There is something deliciously prehistoric about the way Donald Trump approaches the map of the world. He doesn't see borders; he sees property lines. He doesn't see sovereign states; he sees stubborn tenants or undervalued assets. And now, the great orange developer has cast his eye northward once again, toward the vast, icy expanse of Greenland. But fear not, dear Europeans, for he has issued a decree of such staggering benevolence that one can almost hear the sighs of relief echoing from Nuuk to Copenhagen: he won’t use force. Truly, we are living in an age of miracles, where the restraint of a property mogul is the only thing standing between a peaceful Nordic territory and a fleet of gold-plated landing craft.

To clarify that one will not invade a founding member of NATO to acquire its territory is the kind of diplomatic breakthrough one expects from a particularly aggressive game of Risk played by toddlers. It is a statement that occupies the narrow, sunless valley between a threat and a joke. By explicitly ruling out a military annexation, Trump implies that the option was, at some point, sitting on a gilded mahogany desk between a Diet Coke and a stack of classified documents. It suggests that the Pentagon had perhaps been asked to simulate a paratrooper drop onto an ice sheet, only to be told to stand down because the 'closing costs' were too high. This is the surgical precision of the modern American ego: it calculates the cost of an invasion and decides that a simple purchase order is more cost-effective. It is manifest destiny reimagined as a leveraged buyout.

The Danes, those sensible, bicycle-riding practitioners of social democracy, are understandably bewildered. To them, Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory with its own culture, a resilient population, and a rather inconvenient melting problem. To Trump, it is a fixer-upper with a fantastic view of the Arctic Circle and enough strategic minerals to make a billionaire weep with joy. The clash is more than political; it is ontological. Denmark operates in the realm of international law and post-war stability. Trump operates in the realm of 'The Art of the Deal,' where everything has a price, and a refusal to sell is merely a preamble to a higher bid—or, in this case, a promise not to send in the Marines. The sheer historical illiteracy required to treat a sovereign nation’s territory like a distressed commercial property in Queens is, in its own twisted way, a work of art.

One can only imagine the bureaucratic nightmare of such a transaction. How does one value a glacier in a warming world? Does one pay in Treasury bonds, or perhaps a lifetime membership to Mar-a-Lago for every Greenlandic citizen? The administrative incompetence required to even propose this—let alone revisit it with the solemnity of a papal bull—is breathtaking. It is the hallmark of a political era that has abandoned the pretense of statecraft in favor of the aesthetic of the hostile takeover. We are no longer governed by leaders; we are managed by landlords who have lost their sense of scale and their sense of shame. It is the logical conclusion of a world where everything is a commodity: the land, the ice, and the very concept of national sovereignty are all just entries on a balance sheet.

I told you so, of course. For years, we have watched the slow-motion collapse of the West’s intellectual dignity, and yet people are still surprised when the leader of the free world treats a subarctic landmass like a development site for a luxury hotel. The irony is as thick as the permafrost. The United States cannot even manage its own crumbling infrastructure or its fractious domestic theater, yet it feels entitled to browse the catalogs of other nations for additional square footage. It is the height of imperial senescence—a dying empire trying to buy its way into a new lease on life by acquiring a giant ice cube.

Greenland remains, for now, not a resort, but a reminder of how close we are to the edge of total absurdity. The reassurance that force won't be used is the final, mocking twist of the knife. It tells us that we should be grateful for the mercy of a man who thinks he owns the horizon. We Europeans, who have seen empires rise and fall with the regularity of the tides, can only watch with a mixture of horror and exhausted amusement. The theater is collapsing, the actors have forgotten their lines, and the lead performer is trying to buy the stage while it is still on fire. It would be funny if it weren't so pathologically predictable. We are witnessing the final, grandiloquent shrug of a civilization that has run out of ideas and is settling for real estate speculation instead.