The update aligns with Donald Trump's order that the body be referred to as the Gulf of America.

Google Maps (GOOGL) has updated the name for the “Gulf Of Mexico,” now calling it the “Gulf of America” following President Donald Trump’sorder changing the name recognized by the U.S. government.

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California-based internet giant says the name of the body of water will depend on location of the user.

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When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

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Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

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For a moment, the threat of guac-ocalypse loomed over America. Had President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada gone into effect, the prices of avocados and tomatoes would have skyrocketed in the approach to Super Bowl Sunday. Trump may be bluffing about his willingness to start a trade war, but the grace period he negotiated with those nations lasts just 30 days. Yesterday he said that he would announce tariffs on even more countries—he didn’t specify which—in the coming week. Soon, Americans could again be clutching our guacamole.

If the tariffs Trump has threatened do go into effect, they would quickly raise the prices not just of avocados but of strawberries, cucumbers, bell peppers, oranges, countless processed foods, and other grocery staples that are already becoming less affordable for many people. Any pain that tariffs cause American consumers would—in Trump’s view, which he boomed on Truth Social—be only a temporary bump on the road to “THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA.” Implicit in that idea—and the reality of an actual trade war—is the assumption that the U.S. can make up for any lost imports on its own. Trump’s stance on agriculture is the same as his stance on everything else: “America First.”

The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system would promote eating seasonally and locally, supporting more small farmers in the process. But that is not how most people eat now. Eating America First would restrict the variety that shoppers have come to expect; eating fresh blueberries year-round would be impossible. Barring the overhaul of all U.S. agriculture, it would mean a less healthy diet, too. The guac-ocalypse near miss was a reminder of the precarious state of our food system: Much of the food we want is not produced at home.

Trump’s tariffs may amount to nothing but political posturing. During his first term, he threatened Mexico with a 5 percent tariff, then backed off two weeks later. The current grace period could extend indefinitely. But an actual trade war would have a dramatic impact on the food supply. Avocados are a perfect case study. The national obsession is staggering: In 2023, the average person ate more than nine pounds of them—roughly equivalent to 27 average-size fruit. More than 90 percent of the avocados Americans buy come from Mexico; they are the nation’s top import in terms of value, Luis Ribera, an agricultural-economics professor at Texas A&M University, told me. Because they are much more expensive than, say, bananas, the effect of a 25 percent tariff (plus its associated costs) would be more significant: A small Hass avocado worth 50 cents might go to $1.50, Ribera said. Avocado-dependent businesses would feel it, too. A Chipotle representative told me that tariffs would certainly raise prices.

The America First perspective frames tariffs as an opportunity to boost domestic production. Roughly 10 percent of avocados available in America are grown here; the majority come from California, and Florida and Hawaii make up the remainder. Zach Conrad, a food-systems expert at the College of William & Mary, ticked off a multitude of reasons domestic production could not re-create our current avocado bounty. Avocados grow in too few areas of the U.S., and on top of that, they largely produce fruit only from spring to early fall. Trump’s immigration policies threaten the already dwindling farm-labor workforce.

Avocados aside, the U.S. does already produce enough food to feed itself, and then some. About 4,000 calories’ worth of food a day were available for each person in 2010, according to the USDA’s most recent estimate; that year, the average person consumed 2,500 calories a day. But food is more than just calories. The U.S. produces plenty of grains, oils, sweeteners, and meat, but far less fresh produce and legumes; in recent years, the country has become a net importer of food. “The food group that we produce the least of to meet our dietary needs is fruits and vegetables,” Conrad said. In 2022, 69 percent of the fresh vegetables and 51 percent of the fresh fruits imported by the U.S. came from Mexico. Meat, canola oil, and, uh, biscuits and wafers account for most of the U.S. imports from Canada, but 20 percent of this country’s fresh-vegetable imports come from there, too.

Theoretically, America could grow all of its own produce. But that would require a complete remaking of the food system. More land would have to be dedicated to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and less of it to grains and sweeteners. It would also mean addressing labor shortages, increasing the number of farmers, finding suitable land, and building new infrastructure to process and ship each new crop.

Every one of these issues is incredibly complex. Many fruits and vegetables are so delicate that they must be harvested by hand, so machines can’t supplement human labor. A wheat farmer can’t just switch to growing tomatoes; specialty crops—a category that includes any fruit, vegetable, or tree nut—require specialty knowledge as well as specialty equipment, which can cost millions. Solving all of these problems—which would likely be impossible—would take many years, Conrad said.

Cutting off Canada would have subtler but no less extensive effects than abstaining from Mexican produce. Grains, beef, and pork are produced domestically, but sourcing them abroad can be less expensive, Chris Barrett, a professor who specializes in agricultural economics at Cornell University, told me. Demand for beef on the West Coast of the U.S., for instance, can be cheaper to fulfill from the Canadian prairies than from an East Coast packinghouse. Canada’s other big contribution to the American diet is canola oil, which is produced stateside in relatively small amounts. The ongoing campaign against seed oils, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., may claim that Americans would be better off without canola oil, but for now, America runs on processed food. Without cheap canola oil from Canada, many frozen foods and packaged goods will cost more. “That excellent ratatouille you get in a can, even if you think it’s healthy, probably contains a bit of imported oil. It’s going to get priced up, ” Barrett said.

The problems with an America First food system wouldn’t just be about cost. It would lack diversity: There would be no tropical fruits such as mangoes and coconuts, and far fewer specialty varieties, such as Sumo Citrus and Meyer lemons, because domestic growers would have to focus on the basics. Given the current emphasis on meat, grains, and sweeteners,  it would encourage a less healthy diet, too. Striving toward the “Make America healthy again” ideal pushed by RFK Jr. would be made more difficult with fewer choices and higher prices. As my colleague Nicholas Florko wrote recently, people buy food on the basis of taste, convenience, and cost. America could supply its entire population with a healthy diet, as Conrad’s research has shown, but not without totally blowing up its agricultural priorities.

The notion of an America First food supply—harvesting homegrown produce, eating seasonally, supporting farmers—does align with the idea of returning to a pastoral era, which has been embraced by RFK Jr.’s supporters, raw-milk drinkers, and farmers’-market devotees across the political spectrum. “It’s a nice way of thinking about food,” Conrad said. But it just doesn’t align with the reality of how Americans currently eat. Every time we go to the grocery store, we choose from a marvelous variety of foods from around the world. A McDonald’s hamburger with fries, that most American of meals, is made with sesame seeds from Mexico and canola oil from Canada. That eating vatfuls of guacamole every year in the middle of February is a pillar of American culture is a testament to our interdependence with our neighbors.

President Donald Trump’s promise—and subsequent executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America displayed a showman’s flair for branding.

Today Trump could take that showmanship a step further when Air Force One flies him across the Gulf of Mexico from his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, to New Orleans for the Super Bowl. Trump is considering a plan in which, as the plane crosses the gulf, he will bring the group of reporters traveling with him—known as the “pool”—up to a different cabin, where he plans to highlight his proposed name change, according to two people familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity to discuss closely held details.

No matter that Trump has already floated “Gulf of America” during the election, mentioned it during his inaugural address—“a short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he said to applause—and signed an executive order doing as much in his Day One batch of directives. He and his team are still discussing this as a Super Bowl Sunday stunt, like the producers of Rocky trying to squeeze one last sequel out of an aging franchise. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

During his first term, Trump regularly visited the press cabin of Air Force One, and occasionally brought the pool up to his personal cabin to chat, playing the role of consummate host. Once, he invited reporters to join him in watching a recording of a Democratic presidential primary debate, offering color commentary throughout.

And as Trump likely understands, the only way to compete with the Super Bowl and its color commentary this evening is to offer a little bit of a pre-game show himself.

Trump has generally offered an isolationist—“America First”—worldview. But since his return to the White House, the president has nodded to the idea of expansionism as well. In addition to promising to take back the Panama Canal, Trump has also talked about acquiring Greenland and teased about making Canada the 51st state. When pressed by reporters, he has refused to rule out the use of military or economic force in his efforts to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal.

But so far, at least, his decrees to rename the Gulf of Mexico have prompted as much mockery as they have intimidation. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat, yesterday posted on social media that while Trump “is busy unilaterally renaming bodies of water down south, thought we’d get started up in New England”—alongside a map of the eastern seaboard, with “Gulf of Rhode Island” crudely written across the Atlantic Ocean in black marker. And on Friday, Democrat JB Pritzker posted a faux-serious “important announcement from the Governor of Illinois,” in which he deadpanned that, after much study, the world’s finest geographers believe that a Great Lake needs to be named after a great state, which is why “hereinafter, Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois.”

With Trump, the line between jokes and true policy can be difficult to discern. But today, at least—and fittingly for Super Bowl Sunday—spectacle seems to be the point.   

Taking stock of your life can be simpler when you’re half a world away from home. For Tove Jansson, arguably Finland’s most famous writer of the 20th century, a vacation in 1971 marked an unexpected turn following a tumultuous year. After more than two decades of acclaim thanks to her fictional creatures, the Moomins, Jansson, then 57, was on the brink of potential burnout. Instead of coasting on her reputation as a beloved children’s author, she was trying something new, writing novels for adults. In the middle of this career pivot, in 1970, her mother died, compounding Jansson’s feeling that her life was changing irrevocably. “I am going around in a great sense of unreality, calm, but so alien,” she wrote to friends. She needed an escape.

That vacation—culminating in a long trip to the United States—upended her outlook on the balance of work and life, as well as on the key subject of her fiction: a sense of home. Throwing out a packed work schedule, Jansson submerged herself in not only an entirely new landscape, but also an alien culture undergoing post-’60s social upheaval. This experience changed the tenor of her work, and it helped her become the author Americans continue to discover more than 50 years later.

Though Jansson’s global fame still derives from those cheeky Moomins captured in comics and illustrated novels, her books for adults are rich and complex, revealing the stickiness of human coexistence. Jansson conveys a wry, layered empathy rooted in her Nordic traditions, informed by her queerness, and tested by her encounters with American morals and migratory habits. Thanks to a steady parade of recent reissues with introductions by Ali Smith, Lauren Groff, and others, this mature work has quietly developed a readership in the United States. A recent film adaptation of her sweet autobiographical novel The Summer Book may win new converts, but true enthusiasts will seize on the latest rerelease, Sun City, which explores an aspect of American life—the isolation of the aging—that often goes unseen.

Before her American journey, Jansson had been living a life both idyllic and in many ways restricting. She’d been raised by well-known Finnish Swedish artists and remained inseparable from them, leaving art school in Stockholm at 19 to return home to Helsinki, where she would continue her education while writing and creating commercial artwork to better support her family. By 1970, she was tending to her aging mother, Ham, and in a relationship with her longtime partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, that was technically illegal. In Helsinki, the couple lived separately in neighboring studios, though they spent summers in a house on the island of Klovharun, where they could live together in relative privacy. Within a year of Ham’s death, homosexuality was decriminalized in Finland. Jansson felt as though a chapter of her life had ended.

Fulfilling an old dream, Jansson and Pietilä took an eight-month journey. Beginning with a business trip to Japan, they gradually made their way to the continental United States. In New Orleans, Jansson completed The Summer Book, which idealized her spartan life on Klovharun. The next book she wrote, mostly after returning from the U.S., couldn’t be more different: Sun City depicted a Florida retirement home with none of the sentimental warmth of Finland.

[Read: What you should be reading this summer]

Sun City was inspired by a stay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the couple had gone to see the ship used in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. Charmed by the town during what was supposed to be a short visit, the couple checked into a guesthouse called the Butler Arms. The perspective of distance, the novelty of the southern United States, and the break from routine presented unexpected creative gifts.

What began as a short story evolved into a novel about loneliness and contrived community. Sun City renders St. Petersburg as a place where “streets lie empty in their perpetual sunshine.” Setting the novel in the fictionalized Berkeley Arms, Jansson follows people on the margins who are reaching the end of their life without strong communal ties. Residents have drifted from all over the country into this boardinghouse arrangement. Among these loners, miscommunication abounds and short tempers flare. One guest tearfully reflects, “Distrust was a poison that made a person shrink up and lose all contact with real life.” This false Eden, sunny but stark, feels like a photonegative of Jansson’s cozy but rugged Klovharun (lovingly rendered in another recent reissue, the nonfictional Notes From an Island).

Sun City operates as a series of vignettes without a strong unifying plot—appropriate for a work about idiosyncratic humans who may share a pretty veranda lined with rocking chairs but occupy hermetically sealed worlds of their own. A proud woman named Rebecca Rubinstein dines alone with a cab running its fare outside the restaurant. She muses about her fellow residents: “We are also afraid, but we don’t show it, and we don’t open up to anyone. Our bodies no longer express anything. We have to get along entirely with words, nothing but words.”

Americans are often said to prize their personal space, but from Jansson’s perspective, the distance among these residents is a chasm, which prevents them from connecting with others. Their private histories remain fixed in amber rather than coalescing into a collective culture. After the sudden deaths of two sisters, one resident reflects, “None of us liked them and none of us wanted to know about their lives. We are being admonished to be more careful with each other.” No heartwarming community rises from these ashes. There’s too little time and not enough at stake.

The Berkeley Arms is a stately hotel run by Miss Ruthermer-Berkeley and Miss Catherine Frey. Ruthermer-Berkeley is 93, reflecting back on her life. Frey is her harried employee, whose patience is wearing thin. Linda, a young immigrant from Mexico, maintains the guest home as best she can. Linda’s distracted lover, Joe, works on the famous ship—the Bounty—and cruises around town on his motorcycle. She dreams of a passionate rendezvous in the marshes, while he anxiously awaits word from a group of Christians in Miami who promise him that Jesus is coming to whisk them away. The lovers talk past each other; neither shares the other’s innermost desire.

[Read: The antisocial century]

If Sun City represents Jansson’s thoughts on American society—particularly the way it treats its elders—it feels less like a quirky collection of tales, of the sort that made her famous, and more like a moral indictment. It may well be a product of extreme culture shock.

Jansson was not oblivious to the dangers of displacement before she visited Florida. Her best friend moved away to the U.S. during World War II; her father’s shocking sympathies with the Nazis could be traced to the trauma of the Finnish Civil War; her Swedish-born mother was homesick even after decades of building a home in Finland. Ham had supported the family with commercial work while her husband pursued his artistic ambition as a sculptor. Witnessing these marital compromises, Jansson was sure that she would never marry or have children. Yet she seems to have taken the stability and interconnectedness of family life as a given. Though she’d endowed her Moomins with freedom and rootlessness, the precarious independence she described in Sun City felt new in her mature, realist work.

The months-long break that spawned the novel didn’t represent a rupture from Jansson’s earlier life—or not exactly. But after the experience, she became a different kind of writer, partner, and person. Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant.

Rethinking her many obligations after her trip, Jansson delegated some of the work that had been weighing her down (including the Moomins; she never wrote another Moomin-centered novel after her return). More broadly, she began to find a more harmonious balance between love and work, devotion and freedom.

The best evidence for this evolution lies in a work published 15 years after Sun City, the quasi-autobiographical novel Fair Play. When, at the close of the book, the main character’s partner—clearly based on Pietilä—leaves Helsinki for a year’s work in Paris, the couple’s resilience is tested. But this is not a road to alienation, American-style. It’s only a temporary fissure, leading to a more profound connection for both partners. In Fair Play, Jansson allows herself to envision a far more satisfying kind of independence than what she’d wrought in Sun City. As her fictional stand-in reflects: “She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.”

US president announces latest tariffs following trade measures directed at Canada, Mexico and China.

The bus operator says 48 people had been travelling on the Cancun to Tabasco bus service.

Two weeks before Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States, his son Don Jr. paid a visit to Greenland, handing out free food and MAGA caps, and posing for photos. “Incredible people,” he said, of the random Greenlanders whom he met on the street. The trip seemed no more than a stunt, much like Trump’s first-term talk of buying the territory, which for centuries has been under the sovereignty of Denmark, a NATO partner and longtime ally of the United States. But within hours of Don Jr.’s departure, the president-elect held a press conference in which he said he was not ruling out the use of economic or military force to gain control of Greenland.

If I had pitched this scenario as the opening for a new season of Borgen, my TV drama series about Danish politics, which originally aired over four seasons in Denmark from 2010 until 2022 (and became available in the U.S. via Netflix in 2020), I probably would have been laughed out of the writers’ room. A small country of some 6 million inhabitants perched on a peninsula north of Germany, Denmark is a quiet, civilized constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system that tends to result in uncontroversial coalition governments. Our prime minister since 2019, Mette Frederiksen, is the leader of Denmark’s Social Democrats and the current government in coalition with the Moderates and the Liberal Party.

The hero of Borgen was also a woman: My prime minister was named Birgitte Nyborg, and she was played by Sidse Babett Knudsen—an actor perhaps more familiar to American viewers as Theresa Cullen on HBO’s Westworld. Borgen is set in the heart of government in Copenhagen, and the tension in the show often comes when people are forced to choose between political power and their personal beliefs and ideals. Nyborg faces many obstacles, at work and at home, but she is trying to govern Denmark in a consensual yet courageous way, against the odds.

That may be something more possible in a parliamentary system such as Denmark’s, which requires coalition building to form a government, but it was also something that seemed more possible in the earlier, more optimistic era when I was writing it: As political drama, Borgen was unashamedly idealistic. If you want an apt comparison to a U.S. show, think Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing.

The principal characters in Borgen believe in the values of respectful dialogue, democracy, and international law. Back in government, Trump seems bent on creating a new political reality, where objective truth no longer exists and can be replaced with pure fiction. Everything is reduced to the lingo of a real-estate deal, and there appear to be no limits to what kind of accusations and threats you can hurl around—even in the face of a loyal ally and NATO partner.

The last season of Borgen, which aired in Denmark and the U.S. in 2022, did in fact center on Greenland. The territory, considered the largest island in the world, has enjoyed home rule for close to five decades. Thanks to long-running and painstaking negotiations, the island’s 57,000 residents are now on a path toward independence. For now, Denmark remains in charge of its military security and foreign policy, in consultation with the Greenlandic government.

How much of this nuance Trump grasps is unclear. When he first floated the idea of buying Greenland, in 2019, he called the matter a “real-estate deal.” At the time, Frederiksen, who was already serving as prime minister, dismissed his suggestion as absurd; Trump took offense, calling her statement “nasty.” They later patched things up: Trump praised Frederiksen as “a wonderful woman,” and both sides left things as they were.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

President Trump has now returned to the fray, with a vengeance. Five days before his inauguration, a 45-minute phone call took place between Trump and Frederiksen. The exchange sounded brutal: Trump reiterated his demand to take ownership of Greenland; our prime minister repeated that it’s not for sale and is an autonomous territory under the Danish Kingdom. She also reminded the president that Denmark of course recognizes the strategic importance of Greenland to the Unites States—and has given the U.S. military access to Greenland for more than 80 years.

If I were writing that scene for Borgen, my prime minister would be desperately trying to control her temper while her chief of staff and aides would be listening in, trying to guide the conversation with silent gestures and notes. But I might have difficulty imagining a president so uninterested in the facts, let alone the history.

Greenland was colonized by the Danish priest Hans Egede in 1721. Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland was briefly contested in an international court by Norway in the 1930s, but Norway lost the case and withdrew its claims. When Denmark was occupied by the Nazis in 1940, Henrik Kauffmann, the visionary Danish ambassador to the U.S., signed, on behalf of Denmark’s king, an agreement with Washington allowing the U.S. to supply Greenland and establish bases there. The result was the air base at Kangerlussuaq, where U.S. bombers could refuel on their way to Europe.

In 1949, Denmark became a founding member of NATO, and the kingdom has been a loyal ally of the U.S. ever since. In 1952, the U.S. built the huge Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, which, at its height, housed more than 10,000 personnel. The Indigenous Inuit population in the area was forced to leave the vicinity, one of many colonial injustices. During the Cold War, Copenhagen maintained a pragmatic silence as nuclear-armed U.S. Air Force B-52s violated an official policy banning atomic weapons on Danish soil. In 1968, a B-52 crashed at Thule, and four atomic bombs rolled out of the wreckage. Not even that international embarrassment could make Denmark waver in its partnership with the United States. For eight decades, the two countries have been joined in close friendship, with a reciprocal recognition of territories, rights, and obligations.

Thanks in part to the stability provided by this arrangement, the Arctic has been a peaceful region. Denmark has been able to uphold Greenland’s security with a small number of naval ships and planes and—as you may recall if you watched the last season of Borgen—the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol. This border-guard force, a military tradition dating back decades, consists of a dozen sleds, each with a dog team directed by a special-forces soldier, that patrol the coastline of northern and northeastern Greenland.

[Read: Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark—and Europe]

Trump’s reelection has disturbed the mutual understanding between Copenhagen and Washington. In the days leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, Danish media reported that diplomats were working behind the scenes to keep Greenland out of the new president’s speech. That lobbying effort apparently succeeded. (Panama was not so lucky. Speaking of America’s “manifest destiny,” Trump brought up that country’s canal. “We’re taking it back,” he said.)

The uneasy truce over Greenland did not last long. Within days, Trump was talking to reporters aboard Air Force One about taking control of the island. “I think we’re going to have it,” he said. “And I think the people want to be with us.” As a writer, I have to admire the economy of Trump’s phrasing: In fewer than 20 words, he can upset decades of delicate, emotionally fraught colonial relations between Denmark and Greenland.

Currently, Greenland runs its own domestic affairs via its Parliament and an executive body known as the Naalakkersuisut, but is heavily subsidized by the Danish state. Pro-independence Greenlandic politicians are inviting the U.S. president to push ahead with his demands, believing that this will aid their cause. They may be disappointed: Trump has not embraced their call for independence. Frederiksen may take some heart from a recent poll showing that 85 percent of their countrymen do not want Greenland to be incorporated into the United States.

What will the president’s next move be? We are not in the world of Borgen. The drama we’re viewing today seems animated less by idealism than by divisiveness, cynicism, and loudmouthed ignorance. Trump is a businessman who sees Greenland as a potential transaction. (When asked about Gaza last month, Trump replied that it had “a phenomenal location” and “the best weather,” as if he had Palm Beach in mind, not a Middle East war zone; indeed, he’s now proposed taking it over and turning it into a beach resort.) War was once said to be too important to be left to the generals; now politics is too important to be left to the politicians. Enter the tycoons.

The last act of the Greenland plot has yet to unfold. Trump is in his final term and may be thinking about his legacy. He may want to be remembered as the president who took back the Panama Canal and, through the acquisition of Greenland, expanded U.S. territory by a quarter. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once said, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” I hope Greenlanders will not end up feeling the same way. But as a writer of political fiction, I may have to start dreaming up stranger, darker plots if I want to keep pace with Trump’s new world order.