Greenland exists.
That should not be a controversial statement, but apparently it is. So let’s say it plainly, twice if necessary: Greenland exists.
By historical accident more than deliberate design, Greenland is Danish. Which means Denmark holds responsibility for it—legal, administrative, moral. And from a strictly Danish perspective, “taking care of Greenland” appears straightforward, even virtuous. It means running buses, delivering mail, connecting the internet, staffing welfare offices, providing education, mental health services, supermarkets, and social workers. It means governance as Denmark understands governance: calm, procedural, empathetic, civilized.
From Copenhagen, this looks like stewardship.
Denmark even hosts a small American military presence on Greenland. A polite arrangement. A base with a few hundred personnel. Danish officials visit, exchange emails, debate environmental standards, agree on cleanup targets scheduled comfortably years into the future. Everything is courteous. Everything is regulated. Everything is deferred.
And meanwhile, something else is happening—quietly, publicly, and without ambiguity.
Kobold Metals, among others, has published its intentions. There is no secrecy here. The plan is not symbolic extraction or boutique mining. It is industrial-scale strip mining across large portions of Greenland’s coastline—dozens of sites, each requiring ports, transport corridors, permanent infrastructure, and continuous year-round operation.
This is not compatible with seasonal logistics or artisanal energy solutions. Each site would require enormous, stable power generation. In the foreseeable future, that would strongly suggest to me the implementation of these new nuclear reactors, because oil is not going to cut it. Multiple reactors, maybe Hyperion analogue or Thorium.
There is a glaring paradign difference between what the societal model is Denmark envisions versus what the corporate predators from down south have in mind.
On one side: Denmark managing a population of roughly fifty thousand people, grappling—sincerely and often compassionately—with high suicide rates among Inuit communities, commissioning reports, hosting listening sessions, funding cultural programs, and amplifying respected local voices. Environmental remediation proceeds carefully. Every action is weighed, documented, reviewed, and regulated. It’s all full of dignity and diversity and sustainability and woke.
On the other side of the Alantic divide: extraction plans on the scale of Cold War Siberia, driven not by ideology but by Draconian necessity.
Denmark—and much of Europe alongside it—now cosplays relevance, increasingly resembling a Madame Tussauds wax museum: procedurally immaculate, meticulously lifelike, and functionally as impotent as a castrated Soprano in the real world. This is not because Europe is evil. Nor because Denmark is retarded or anything. It is because Europe governs on moral time, while the world is now operating on debt time. It is a bit as if Denmark is the Shire in Lord of the Rings and the US is Sauron.
So yes – across the Atlantic, the situation is different—brutally so. So why is that the case?
The United States has spent nearly a century living beyond its means on a near methamphetamine binge state, subsidized by the rest of the world: by petrostates recycling dollars, by Asian exporters parking surpluses in Treasuries, by its own aging population consuming promises made decades earlier. The number—forty trillion dollars right now early 2026, give or take—is abstract only until it isn’t.
What matters is not the total, but the structure. The United States has built an institutional and consumption machine that cannot be wound down to anything approximate “sane”or “sustainable” quickly. Military spending, entitlements, pensions, healthcare, infrastructure, bureaucracy, corporate dependencies—all of it must be fed this year. Not next decade. Not after reform. This calendar year.
To the tune of over two trillion dollars annually. We are talking 2026, or else. And while we are at it, for some reason *smirk* Trump actually wants to increase the military budget by another half a Tril annually. Sure, pal, have another snort while you’re at it.
Anyways … what money does not exist. It must be borrowed.
But borrowing is no longer frictionless. Old debt matures. New debt must replace it. In recent years alone, roughly ten trillion dollars in U.S. debt has needed “refinancing”. Treasuries are issued, rolled over, reissued—an elegant abstraction until confidence wavers.
The United States can “create dollars”, yes. But it cannot repay creditors with belief alone. No, the US is not yet a Clown Car. At some point, money must anchor itself to assets, productivity, leverage, or control.
And this is where Greenland stops being a moral responsibility and becomes a balance sheet. Or, as we would say in common parlance …
…..Enter the wolves.
Them wolves are not cartoon villains. They are investors, commodity firms, defense contractors, energy interests, geopolitical realists. They do not whisper anymore. They howl. They demand speed, scale, certainty. Because if the music stops—if refinancing falters, if confidence breaks—there are no chairs left.
And then everything collapses.
Donald Trump, in this story, is not some insidious Doctor Evil mastermind. He is not even particularly important, smart nor does he have magical powers. He is a very strange middleman with zero conscience, perfectly suited to the role history assigned him. He is simply a carnival barker that appeared out of nowhere that could work miracles with just enough electoral base to generate just enough support to engender just enough momentum to make this avalanche happen. He does not care what gets devoured, only that he does not have to sit down when the music stops. He just doesn’t want to go to prison, he just doesn’t want to something something involving PDF files.
Trump is little more than a potted fern in the oval office that facilitates. In all likelyhood every morning and every week Trump gets a wishlist from his Agenda 25 pals and then he addlibs like a jazz musician, with his particular set of skills, and sometimes he still surprises the guys in the smokefilled room. In terms of screwing up situations and still succeeding Trump is self-evidently some kind of idiot savant with a many decade track record. He clears obstacles. Not out of ideology, but sociopathic indifference. In fact, Trump might be the most of a total jerk Chauncey Gardener thinkable. “Being Berk” as it were.
Trump never had much of a perspective on “Greenland”. Someone had to take some time to explain to him Greenland. I can imagine how much time it took them to explain to him the actual size of Greenland on a Mercator projection. Then someone had to explain to him the concept of Denmark, and the concept of Boats. Greenland, from this perspective, is not a homeland, nor a community, nor an ecosystem. It is a really weird real estate deal that might one day have heated indoor golf courses.
And then “over there” is this strange hypotheticak Denmark—morally earnest, procedurally impeccable, governing like a geriatric mausoleum—running psychotherapy sessions, filing environmental reports, and listening patiently as history gathers outside the door. If we filter that through the Kobold algorithm, it doesn’t even register. The tragedy is not that the wolves exist.
The tragedy is that we pretended they wouldn’t come.