As I write this, Donald Trump appears willing to test the outer limits of the postwar order. The idea that the United States could openly threaten the territorial integrity of a NATO ally would have sounded absurd a year ago. Yet absurdity no longer seems disqualifying. It now describes the conditions we inhabit.
In days, the president will address world leaders. Already, the familiar language of “national security” is being deployed to rationalise expansionist gestures, this time toward Greenland. The claim collapses under scrutiny. The United States already maintains extensive military reach in the region. Security is not the issue. Legacy is.
What appears instead is a familiar pattern: a leader mistaking scale for significance, confusing territorial expansion with historical permanence. The United States does not lack power. It lacks restraint. And restraint is the foundation upon which the last seventy years of relative order were built.
If this line is crossed, NATO becomes symbolic rather than structural. The assumptions underpinning global cooperation fracture. Markets, diplomacy, and security arrangements—never as stable as advertised—are exposed as contingent, not guaranteed.
Economic threats already signal this shift. Tariffs of ten, twenty-five percent are floated casually, as though trade wars were administrative inconveniences rather than accelerants of instability. Military escalation would render such disputes trivial by comparison.
This forces a personal reckoning. Do I continue on my present path—site management, a future home in France—assuming continuity? Or do I prepare for rupture?
I find myself drawn toward preparation rather than assumption. Toward capability rather than comfort. The idea of developing small-scale drone manufacturing, initially to support Ukraine, but more broadly to contribute to defensive capacity within Europe, feels less like ambition than obligation.
But obligation carries cost. It would mean abandoning parallel lives, relinquishing long-held plans, accepting constraint over freedom.
No decision should be made prematurely. Wednesday matters. Words matter. But if action confirms intention—if alliances fracture and deterrence weakens—then hesitation becomes its own form of choice.
The fuse may burn slowly. But it will be lit.