The Frame When Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen described his government as “cautiously optimistic” about President Donald Trump’s announced Greenland deal, he wasn’t practicing diplomacy. He was speaking the native language of the 21st century’s small-state condition: the vocabulary of managed surrender. The announcement itself — a U.S. military expansion on the world’s largest island, framed as a “deal” between sovereign equals — contains the entire architecture of the new order. Greenland remains Danish on paper. The Americans get the basing rights, the mineral access, the strategic depth. Denmark gets the flag, the fiction, and the phrase “cautiously optimistic” for domestic consumption. This is not the Westphalian system bending. This is the Westphalian system being rewritten in real time, and the scribes are calling it optimism. The year is 2026. The post-1945 security architecture — the one where Article 5 meant something automatic, where small states could shelter under great power...