The world is a very strange stage, and the actors are getting worse at their jobs. Right now, we are watching a play that nobody asked for. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has packed her warmest coat and flown to Greenland. Why? Is she there to look at the pretty lights in the sky? No. She is there because a man across the ocean, who used to sell apartments and host a reality show, decided he wanted to buy a country. This is the state of our world. We have reached a point where a world leader has to fly thousands of miles just to tell a billionaire that he cannot put a gold tower on a glacier.

Let’s look at the facts, as boring as they are. For weeks, the President of the United States has been making noise. He looked at a map of the world and saw Greenland. He didn’t see a place where people live. He didn’t see a land with its own culture. He saw a big piece of real estate that was missing from his collection. He suggested that the United States should just buy it. He treated a whole nation like a used car or a slightly bruised banana. And because we live in a time of total madness, this was not treated as a joke. It was treated as a ‘diplomatic event.’

Now, Mette Frederiksen has to deal with the fallout. She is calling her trip a ‘show of support.’ In the world of politics, a ‘show of support’ is a very funny phrase. It usually means standing in the wind while people take pictures of you. It is a performance. It is meant to show that Denmark and Greenland are one big, happy family. But we all know how families work. They are usually messy, and they usually argue about money. Denmark likes having Greenland because it makes them look bigger on a map. Greenland likes Denmark’s money but would rather be left alone. And then Uncle Sam shows up with a checkbook and ruins the whole dinner party.

Mette’s visit is supposed to make everyone feel safe. She walks around, she meets local leaders, and she says very serious things about ‘strong bonds.’ But the irony is thick enough to choke on. She is defending a territory that Denmark has held onto like a dusty old trophy for hundreds of years. She is playing the role of the protector, but she is really just trying to stop the neighbors from stealing the lawn ornaments. It is a classic case of bureaucratic panic. When a property developer threatens your borders, you don’t call the police; you fly to the border and stand there until he looks away.

The most depressing part of this story is how simple it all is. There is no deep strategy here. There is no grand plan for the future of the Arctic. It is just ego. On one side, you have a man who thinks everything is for sale. On the other side, you have a woman who has to pretend that a ‘show of support’ is a real solution to a global crisis. It is a fight between a man who wants to buy the world and a woman who wants to keep her part of it exactly the way it is—cold, quiet, and under her control.

Think about the people who actually live in Greenland. They are watching this like people watching a tennis match where the ball is their own home. They have to listen to a man in Washington talk about them like they are a business deal. Then they have to listen to a woman from Copenhagen tell them how much she loves them, right after she spent years barely thinking about them. It must be exhausting to be the prize in such a silly game. They are caught between a landlord who wants to evict them and a parent who only visits when there is trouble.

This trip is the perfect example of how modern politics works. It is all about the ‘look.’ It doesn’t matter if anything actually changes. It only matters that the cameras see Mette in Greenland. It only matters that the headlines say she is being ‘strong.’ In reality, she is just one more person caught in the absurd theater of the twenty-first century. We are all just waiting for the next tweet or the next press release to tell us which part of the planet is up for auction next.

I told you this would happen. When we stop treating politics like a serious job and start treating it like a shopping trip, this is what we get. We get Prime Ministers flying into the frozen north to protect ice from a man who probably can’t even find it on a map without help. It is a comedy, but nobody is laughing because we are all stuck in the audience. Mette will go home, the ice will stay cold, and the man in the red hat will find something else to try and buy. And we will all sit here, watching the world melt, wondering when the grown-ups are coming back to take charge. Spoilers: they aren't.