Dear Europe: Put Up or Shut Up
Published at 08:22 on 20 January 2026
You promise an unflinching and united response should Trump decide to seize Greenland by force. Soon you will have to deliver one.
Because of course you will. Trump’s entire life, starting as a small child born into extreme wealth and privilege, has taught him that in a bourgeois society all men are not created equal, and that the children of privilege like himself can personally profit by being a liar, a bully, a cheat, and an overall scoundrel. And he has profited like few men in history have.
His entire life has taught him that he can seize Greenland and not only get away with it, but personally profit from it. So of course he will at least make a serious attempt at it. No other course of action is even remotely plausible. Sorry.
At that point, it becomes up to Europe to put up or shut up. If they choose the former, there is a chance — actually a fairly good chance — of engaging TACO mode, much like China did in response to Trump’s tariffs.
If they choose the latter, kiss Greenland goodbye. And then Canada comes next.
And you can spare me any thought of pushback from Republicans stopping this internally before the Europeans have to stop it externally. Rule No. 1 violation. Not gonna happen.
The world let Trump get away with Venezuela, and the lesson Trump took from this is that he can get away with subjugating Denmark and Greenland, too.
The proper reaction to what Trump did to Maduro would have been something along the lines of what Churchill alluded to when he once said, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” But for the most part that didn’t happen so here we are.
Maybe it will matter more this time. Greenland is full of brown people but Denmark as a whole is a first-world country full of white people, so if it matters more this time, that, and not any lofty principles about national sovereignty, will be the real reason behind it all. But we have to take our resistance to fascism however we find it; it is an imperfect world.