the levers of global finance and nuclear arsenals, having to huddle in wood-paneled rooms to figure out how to explain to a billionaire that 'No, you cannot buy a country.' It is a diplomatic daycare center. The Danes have already called the idea 'absurd,' a word that has lost all meaning in a world where we let teenagers set economic policy and octogenarians run the militaries. In retaliation for being told 'no,' Trump canceled a state visit and called the Danish Prime Minister 'nasty.' This is the peak of human intellectual evolution. This is what thousands of years of philosophy, science, and bloody conflict have led to: a petulant real estate dispute over a frozen island that is melting anyway.

The irony, of course, is that while the Davos crowd hand-wrings over the 'erosion of alliances,' they are the ones who paved the way for this entropy. For years, the European elite has looked down its collective nose at American 'uncouthness' while happily cashing the checks and hiding under the American security umbrella. Now that the umbrella is being wielded by someone who wants to use it to poke them in the eye, they have suddenly rediscovered the sacred importance of 'traditional diplomacy.' It is a farce. The alliance isn’t being destroyed by a real estate offer; it’s being exposed as the hollow, transactional shell it has always been. Both sides are equally grotesque: one side wants to maintain a polite, orderly facade while the world burns; the other wants to sell the ashes to the highest bidder.

We are witnessing the final, pathetic wheeze of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, nations were bought and sold with the stroke of a pen—the Louisiana Purchase, the sale of Alaska. We called it 'manifest destiny' or 'grand strategy.' Today, we call it a 'diplomatic crisis' because we’ve wrapped our primitive tribalism in the tinfoil of international law. Trump is simply the man who stripped the tinfoil away, revealing the raw, ugly machinery underneath. He is the mirror that the Davos ghouls cannot stand to look into, because he reflects their own rapaciousness without the benefit of a Harvard degree or a bespoke suit.

As the private jets warm up their engines for the flight home, leaving another massive carbon footprint on the glacier, the 'U.S.-European alliance' will likely survive through some word-salad communique. They’ll find a way to phrase a document that sounds like they’ve reached a 'mutual understanding of shared interests.' But the mask is off. The world isn't a community of nations; it's a high-stakes real estate market, and the only thing more depressing than the man trying to buy the North Pole is the collection of grifters trying to pretend the sale isn't already underway. No one is coming to save the alliance, because the alliance was always just a business arrangement where the partners finally started hating each other's guts.