The news that troops and vessels from a motley crew of European NATO allies—Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, and the UK—have descended upon Greenland is the kind of geopolitical slapstick that would be funny if it weren’t so profoundly depressing. Welcome to the Arctic, the latest stage for humanity’s favorite pastime: marking territory on a sinking ship. While the rest of the planet grapples with the slow-motion car crash of civilizational collapse, these nations have decided that the best use of their dwindling resources is to send a few boats and some shivering teenagers to the far north to play a high-stakes game of 'I’m Not Touching You' with the horizon.

Let’s look at the roster of this illustrious Arctic expedition. We have the British, who are so desperate for a post-imperial hug that they’ll sail anywhere with a coastline, and the French, who undoubtedly view the Arctic’s melting ice as a metaphor for the tragic cooling of Gallic romance. Then there’s Germany, bringing their signature brand of humorless efficiency to a region that has absolutely no use for it. And of course, the newcomers to the NATO club, Sweden and Finland, who have spent decades pretending to be neutral only to sprint into the arms of the military-industrial complex the moment someone mentioned a Russian submarine. It is a collection of nations that can barely manage their own energy grids, yet they feel compelled to project power over a wasteland that is currently liquefying beneath their boots.

The deployment is officially described as 'limited,' which is military-speak for 'we don’t actually have a coherent plan, but we want to make sure we’re in the group photo.' They are congregating in Greenland, a massive, frozen expanse that is currently the focus of every greedy eye on the planet. Why? Because the ice is melting. We have reached the absolute pinnacle of human development: we have successfully heated the planet to the point of collapse, and our immediate response is to send warships to the newly accessible ruins to argue over who gets the rights to the minerals buried in the slush. It’s the ultimate vulture move—waiting for an ecosystem to die so we can pick its pockets.

It is a magnificent cycle of stupidity. We burn carbon, the ice melts, the shipping lanes open, and the military moves in to protect those shipping lanes so we can transport more things to burn. The Dutch are there too, presumably because they have a genetic predisposition to being near water, even if that water is currently in the process of reclaiming their own country. The Norwegians, meanwhile, are there to remind everyone that they were into the Arctic before it was cool—or rather, before it was warm. It’s a performance of sovereignty for an audience of polar bears that are too busy drowning to care about the finer points of international law.

The hypocrisy is thick enough to stop a nuclear-powered icebreaker. These nations present themselves as the vanguard of global stability, yet this deployment is nothing more than a high-stakes game of King of the Hill played on a hill that is literally turning into a swamp. They speak of security, but what they really mean is extraction. They are not there to protect Greenland; they are there to make sure that when the last glacier slides into the sea, they are the ones holding the lease for the oil rig that replaces it. The Right will hail this as a necessary stand against eastern encroachment—never mind that the encroachment is a direct result of the global market they worship. The Left will fret about the environmental impact while quietly being relieved that 'our side' is the one doing the colonizing this time. Both sides are equally delusional, trapped in a 20th-century mindset while the 21st century prepares to drown them.

Consider the logistics of this shambolic endeavor. Moving troops and vessels to Greenland isn't just an exercise in military readiness; it’s an exercise in vanity. The sheer amount of resources required to maintain a presence in such an inhospitable environment, all to counter a 'threat' that is largely a product of their own collective insecurity, is staggering. It’s a theater of the absurd where the actors are wearing Gore-Tex and carrying assault rifles, staring out over a horizon of icebergs that are shrinking faster than the European middle class. It is the military equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are destroyers and the iceberg has already won.

This isn’t a defense of the West; it’s an observation of its terminal decline. These allies are like a group of elderly neighbors arguing over who owns the lawnmower while the house is on fire. Greenland, once a remote curiosity, is now the front line of a desperate, pathetic scramble for relevance. We are witnessing the final act of the Great Game, and the punchline is that there are no winners. There is only a collection of cold, tired soldiers wondering why they’re guarding a glacier that won’t exist in fifty years, while the politicians back home congratulate themselves on another successful deployment. We are a species of monkeys fighting over a shrinking rock, and the Arctic is just the latest place where we’ve decided to prove it.