Welcome back to the annual high-altitude circle-jerk known as the World Economic Forum, where the air is thin, the ethics are thinner, and the private jet emissions are thick enough to choke a polar bear. In the pristine, snow-dusted purgatory of Davos, the world’s most expensive collection of carbon-based life forms has gathered to discuss the latest geopolitical dumpster fire: the Greenland Crisis. It is a spectacle of such profound, unadulterated stupidity that one begins to wonder if the melting permafrost is releasing ancient, brain-eating parasites into the Swiss water supply. This year’s theme might as well be 'How to Pretend We Aren’t All Hostages to a Real Estate Mogul’s Fever Dream.'

At the center of this farce is Rachel Reeves, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has taken upon herself the role of the primary school teacher attempting to soothe a classroom of pyromaniacs. Reeves is urging world leaders to keep 'cool heads' over Donald Trump’s latest tariff threats regarding Greenland. It is a quintessentially British performance: polite, utterly impotent, and drenched in the desperation of a nation that has spent the last decade setting its own hair on fire through Brexit, only to realize it now needs the neighbors’ garden hose. Reeves’ plea for 'cool heads' is the diplomatic equivalent of asking a Category 5 hurricane to please consider the structural integrity of a thatched roof. She represents a technocratic class that believes if they just use enough spreadsheets and measured tones, the sheer force of their boredom will cause the populist monsters to retreat. It won't.

Then we have Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission and the high priestess of bureaucratic inertia. Von der Leyen has labeled Trump’s proposed tariffs over Greenland an 'error.' One must admire the linguistic gymnastics required to use such a mild word for what is essentially a geopolitical shakedown. To call these tariffs an 'error' is like calling the sinking of the Titanic a 'minor navigational oversight.' The EU, in its infinite capacity for performative hand-wringing, remains convinced that the world operates on a 'rules-based order'—a charming fiction that everyone else stopped reading years ago. Von der Leyen stands there, a pillar of Brussels-grade marble, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the man on the other side of the Atlantic views 'rules' as things that happen to people who can’t afford better lawyers. The EU’s response is, as always, a mix of shocked indignation and the quiet realization that they have no real plan B other than 'asking the Americans to be nicer.'

Enter Scott Bessent, the incoming US Treasury Secretary and the designated gaslighter for the Trump administration. Bessent, with the smooth, oily confidence of a man who has spent far too long in the darker corners of the financial sector, has dismissed the idea of the 'nuclear option'—EU and UK countries dumping their holdings of US Treasuries—as 'hysterical.' He tells the world to 'take a deep breath' and 'let things play out.' This is the classic language of the institutional arsonist. He wants us to remain calm while he pours the gasoline, suggesting that the smoke we’re smelling is merely a figment of our collective 'hysteria.' Bessent’s insistence that the narrative is 'completely false' is a masterclass in the new American diplomacy: if the reality is inconvenient, simply declare the reality to be a hallucination. He mocks the panic of April 2nd, conveniently forgetting that panic is usually the only rational response to a global economy being treated like a game of Monopoly played by a toddler with a grudge.

The 'nuclear option'—the threat of the EU and UK dumping US Treasuries—is the ultimate empty threat. It is the economic equivalent of a suicide vest where the wearer and the target are the same person. Everyone in Davos knows this. The UK and the EU won't dump their Treasuries because their own withered economies are tethered to the US dollar like a sickly remora to a shark. If the shark dies, the remora is just a piece of floating trash. So they sit in their velvet chairs, eating five-star meals, and pretend they have leverage while the man who wants to buy an autonomous Danish territory with the same casualness one might use to buy a used Buick laughs at them from across the ocean.

This is the end state of global politics: a collection of grifters, dreamers, and dead-eyed bureaucrats arguing over the price of an ice cap while the world burns. The Right is represented by a bullying transactionalist who views nations as property; the Left is represented by performative moralists who have forgotten how to actually exercise power. And in the middle are the rest of us, watching as the 'nuclear option' becomes less of a financial metaphor and more of a geopolitical inevitability. Take a deep breath, Bessent says. I’d prefer to hold mine until the smell of the Davos hypocrisy fades, but that would take longer than the planet has left.