really the valuable thing is controlling the shipping lanes between Pacific and Atlantic countries

The only reason Chinese or Russian ships would need to go anywhere near Greenland is to deliver to north east North America, which would by definition be welcome travel. Arctic route between Asia and Europe goes through Russian waters. Closer and friendlier to China, and Chinese ships dominate world, and can pick up goods from rest of Asia.

Sorry but we in Europe don't want chicken raised up in filth so that it must be chlorinated and even then still has much higher levels of salmonela, beef with hormones affecting the growth of young people (and making the meat shit) or chemicals allowed into public use under the principle of "it can be sold until proven bad" rather than the principle "it has to be proven not bad before it can be sold".

In other words, we're fine with our higher life expectancy and better health outcomes and don't want to suffer the consequences of shit American-style "regulation".

Dropping European trade borders would be horrible, especially with America: stuff isn't more expensive to produce in Europe because Europeans are shit at growing/making them, they're more expensive to produce here because we actually have consumer protection standards which have costs to be obbeyed rather than the Free For All of America (and to a lesser extent of most other Anglo-Saxon countries) were pretty much everything goes for maximum profits for corporates even at the cost of fucking everybody else.

pass on open trade/borders with US, their lack of regulation and standards on food means most of what they produce is garbage and/or potentially contaminated. Not to mention simply flooding the markets with their crap. When Mulroney negotiated NAFTA, it crushed so many industries in Canada, and we're really only starting to attempt to recover from that.. Maybe the only good thing Trump has done is to galvanize us to make better trade agreements with other countries and not rely on free trade with the US.

UK is an extra special Mi6 corrupt theocracy, but Biden's US proxy war on Russia was a war on Europe and nordstream. Essentially strengthening the colonial status of an isolated Europe. This paved the way for Trump to extort them harder with tariffs as first round, and liberating Greenland from NATO is purely for direct missile/airstrike potential on Europe.

Sure, one path to western sustainability is free trade/travel among partners. But from US perspective, collapsing the colonies for extortion power and GDP boosts is an attractive delay tactic for next election cycle, when all colonial governors political capital is from CIA/US election determination, and will support US rule over them harder.

Avoiding confronting US empire lies directly is done to sell CIA narrative to the colonial indirect slaves. The west's problem is that democracy itself, and its supposed values, is a lie. It's only a colonial empire meant to extract tribute from the colonies.