Spooky times, let's hope things fizzle out back to a rule based Pax Americana.

Edit: Interestingly, the likelyhood of things fizzling out would jump up quite a bit if Trump or Putin were to die. I think the US system of government is prone to electing Trumps, but it's not a given, I think the cult of personality would die and things would relax for now.

The entire world is just rooting for Father Time on this particular problem.

The "rules based" model that the EU promulgated only worked in the 1990s-2000s when we lived in a unipolar world where the US and the EU represented the bulk of global production and those 5 countries had the economic power to successfully negotiate or pushback against the US.

The rise of Asian economies, EU expansion leading to the inclusion of hybrid regimes like Hungary and Poland under PiS who monkeywrenched procedural work within the EU, and the EU+UK's lost decade due to the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit degraded their comparative power.

Additionally, countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, etc also began strategically leveraging FDI in order to negotiate with subsets of EU states unilaterally, which reduced the EU's aggregate negotiating power.

Edit: Can't reply

> Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it?

Access to markets and capital along with defending IP are predicated on mutually agreeing to those terms. When the EU (then including the UK) was at it's peak in the 2000s, it was able to drive favorable IP protection and market access agreeements to help underwrite innovation. The European "rules-based" system also eschewed large scale subsidized industrial policy, viewing these as potentially accelerating trade wars.

This is less true now in the 2020s, with countries like the US, China, Japan, India, and others adopting large scale industrial policy and subsidy programs (IRA/CHIPS, Make in China, GX 2040, PLI) and co-opting pillars of European industry like Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis, Renault, ZF, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Dassault, Airbus, Leonardo, Safran, Rolls Royce, Siemens, EDF, TotalEnergie, etc to join these programs on their terms and having them lobby for their interests in Brussels.

> I think the main "culprit" is energy

Industrial energy prices in Europe only began spiking in 2022 following Russia's escalation of it's invasion in Ukraine (it started back in 2014). The trends I mentioned began all the way back in 2007-12 when energy prices were at all time lows.

Europe is setting up a tripwire force because they know from the past that lunatic ramblings of a leader should be taken serious.

I wonder how to survive? Nomad lifestyle?

No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.

Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.

We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.

What do you mean? Only one country is threatening Greenland/Denmark/EU with military actions directed against the sovereignty of Greenland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/07/brief-history-...

I suspect the main limit is that nobody wants to be deployed in a dull frozen wasteland for very long.

These kinds of joint exercises are pretty common and largely symbolic.

(The wikipedia page about this contains blatant partisan propaganda. Gross.)

How many "ppls" did Afghanistan deploy, long-term, against TWO different superpowers, with only discreet, behind-the-scenes support from other nations?

Invasion and control of another country that has more than paleolithic technology is pretty damned hard. Harder than anyone who attempst it ever guesses. ("They will welcome us as liberators!" - the stupidest thing ever said by a pre-Trump POTUS.)

It's even harder if a majority of the invading population hates the idea, and a significant part of the military doubt the constitutionality of their orders.

Oh, and two nuclear powers would be openly defending Greenland.

It would be cheaper and more popular to pile $9B in bills on the National Mall and set them ablaze.

Scenario 2: US troops land and would now have to deal with some NATO soldiers.

Regardless of how many NATO soldiers we're talking about, the geopolitical stakes in S2 are orders of magnitude higher than in S1. And so is the political backlash, problems at home, reasons for other nations to respond, etc.

So yes, these few troops, being there, in an official capacity as a NATO deployment no less, matters. Alot.

I'm genuinely questioning your mentality in using this term. It sounds like something Fox News would say.

Why jump directly to conclusions ? Just take some popcorn and enjoy the development. From my POV the whole "show" looks a lot like a cheap porno with a gangbang at the end. /s

This is especially the case when the tripwire force is deployed by a nuclear power on the territory of a non-nuclear power facing a conventional threat from a nuclear power.