I find myself, once again, staring into the abyss of the morning news cycle, only to find the abyss is staring back and asking for a down payment on a tectonic plate. It is truly a marvel to witness the current state of trans-Atlantic relations, which has devolved from a sophisticated geopolitical partnership into a dispute between a belligerent landlord and a group of tenants who haven't realized their building is being condemned. At the center of this latest circus is Donald Trump, a man who views the world not as a complex web of histories and cultures, but as a series of distressed assets waiting for a rebranding. His recent escalations with European allies over Greenland and the Gaza 'board of peace' are not just diplomatic blunders; they are the logical conclusion of a world run by people who have replaced statecraft with a Monopoly board.

Let’s start with Greenland. The sheer audacity of the American President demanding to purchase a semi-autonomous territory from Denmark is a stroke of satirical genius that I couldn't have written better myself. It is the ultimate expression of the American id—the belief that everything, including several hundred thousand square miles of melting ice and the people living on it, has a price tag. But let’s not pretend the Danish response is fueled by some noble sense of sovereignty. The Danes are 'horrified' because their sense of national pride is as fragile as a piece of Royal Copenhagen porcelain. They treat Greenland like a dusty, expensive heirloom in the attic—they don’t really know what to do with it, they certainly don’t want to pay for its upkeep, but the moment someone offers to take it off their hands for a profit, they start clutching their pearls and shrieking about 'dignity.' Dignity, in the European context, is usually just a lack of liquid assets. They are a continent of museum curators pretending they still run the world, while they rely on the very man they despise to keep the lights on and the Russians at bay.

Then we have the Gaza 'board of peace' situation. Trump’s 'bellicose demands' for European participation in his Middle Eastern peace efforts are a masterclass in unwanted invitations. It’s like being invited to a housewarming party at a house that is currently on fire. The Europeans, of course, are terrified. They love to talk about peace; they love to hold conferences in expensive hotels and issue 'deeply concerned' press releases from the safety of their five-week mandatory vacations. But the moment they are asked to actually participate in a plan—no matter how ham-fisted or transactional it might be—they retreat into a shell of bureaucratic proceduralism. They don't want a solution to Gaza any more than they want a solution to Greenland; they want a status quo that allows them to maintain a perpetual moral high ground without ever having to get their hands dirty. They view Trump’s involvement as a vulgar intrusion into their carefully curated world of polite, eternal failure.

What we are witnessing is the final, pathetic wheeze of the trans-Atlantic alliance. On one side, you have the American Right, led by a man who thinks he can flip a geopolitical conflict like a condo in Atlantic City. On the other, you have the European establishment, a collection of performative moralists who are so obsessed with 'norms' and 'alliances' that they’ve forgotten these things are supposed to actually achieve something. The 'worries' about the fate of the alliance are hilarious to me. What alliance? The one where America pays the bills and Europe provides the condescending commentary? That’s not an alliance; that’s a toxic relationship that should have ended in the nineties. Trump is simply the loud, obnoxious divorce lawyer who has decided to start selling off the furniture before the papers are even signed.

There is no hero in this story. There is no 'adult in the room.' There is only a reality TV star trying to buy the North Pole and a group of European bureaucrats who are so addicted to their own perceived sophistication that they would rather drown in a rising tide of ice-melt than admit they’ve become irrelevant. The tragedy isn't that the alliance is deepening its worries; the tragedy is that we are expected to care about the feelings of people who have turned global politics into a vanity project. Whether Greenland is sold or Gaza is 'fixed' by a board of real estate moguls is almost irrelevant. The real story is the absolute intellectual bankruptcy of the people we’ve put in charge. I’ll be over here, watching the ice melt, waiting for the next 'escalation' to distract us from the fact that the ship has already hit the iceberg, and both sides are arguing over who gets to keep the deck chairs.