And the same goes for Canada, possibly worse. You don't go around threatening your allies unless you really have plans and that's why you don't elect senile old guys to positions of power.
I can't say I know much about how the EU operates or how quickly their Open Digital Ecosystems initiative could take shape, but this is a really opportune time to build a better tech industry.
They were being discussed a year ago, too, they just got flagged. Make sure to check /active
The Post-American Internet
Who is the leader in culture, business, technology? The only other contender I can think of is China.
And this is better?
>> And this is better?
Who says you need a leader in each of those? Maybe it's post-centralization, or in other words decentralization which people have been wanting for the internet for a while now.
China is far more reliable and dependable than dealing with a lying narcissistic paedophile and his cronies.
But China currently is a lot more stable and somewhat more trustworthy than the U.S.
However, if China does come to occupy a majorly influential seat at the table it will not be the for the first time. The last time it did, it did not impose it's will beyond its boundaries.
It is to be seen whether that repeats.
Which one ?
My interpretation is that you're asking "which Holocaust won't survive historical revisionism", and there are two options (both are red flags):
- you're deliberately trying to dilute the designation of Holocaust, by stating there are other "holocausts", by which you're probably referring to other genocides - when in reality the Holocaust is the name given to the genocide at the hands of Nazis; it's the same has asking "which Holodomor?" in the context of my statement.
- you're implying the Holocaust didn't exist, as if there was a list of "many holocausts", some historically true, others historically false;
Being at the other end of colonialism, we are aware of many holocausts and acknowledge them if not equally we don't identify any one as 'the holocaust'.
Don't get me wrong, I suspect our values mostly agree.
I literally have a 3ft by 3ft Anne Frank's photograph as a poster in my bedroom as a reminder. Lest we forget.
I wrote the code myself to take a jpeg of her at her desk and enlarge it with minimal pixellation. Then I printed it out over multiple letter sized sheets. I did not have access to a wide form factor printer then.
I still remember figuring out the libpgm libppm libraries from source. Assembled the jigsaw puzzle and framed the result. This was from many decades ago, when I was in college. It is still there on my bedroom wall.
Anyone of principle would have been saying this before 2025, and far louder.
Our debt to the US has long been paid off. It was paid off when we submitted to their economic world order, when we bought their goods and their entertainment, when we bought their software and let our own software industry dwindle, and finally when we went to war on their side on their questionable military adventures.
We owe the US nothing. I will still help them when they actually want it, but not like this.
I am doing what I can and then some, and to be complete I should mention I am aware of multiple other HN'ers doing their bit too.
> We owe the US nothing.
Hear hear. Well said
And then they ridiculed us for that.
And then asked for help in another war they just started.
Do Americans support this violent annexation and expansion? As a European I'm feeling threatened. Very few countries have Atom Bombs and can say NO to the USA.
From that perspective, the current "emperor is naked" development might be positive in the sense that Europe can relatively soon have enough military power to be taken seriously, and at the same time become impossible to drag into an offensive war because none of its countries wants any war and we only went there because US pressured us into - but now that the USA has became unreliable, there's no reason to sacrifice oneself.
They are adults now (rare commodity), but can still be pushed around, have their leash yanked.
They have to come to terms with their islands of racist tendencies.
My hope hasn't died yet
The brutality of the School of Americas might indicate otherwise.
Now rebranded as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...
PR spin aside, it was largely a force for global stability (a few notable and disastrous military quagmires aside). "Free trade" isn't much of a philosophy to hang your hat on but it is an ideal of sorts, and it allowed a more connected world.
Now? Brazen corruption, kleptocracy, hostility towards allies...
It's certainly fair to say the US never lived up to the ideals it espoused, but now it's not even espousing those ideals and seems to actively be working against them.
Then the comment repeats the same PR spin.
How many of them have a wealthy hegemon and wealthy minor partners?
It's <<extremely>> rare for that to happen and the US managed that for about 80 years.
Ignore all the propaganda and look at the results. Actions, not words.
In the modern era there are basically 0 wealthy Russian (similar story for the Soviets) or Chinese allies.
There has always been a meddlesome quality to the USA that the rest of the so called developed world turned a blind eye to. Along the lines of 'their bastards, but at least they're our bastards'. Of course that does not make it good, but the balance calculation worked out in favor of toeing the line and being careful not to get pulled out of joint too much. 9/11 changed all that and effectively Bin Laden forced the USA to lower its mask for long enough that the world could no longer ignore the bad sides of Uncle Sam. Even that would have not been enough to seal it, but Trump has managed to accomplish this in record time.
Bay of Pigs, regime changes all over including Iran, South Asia wars, Afghanistan (not the recent one, the one in the 80s), all the cold war stuff, etc etc.
What I find more troubling is that Trump has popular support. It's just not Trump. The rot goes far deeper.
What Trump has is oligarch support - an unholy alliance of weird and cranky tech billionaires, old(ish) money, foreign money, media owners, and insane white supremacist patriarch-wannabes, some of whom operate through think tanks, some through megachurches.
The media are doing an excellent job of normalising this, not least - but not only - sanewashing Trump's obvious mental and physical decay.
I will however grant you that my sampling is no where close to uniform.
Soft power? Have you been sleeping during the 20th century? The formidable military power of the US comes from a constant state of war.
I think they rightfully turned defensive in light of the current administration. Remains to be seen how/if they change when the administration changes.
> how quick Europe and Canada turned on the US
It's YOU that turned on YOUR allies. YOU threatened to invade YOUR allies. Jesus fucking Christ. You are living in a different universe entirely. I agree that countries apparently can "turn on a dime" as you say, but it's not us that's "turned on a dime" it's YOU.
America is lost.
If you want to rule purely through hard power, you become Russia.
Such a cynical view of life. With this mindset, we can never change. We're stuck in the cycle of violence.
I believe it can change. We need to get out of the "oh well, this is life" mindset and stop giving the hawks and warmongers a free pass.
Plus there's nothing natural about widespread global war. It's not like you getting angry at your neighbor over some domestic dispute. Global wars are artificially engineered by guys who want to profit from them. It's not "human nature". Those willing to go to war exploit human nature, sure, but this is done intentionally; and just as intentionally, it could be downplayed or mitigated.
And if it's about egoism and greed, we've learned to reign those in in multiple situations. If we can attempt to go to Mars or whatever, I'm sure we can first try to sort things out on Earth.
Get out of your mindset. It's bad for you.
In Cosmos 2, Neil de Grasse Tyson has a reflection about that saying, "what are you going to do? It's human nature!". I encourage you to find the clip on YouTube and watch it.
Edit: well, I wanted to find the transcript or clip, but I cannot now. The Cosmos sequels are infuriatingly hard to find, and in my country there are no legal ways of watching them anymore (fuck you, Netflix and Disney! I pay you yet you remove stuff I like).
Here's Sagan's last paragraphs from his Pale Blue Dot speech instead:
"The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Which allied countries? And (I assume we are talking about the USA) why would it not exist?
https://www.britannica.com/question/Which-countries-fought-o...
We'd have been part of the German Reich or the USSR for sure.
I make a point of visiting the war graves every year, just to remind me not to take anything for granted.
They're so close to getting it. So very, frustratingly close.
At least one of them got published somewhere recently, might have been The Atlantic. You just wish you could smack them with a clue-stick.
That being said, I don't think we can pin this particular expression of derangement on age, or at least not age alone. Trump has nothing to lose. He cannot run again. He doesn't care one whit about the common good or even tawdry partisan interests. This is his unhinged narcissism at work, abetted by a cultish, smarmy, obsequious coterie of yes-men that surrounds him.
I can just imagine him saying, as he walks into the TV room in the Whitehouse, "I went to Glitterhoof's chamber and gave him a good tumble! It is good to be the king!"
Oh, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence, but nothing that would constitute proof without access to the results of a detailed medical examination. Source: watching the decline of family members, and others in the care home my mother is currently in.
The increasing randomness and apparent lack of concentration, the “resting his eyes” in some meetings, the leaning, etc. A lot of the signs could be other things of course, like just plain ol' age related decline. But if the people close to him don't at least have concerns, would he have been subject to the cognitive tests he is so proud of “winning”?
Trump took more than double the amount of vacation days in his first term, and if the golf tracker is accurate, he's on pace to increase it this term.
> Trump's talking basically every day in front of press
I'm not sure if talking === communicating_effectively. There are certainly noises coming out of his mouth, if that's the only metric we care about.
> Joe Biden was in far, far worse shape than Trump is
Given the choice between a president who recognizes his own weaknesses and delegates to competent team members and one who is unable to admit a single mistake and surrounds himself with grossly unqualified and incompetent sycophants, I'll take the former.
> There's absolutely no comparison
As with most comparisons made by Trump supporters - you're right, but not for the reasons you think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_vac...
Biden copied Trumps extremist way of Government. Biden said (totally abnormal comments for a president) "we've been patient with the unvaccinated, but our patience is wearing thin" highly aggressive comments. Trump is basically using that same language with illegal immigrants and Americans critical of Israel and the Iran war.
Both are senile. Bidens was more pronounced but less erratic/manic as Trumps. That make Trumps senility more dangerous.
Both Biden and Trump wanted to use media organizations to censor their political opponents. Trump using FCC to remove broadcast licenses for critical media, Biden administration communicating with social media companies to get users that post critical content banned.
If you still view this as a partisan problem, where one side is the good guy. We won't get anywhere. The United States and the interests that control it, both D and R, are at war with the American people. Im my opinion.
You're equating a _statement_ made by Biden (with regards to a public health crisis actively killing Americans) with Trump arresting US citizens, illegally deporting asylum-seekers, and bombing Iran without congressional approval, a plan for the strait of Hormuz, nor buy-in from allies. This is not a good faith comparison.
> Both Biden and Trump wanted to use media organizations to censor their political opponents
Again, you're comparing the Biden admin _asking_ Twitter to censor content (primarily relating to revenge porn against his adult son) with Trump actively threatening the broadcast license of networks because comedians were mean to him - another bad faith comparison.
This isn't to say "oh he was just a puppet" nor "all US presidents are puppets", but to say that the decision of who they choose to fill important positions is in and of itself the most important decision in every presidential term. They only really need to be not senile for the first month or so, for the rest of the term it's just a PR problem.
No comparison, folks. What can you do?
Thus, some lessons need to be learned again and again. Some rights fought for again and again.
Not necessarily with similar judicial executions. Fair trials and fair and exemplary punitive measures would be enough for me.
I lost respect when Obama let Bush Jr administration off the hook. It essentially set the tone that it is ok to behave like that, that there would be no consequences.
this kind of corruption and extortion, if in China, would see executions, e.g.
https://nordictimes.com/world/china-executes-senior-official...
At most, old Singapore style corporeal punishment added to the mix perhaps.
Jan 6th 2021 was the turning point.
We need to prosecute both the Biden and Trump administration, the Israeli leadership, and the leadership of most European countries. Never again is never again.
Imprisonment would be a good starting point though. Together with education, regulation and reforming the political system. But this takes decades.
Maybe the predecessor regime is corrupt. Maybe not. But the first thing the new regime always does is to arrange the show trials to establish their own bona fides.
> Obama bombed kids in the Middle East
You are aware that Trump is bombing Iran right now, and bombed a girl's school in particular?
And the asset seizure would be for the proceeds of all the open bribery, at the very least.
They were tried after being beaten militarily, who will lead the rebellion against Trump and the American military backing him? The military doesn't dislike what he does and those are the main ones that could oppose him.
But ultimately, it's the people of the US who have to do this. You're absolutely right that nobody else is going to do it for them.
This is such a long-standing problem that people no longer even notice the crimes happening right in front of their eyes. It's just become normal.
Our president should be boring and relatively quiet. Congress should be our focus, not the president.
You're going to have to specify a framework if you want to make statements about legality.
Thus, US law, too, defers to international law.
Please at least read the legal framework you're so confidently misdescribing.
That's obviously not how things work. If you don't obey the law, you are a criminal. That's the whole point of laws.
Well you can say the same about Putin then. All nice and dandy
The problem is: over time the US grew so powerful, that the definition of "war" became blurry. "No, we are not at war, our soldiers are just dropping bombs on Iran for fun and profit".
EDIT: Another problem, of course, is that current member of Congress have no balls to stand up to Trump and reclaim their constitutional powers.
Yes
> And of course he can be declared national threat and foreign agent
There is no evidence of that he is a foreign agent and there is no legal procedure (nor should there be) for declaring someone a "national threat."
> When there’s choice between the bad (block Trump and allies) and the worse (his ideas stay alive even if he is no longer in business)
This is inevitable and any government that tries to act against holders of an idea is a tyranny
> Legal matters are secondary, as long as majority is convinced that justice is served.
That is mob justice
This isnt a conspiracy. Epstein was an israeli agent and him and trump were bffs for years. Trumps family is also heavily in debt to Russia and theyve been very open about it.
You seem to be a weird trump supporter who is mildly trolling by saying false stuff like the iran war isnt illegal when it very clearly is. Your comments are either very ignorant or youre trolling. The only folks still defending trump are p silly folks. The evidence is overwhelming at this point.
Civil forfeiture would do just fine. Such a wonderful tool. /s
Although given the current lunatic escapade it does seem like a good moment to remove him from office. There must be someone somewhere in the administration that thinks another forever war is a bad idea, even if they aren't worried about WWIII. I've never seen a presidency implode so quickly - this has to be the most illegal, unconstitutional, unmandated, immoral and ill-advised war of choice the US has launched in decades.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/chart-shows-net-worth-us-presidents...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
Soft power is still power. It might not be as good as hard power, but you sure would rather have it than not.
It would destroy the US on the worldwide stage, and even internally. Not to mention it absolutely annihilates the American delusion that you're the "good guys". Right now the US is a staggering idiocracy, and is absolutely the most dangerous rogue nation on the planet.
And how utterly pathetic. When the "join us, please, we're so great" fell absolutely flat -- the 51st state nonsense, which is spectacularly unpopular in Canada (in fact, it's significantly more likely for an American to want their state to join Canada than for the reverse) -- now every gun-fellating uneducated American MAGA blowhard sits in their basement and fantasizes how, much like their halfwit rapist leader, they're just going to force it on Canada. Good god, what an absolute collapse to worldwide pariah.
And do Americans realize how close your country is to absolute fracture?
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
Dude, that isn't sustainable. That is an absolute powder keg where rural, low-density shithole states full of angry, poorly educated alcoholic clowns keep lording over urban, educated Americans. That it has been endured this long is an absolute mystery.
The coming decade is going to see the worst nuclear proliferation in history -- courtesy of the spectacularly stupid Trump and his MAGA misfit clowns -- and the end result is going to be some mushroom clouds in American cities. And sadly it won't be the rural garbage states like Oklahoma, it'll be American cities that never wanted any part of this idiocracy.
At some point, the mystery to me feels how are american people so tolerant of so many bad decisions which are net negative (like really bad) long term as well too.
Could such tolerance be provided to perhaps have some short term losses/accomodations to better suit the economy and people's lifestyle to enrich it long term?
Where was the tolerance for those sectors?
Things didn't have to go down this way for America until literally quite recently. America and heck, even the rest of world have their own problems but it feels like stacking one problem after another as to what america is doing and America was given good cards. America was the global superpower and nothing else really came close and it could've cozied up to Europe,Australia,India, Japan, SK and african countries to battle chinese influence but what it has done is actually backstab these very nations that they are more opening up to china.
Truly, short term loss for long term loss moment.
Further, what irony. The MAGA movement, empowered by angry, uneducated rural America, only has hate as their concern. They are willing to tear everything down if it serves the goal of getting even at those uppity libs. Absolutely nothing Trump and his crew of plastic-faced, incompetent criminal clowns does anything to improve the lives for shithole states like Oklahoma (50th out of 50 on education, but their head of education spent his time attacking NY and California and buying Trump bibles...good god, what a pathetic idiocracy), but he causes pain for "the cities" so that's good enough for them.
When a country has that sort of voting, it's time to move on. The US should have fractured years ago -- Texas has openly talked secession repeatedly, but the moment a "blue state" does the whole indivisible thing becomes paramount.
America's power has never been greater. In the 60s we had low level paramilitary street insurgencies. American politics are deliberately designed to be un-actionable by the public and opinion is irrelevant.
European countries and their governments are satrapies that we allow a limited independence to. If they try to step too far out of line they will find their government collapses. We did this to Australia at Pine Gap in the 70s and have a whole word for it "color revolution"
Younger people are not fit to power in 300M country with lots of smart and rich people. Instead these smart and rich people back these old guys because when it comes to election they use half of their brain or sometimes not use their brain at all. One of these rich one was recently bl00mberg and he tried to get elected at age of 500 year old but couldn't do it.
Maybe you should be. You might need them one day.
> Most Americans don’t know the name of a single politician in Denmark.
Ignorance is nothing to be proud of.
I don't think a country should make decisions based on how it affects their "reputation" among other countries.
Most of Europe has been riding on American security guarantees and under-invested in their own defense. And then there's other things like straight up theft from American companies mostly through "antitrust" or "data privacy" laws. This is thankfully changing due to Ukraine war. People say Europe is an ally but when America pays for their protection and gives them innovations in tech and subsidized drug discovery, what does America get in return?
The fact is Europe hasn't offered America much of anything other than a vacation spot over the last 100 years. And there's the cookie banners too. They're essentially irrelevant in culture, technology and pretty much everything else. It's a shame and I hope it changes, but that's where we are. It's a stagnant culture, basically a museum, no economic growth or prosperity. The poorest US state rivals Germany in GDP per capita.
So I don't think the US should give much consideration about it's reputation across Europe.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/poorest-us-state-rivals-ge...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
Specific examples: Francis Lowell stealing British Loom designs in 1800.
Bessemer steel process replicas. Bell vs European Telephone patents.
Radio: Marconi was initially backed in the US then Bell filed the patents.
Operation Paperclip and all that entails (thousands of German patents invalidated and filed in the US).
And then there were those Romans, what have they ever done for us?
Thank God for the French. I long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world, but turns out they were right along.
Europe can't trust any outside powers. Any external dependency can and will be used against us. We used to be wide-eyed believers in international corporation and global alliances, but those are, as it turns out, always a risk and a liability.
I sure as hell am glad the French kept being stubborn enough to build most capabilities in-house, so now we have our own nuclear deterrent, aircraft carrier and fighter jet programs. Imagine if we had gone all-in on American weapons tech! They'd have us, excuse my French, by the balls!
There is very good reasons why De Gaulle was always a bit doubtful about American military protection and why post-war France put a strong emphasis on military sovereignty.
That has nothing to do with any French stubbornness or a so called French anti-American feeling.
The main reason is that De Gaulle experienced the fact American leadership can be untrustworthy first hand.
When he was the leader of the exiled French force during the 40s, Churchill supported him.
Meaningwhile Roosevelt refused to give him any support and actively acted to make him replaced by a puppet, General Giraud. Mainly because it was better aligned with American interests to setup a puppet state in France on the longer term.
The situation changed only later when it became pretty obvious that Giraud was antisemite, an openly nazi collaborationist and a pretty poor politician.
Only then, America started to support De Gaulle officially. Initially only indirectly through the relation between De Gaulle and Eisenhower.
Every single French president since Mitterand (with a brief exception for Iraq that was more than made up by Libya) spent a large part of their time liquidating Gaullism.
I think partly because of the shared language British elites were able to convince themselves that the US is just like us, and the so called "special relationship" sort of preserved British power albeit as an extremely junior partner riding on the coattails of the US.
With the French there was no such delusion and they've never seen eye to eye with the Americans, they've just been biding their time waiting for this all to play out.
In hindsight, the French were right of course (they usually are as much as it pains me to say it)
Part of the solution to Europe's wars of religion was to pack off some of the most swivel-eyed ones to the new world to let them build their New Jerusalem there, and it worked for a bit
Silly ? it originally comes from the american trying to impose a governement to france / print money and administrate it right after WW2. The ONLY reasons this didn't happen is because De Gaulle marched to paris and became the de facto ruler of the nation after that from his popularity, other wise the american plan would have happened.
US has literally had the SAME policy since maybe as early as the 1800 : expand the empire and get as much as influence as possible. They were never exactly friends or at least "kind" friends.
If anything the subsequent presidents who meshed our defense / intelligence / technical appartus so deeply with the US were complete fools, at best.
France has nowhere the military power to resist a country like the US. They have not invested in the military for a very long time and most of their equipment is completely outdated.
It turns out even Iran has the power to resist a country like the US.
[1]: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-declaratory-p...
To quote one of our founding fathers, Robert Schuman, the point of tightly interweaving our economies this way is to "make war not only unthinkable, but materially impossible"
Covid showed us how economically dependent we are to major manufacturing countries like China. Paper money != ability to manufacture.
Russia broke any notion of peace that can be funded by cheap energy. It will always be a tool used against you, and Russia will not change.
The axis of US+Israel is breaking down the international system of laws and diplomacy. It’s going to be in a state even worse than the heights of the Cold War. Nukes are now a more favored instrument of peace compared to diplomacy.
Is it worth fighting for what we had, or should we fight for something better? Who knows.
(Edit: I don’t think non-Europeans can appreciate the whiplash suffered in our populations. In the span of around two years, European leaders drew red lines on political, economical and cultural decoupling from Russia based on human rights and the rule of law, then had to explain why preventable atrocities happening to civilians in the Mideast is not against our values and laws concerning human rights.)
The war in Ukraine is literally at the EU's border. It could be destabilizing in many ways. It's not just about moral reasons. By the way, I see similarities between Putin and Trump as they both started wars against big countries without thinking ahead more than three days. It's one more reason to strengthen the EU.
And yes, it certainly has served America's interests to have a weak Europe that's dependent on it. But seeing that as "good will" seems like a distortion.
Europe could easily defeat Russia without outside help (look at how well Ukraine is doing with far less!), but we still fear Russia because that's what we're used to. That's what we were told to do and what we have embraced. We need to grow out of that and stand on our own feet again.
Ukraine has received unbelieviable levels of aid from NATO, esp. the US.
10000+ Javelin missiles, WW3 levels of cluster munitions that were slated to be decommissioned in the US, multiple factories in the EU making shells that go straight to the AFU (e.g. Bulgarian 152mm), etc.
there is no way they'd have made it 6+ months let alone 4 years without the US' heavy backing.
Indeed it is true. But it is also changing, the stockpiles are growing.
In the 1990s everybody was eager to believe that war was finally and forever over. Some held on to that delusion for a bit too long, but not anymore.
I am curious how much of NATO's hardware originate from the / depends on the US and and what will suddenly stop working if the US decides to break military alliance.
> Tutelage is a comfortable relationship for the senior partner, but it is demoralizing in the long run. It breeds illusions of omniscience on one side and attitudes of impotent irresponsibility on the other
This is the moment it helps to have allies. Like an insurance. Even if you can manage without, it hurts less if you have them.
To me it makes more sense to focus on that perspective.
True both outside AND inside the country.
The worst part to me feels like US has lost trust and such soft power loss is irrecoverable no matter what happens now :/
A common statement I hear from people, or maybe its just what I think, but its like "How can we trust US after this" and hey mind you, Trump still has 3 years in office, but even if political parties change, how can we trust the whole system for not having another Trump moment.
So this loss of soft power is quite a permanent loss. US has to now condition itself to live with it accordingly and live with some shame (which is something that I am observing too of people not being proud of being american anymore seeing the devastation caused by it)
Countries across the world will have to treat US as unpredictable from now on and treat its financial markets in the same way as well.
The worst part out of all of this is that it hurts the average day american the most not the people at the top who are doing all of this and the average person has no say in all of this seeing their country being destroyed by wreckless actions.
The sad part is that people did have many wake up calls to be honest, greenland was first joked about and then became so serious that denmark was preparing only to then move to iran now impacting the normal people's everyday life with oil price increases all across the world..
I do think that the people of US tried to stand up against the oppression by protests but some were shot (rest in peace) and others were detained.
The sad part is that the people tried their best but it still wasn't enough to stop all of this from happening. It was maybe too late after the election.
1. Geopolitics is always unpredictable. Maybe the US has been unreliable lately, but the idea that there are states out there which have been bastions of reliability is not historically accurate. All great powers have screwed people over or made disastrous decisions. It’s mostly just the US’s turn now.
2. This all happened 20 years ago with Iraq. All it really took was a charismatic president (Obama) to undo the 8+ years of bad international relations. All it will probably take again is a charismatic reliable president to set things back on track.
3. Which leads me to my third point, which is that most foreigners understand that the American government is separate from the people and separate from the corporations. And more importantly, changing the world system dramatically is really hard, and has a lot of friction. It will be a lot easier for states to go back to the pre-2024 status quo than to embark upon something entirely novel.
Just count all the things that america did in the last year and try to imagine as a foreigner or foreign nation once as an exercise. All of the things that America has done in the past year is just quite so much to list here even.
No amount of charm within a president might fix or make the people of denmark/EU/even the world, forget the greenland crisis and many others.
This is fundamentally different, in my opinion.
> 3. Which leads me to my third point, which is that most foreigners understand that the American government is separate from the people and separate from the corporations. And more importantly, changing the world system dramatically is really hard, and has a lot of friction. It will be a lot easier for states to go back to the pre-2024 status quo than to embark upon something entirely novel.
Yea, we do but we can only tolerate so much at a certain point too. This goes to my point again but we are forgetting that US is still voted by its people. Yes the two party system corners the people and we are sympathetic of that, but the world/foreigners (atleast me) sympathesize with the american citizens but at the same time, can't trust them.
This isn't something even foreigner related issue but the people of America themselves don't trust their fellow neighbours now as I read the comments of this post and many others.
We sympathize with the people of America but sadly, the world doesn't trust America anymore, Trust is quite brittle and delicate thing so its quite an miracle we still saw trust bounce so many times but right now the glass of trust has shattered (as evident by Denmark preparing for almost war against America)
I can be wrong, I usually am but that's just my understanding.
Where I don't agree is that 1) this is somehow irreversible 2) that it really affects American citizens on the personal level – from personal experience, as an American living in Europe for the last decade, I've had basically zero negative interactions with people or hostile accusations. Most people do understand that the American government is a bit out of control, and American culture is in a tumultuous period. If anything I'd say it tends more toward sympathy than anger.
So while this is definitely a big, huge, giant problem, it's also a problem that I think the Europeans and Japanese want America to solve, and would basically rather America solve it than do anything else. Especially when there aren't really other geopolitical options at the table, the EU can't have a coherent singular opinion on Russia or Ukraine, etc.
> from personal experience, as an American living in Europe for the last decade, I've had basically zero negative interactions with people or hostile accusations. Most people do understand that the American government is a bit out of control, and American culture is in a tumultuous period. If anything I'd say it tends more toward sympathy than anger
Imagining that America attacked Greenland Thus Denmark/EU and the fact that Denmark was genuinely preparing for this, Just imaginging America attack Greenland and I do feel like that the sentiments might change. (This is what had happened to Muslim people not even people of specific country but negative interactions against whole religions after 9/11)
I would agree with you if this was the last day of Trump administration, but far from it. We have to handle so much more of this current administration. It's literally only been a year to see so much shift. I hope you realize it that for the most part, America is busy with the Iran war but any assurances about the sovereignity of EU or any country in the world for that matter isn't made by America and everything is off the table and anything might happen. I am sure that both of us wasn't predicting an Iran war or a greenland invastion but here we are.
It just feels natural to me that if a single year can have this much impact and you have four years for something like this and the most important fact which I want to highlight again, people technically voted for this and can still technically vote for it again , there are no safeguards and the most important part was a belief that if shit hits the fan, then American Judiciary or checks and balances or congress would stop something like this from happening but we all saw how nothing really happened.
My point is, 3 more years, let that sink in, into this level of turbulent times when an war is currently active and gas prices are rising all across the world solely because America and Israel started the Iran war :/
I can only have so much patience but if gas prices are double the price because of America/this war, Sadly I might lose my patience.
I lost my patience somedays ago when I heard that the local fast food shop was talking about the gas price increases and how it hurted them. I had true resentment to this war and America/Israel for starting it and having this poor guy suffer so much from the gas prices. I know that America and American people are different but till how long/how much especially if some people are still supportive of such war. It sort of left me speechless when he was talking about how hard it is to stay in this business.
To think that the world will forgive America so easily might not be accurate, that's all I am saying.
My point is, Even if party changes next time from red to blue, It's just really really hard to undo all this harm that it has done to its soft power.
Anyone who has studied American history knows the US has been unreliable. Just look at how they made and then broke treaties with Native Americans. It's part of the foundation of the country.
"to be an enemy of america can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal"
So yeah, America has never been trustworthy in a way but it still had its upsides and it still had some laws and checks and people still believed in some aspects of the American dream somewhat, Not anymore.
But now?,it has never been this less trustworthy either in a way to the whole world.
Because US administration is compromised. Putin says jump, Krasnov asks how high.
Europe took the deal that the US "handels the war stuff in the world" for some influence.
If we handle the "war stuff", the US influence will be gone in Europe.
To be honest, EU will invest in its own defense in coming years. The cat is out of the box, US proved to be an unstable partner/even an enemy for a country like denmark that you had to prepare to fight full scare war against.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/danmark-forbered...
Shouldn't? it's not on the table at all lol
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-military-i...
> Starmer refuses to send warships to Strait of Hormuz. PM rejects Trump’s call for reinforcements to stave off mounting economic crisis
> France will never take part in operations to unblock Hormuz Strait amid hostilities, says Macron
> European countries reject Trump’s call for help to reopen strait of Hormuz
> The Royal Navy's strength has been drastically weakened by years of cuts; the events of the past week are the prime example of how the Senior Service has fallen.
> Together, the French Navy has 19 out of its 21 major surface vessels at sea or preparing for operations – by contrast, the UK is still struggling to deploy one
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/15/starmer-sn...
https://www.reuters.com/world/france-will-never-take-part-op...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/16/europe-donald-...
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2180044/british-navy-analy...
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/france-royal-navy-briti...
On the table doesn't mean it is already decided they will send anything.
France/UK/Spain/Italy/Germany/Greece all very clearly stated they won't send jack shit to Hormuz while the war is active, they're the biggest navies in Europe, so who's left?
Then what is this statement from the UK government where they say many of the worlds biggest powers are ready to support it? Countries say a lot of things publicly to change it the next day. To me it looks like them helping protecting it is still on the table.
"We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning."
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-...
They also have said they will send drones to help clear mines, but they still feel ships are probably a bit too risky. But that means sending ships is still on the table if things change in the future, he said all options are considered to open the straight, meaning no option is off the table.
"He added: “All of these things are being looked at in concert with our allies … Any options that can help to get the strait reopened are being looked at."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/15/uk-plans-mines...
Pure copium as usual, like Trump's "many great nations already accepted to send ships", where are they? Who are these nations? Which ships? it's posturing at its finest.
"we may be ready to maybe consider some plans about potentially helping nations who might want to hypothetically commit ships to restore the safe passage through the Strait"
They won't send jack shit until the US are out of the region and the war is so cold you can't call it a war anymore, and they're right.
This is the source article (in Danish) for the bluesky posts:
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/danmark-forbered...
And in the case of countries like Denmark who have few realistic enemy choices, that means they must be prepared for unrealistic invasions, even if the US isn't threatening to invade.
Yes the Danes probably spend most of their time preparing to fight the Russians, but always wargaming the same thing leaves them unprepared for different enemies or unexpected approaches from expected enemies.
Yes, the actions in the links are more than just wargaming, but a large part of it is stuff the military should be doing anyways.
> that means they must be prepared for unrealistic invasions, even if the US isn't threatening to invade.
It's not unrealistic to think the US would invade Greenland. We've now had 10+ years of this "it's a joke... no it's a bargaining chip... well it's overstated... okay it's temporary... ahh yes well this is Good, Actually."
1. Denmark does have allies; they're not completely alone, and they're not completely helpless.
2. The US has a track record of invasions, but not one of successfully pacifying states. Resistance works.
You're using the same simplistic logic as Russia invading Ukraine; you can't just compare population numbers and guarantee an immediate victory.
There's also a separate issue here: the US invading Denmark would lead to a lot of death and a loss of freedom for its citizens, even if unopposed. Flip your demurral: if they're going to take everything anyway, why not fight?
Do you really think NATO wouldn't defend a NATO country being invaded? It isn't USA they are fighting against, it is just Trump, and that war wouldn't continue for many days before the congress decides to end it since USA doesn't want it. So I don't doubt NATO would go to defend Denmark there, since they know USA would remove Trump if they did.
> As a source puts it, the French said: "Would you like more soldiers? You could have them. Would you like more naval support? You could have that. Would you like more air support? You could have that too."
The idea that France was going to engage in armed conflict with the US over Greenland is absurd. The US could probably take Saint Pierre and Miquelon or French Guiana without triggering a French armed response.
What will anyway happen is your life someday ends, what must not happen is that you are remembered in dishonor.
Also, Mearsheimer, what a muppet.
I would expect the territory after a brief economic war to be returned with apologies and reparations by the next president of the USA.
Rich powerful countries could also keep slaves and no one would be able to stop it by force.
But they don't. Civilisation advances.
"The west" is no longer a well defined thing. America is its own thing now, and I don't think it fits in with any traditional notion of "The West" anymore, outside of historical inclusion. And without America the term just means Europe, so you might as well just refer to things directly instead of coming up with a new term: America, Europe, Canada, etc.
It provides no analytical value anymore to talk about "the west" as a shared family of identities or cultures. That concept was more an ephemeral artifact of some colonial history combined with the post WW2 global landscape and the fact that the US was the last industrialized country remaining that didn't have its industrial base bombed to smithereens.
Judging by ever shrinking middle class, rise of poverty and few rich owning the rest of the world it is heading back to that state. Have nots are not slaves by definition but their lives are getting worse and worse and where does that end?
I'd love to hear how Biden, Obama, or Clinton got us into forever wars. Or how they threatened allies. Or how they destroyed our trade or deal-making reputation. Where are the Democrat newscasters saying we should invade Canada? The figure heads calling for internment camps?
Are we all affected? Sure. Does everybody in the world view us through the lens of our worst (people/behavior)? Of course. But it IS about a single party on every. single. issue.
If the Democrats were to regain control and we had public trials for all involved for war crimes, constitutional violations, etc, it would do a lot to fix the damage. Not pretending it would all go away, but actually holding the one party accountable would help because everyone on the planet knows who is responsible.
I've seen roughly two types of American commentators over the last year. The ones that cheer this stuff going on, which HN has plenty of, and the ones that think "come the midterms/2028/impeachment everything will go back to normal"
The latter are massively mistaken, it would take decades for the US to rebuild its standing in the eyes of the world, and there is no evidence that it even wants to.
Trump is a symptom of what America truly is, not the cause.
(I think I know, it has to do with how its 'stealth' works.)
Danmark forberedte sig på muligt angreb fra USA [Danish language - no native translation] https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/danmark-forbered...
Google translated URL: https://www-dr-dk.translate.goog/nyheder/indland/groenland/d...
>DR is a Danish public-service radio and television broadcasting company. Founded in 1925 as a public-service organization, it is Denmark's oldest and largest electronic media enterprise.
It's ludicrous to see the USA threaten to invade a well-connected European country, invade a South American country weeks after, and then now, three months later, beg its European allies to help with the invasion of Iran because ostensibly American leadership couldn't foresee that war in the Middle East might impact fuel prices. I still think it's a ruse to distract the European military by sending the navy to the Middle East but who knows with the current idiot in charge.
I hope the country will recover some normalcy in post-Trump decade(s), but I fear we're witnessing the slow collapse of a world power. Regardless of anyone's feelings on grip the East/West dichotomy has had over the world in the past 90 or so years, such shifts in world power rarely go calmly and peacefully.
I think Europe's inaction in 2022 will go down as the greatest moral failing of the century. You can't say "they didn't act because Russia is a nuclear power" - the same is true here.
Russia has invaded Ukraine. There is no political entity called Europe. And if you're talking geography than good chunk of Russia is in Europe.
It wasn't until that thing with Trump and Vance shouting at Zelensky in the oval office that Europe figured the US had kind of flipped and it was on us to support Ukraine.
Just for some additional context, these meetings are held every week, but this caused headlines because there was held an additional one outside of the normal schedule due to some classified time sensitive case, i.e. not something that happened in another country many months ago.
Using F35 in this situation is like brining in a billion dollar paperweight to the battle.s
So you don't attack Greenland. Because that would be wrong.
Unless all that stuff about shining cities on hills was nonsense. Instead of making America great again the US has ceded power to China.
If mainstream media in the US showed this, I bet the politics would look different.
On the topic of manufacturing outside China, the YouTuber "Smarter Every day" (Destin Sandlin) has a series on manufacturing and feels strongly about manufacturing having moved out of the country. As an experiment he tried to manufacture something without China, but was unable to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
I just ordered a bunch of drone parts. The majority of those part were only available from China.
As near as I can tell, the vast majority of the parts are made in China. When I look at the few alternatives, they're full of Chinese circuitry. If I look at circuit components, they're all made of Chinese raw materials.
Both Ukraine and Russia are planning to deploy (and use up) several million drones over the next year. Iran just joined them as a major procurer.
Where are all the US and EU component factories?
On those specific parts:
Motors: T-Motor F90 1300KV - $119.60(incl shipping) + Tariff
ESC: Holybro Tekko32 F4 50A - $88.97(incl shipping) + Tariff
FC: Matek H743-SLIM V4 - £88.12(incl shipping + VAT) + Tariff
Radio: Radiomaster M2 $95.99(incl shipping + sales tax)
The FC was from a UK store but it originated in China. I already had the radio so I don't have current prices on it.
I'd love to find a list of vendors that have comparable parts, in stock, and without being insane multiples of those prices.
edit: formatting
Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info. It seems they just raised 2.6M in seed funding 3 months ago. It's great that there are startups in NL but that's not even close to a replacement for China's scale yet.
Both of these may change the landscape in the future. For now, neither of them is a practical way to get drone parts without China.
They absolutely do.
> Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info.
You can order as much as you want from them, the price is right and the quality is extremely high.
Indeed, they're not on AliExpress, but that's roughly the difference between being a producer in Europe and in China, and that is precisely the difference that you should be happy with.
Rhetoric and public support aside, I honestly very much doubt that there will be a solid EU military response. For many countries like Baltic, Eastern Europe and Nordic countries (ironically DK included). US military support means life or death of their countries. I imagine they'd stall response like what Hungary did and hope that Greenland annexed become fait accompli.
Meant. They have begun to realize that this has changed and realize that if this were put to the test that the US military would likely not hold up their end of NATO.
What you wrote would have made good sense in 2015, but today it makes a lot less sense and with every passing day that gap is widening. The Baltics have become the voice of reason and ethics in Europe, Poland is much stronger than parties outside of Europe seem to realize, France is always going to be a force to be reckoned with and we have no doubt about where the UK stands, then there are Finland, Sweden and Norway who all are automatically on the side of anything that Denmark is involved in and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Canada would become part of it, because they too have a lot to lose.
There is a good reason why Putin has not risked engaging the EU and that's not just because the United States is still formally part of NATO.
Um, lots of us have doubts about that. The USA couldn't win against Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; why do you think it could win against Greenland? Greenlanders actually have a lot of guns; and likely most of Europe and Canada would also go to war against the USA.
Canada and the US share border and almost all meaningful infra of Canada is located in that thin border area. The US can obliterate much of Canada with artillery, various types of missiles, bombs etc. etc. Canada has nothing to counter it with. So no, I doubt Canada is that suicidal (I am Canadian btw).
If it was because of resources, then American companies are frankly free to extract them as long as they reach deals with Greenland about it. If the USA had waited a few years for Greenland to gain more independence then it would have been even easier.
It will cost a fortune, but nobody is going to go 500 miles over an ice pack to raid a US mining settlement.
Unless we go full evilmode and just run them with slave labor.
I’m not suggesting this is a good idea or anything but there’s a ton of other ways that something like this could play out which involves more difficult ways to counter than you might think.
> Instead of making America great again the US has ceded power to China.
What power has the US ceded?
Before this, we (large multinational infra company) were happily using AWS, microsoft and a bunch of other US based companies.
Now we are beginning the migration away, not because its cheaper or better, but because we just don't think that we can trust the contracts we have with them any more.
This isn't a sudden thing, we are not going to do it over night. But we are not renewing multi-million dollar contracts in the coming years for stuff that would have been a no brainer last year.
Similarly, while it's great to take a principled stand here (it's yet again interesting how it's always a principled stand against American companies but never others), while you are busy spending time and money migrating away from AWS to a competing product that has worse features and is more expensive as you said, you should hope your competitors are too because if not, they're going to be delivering features faster and more cheaply. Something worth thinking about there.
I don't think Microsoft losing some European contracts is an example of the US ceding power.
Personally I have a Lenovo laptop (China) running Ubuntu (UK), on an LG monitor (Korea) with a logitech (Switzerland) mouse on an Ikea (Denmark) desk connected to a Mikrotik (Latvia) router.
Who do you think designs the MacBook, chipsets, and more? Who designs and builds the semiconductors for your Lenovo laptop?
That would be so funny if it wasn't clear that you are serious.
> Who do you think designs the MacBook, chipsets, and more? Who designs and builds the semiconductors for your Lenovo laptop?
Why don't you tell us?
Sure ok - tell me what I'm missing.
> Why don't you tell us?
Are you unaware that Apple designs the MacBook and A/M series chips?
I was just going off what you wrote. I buy locally handmade furniture and haven't bought anything from Ikea since college. Anyway, Sweden doesn't build all of this stuff either.
> ARM comes from a long line of UK products?
Again, global supply chains when it's convenient for your argument.
Actually, in a number of cases EU cloud is cheaper and better.
In terms of "better", spec wise it is not uncommon to get more bang for your buck in the EU cloud, especially around compute.
In terms of "cheaper", that too. AWS, Azure etc. will happily sit there all day nickle and diming you through obscure pricing structures with all sorts of small-print. Good luck, for example, figuring out if you're going to go over your "provisioned IOPS-month" on AWS EBS, whatever the hell that is. And have fun with all the nickle-and-diming on AWS S3. Meanwhile on EU providers a lot of stuff is free that the US providers nickle and dime you for, and the stuff that is charged is done in a manner where you actually CAN forecast your spend.
And then of course there is the real EU sovereignty. Not the fake US-cloud-in-Europe which despite what the US providers salesdroids try to tell you is still subject to CLOUD, PATRIOT and everything else.
Seriously?
You live in a multi-polar world, there are three major power blocks and Europe isn't one of them, though that may change now (we're sick of war, but we're also sick of the threat of war, which one of the two will win out is up for grabs). There is - or rather, was, by now - Russia, China and the USA. Russia is unacceptable for many reasons, China is too clever for its own good in the longer term and the United States was historically our ally.
The United States has thrown away 80 years or so of very carefully and very expensively built up soft power because someone didn't understand the concept (apparently just like you). That doesn't translate into ownership and it doesn't in any way give you control but it ensures that things will, at least most of the times, go your way because of momentum and because it makes sense by default. Just like you may disagree on some stuff with your friends but you're not going to rob their homes, just because you can (and maybe just because they gave you the key to the back door).
You throw that away at your peril and because Russia is in no way capable of capitalizing on that the Chinese are. I wouldn't be surprised at all if in a decade or two the US$ is no longer the reserve currency. It could happen a lot faster than that. The US economy is teetering on the edge of the abyss and if you think that your ability to project power isn't diminished then maybe by the end of the Iran war you'll get it.
The US maximized its post-war power on the 10th of September 2001. Since then it has gone down hill very steadily and the fall rapidly accelerated with Trump. I see no reason to believe this will change, all institutions that were supposed to provide checks and balances have failed. And all China has to do is to look sane in comparison, that's not super hard.
We live in a multi-polar world. Sure. But I disagree with your assertion that there are three major power blocks. The US and China are the only two. Europe has a decent sized and advanced economy but it lacks military power and is politically fragmented and always will be. China is building military power but lacks the ability and will to project that power. Manufacturing and economic powerhouse rivaling the United States. No doubt about that.
Russia isn't a pole in this world. As President Obama said back in the 2010s I believe "Russia is a nuclear armed gas station". That was true then, and it's still true today.
> The United States has thrown away 80 years or so of very carefully and very expensively built up soft power because someone didn't understand the concept (apparently just like you).
Well, I don't think this is true for one. And secondly if it takes just a year or so to throw away that power then it was just a matter of time until the EU got mad at the US for doing something and threw it away anyways.
> You throw that away at your peril and because Russia is in no way capable of capitalizing on that the Chinese are.
What soft power is the Chinese capitalizing on? Is it their support for Russia and supplying money, weapons, and equipment for their war in Ukraine? Or is it the soft power they had in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran that they have just lost because of US military action?
> I wouldn't be surprised at all if in a decade or two the US$ is no longer the reserve currency. It could happen a lot faster than that. The US economy is teetering on the edge of the abyss and if you think that your ability to project power isn't diminished then maybe by the end of the Iran war you'll get it.
The US ability to project power isn't being diminished by the Iran war, only being exercised. Talking heads for some reason think that when you launch an aerial assault against a country that is amassing ballistic missiles, drones (which they build and sell to Russia to go bomb innocent Ukrainians), and more that it should be over within 24 hours and that the enemy shouldn't be able to fight back. It's unrealistic.
Nevermind Iran launching these missiles at civilian targets in countries throughout the Middle East. I get the argument that if you hose a US military base that the base is a target, but there's no excuse for attacking civilian apartment complexes and such.
It also misses the fact that, we've seen this movie before with North Korea. Except if Iran gets a nuclear weapon they also have control over your oil supply and it would kick off a nuclear arms race in the region because Saudi Arabia and others certainly aren't going to let Iran be the only one with nuclear weapons.
These are tough problems to deal with, and from the sidelines it's easy to think about how simple the solution is or point out all the mistakes, but the alternative headline here is the US does nothing, all of these Middle Eastern countries get nuclear bombs, Iran loads up on ballistic missiles, and then who knows exactly what will happen? Do they nuke Israel and Israel nukes them back? Do they extract a toll on oil passing through the Straight of Hormuz like they are as of today declaring they will do?
https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/images/0421/mapoverviewofchine...
https://africacenter.org/spotlight/china-port-development-af...
Two maps that show a small selection of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa. See all those harbours?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power_of_China
For example, one-third of the top 100 mobile games in Japan currently come from China.[20]
I'm short on time right now, so no more examples.
Economic power (US will no longer be the world reserve currency).
The power of allies (see Trump begging for help in Hormuz).
All the soft power it ever had.
As a reminder, reserve currencies are just currencies that are held in large amounts by national banks and other important institutions. The USD, like the Euro, Yen, Pound, and others are all reserve currencies.
The USD is the dominant currency, in part because the US is in the Middle East right now doing exactly what it is doing by using the military to enforce trade for oil in USD. But if the US loses that "status" it just.... reverts to being more like the EU? Doesn't seem so bad to me.
There's also pros/cons with being "the reserve currency".
> The power of allies (see Trump begging for help in Hormuz).
See Europe begging for help in Ukraine. I don't think this is a good argument. If 4 years of Trump being mean was all it took to erase all soft power the US ever had, then it never had it in the first place and it wasn't worth caring about.
That was a signal, thankfully there are still adults in the USA who recognised it.
Firing on one British officer would be as bad a firing on 10000.
It's about lines.
But the sun would rise the next day and the USA won't like the 'non-kinetic' consequences. Too many to enumerate.
Eventually the adults in USA would just return it.
It's not an exercise we should entertain, though the EU needs to step up in a very serious way and spend billions of Euros adding new equipment to Greenland to beef up detection and defense.
Most regular equipment doesn't work in -40C temperatures, to take Greenland USA would need to develop more arctic enabled weaponry just for that.
The US literally has bases in Alaska and Greenland and deals with these temperatures regularly.
Anyway, there’s actually an index for soft power. Eliminating USAID halved that index. China built the highways, hospitals and water treatment instead.
The idea was to make it as difficult as possible to invade, not to stop it, because that’s largely impossible.
Didn't UK get really really annoyed with France in the one instance their kill switch Didn't work?
Sometimes these billion dollar high tech things work.
They're wise to the fact that "the Stable Genius" isn't going to try anything violent with Denmark/Greenland, but they still want to prevent him thinking about just stealing territory "peacefully."
The assumption was - and still is - that the USA wasn't posturing either.
We (and I realize I obviously don't speak for all of Europe but I have my finger on the pulse in many places here) are also not assuming that when Trump is gone the USA will go back to normal.
If the people voted Trump in to office twice, it’ll happen again. It’s a divided country where propaganda has a strong hold.
There was similar tough talk in 1940 and Denmark lasted 6 hours. Without capitulation the country would have been razed. But surrender saw it able to keep some level of control and thus extricate the Jewish population in relative safety which would not otherwise have been possible.
If you have never seen war up close then I am happy to forgive you, but trust me, in 'actual war' there is no possibility of success for anybody, there are only degrees of damage and degrees of grief and illusions to the contrary are focused on the few people that manage to get out of war with the profits in their pockets. Everybody else suffers.
1. Denmark cannot win militarily
2. You are suggesting Denmark would not capitulate and indeed enter into a state of war
What do you think happens in this situation?
Meanwhile they stand to lose a lot. There have been many NATO exercises that showed US aircraft carriers to be vulnerable to European submarines, so they can't park their fleet too close. They have to fly between NATO members Canada and Iceland. How would soldiers feel if they're forced to fight all their former allies? How would the US citizens feel?
Don't go around poking hornets nests if you don't want to get stung.
Make of that what you will, but if I were you I wouldn't go around poking the hornets nest that has an explicit sign "these hornets will sting" attached to it.
See, this is what is so dumb about this: you are treating this as if it is some kind of board game. It is exactly why the US gets into these messes over and over again, the incredible overconfidence that because they somehow have battlefield superiority they can do whatever they want. You are exemplifying precisely where the rot in the USA is located.
The one thing that is common about 'rationalists' is that they share a lot of the viewpoints with other ra*ists and that's not the world many of us want to live in.
Sure, you can take it. But can you afford to take it?
The answer is most likely you can't. And so far every attempt to show John Mearheimers superiority has been the equivalent of 'just relax and enjoy it'.
Guess what? We won't. Alliances are made voluntarily, not through conquest.
I wonder which particular set of states that are united might have given people the impression that might work in recent times!
> There was similar tough talk in 1940
If your comparison there is intentional, we agree which side of history the current US regime is on. Unless it gets to write that history, of course.
What are we supposed to do, just fucking give up?
Just like Ukraine, Europe does not want war, doesn't want to see their kids die for the umpteenth time so that fat cats can line their pockets. But if push comes to shove we would be absolutely capable of doing it, either outright or by slower guerilla like means. Bombing shit is easy. Taking over territory and holding it is much, much harder, infinitely more so if the population holds a grudge. Note that the Dutch resistance killed more German soldiers than the army ever did. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, lots of countries in Europe. Examples aplenty.
Assume that Denmark's strategic success criteria is not "win up-front battles with US armed forces". And that they understand the difference between "lost battle(s), got occupied" and "nation permanently removed from existence".
Also, US service members are not slavishly loyal Clone Troopers. That I've heard, the greatest fear of most senior American officers is that the CIC will issue orders sufficiently offensive to the lower ranks that they will be disobeyed at scale.
World tension continues to increase.
Why should they trust a country that smells of corruption and lashes out at random like a shambling corpse?
> The Danish public broadcaster DR reports that officials in Denmark, France and Germany say that Donald Trump's threats to seize Greenland were taken so seriously that wide-ranging preparations were made to forcibly resist a US invasion of the Danish island.
Breaking (2): small country was preparing to forcibly resist (?) an invasion. That was threatened.
What I find harder to believe is that they were preparing for "full-scale war". That makes no sense. Using F-35, American made and very likely with kill switches or otherwise susceptible to American interference? And where would they get their American made parts and supplies? And Denmark stands no chance at all against US military might, with or without assistance from France.
I'm sure they were prepared to engage in token resistance, and also more serious diplomatic and economic struggles, but "full-scale war" is hyperbole.
If the oligarchs don't feel any pushback they'll continue to wreck the US and Europe.
Europe claims: they don't want Russia to conquer Europe.
European actions: refuse to defend themselves, buy Russian gas, give crumbs to the Ukrainians and get angry when the US actually starts dismantling the Russian Axis.
There's only 1 reason for the US to want Greenland. Take your globe, draw a straight line from Washington DC to Russia and observe what's perfectly halfway in between. And consider how ballistic missiles fly...
In the end of this affair Denmark appears to have agreed to take defense seriously. Why weren't they already?
Now, what is the end game for Europe here? They've already given up their manufacturing to China, given up their energy independence, given up their defense independence to the USA...
China and Russia have already stated their desire to destroy the west, and Russia has been using Iran as a main tool to accomplish this. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, agitators abroad (look how many crowds came out for Quds day in the west), etc...
Trump has finally decided to destroy Russia's axis and what, the west is upset? Europe honestly deserves their own destruction at this point, not sure there's ever been more self-destructive behaviour by any world powers in history before... And why, because the US administration says mean (but true) things?
Is the west so far gone that people would actually prefer Russian fascism or Chinese communism to the status quo? It's unbelievable that, with WW3 on the horizon, most of the west is siding with those who want to destroy us... Then again, most of Europe did collaborate with Hitler, even if they pretended they didn't in the end.
This is just vaguely frustrated venting into the void using a piece of months-old fantasy erotic fan fiction from a hyper-political filter bubble (bluesky).
I do not believe you. I think you quite like to be that guy.
It is entirely different if USA starts attacking NATO allies such as Denmark which isn't a threat or problem to anyone, that is not something anybody would expect and it would ruin American diplomacy completely.
While Trump was trolling European leaders about their security posture (by threatening to relieve them of sovereign territory which the US already has extensive access to) the USAF was already moving assets in the opposite direction to the middle east (this was mid-january).
It's fairly easy to work out what's happening if you ignore the orange man and listen to what serious people are saying, what they've briefed on, how they contradict one another, and where the assets are moving.
Obviously European leaders have to pretend to take the orange man seriously, but the reaction in the media was bordering on hysterical.
off you go then, what is it?
Then maybe look at the Nato chain of command and who was interviewed and what was said in mid-Jan?
The narrative he wanted to control was about Epstein. Denmark could have simultaneously prepared for that, but it wouldn’t be on OSInt Twitter.
It’s rational to prepare for his propaganda to sometimes accidentally turn out true. Hence this relatively modest response. But the narrative most reliably supported by fact is that Trump hasn’t kept his story straight about Epstein.
