When Donald Trump suggested the United States might acquire Greenland, analysts scrambled to answer an interpretive emergency, enthusiastically explaining before determining whether anything had, in fact, occurred. Interests were assumed to exist, and then they were searched for. Yet when none materialized, the action itself was declared incoherent.

After decades of incremental progress, nuclear fusion sits at an inflection point. The remaining uncertainties strain the justificatory frameworks of modern systems. China’s response reveals the constraints shaping contemporary state imagination.