The price of ...not caring by John Kato

“Who gives a shit who owns Greenland? I don’t.” With that single sentence, perhaps mimicking the First Lady’s jacket, tossed off on a Friday as casually as a punchline at a fundraiser, Senator Lindsey Graham managed to distill a worldview. Not a policy argument. Not a strategic doctrine. A shrug. A shrug at sovereignty. A shrug at alliances. A shrug at history.

Greenland, for the record, is not an abandoned strip mall in need of redevelopment. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, populated by people who have spent centuries surviving a climate that would humble most empires. It is not a punchline, not a bargaining chip, not a square on a Monopoly board for bored superpowers. But in the strange afterlife of Trump-era politics, geography has become negotiable and dignity optional.

The remark reverberated across Europe not because it was shocking, Europe has grown wearily accustomed to shock but because it confirmed something more unsettling, that what once passed for rhetorical excess has hardened into posture. When Donald Trump floated the idea of “buying” Greenland, it was treated, initially, as a curiosity. A real-estate developer viewing the world as inventory. But the joke never quite landed and it never quite went away. Instead, it calcified into a kind of ideological mood, borders are flexible, alliances transactional, sovereignty conditional.

Europe hears that mood clearly. It hears it in the insinuation that NATO is a protection racket. It hears it in the impatience with multilateralism. And it hears it in the glib dismissal of who “owns” a place like Greenland, as though ownership were the relevant category at all. The language is revealing. Ownership implies property. Property implies transferability. Transferability implies power.

For Europeans, particularly smaller nations, the implication is not theoretical. The continent’s twentieth century is a graveyard of the idea that borders are merely suggestions. Sovereignty in Europe is not an abstraction debated in think tanks; it is the hard-won residue of wars, occupations and partitions. When an American senator shrugs at who owns a territory, Europeans do not hear bravado. They hear a ghost.

And yet the more striking aspect of Graham’s comment may not be its casual imperialism but its casual obedience. The transformation of a once-conventional Republican into a reliable echo chamber for Trump has been one of the quieter dramas of the past decade. Graham, who once warned of the dangers of Trump’s temperament, now appears determined to demonstrate that there is, indeed, no bottom to partisan pliancy. If Trump suggests buying an Arctic island, the appropriate response, in this new orthodoxy, is not skepticism but indifference to the concept of ownership itself.

This is not realism. It is abdication dressed up as toughness. Realism would ask, what are America’s interests in the Arctic? How do we cooperate with allies to address climate change, shipping routes, mineral resources, and security concerns? What is the role of Greenland’s own people in determining their future? Instead, we get a smirk.

The irony is that American influence has historically depended less on coercion than on consent. The postwar order, for all its hypocrisies, rested on the idea that sovereignty mattered, that alliances were partnerships, not acquisitions. To treat a territory like Greenland as an object to be owned, or dismissed as irrelevant, undermines the very architecture that has amplified American power for decades.

Europe’s insecurity in this moment is not melodramatic; it is rational. When the United States signals that it views the world through a lens of transactional dominance, allies recalibrate. They hedge. They invest in strategic autonomy. They wonder, quietly but persistently, whether the security guarantees they have relied upon are subject to the same shrug.

And there is a deeper cost. Language shapes imagination. When elected officials normalize the idea that powerful countries can casually contemplate absorbing or trading territories, the moral floor drops a little lower. It becomes easier to excuse other strongmen, other land grabs, other “who cares?” moments. The erosion is incremental but it is real.

Perhaps Graham truly does not care who owns Greenland. Perhaps the comment was meant as a flourish, a signal to a base that delights in irreverence. But indifference, when wielded by the powerful, is rarely neutral. It is a choice. It says that some questions of sovereignty, of self-determination, of international norms, are beneath serious consideration.

In a more stable era, such a remark might have been dismissed as bluster. In this one, it reads as doctrine by default. And the price of not caring, history suggests, is eventually paid by those who assumed ownership was just another word for leverage.