Photo by Samuel Ferrara

I have a friend drawn to mountains. When he isn’t in the UK, he’s usually somewhere in the Nordic region or the Himalayas, where he is now.

It’s not that he’s a mountain man pining for grappling hooks and crampons. Rather, his interests carry him to dramatic places—places that demand attention rather than conquest.

In truth, he’s one of those people who quietly does a great deal for others and accepts no credit for it.

Anyway, I was messaging him about Trump announcing another 10% tariff on NATO countries. Something about the story—Greenland, European troops misread as hostile in the fog of the Arctic—made it feel more than about tariffs.

Interestingly, my friend had explained to me before travelling how the UK’s Arctic-trained units, alongside those of the Scandinavian countries and Finland, amount to more Arctic-specialist soldiers than the United States currently has. There is also now the well known fact of Denmark suffering the highest per-capita casualty rate in Afghanistan after the US invoked Article 5 of NATO—calling for, and swiftly receiving, collective assistance from its allies.

I won’t report my friend’s response to that latest threat. Suffice it to say that explaining the apparent pettiness of a major world leader to someone who is not known as petty themselves is revealing. Far better, I was reminded, to be a human being, like my friend, enjoying a stretch of the Himalayas beneath the world’s highest peaks, than to sow seeds of discontent.

Here’s Thomas Wolfe on mountains: “They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.”

The same day, someone else I know messages me, almost randomly: “The reality is, we can no longer trust the US to act rationally.”

I then watch Keir Starmer address the UK on Greenland in what one reporter describes as a holding operation. What strikes me is how little appetite there is for performance. There is no point-scoring, no attempt to turn the moment into anything larger than it is. But he does confront Trump directly over the threat of sanctions, calling it wrong........

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