Adam Tooze

It's just...

It's a weird, my personal favorite interpretation is it's the map of the game Risk.

I mean, it's Venezuela and Greenland are very large on that map.

I mean, depending on what you saw earlier in the day, you saw the opposite logic.

The common denominator is it's as though the Americans forced the Europeans to actually come up with a concerted investment strategy for Greenland.

Which they've never previously have and the Europeans are actually going to do, they're going to make the movie and he's made the trailer.

Well, they're going to make the sequel to the film that he never made and so they're going to end up doing some sort of weird actual European program.

Greenland, it's 56,000 people.

It's a territory the size of both Alaska and California put together.

It currently runs entirely on Danish public money.

So 25% of its GDP, half its 50% to 60% of its public budget is coming from Copenhagen and Danish taxpayers.

So if that's what America wants to take over, this is a substantial, I mean, not huge by American standards, but nevertheless, this is a net negative.

in its current form.

And what the Europeans are going to do is their usual European thing.

They'll do a regional policy and they'll find a few billions to transform this.

And Ivan in Bulgaria knows the story only too well of how mixed the results of those kinds of programs can be.

They can be very real, but it depends critically on the politics in the place where the money is applied.

I mean, I'd love to think that.

I just really need to check my biases on this.

One shouldn't underestimate the capacity of the Europeans to fail.