How to deal with a predator
They are men of a certain age, white, seemingly successful—if success is measured by bank accounts—and who share a predatory view of life, human relationships, and power. It's not always easy to quickly escape the clutches of a predator, and in the meantime, it's necessary to learn how to deal with those who are accustomed to buying or taking what they want. We're not going to talk about Julio Iglesias, but we will talk about Donald Trump. This is a lesson for Europe.
"How to Deal with a Predator" or "Arctic Laboratory" could be titles for this article. Freedom also has a price. Europe is trapped by language, but these new times demand action. Geopolitics doesn't work with declarations, but with muscle and deterrent capacity. And Greenland—that immense island that until recently only existed in Trivial Pursuit—has made that clear: if you depend on someone else to defend yourself, you also depend on someone else to exist politically.
The debate about the United States' interest in Greenland has been presented as normal: Arctic strategy, security, shipping lanes, Russia, China, radar. All of this is true. But it's also a pretext. What's new isn't that Washington is looking north; what's new is the predator's tone: when an ally speaks as if it has the right to decide on the territory of another ally, the problem is no longer the Arctic. The problem is Europe.
Europe can no longer do what it always has: invoke sovereignty and wait for someone else to guarantee it. Not anymore. Nor can it convince the 27 member states to cede sovereignty in terms of defense and foreign policy.
For years we've repeated "strategic autonomy" as if saying it granted it to us. But the truth is simpler: autonomy doesn't exist without four basic things: a brain, command, planning, and rapid decision-making. Muscles: available forces, air defense, ammunition, logistics. A factory or industry capable of production and replenishment, and finally, nerves: intelligence, space, cyber capabilities, critical infrastructure.
Europe has fragments of all this, yes. But it lacks the complete architecture. And without architecture, what you have is a collection of expensive parts and a structural dependency elegantly disguised.
It is no coincidence that when there is tension within NATO, it collapses. NATO is useful for deterring an external enemy; it is much less useful when the problem is political friction between partners. And when your first recourse is a mechanism that doesn't know how to handle internal crises, you have a design problem. Europe has donned the hat of responsibility and talks about percentages of GDP. NATO has raised the bar and adopted the 5% mantra. But spending more is not synonymous with being more free. If you spend more but buy from abroad, you are still dependent. If you spend more with 27 incompatible national priorities, you continue to fragment.
The debate over "buying European" makes Washington nervous because it touches a real nerve: business and control. The US wants Europe to shoulder more of the burden; everyone likes the idea of Europe deciding where to allocate its money and what industries it wants to have less. And it's even harder to guarantee the transparency of defense contracts that Europeans deserve. A Europe that buys from abroad is a Europe that doesn't manage its risk. And defense is about managing risk. If, in a crisis, supplies can be cut off, maintenance delayed, parts refurbished, and decisions forced, you don't have autonomy but rather polite dependence.
The EU has begun to move instruments of financing and joint procurement. But there's still a childish fear of saying aloud what is obvious: that a European defense industrial base is as political as a central bank.
Greenland is a warning: the umbrella comes with conditions.
The harshest message of all this is that the transatlantic alliance is not something natural; it is a variable political agreement. Political agreements change with elections, interests, moods, and psychiatric diagnoses. When an ally proves to be unpredictable, its system must have redundancy. And Europe, defensive redundancy, has little: it has a lot of dependency and solemn words.
The question today is who defends Europe when Europe is a nuisance. This is the question that Greenland brings to the fore. What happens when European and American interests diverge? To answer them, Europe runs the same old risk: turning a vital necessity into a PowerPoint diagnosis. More acronyms, more summits, more "strategies," and the void.
A more autonomous European architecture is a concrete list of absences to be filled. And the criterion is equally concrete: if tomorrow there is a crisis in which the US does not want to be at the center, can Europe act? If the answer is "it depends," the real answer is "no."
Greenland is not a mere anecdote. Europe still confuses being rich with being strong. And it confuses being right with being able to enforce it.
This is what is at stake: not just an island of ice, but the possibility that Europe, at last, will cease to be a protected space and become a mature actor. Therefore, it needs decision-making mechanisms for the actors who wish to participate in a structure of concentric circles and a representative system that favors the transfer of sovereignty not by handing it over to an irresponsible bureaucracy, but to clear and transparent political leadership.
