The US has walked away from international bodies, seized oil tankers at sea, and forced NATO to plan around a Greenland threat - its all connected. Right, so Donald Trump has just ordered the United States to walk away from sixty-six international organisations, including thirty-one UN bodies, at the same time as US forces, with British support, are physically seizing oil tankers in international waters and daring Russia to respond, all while NATO quietly starts planning Arctic contingencies because Trump won’t rule out taking Greenland from a NATO ally. Some of that you’ll have heard something about, some if it you won’t have though, only getting served half a story. And that’s because taken together, that combination has a cost. It strips out the restraints that normally slow escalation, it drags allies into enforcement actions they don’t control, and it hard-codes retaliation risk into things as boring as shipping insurance and port access. This isn’t about Trump saying wild things or rattling sabres. This is about what stops working once the US treats international rules as optional paperwork and turns alliances into tools for coercion instead of brakes on power. And we wonder why talk of World War Three keeps ratcheting up. Right, so Donald Trump has now ordered the United States to pull out of sixty-six international organisations, including thirty-one United Nations bodies, and to stop participation and funding “as soon as possible”. He has then forced NATO take consider contingencies against the US over Greenland and all of that has been paired that with a new kind of maritime enforcement that looks, to anyone outside the Washington bubble, like a doctrine of armed economic strangulation dressed up as sanctions compliance, and it has already pulled Britain in as operational support because of course Keir Starmer got involved and picked his side. This is the part that keeps getting missed, when we look at the Seizing Greenland story, the Venezuela mess and Russian tankers getting seized, because this is the part of the story that doesn’t arrive with explosions or sirens. It arrives as memos, and bland official language that makes coercion sound like procedure.