Of course they were. The United States has never before damaged its own reputation in Europe as much as they did in the last 12 months.
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'm really happy these topics are being discussed here on HN, when they weren't ~1 year ago. When considering a post-USA world, we also get to consider a post-Microsoft, post-Meta, post-Google, post-CloudFlare, post-Amazon, etc world.
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.
>> What does post-USA world mean?
>> Who is the leader in culture, business, technology? The only other contender I can think of is China.
>> 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.
Much better is rather an exaggeration. China is ruthlessly 'colonizing' Africa for example. Not that 'the west' has any leg to stand on criticizing China for it of course.
But China currently is a lot more stable and somewhat more trustworthy than the U.S.
You get downvotes, but even if China is an authoritarian oppressive regime, they are not going around starting wars and threatening their allies, changing directions daily.
I am not Chinese. In fact we feel threatened by China.
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.
Careful what you wish for, their History revisionism is remarkable and soon you'd find a narrative preaching that Western culture was all made up (in part by the usual suspects), not even the Holocaust will survive - just follow some social media trends and you'll see what's already happening.
Maybe it's because stuff gets flagged and deleted. But I haven't really seen it?
Unless you equalize 'critical of Israel' with 'antisemitic dogwhistle' maybe.
Note that this is from a country that wouldn't exist if not for the allied countries and that the US has somehow managed to all but erase that reputation. We recognize our debt, we also recognize that this is to a country that no longer exists in a meaningful way. All we have now is multiple variations of the mob.
The way you pay off that debt is not to the original liberator now turned oppressor, but by extending similar help to countries that are now in a similar bind as we were then. Like Ukraine. I really think we are morally obligated to liberate and help Ukraine.
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.
> 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.
Yeah the US we knew is gone. I think about this sometimes when I am listening to American music from the 20th century, how much soft power they had, how great they made America sound either directly or indirectly. That America that we all looked up to and admired is gone. Pity.
I am the guy who participated in Green Card lottery for few years willing to work in most advanced planet‘s semiconductor companies. I changed my mind recently. Speedboat ambushes, Greenland, public executions by ICE „officers“ and now Iran war. US I knew is definitely gone. That’s not the country sharing culture and values peacefully anymore: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika-Haus_(M%C3%BCnchen)
To be fair, the US has never been peaceful, and it's the country that started the most wars since WW2. It's just that it used to be in our team, and human nature make the aggressiveness of our team justified, or at least understandable.
And, at least regarding the more recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, Europe witnessed the largest anti-war protests in history.
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.
The US was historically self-interested in empire building, with an excellent PR campaign in front of it, but... it also did useful and good stuff, both for its allies and for unrelated parties. USAID was a testament to this.
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.
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.
I think that a big part of it is the transparency brought on by the vast communication bandwidth that came online starting after the dot com years. This stuff happened before just the same, but was concealed by media gatekeepers.
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.
It's the two party system. If liberals are okay with 'pro lgbt muslims' and say things like 'gang violence isn't a problem' then people no longer vote for liberals.
Trump doesn't have popular support. Many of his 2024 voters are furious with him.
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 want to believe this desperately, but from what I see (well, on YouTube videos, surveys and polls) it makes it very hard for me to do so. I still see massive endorsement from the not so well to do in the hinterlands.
I will however grant you that my sampling is no where close to uniform.
As a european I see what you mean, but that 'we all' in your sentence probably hasn't included those from Latin America, and large parts of Africa or Asia since long before Trump. The US pulled quite a few less than admirable tricks (to use an euphemism) on non-europeans during the 20th century.
'Until early in 1778, the American Revolution was a civil war within the British Empire, but it became an international war as France (in 1778) and Spain (in 1779) joined the colonies against Britain. The Netherlands, which was engaged in its own war with Britain, provided financial support for the Americans as well as official recognition of their independence. The French navy in particular played a key role in bringing about the British surrender at Yorktown, which effectively ended the war.'
There is no evidence that dozy Donny the paedo president has dementia. It's just that one of his personality traits is "Arbitrary".
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!"
> There is no evidence […] Donny […] has dementia.
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”?
Men of old age are indeed generally ill-suited for the presidency (as are the young; middle age best balances vigor with prudence and wisdom). The elderly function better as advisors where they may be consulted for their experience, or as amici curiae.
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.
The only way the US can fix our reputation will be to try and imprison our current leadership after they are eventually removed from power. And in particular, the Trump family needs to have all of its assets seized.
I don't know why this is voted down, because it's absolutely true. The only way for the US to regain the lost trust is to finally clean house, hold its corrupt leadership accountable. Throw them in prison, seize their illegitimately gotten assets, reform that broken political system, and educate your people so this doesn't happen 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.
Following the precedents of imprisoning and persecuting the previous regime on "corruption" charges established by the likes of much of Latin America, Pakistan, the Phillipines, and other similar countries will definitely mark the USA as a second-rate tin-pot dictatorship.
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.
It was very obvious that Trump is a highly corrupt and incompetent person at the second term election. His voters do not disappear when he is in prison, neither would the US reputation suddenly be way better. Who will these people elect next, why should anyone trust the US anymore?
Imprisonment would be a good starting point though. Together with education, regulation and reforming the political system. But this takes decades.
The absolute lack of consequences Trump faced after his first go-around all but guaranteed the crime spree we're now seeing, and will probably go down in history as the primary blunder of Biden's DOJ.
Open bribery and corruption (both the direct pay-for-play and the indirect via insider information), openly violating the law and ignoring the courts, betrayal of public trust, mishandling of confidential information, war crimes, take your pick of the many different choices.
And the asset seizure would be for the proceeds of all the open bribery, at the very least.
Sadly, these are all fairly "safe" things for a US president to do. Either because there's no law against it and if there is he can just pardon himself and his partners in crime. I know a presidential self-pardon is controversial but realistically Trump will be dead before that legal question is settled.
There should be a law against it. It's blatant corruption. The fact that lawmakers and supreme judges have the power to make their own corruption legal, doesn't make it any less corrupt. The Nazis made their crimes legal, and they were tried anyway.
> The Nazis made their crimes legal, and they were tried anyway.
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.
It's peculiar to me that after Nixon, Americans just don't hold their presidents accountable for their illegal actions anymore. It seems like they've just given up; they no longer behave as if the president was the head of the executive branch. They behave as if he was a king with absolute power.
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.
The president of the US does not have the power to start a war without getting it approved by the UN security council. You're arguing internal implementation details, but the legality is not determined by your courts.
The war is certainly illegal. Our systems are just so atrophied at this point that we treat congressional approval as a formality. This is a choice we make over and over again that we need to stop making.
There’s probably a huge case for corruption. And of course he can be declared national threat and foreign agent. I mean, just look what Putin does within his constitutional limits. 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), you have to choose something and then reflect not on what you just did, but how did you get there in the first place. Legal matters are secondary, as long as majority is convinced that justice is served.
Who cares? Just stop enforcing laws on little guys completely, if you can't even think of what to put any of the US admin members on trial for. It's nuts that there are long complicated trials and TV series and movies about like a single person murdering one other person, yet people ask what we could even try nutjobs that murder and kill by thousands and/or support mass crimes all around the world for. Let alone all the financial crimes that are being perpetarated for sure, with all the crypto scams and insider trading on the insane volatility they themselves create and know in advance about.
If you hold the belief that the Trump administration (and Trump himself personally) have not commited a rather long list of crimes openly, you are either willfully ignorant or complicit. I do not care if this statement irritates you in any way. After a certain point, we are firmly in the realm of personal responsibility.
Well, his administration has ignored the constitutional rights of this country multiple times at best, and at worst outright violated them resulting in killing American citizens with zero justice or recourse. There's a million different alternative reasons people could come up with, but we can just go with the classic 'treason' and line them up accordingly.
On what principle would the Trump family's assets be seized? Just to pre-empt the idea that he corruptly became rich in office, that is actually fairly usual for US presidents to become suspiciously wealthy after their time in office [0, 1]. That's never been a reason to start talking about asset seizure.
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.
This is why two party system is really great. because they both don't try to put old guts into power in last decade. /s
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.
I'm sure this will be very unpopular but no one else is going to say it so here goes,
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.
The United States is a bully in a China shop and that China shop is the world. It constantly destabilizes the Middle East under false pretenses and lets Europe pick up the refugees. It brain drains and takes innovation to be commercialized. It makes money on the hard labor of others.
So yes probably for the best for Europe to do what China is doing and decouple.
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).
> 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."
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!
>I long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world, but turns out they were right along.
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 long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world, but turns out they were right along.
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.
The French took basically the exact opposite approach to the British in terms of post-WW2 foreign policy.
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)
pre-EU history shows that, which is why we founded the EU in the first place.
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"
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.
Maybe not but they have enough to be useful. They do have nukes - a US invasion of France would not be a good idea. On the more realistic end of things the French are able to provide military intelligence to Ukraine to counter the US president turning it off to help his mate Vlad.
Russia's invasion ironically strengthened NATO, with more countries joining or feeling the usefulness of it. Somehow the US managed to break down all that good will in such a short amount of time.. I think it's hard to overstate how much more hostile people look at the US the last few years. So much soft power has been lost.
Covid, Russia and the axis of US+Israel has done massive damage to the European psyche.
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.)
I'm of pretty mixed feelings about this. It certainly strengthened Europe's collective defense priorities and awareness. That response happens to include NATO but primarily because Europe is too weak without NATO. Europe used to be full of world powers and now they collectively can't manage collective defense without the US? There's something very learned-helplessness about that.
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's weakness is mostly in their heads. The US is the most powerful military in the world, but the second most powerful military is NATO without the US. If the rest of NATO pulls together and reorganises into an effective military that doesn't depend on the US, it would be a force to be reckoned with.
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.
> Europe could easily defeat Russia without outside help (look at how well Ukraine is doing with far less!)
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.
Much of their support has also come from the EU, and the EU has a lot more than that. The EU has more fighters and ships, more tanks, more soldiers. It is true that the EU didn't and still doesn't have deep ammo reserves, though. But it has far more capacity to ramp up production of these than Russia has; the Russian economy is about the size of that of the Benelux.
> 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
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.
I am equally dismayed at recent US behavior; but this is a short sighted view.
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.
I do agree with some of your points and I believe some aspects of it might be right but there is a big difference between the past and present because this time, its America attacking EU sovereignity/other countries and so many things all at once literally within less than a year.
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.
I mean I definitely agree that a lot of trust has been lost, and that a lot of work will be needed to patch things up.
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.
> Countries across the world will have to treat US as unpredictable from now on
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.
Within Geopolitical commentaries that I used to watch, A famous quote by Henry Kissinger is often repeated.
"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.
And this is, in my opinion, why support at Hormuz shouldn’t even be on the table. How can you possibly hold joint patrols when you were just months ago planning full scale war between each other?
The original title is better translated as "prepared". The tweeting reposter translated to continuous past tense somewhat erroneously imo, because it sounds as if the preparation was interrupted by something.
Lars Løkke Rasmussen - Minister of Foreign Affairs, said just the other day on Genstart (podcast), that an EU solution for the Hormuz straight could be an option. This would probably be through Aspides.
Yeah, he's talking for himself, and begging for one, everyone else said "No." Danemark can keep their CIA bases and fuck right off to daddy trump if they want, nobody in Europe will follow them to a war in the middle east
It is on the table, why are you spouting bullshit? People are discussing this right now. Or do you mean Denmark wont help at Hormuz, but I doubt Denmark would help there anyway, but other countries are discussing that.
Sending experts to the US to "help" and sending warships to an active war zone are not the same thing.
> 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
It is on the table, on the table means it is still discussed, that is what they are there for. If it wasn't on the table they wouldn't go there to discuss it.
On the table doesn't mean it is already decided they will send anything.
Who's discussing what exactly? Give sources, everyone publicly said it's not on the table. Your own link doesn't mention any of this.
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?
Keep in mind that militaries are always preparing for war. They have to. A military exists in large part to always be prepared for the unthinkable.
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.
Hot take: Preparing to defend your country from an ally invading you is actually very bad and indicative of inexcusable behavior from your "ally."
> 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."
No thats not what this was. These are the actions that the Russians did before invading Ukraine and were the specific actions that the military pointed out and said "these aren't normal actions everyone is always doing"
Tu as le droit de perdre, mais tu n'as pas le droit de te faire surprendre.
(You have the right to lose, but you do not have the right to be caught off guard.)
I think there is a pretty good chance US is in the late empire phase. This is not about a single President or party, or even single geopolitical event/development.
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 Naval is right when he was making the observation that history has alternated by being determined by either individuals (think Genghis Khan, Napoleon) or larger forces at play (think socio-economic reasoning to many historical events). In this, I would say Trump is Trump (the individual) making his moves that very much go against the larger forces at play that was "business as usual". So equating him to a symptom of America is true in the sense that sooner or later America was bound to have someone like him deviate the course of history, and I also believe post-Trump America is not going to reverse course.
The F-35 is mentioned in the article as being readied for the defense of Greenland. I wonder what the 'easter-eggs' Danes would've found out about it if they went up against the US.
(I think I know, it has to do with how its 'stealth' works.)
>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.
Every week, the USA finds a new way to lose credibility as a serious nation. If it weren't for the observably fair elections, you'd almost think America was being taken over from the inside by foreign infiltrators.
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 don't think it's very likely that the emergency meeting in the Norwegian government yesterday was called because of the security situation in Denmark 3 months ago. Not unlikely that it is related to US-Europe/NATO relations ofc (although there are plenty of other things that would cause an emergency meeting as well, king has been hospitalized plenty of times lately, wife of the next in line is deep in drama due to both being revealed to have been close with Epstein and having a son that is currently in court for some pretty serious allegations, and sharing a border Russia that is currently waging hybrid warfare across europe)
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.
That doesn't matter. It is not so much about whether the USA could do this and expect to win, of course they can. Nobody has any doubt about that. It is about gross miscalculation of consequences. Attack Greenland ->attack Denmark, attack Denmark -> Attack the EU.
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.
Living in Japan, I meet and talk to Chinese when out drinking. Many of them are almost literally ROFLing about how the US practically just gave away everything they had to China. It's as if the US is playing poker with their cards facing up on the table. Chinese already consider themselves the defacto superpower.
If mainstream media in the US showed this, I bet the politics would look different.
They are pretty happy with having superiority on high tech manufacturing and robotics. You basically cannot manufacture something without using China - even if you try. I don't think they consider the TSMC EUV monopoly a long term threat. Doing good on AI as well, you bet the OSS chinese models causing stock panic in the US makes them laugh.
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
If you want: motors, ESCs, flight controllers and radios those can be sourced from outside of China, and competitively priced too (if you're in Europe, outside you'd still have to add taxes).
I think the most interesting takeaway from this video in question is that he tried to buy material from an Indian seller, who promised it was Indian. When the box arrived, it had the name of a Chinese factory on it.
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.
> US military support means life or death of their countries.
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.
>It is not so much about whether the USA could do this and expect to win, of course they can. Nobody has any doubt about that.
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.
I'm Danish. There are 56k people in Greenland and almost half of them live in Nuuk. The USA could frankly "take" greenland simply by putting a warship there and saying it was theirs. Not really sure why it was ever on the table though. The USA has basically free reign to expand it's military bases there, aside from the ban on nuclear weapons. Sure it would need approval by both Greenland and Denmark, but up until recently we were frankly more allied with the USA than the EU, and I doubt we've ever really said no before. We even bought the damn f35's despite them being so much more expensive than the alternatives, primarily because our history with the F16's. Which would probably have been a possiblity considering we're now debating whether or not to have french nuclear weapon carrying planes stationed on Danish soil in the fallout of the USA no longer being a trusty NATO ally.
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.
Not the parent poster but, while I acknowledge your point on Canada and Europe entering the conflict (and I'd add that the highly motivated Dutch punch well above their weight in intelligence and economic spheres and this whole scenario of US invasion is a Putin dream), when you ask "why do you think it could win...", the 50k population of Greenland is smaller than Granada (100k) and three orders of magnitude smaller than Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (~40m). So I find its insurgency potential hard to compare to those examples you give.
The US wouldn’t even need to “attack” Greenland. What is there to even attack? 50 Danish soldiers? They could just say “that’s ours”, ignore whatever Europe says, and start doing whatever they wanted to do and instead force the EU to attack American forces or civilian business interests.
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.
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.
It’s interesting how these conversations always start and end with “my company isn’t buying XYZ American cloud provider services” while ignoring other incredibly important products and services that you can’t or are unwilling to boycott. Are you turning in your MacBook Pro and iPhone, or are you putting a bumper sticker on it saying you bought it before you knew America was crazy?
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.
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.
> Economic power (US will no longer be the world reserve currency).
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 EU, 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 is 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
It wasn’t even about Greenland, but a distraction from the extent of Trump’s knowledge of Epstein.
Anyway, there’s actually an index for soft power. Eliminating USAID halved that index. China built the highways, hospitals and water treatment instead.
This kind of stuff masked you feel good to say but the UK isn’t going to stop the US if it (somewhat foolishly in my opinion) decided that it was going to take Greenland. Neither is the EU.
No it would be a point of no return. But the "non-kinetic" consequences would go both ways.
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.
How will the EU get this arctic warfare equipment to Greenland? If the EU is so ready and willing to use this equipment, maybe they should deploy it to Ukraine instead.
The US literally has bases in Alaska and Greenland and deals with these temperatures regularly.
Sure if the US decides it would like to leave Greenland? It's just depending on who wants what with what influence factors. But if both blocks just decided to put all of their might and resources and politics capital into this the US clearly can just take Greenland and there's nothing the EU can do about it.
Argentina didn't lose the war because they came with fighter jets, but because their fighter jets were throwing scrap metal at British boats. Had these detonated, the outcome would have been different, and expensive for UK. I don't doubt that F35 are working very well in comparison to the junk Argentina was using.
Argentina only had 6 Exocets. I think the parent is referring to the failure of the fuses in the bombs the Argentinian pilots dropped on British ships.
There's a difference between "posturing" for show and actually "preparing for war".
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."
I'm pretty sure Ukraine were taking the Russian preparations as what they were. And they had plans to counter them. Proven by the fact that Putin's 3 days war has now surpassed the Russian involvement in WWII.
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.
USA cannot go back to normal. The internal damage / changeover is massive - everybody disagreing with current administration policies has either been removed or departed - whether in health or defense (I'm sorry, War) or science or education or other departments.
And even if they did go back to normal for the next presidency - why trust it? Their entire political system is set up so that the winds can change entirely every 4 years.
If the people voted Trump in to office twice, it’ll happen again. It’s a divided country where propaganda has a strong hold.
Useful stability can be achieved again, either “back to normal” as mentioned elsewhere in this thread or “forward to something different but better (and not crap like it is now)”, but it is going to take at least a few terms, maybe several. Even if it did happen more quickly, it will take that long for those of us on the outside to trust it, reputational damage like this can not be undone quickly.
This is absurd in the extreme. In actual war there is absolutely no possibility of success for Denmark, even with the help of allies. Failure to capitulate results in nothing but death and destruction with no hope of strategic gain to begin with. What you are likely experiencing is a modern belief that screaming and shouting will bring popular diplomatic pressure to bear on the opponent, thus arresting their actions.
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.
No, what is absurd is the number of people that can't wait to go back to a world with endless wars of conquest. We already know what that looks like.
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.
I'm sorry but you are not interacting with the rational suppositions of posters in various threads here. No one is arguing for a war except you. People are explaining to you the strategic reality and you are espousing rhetoric that I honestly can't decipher.
1. Denmark cannot win militarily
2. You are suggesting Denmark would not capitulate and indeed enter into a state of war
Denmark cannot win militarily, but can the US? What war has the US won recently? They're great at destroying things, but not at winning. There's nothing for them to win in Greenland. It's an indefensible chunk of ice. They can kill the people who live there, but what would that gain them?
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?
You think there's a game theory scenario in the book where France launches a nuclear weapon at mainland USA over a land dispute between them and Denmark?
France has the only first strike nuclear doctrine in the world, with the specific policy of shooting nukes to "protect it's vital interests", a term Macron has recently clarified "has a European dimension".
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.
> I'm sorry but you are not interacting with the rational suppositions of posters in various threads here.
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.
Ukraine is rapidly becoming one of the hardest countries in Europe. They fought a former superpower to a stand still and are innovating on weapons systems and integration at a pace that makes LM's skunkworks look like sloths. And on a budget that is insane.
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.
The United States are not longer an allie nor a friend to to EU.
Under Trump, they have turned into a Terror regiem, ignoring international law, human rights. They have to be international isolated together with Israel. They are the enemy of a free and civilized world!
We all were... they wouldn't speak it but reading between the lines you could see the leaders were very nervous Trump would unilaterally decide to just 'try it' like in Venezuela and now Iran.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This news concerns the biggest shift in Trans-atlantic relations in decades – possibly ever. The US is not losing relationships with single countries such as France. It’s not just scaring a small population like Denmark. The entire ”Western world” has started decoupling from the US. Tech is one of the first targets.
It would be an interesting new phenomenon if it were true. But it requires unquestionably pretending a country of 5 million people was going to go to "war" with one that has 70X that and a military hundreds of times larger. C'mon.
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).
Denmark is a part of NATO, attacking them would mean the entirety of NATO would go against USA, not just Denmark. It is reasonable to assume the entirety of NATO would put up enough resistance that USA had to withdraw from that war without getting Greenland, because Trump would get removed from office by being so hated by the people before the rest of NATO gave up.
The US president wanted to start a full on war with Europe over Greenland of all places. And he still might. And some people will still claim I just have "TDS".
I have no doubts they took US threats seriously; anyone who doesn't these days is a fool (of course, this doesn't mean Trump will do anything he claims, but he's dangerous enough you can never tell for sure).
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.
The billionaire oligarch who put that (stupid) idea in Trump's head is still out there. His son-in-law will probably be the next head of the Federal Reserve.
If the oligarchs don't feel any pushback they'll continue to wreck the US and Europe.
There is a difference, basically the entire world hates the Iranian regime and wants them gone, USA bombing the Iranian regime wont get that much pushback from the world even if the war was started in an underhanded way.
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.
I live very close to one of the USAF's largest European airbases.
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.
This is exactly right. The liar who lies to control the narrative is lying again. The chance he’s lying is high but as adults the (likelihood * hazard) of an invasion is worth preparing for.
The narrative he wanted to control was about Epstein. Denmark could have simultaneously prepared for that, but it wouldn’t be on OSInt Twitter.
More precisely, propaganda is always fake. After verification it’s possibly true, but it still began fake. Trump could try supporting his utterances with fact, but he doesn’t.
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.
Of course they were. The United States has never before damaged its own reputation in Europe as much as they did in the last 12 months.
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'm really happy these topics are being discussed here on HN, when they weren't ~1 year ago. When considering a post-USA world, we also get to consider a post-Microsoft, post-Meta, post-Google, post-CloudFlare, post-Amazon, etc world.
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.
> I'm really happy these topics are being discussed here on HN, when they weren't ~1 year ago.
They were being discussed a year ago, too, they just got flagged. Make sure to check /active
What does post-USA world mean?
Who is the leader in culture, business, technology? The only other contender I can think of is China.
And this is better?
Bunisess and technology. Culture ? Highly debatable and certainly not in the last 10 years.
>> What does post-USA world mean? >> Who is the leader in culture, business, technology? The only other contender I can think of is China.
>> 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.
Much better.
China is far more reliable and dependable than dealing with a lying narcissistic paedophile and his cronies.
Much better is rather an exaggeration. China is ruthlessly 'colonizing' Africa for example. Not that 'the west' has any leg to stand on criticizing China for it of course.
But China currently is a lot more stable and somewhat more trustworthy than the U.S.
You get downvotes, but even if China is an authoritarian oppressive regime, they are not going around starting wars and threatening their allies, changing directions daily.
I am not Chinese. In fact we feel threatened by China.
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.
Careful what you wish for, their History revisionism is remarkable and soon you'd find a narrative preaching that Western culture was all made up (in part by the usual suspects), not even the Holocaust will survive - just follow some social media trends and you'll see what's already happening.
I feel like it's ruining HN. The internet did not lack places to talk politics. The comments threads are a solid 20% anti-semitic dog whistles now.
Maybe it's because stuff gets flagged and deleted. But I haven't really seen it? Unless you equalize 'critical of Israel' with 'antisemitic dogwhistle' maybe.
> that's why you don't elect senile old guys to positions of power.
Anyone of principle would have been saying this before 2025, and far louder.
Note that this is from a country that wouldn't exist if not for the allied countries and that the US has somehow managed to all but erase that reputation. We recognize our debt, we also recognize that this is to a country that no longer exists in a meaningful way. All we have now is multiple variations of the mob.
The way you pay off that debt is not to the original liberator now turned oppressor, but by extending similar help to countries that are now in a similar bind as we were then. Like Ukraine. I really think we are morally obligated to liberate and help Ukraine.
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 really think we are morally obligated to liberate and help Ukraine.
I am doing what I can and then some.
> 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.
Hear hear. Well said
> when we went to war on their side on their questionable military adventures.
And then they ridiculed us for that.
And then asked for help in another war they just started.
Yeah the US we knew is gone. I think about this sometimes when I am listening to American music from the 20th century, how much soft power they had, how great they made America sound either directly or indirectly. That America that we all looked up to and admired is gone. Pity.
I am the guy who participated in Green Card lottery for few years willing to work in most advanced planet‘s semiconductor companies. I changed my mind recently. Speedboat ambushes, Greenland, public executions by ICE „officers“ and now Iran war. US I knew is definitely gone. That’s not the country sharing culture and values peacefully anymore: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika-Haus_(M%C3%BCnchen)
To be fair, the US has never been peaceful, and it's the country that started the most wars since WW2. It's just that it used to be in our team, and human nature make the aggressiveness of our team justified, or at least understandable.
And, at least regarding the more recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, Europe witnessed the largest anti-war protests in history.
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.
Did that US really exist without a self imposed convenience of blindness ?
The brutality of the School of Americas might indicate otherwise.
Now rebranded as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...
The US was historically self-interested in empire building, with an excellent PR campaign in front of it, but... it also did useful and good stuff, both for its allies and for unrelated parties. USAID was a testament to this.
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.
> PR spin aside,
Then the comment repeats the same PR spin.
That's a tough question.
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.
I think that a big part of it is the transparency brought on by the vast communication bandwidth that came online starting after the dot com years. This stuff happened before just the same, but was concealed by media gatekeepers.
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.
"Meddlesome" is certainly a light way of labeling torture training.
What I find more troubling is that Trump has popular support. It's just not Trump. The rot goes far deeper.
It's the two party system. If liberals are okay with 'pro lgbt muslims' and say things like 'gang violence isn't a problem' then people no longer vote for liberals.
Fair enough.
Trump doesn't have popular support. Many of his 2024 voters are furious with him.
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 want to believe this desperately, but from what I see (well, on YouTube videos, surveys and polls) it makes it very hard for me to do so. I still see massive endorsement from the not so well to do in the hinterlands.
I will however grant you that my sampling is no where close to uniform.
Unless all of the useful idiots in this thread are bots there is plenty of popular support. And it's not like they couldn't know better.
Does JB Pritzker, who many people want to run in 2028, have oligarch support?
You are seeing a side that always existed. Arguably in the past it was worse.
As a european I see what you mean, but that 'we all' in your sentence probably hasn't included those from Latin America, and large parts of Africa or Asia since long before Trump. The US pulled quite a few less than admirable tricks (to use an euphemism) on non-europeans during the 20th century.
Exactly.
> how much soft power they had,
Soft power? Have you been sleeping during the 20th century? The formidable military power of the US comes from a constant state of war.
Reminder that “Born in the USA” was not a “patriotic” song.
Neither was "This land is your land"
Where is Guthrie's guitar ?
> Note that this is from a country that wouldn't exist if not for the allied countries
Which allied countries? And (I assume we are talking about the USA) why would it not exist?
'Until early in 1778, the American Revolution was a civil war within the British Empire, but it became an international war as France (in 1778) and Spain (in 1779) joined the colonies against Britain. The Netherlands, which was engaged in its own war with Britain, provided financial support for the Americans as well as official recognition of their independence. The French navy in particular played a key role in bringing about the British surrender at Yorktown, which effectively ended the war.'
https://www.britannica.com/question/Which-countries-fought-o...
NL (where I live), BE, FR, ES, IT, a good chunk of Germany, Austria, possibly the UK.
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.
The post mentions, france, germany and nordic nations. France, Holand and nordic nations helped in the early stages of US.
C'mon, everyone was saying this in 2024. It is just that people hate women and people of color more.
Lots of us were, but we were mostly shouted down as being hysterical for warning that fascism was coming.
The people who said that are still saying it. Few minds appear to have really changed. Everyone just believes the same positions, harder.
But the people who were saying that have been proved right, and those who shouted them down are now just putting their fingers in their ears.
Jake Tapper was on the case… against Biden.
Aye. Though those making a big noise about “Sleepy Joe” didn't seem to have a problem electing Drooling Dementia Drone Don.
There is no evidence that dozy Donny the paedo president has dementia. It's just that one of his personality traits is "Arbitrary".
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!"
> There is no evidence […] Donny […] has dementia.
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”?
You can bet that it is exactly what his defense will be if he's ever in court for all of his crimes. I can dream, no?
Totally! I intended to imply that hypocrisy :)
Men of old age are indeed generally ill-suited for the presidency (as are the young; middle age best balances vigor with prudence and wisdom). The elderly function better as advisors where they may be consulted for their experience, or as amici curiae.
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.
And partisan hacks will say that a stubbed toe and terminal cancer are both bad.
I think learned wisdom has institutional memory of a few generations only, unless mythologized.
Thus, some lessons need to be learned again and again. Some rights fought for again and again.
Europe and the rest of the world.
The Anti-NATO pact.
The only way the US can fix our reputation will be to try and imprison our current leadership after they are eventually removed from power. And in particular, the Trump family needs to have all of its assets seized.
I don't know why this is voted down, because it's absolutely true. The only way for the US to regain the lost trust is to finally clean house, hold its corrupt leadership accountable. Throw them in prison, seize their illegitimately gotten assets, reform that broken political system, and educate your people so this doesn't happen again.
Nuremberg style judicial proceedings.
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.
nah the world needs to see there are consequences, and that the US can be trusted to follow through on them.
this kind of corruption and extortion, if in China, would see executions, e.g.
https://nordictimes.com/world/china-executes-senior-official...
Death sentences worry me because they are irreversible and can be abused and they have been, see Pakistan, Bangladesh.
At most, old Singapore style corporeal punishment added to the mix perhaps.
Bush wasn't great with Iraq, but it was hardly the first bad foreign policy move the US has made, and Obama wasn't squeaky clean.
Jan 6th 2021 was the turning point.
And change the constitution to fix the issue of an administration just ignoring the law.
Following the precedents of imprisoning and persecuting the previous regime on "corruption" charges established by the likes of much of Latin America, Pakistan, the Phillipines, and other similar countries will definitely mark the USA as a second-rate tin-pot dictatorship.
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.
It was very obvious that Trump is a highly corrupt and incompetent person at the second term election. His voters do not disappear when he is in prison, neither would the US reputation suddenly be way better. Who will these people elect next, why should anyone trust the US anymore?
Imprisonment would be a good starting point though. Together with education, regulation and reforming the political system. But this takes decades.
Lets also include the Rothschild and BlackRock then
The absolute lack of consequences Trump faced after his first go-around all but guaranteed the crime spree we're now seeing, and will probably go down in history as the primary blunder of Biden's DOJ.
The precedent was already set by Nixon's pardon. The signal was clear: presidents suffer no consequences for their crimes.
Imprison based on what and seize assets based on what exactly? You not liking the administration is not a valid reason for asset seizure
Open bribery and corruption (both the direct pay-for-play and the indirect via insider information), openly violating the law and ignoring the courts, betrayal of public trust, mishandling of confidential information, war crimes, take your pick of the many different choices.
And the asset seizure would be for the proceeds of all the open bribery, at the very least.
Sadly, these are all fairly "safe" things for a US president to do. Either because there's no law against it and if there is he can just pardon himself and his partners in crime. I know a presidential self-pardon is controversial but realistically Trump will be dead before that legal question is settled.
There should be a law against it. It's blatant corruption. The fact that lawmakers and supreme judges have the power to make their own corruption legal, doesn't make it any less corrupt. The Nazis made their crimes legal, and they were tried anyway.
> The Nazis made their crimes legal, and they were tried anyway.
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.
Plenty of soldiers and veterans hate what he does. The current leadership doesn't because Trump purged them and promoted loyalists.
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.
It's peculiar to me that after Nixon, Americans just don't hold their presidents accountable for their illegal actions anymore. It seems like they've just given up; they no longer behave as if the president was the head of the executive branch. They behave as if he was a king with absolute power.
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.
Starting illegal wars and engaging in extreme corruption, for starters.
The war isn't illegal. The president has that power. I don't like it either, but since the Korean War this is simply a statement of fact.
The president of the US does not have the power to start a war without getting it approved by the UN security council. You're arguing internal implementation details, but the legality is not determined by your courts.
The war is certainly illegal. Our systems are just so atrophied at this point that we treat congressional approval as a formality. This is a choice we make over and over again that we need to stop making.
> The war isn't illegal.
You're going to have to specify a framework if you want to make statements about legality.
There’s probably a huge case for corruption. And of course he can be declared national threat and foreign agent. I mean, just look what Putin does within his constitutional limits. 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), you have to choose something and then reflect not on what you just did, but how did you get there in the first place. Legal matters are secondary, as long as majority is convinced that justice is served.
> There’s probably a huge case for corruption
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
Who cares? Just stop enforcing laws on little guys completely, if you can't even think of what to put any of the US admin members on trial for. It's nuts that there are long complicated trials and TV series and movies about like a single person murdering one other person, yet people ask what we could even try nutjobs that murder and kill by thousands and/or support mass crimes all around the world for. Let alone all the financial crimes that are being perpetarated for sure, with all the crypto scams and insider trading on the insane volatility they themselves create and know in advance about.
If you hold the belief that the Trump administration (and Trump himself personally) have not commited a rather long list of crimes openly, you are either willfully ignorant or complicit. I do not care if this statement irritates you in any way. After a certain point, we are firmly in the realm of personal responsibility.
Well, his administration has ignored the constitutional rights of this country multiple times at best, and at worst outright violated them resulting in killing American citizens with zero justice or recourse. There's a million different alternative reasons people could come up with, but we can just go with the classic 'treason' and line them up accordingly.
Yes I know that president Obama ordered the military execution of multiple US citizens, but I think that's a bit extreme.
> just go with the classic 'treason' and line them up accordingly.
You sound like a Nazi
Treason.
Epstein files for one
>"You not liking the administration is not a valid reason for asset seizure"
Civil forfeiture would do just fine. Such a wonderful tool. /s
On what principle would the Trump family's assets be seized? Just to pre-empt the idea that he corruptly became rich in office, that is actually fairly usual for US presidents to become suspiciously wealthy after their time in office [0, 1]. That's never been a reason to start talking about asset seizure.
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...
This is why two party system is really great. because they both don't try to put old guts into power in last decade. /s
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.
I'm sure this will be very unpopular but no one else is going to say it so here goes,
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...
The United States is a bully in a China shop and that China shop is the world. It constantly destabilizes the Middle East under false pretenses and lets Europe pick up the refugees. It brain drains and takes innovation to be commercialized. It makes money on the hard labor of others. So yes probably for the best for Europe to do what China is doing and decouple.
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).
> 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.
https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?si=XCJWAtcZ0t633oLE
Spoken like someone who is utterly clueless about international relations.
> 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."
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!
>I long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world, but turns out they were right along.
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 long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world, but turns out they were right along.
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.
I'm not sure you understood my point. I used to think it was silly, but now I agree with your view.
The French took basically the exact opposite approach to the British in terms of post-WW2 foreign policy.
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)
History shows that Europe can't trust any inside powers either...
pre-EU history shows that, which is why we founded the EU in the first place.
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"
> Thank God for the French
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.
Ah but alas: have you considered that the US is increasingly run by actual idiots?
It turns out even Iran has the power to resist a country like the US.
France has completely sovereign nukes and the only first-strike nuclear doctrine in the world. It has the military power to resist any country.
It's not the only country with that doctrine. See [1]. I think only China and India is no first use.
[1]: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-declaratory-p...
Maybe not but they have enough to be useful. They do have nukes - a US invasion of France would not be a good idea. On the more realistic end of things the French are able to provide military intelligence to Ukraine to counter the US president turning it off to help his mate Vlad.
Russia's invasion ironically strengthened NATO, with more countries joining or feeling the usefulness of it. Somehow the US managed to break down all that good will in such a short amount of time.. I think it's hard to overstate how much more hostile people look at the US the last few years. So much soft power has been lost.
Covid, Russia and the axis of US+Israel has done massive damage to the European psyche.
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.)
I'm of pretty mixed feelings about this. It certainly strengthened Europe's collective defense priorities and awareness. That response happens to include NATO but primarily because Europe is too weak without NATO. Europe used to be full of world powers and now they collectively can't manage collective defense without the US? There's something very learned-helplessness about that.
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's weakness is mostly in their heads. The US is the most powerful military in the world, but the second most powerful military is NATO without the US. If the rest of NATO pulls together and reorganises into an effective military that doesn't depend on the US, it would be a force to be reckoned with.
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.
> Europe could easily defeat Russia without outside help (look at how well Ukraine is doing with far less!)
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.
Much of their support has also come from the EU, and the EU has a lot more than that. The EU has more fighters and ships, more tanks, more soldiers. It is true that the EU didn't and still doesn't have deep ammo reserves, though. But it has far more capacity to ramp up production of these than Russia has; the Russian economy is about the size of that of the Benelux.
Kissinger warned about this in 1969:
> 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
Maybe a bit of learned helplessness, but what people tend to forget is that an all-in Russia is a formidable enemy.
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.
The Apollo missions were the greatest scientific accomplishment by the Soviet Union. History repeats.
> I think it's hard to overstate how much more hostile people look at the US the last few years.
True both outside AND inside the country.
> So much soft power has been lost.
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.
I am equally dismayed at recent US behavior; but this is a short sighted view.
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.
I do agree with some of your points and I believe some aspects of it might be right but there is a big difference between the past and present because this time, its America attacking EU sovereignity/other countries and so many things all at once literally within less than a year.
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.
I mean I definitely agree that a lot of trust has been lost, and that a lot of work will be needed to patch things up.
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.
> Countries across the world will have to treat US as unpredictable from now on
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.
Within Geopolitical commentaries that I used to watch, A famous quote by Henry Kissinger is often repeated.
"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.
> Somehow the US managed to break down all that good will in such a short amount of time
Because US administration is compromised. Putin says jump, Krasnov asks how high.
Yes that is clearly the case. Obviously Putin told Trump to start seizing his oil tankers recently.
Yes, I'm sure Putin told Trump to take out 2 of his allies in succession...
Source cited by @chriso-wiki.bsky.social is this article on DR.dk, the Danish public broadcaster:
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/danmark-forbered...
And this is, in my opinion, why support at Hormuz shouldn’t even be on the table. How can you possibly hold joint patrols when you were just months ago planning full scale war between each other?
Also, the "was" in this title feels misleading. If they're not still, they're crazy.
The original title is better translated as "prepared". The tweeting reposter translated to continuous past tense somewhat erroneously imo, because it sounds as if the preparation was interrupted by something.
> And this is, in my opinion, why support at Hormuz shouldn’t even be on the table
Shouldn't? it's not on the table at all lol
Lars Løkke Rasmussen - Minister of Foreign Affairs, said just the other day on Genstart (podcast), that an EU solution for the Hormuz straight could be an option. This would probably be through Aspides.
Yeah, he's talking for himself, and begging for one, everyone else said "No." Danemark can keep their CIA bases and fuck right off to daddy trump if they want, nobody in Europe will follow them to a war in the middle east
It's absolutely insane they're thinking of bailing out the US given the context of this thread.
Well it is on the table but only trump is sitting on that table.
It is on the table, why are you spouting bullshit? People are discussing this right now. Or do you mean Denmark wont help at Hormuz, but I doubt Denmark would help there anyway, but other countries are discussing that.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-military-i...
Sending experts to the US to "help" and sending warships to an active war zone are not the same thing.
> 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...
It is on the table, on the table means it is still discussed, that is what they are there for. If it wasn't on the table they wouldn't go there to discuss it.
On the table doesn't mean it is already decided they will send anything.
Who's discussing what exactly? Give sources, everyone publicly said it's not on the table. Your own link doesn't mention any of this.
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?
Keep in mind that militaries are always preparing for war. They have to. A military exists in large part to always be prepared for the unthinkable.
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.
Hot take: Preparing to defend your country from an ally invading you is actually very bad and indicative of inexcusable behavior from your "ally."
> 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."
No thats not what this was. These are the actions that the Russians did before invading Ukraine and were the specific actions that the military pointed out and said "these aren't normal actions everyone is always doing"
> * The Danish public broadcaster DR reports ...*
This is the source article (in Danish) for the bluesky posts:
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/danmark-forbered...
Tu as le droit de perdre, mais tu n'as pas le droit de te faire surprendre. (You have the right to lose, but you do not have the right to be caught off guard.)
That is a very reasonable response to the threats they faced.
I think there is a pretty good chance US is in the late empire phase. This is not about a single President or party, or even single geopolitical event/development.
> This is not about a single President or party
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 Naval is right when he was making the observation that history has alternated by being determined by either individuals (think Genghis Khan, Napoleon) or larger forces at play (think socio-economic reasoning to many historical events). In this, I would say Trump is Trump (the individual) making his moves that very much go against the larger forces at play that was "business as usual". So equating him to a symptom of America is true in the sense that sooner or later America was bound to have someone like him deviate the course of history, and I also believe post-Trump America is not going to reverse course.
He is also a singular political figure. I don't think things will go back to normal, but they won't stay the way there are now.
The F-35 is mentioned in the article as being readied for the defense of Greenland. I wonder what the 'easter-eggs' Danes would've found out about it if they went up against the US.
(I think I know, it has to do with how its 'stealth' works.)
The source of this post is this article from a site called dr.dk. Maybe someone can double check the validity of it.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR_(broadcaster)
>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.
Danish public broadcaster. Probably the best reputation in the world on Danish news.
Every week, the USA finds a new way to lose credibility as a serious nation. If it weren't for the observably fair elections, you'd almost think America was being taken over from the inside by foreign infiltrators.
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.
Thats probably what this was all about then (use Google Translate) -> https://www.nrk.no/norge/gradert-sak-behandlet-i-ekstraordin...
I don't think it's very likely that the emergency meeting in the Norwegian government yesterday was called because of the security situation in Denmark 3 months ago. Not unlikely that it is related to US-Europe/NATO relations ofc (although there are plenty of other things that would cause an emergency meeting as well, king has been hospitalized plenty of times lately, wife of the next in line is deep in drama due to both being revealed to have been close with Epstein and having a son that is currently in court for some pretty serious allegations, and sharing a border Russia that is currently waging hybrid warfare across europe)
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.
Those Danes should study the Falklands war.
Using F35 in this situation is like brining in a billion dollar paperweight to the battle.s
That doesn't matter. It is not so much about whether the USA could do this and expect to win, of course they can. Nobody has any doubt about that. It is about gross miscalculation of consequences. Attack Greenland ->attack Denmark, attack Denmark -> Attack the EU.
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.
Living in Japan, I meet and talk to Chinese when out drinking. Many of them are almost literally ROFLing about how the US practically just gave away everything they had to China. It's as if the US is playing poker with their cards facing up on the table. Chinese already consider themselves the defacto superpower.
If mainstream media in the US showed this, I bet the politics would look different.
Seems weird. China is definitely falling behind. India is not.
They are pretty happy with having superiority on high tech manufacturing and robotics. You basically cannot manufacture something without using China - even if you try. I don't think they consider the TSMC EUV monopoly a long term threat. Doing good on AI as well, you bet the OSS chinese models causing stock panic in the US makes them laugh.
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
And he's just making a grill scrubber.
I just ordered a bunch of drone parts. The majority of those part were only available from China.
If you want: motors, ESCs, flight controllers and radios those can be sourced from outside of China, and competitively priced too (if you're in Europe, outside you'd still have to add taxes).
Yeah tbf I wouldn't underestimate Eastern Europe. The drone industry there must be booming nowadays, pun not intended.
It's everywhere. And 'China free' is a real motto here.
I have some friends who are doing things 'China free' and it is possible but it comes at a very substantial premium.
I think the most interesting takeaway from this video in question is that he tried to buy material from an Indian seller, who promised it was Indian. When the box arrived, it had the name of a Chinese factory on it.
> Attack Greenland ->attack Denmark, attack Denmark -> Attack the EU.
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.
> US military support means life or death of their countries.
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.
>It is not so much about whether the USA could do this and expect to win, of course they can. Nobody has any doubt about that.
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.
I'm Danish. There are 56k people in Greenland and almost half of them live in Nuuk. The USA could frankly "take" greenland simply by putting a warship there and saying it was theirs. Not really sure why it was ever on the table though. The USA has basically free reign to expand it's military bases there, aside from the ban on nuclear weapons. Sure it would need approval by both Greenland and Denmark, but up until recently we were frankly more allied with the USA than the EU, and I doubt we've ever really said no before. We even bought the damn f35's despite them being so much more expensive than the alternatives, primarily because our history with the F16's. Which would probably have been a possiblity considering we're now debating whether or not to have french nuclear weapon carrying planes stationed on Danish soil in the fallout of the USA no longer being a trusty NATO ally.
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.
Not the parent poster but, while I acknowledge your point on Canada and Europe entering the conflict (and I'd add that the highly motivated Dutch punch well above their weight in intelligence and economic spheres and this whole scenario of US invasion is a Putin dream), when you ask "why do you think it could win...", the 50k population of Greenland is smaller than Granada (100k) and three orders of magnitude smaller than Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (~40m). So I find its insurgency potential hard to compare to those examples you give.
Doesn't need to. America can just leave the towns alone and do whatever it wants elsewhere.
It will cost a fortune, but nobody is going to go 500 miles over an ice pack to raid a US mining settlement.
I suspect its easier to find Greenlanders willing to do that than it will be to find Americans willing to work in that mining settlement.
Unless we go full evilmode and just run them with slave labor.
The US wouldn’t even need to “attack” Greenland. What is there to even attack? 50 Danish soldiers? They could just say “that’s ours”, ignore whatever Europe says, and start doing whatever they wanted to do and instead force the EU to attack American forces or civilian business interests.
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?
> 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.
It’s interesting how these conversations always start and end with “my company isn’t buying XYZ American cloud provider services” while ignoring other incredibly important products and services that you can’t or are unwilling to boycott. Are you turning in your MacBook Pro and iPhone, or are you putting a bumper sticker on it saying you bought it before you knew America was crazy?
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.
Macbooks are built in China.
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.
I guess it's global supply chains when it's convenient for your argument, but not when it's inconvenient? Does Denmark build all the Ikea furniture?
Who do you think designs the MacBook, chipsets, and more? Who designs and builds the semiconductors for your Lenovo laptop?
> Does Denmark build all the Ikea furniture?
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?
> That would be so funny if it wasn't clear that you are serious.
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?
> not because its cheaper or better
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.
What power?
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.
> Economic power (US will no longer be the world reserve currency).
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 EU, 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 is 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.
> What power has the US ceded?
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.
> 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.
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?
It wasn’t even about Greenland, but a distraction from the extent of Trump’s knowledge of Epstein.
Anyway, there’s actually an index for soft power. Eliminating USAID halved that index. China built the highways, hospitals and water treatment instead.
The UK only had to send a single officer to Greenland to stop Trump's previous attempt to annex Greenland.
That was a signal, thankfully there are still adults in the USA who recognised it.
You’re naive if you think that was what stopped Trump there lol
It's clear that you're projecting by not understanding the point presented.
You clearly don't know British understatement.
Firing on one British officer would be as bad a firing on 10000.
It's about lines.
This kind of stuff masked you feel good to say but the UK isn’t going to stop the US if it (somewhat foolishly in my opinion) decided that it was going to take Greenland. Neither is the EU.
You are mistaking the battle for the war: Denmark / EU would no doubt lose the BATTLE for Greenland. Within hours.
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.
No it would be a point of no return. But the "non-kinetic" consequences would go both ways.
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.
EU has more arctic warfare equipment than USA does, USA doesn't do much arctic warfare so the war would likely be much more expensive for USA than EU.
Most regular equipment doesn't work in -40C temperatures, to take Greenland USA would need to develop more arctic enabled weaponry just for that.
How will the EU get this arctic warfare equipment to Greenland? If the EU is so ready and willing to use this equipment, maybe they should deploy it to Ukraine instead.
The US literally has bases in Alaska and Greenland and deals with these temperatures regularly.
The EU doesn't have to fire a single bullet to get the US out of Greenland again. You are thinking in a very limited way.
Sure if the US decides it would like to leave Greenland? It's just depending on who wants what with what influence factors. But if both blocks just decided to put all of their might and resources and politics capital into this the US clearly can just take Greenland and there's nothing the EU can do about it.
They did study the falklands war, thats why they were planning to blow up the runway should shit go wrong.
The idea was to make it as difficult as possible to invade, not to stop it, because that’s largely impossible.
Argentina didn't lose the war because they came with fighter jets, but because their fighter jets were throwing scrap metal at British boats. Had these detonated, the outcome would have been different, and expensive for UK. I don't doubt that F35 are working very well in comparison to the junk Argentina was using.
Wasn't there a kill switch in the missiles?
Didn't UK get really really annoyed with France in the one instance their kill switch Didn't work?
Argentina only had 6 Exocets. I think the parent is referring to the failure of the fuses in the bombs the Argentinian pilots dropped on British ships.
I'm sure they'd be grateful for your expert analysis. Maybe you could offer to teach at their war college?
There's a difference between "posturing" for show and actually "preparing for war".
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."
Ukraine thought Russia was just posturing and look where it got them.
Yeah, tbh I was in the camp of 'nothing ever happens' too and I was shocked when they actually invaded.
I'm pretty sure Ukraine were taking the Russian preparations as what they were. And they had plans to counter them. Proven by the fact that Putin's 3 days war has now surpassed the Russian involvement in WWII.
Trust me, Denmark wasn't posturing.
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.
USA cannot go back to normal. The internal damage / changeover is massive - everybody disagreing with current administration policies has either been removed or departed - whether in health or defense (I'm sorry, War) or science or education or other departments.
And even if they did go back to normal for the next presidency - why trust it? Their entire political system is set up so that the winds can change entirely every 4 years.
If the people voted Trump in to office twice, it’ll happen again. It’s a divided country where propaganda has a strong hold.
Useful stability can be achieved again, either “back to normal” as mentioned elsewhere in this thread or “forward to something different but better (and not crap like it is now)”, but it is going to take at least a few terms, maybe several. Even if it did happen more quickly, it will take that long for those of us on the outside to trust it, reputational damage like this can not be undone quickly.
This is absurd in the extreme. In actual war there is absolutely no possibility of success for Denmark, even with the help of allies. Failure to capitulate results in nothing but death and destruction with no hope of strategic gain to begin with. What you are likely experiencing is a modern belief that screaming and shouting will bring popular diplomatic pressure to bear on the opponent, thus arresting their actions.
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.
No, what is absurd is the number of people that can't wait to go back to a world with endless wars of conquest. We already know what that looks like.
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.
I'm sorry but you are not interacting with the rational suppositions of posters in various threads here. No one is arguing for a war except you. People are explaining to you the strategic reality and you are espousing rhetoric that I honestly can't decipher.
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?
Denmark cannot win militarily, but can the US? What war has the US won recently? They're great at destroying things, but not at winning. There's nothing for them to win in Greenland. It's an indefensible chunk of ice. They can kill the people who live there, but what would that gain them?
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?
France has a nuclear deterrent it has stated has "a European dimension".
Don't go around poking hornets nests if you don't want to get stung.
You think there's a game theory scenario in the book where France launches a nuclear weapon at mainland USA over a land dispute between them and Denmark?
NATO dictates that an attack on any NATO nation should be seen as an attack on every nation, so yeah.
France has the only first strike nuclear doctrine in the world, with the specific policy of shooting nukes to "protect it's vital interests", a term Macron has recently clarified "has a European dimension".
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.
Would you like to find out?
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.
> I'm sorry but you are not interacting with the rational suppositions of posters in various threads here.
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.
You have ignored any questions put to you in this thread. You are speaking in some kind of fervour I can't decrypt.
> What you are likely experiencing is a modern belief that screaming and shouting will bring […]
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.
I mean the same was said about Ukraine.
What are we supposed to do, just fucking give up?
Ukraine is rapidly becoming one of the hardest countries in Europe. They fought a former superpower to a stand still and are innovating on weapons systems and integration at a pace that makes LM's skunkworks look like sloths. And on a budget that is insane.
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.
This is the type of thinking that convinced people that Trump would never be stupid enough to start a full on war with Iran. And yet here we are.
The United States are not longer an allie nor a friend to to EU. Under Trump, they have turned into a Terror regiem, ignoring international law, human rights. They have to be international isolated together with Israel. They are the enemy of a free and civilized world!
I think that started with Bush and continued with Obama. Who with his financial donators still walk free after committing mass murders.
What else would they be doing, watching TV?
France offering support to little ententes to prevent facist revanchism. Seems familiar.
World tension continues to increase.
We all were... they wouldn't speak it but reading between the lines you could see the leaders were very nervous Trump would unilaterally decide to just 'try it' like in Venezuela and now Iran.
You mean, they are not anymore?
The goldfish prez seems to have moved on to Cuba now
Hate to be that guy but
> What to Submit
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This news concerns the biggest shift in Trans-atlantic relations in decades – possibly ever. The US is not losing relationships with single countries such as France. It’s not just scaring a small population like Denmark. The entire ”Western world” has started decoupling from the US. Tech is one of the first targets.
The US threatening to invade European territory, and Europe preparing to fight a war against the US, is absolutely "some interesting new phenomenon".
It would be an interesting new phenomenon if it were true. But it requires unquestionably pretending a country of 5 million people was going to go to "war" with one that has 70X that and a military hundreds of times larger. C'mon.
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).
Denmark is a part of NATO, attacking them would mean the entirety of NATO would go against USA, not just Denmark. It is reasonable to assume the entirety of NATO would put up enough resistance that USA had to withdraw from that war without getting Greenland, because Trump would get removed from office by being so hated by the people before the rest of NATO gave up.
> Hate to be that guy but
I do not believe you. I think you quite like to be that guy.
Top class comedy is allowed though.
No one forces you to be that guy :)
Sad to see HN crumbling under the weight of hysterical political polarization.
I saw bluesky in the url and immediately knew what this thread was going to be, and it's even sillier and dumber than I thought.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
The US president wanted to start a full on war with Europe over Greenland of all places. And he still might. And some people will still claim I just have "TDS".
TDS is an apt description for anyone supporting this senile, psychopath.
Yes. The only TDS is the one exhibited by those that are so brainwashed by his cult of personality.
I have no doubts they took US threats seriously; anyone who doesn't these days is a fool (of course, this doesn't mean Trump will do anything he claims, but he's dangerous enough you can never tell for sure).
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.
Lol there is posturing and there is whatever this is.
lol Denmark yea i'm sure no one was concerned
The billionaire oligarch who put that (stupid) idea in Trump's head is still out there. His son-in-law will probably be the next head of the Federal Reserve.
If the oligarchs don't feel any pushback they'll continue to wreck the US and Europe.
The idea that the US would attempt to take Greenland by force is utterly ludicrous.
Unfortunately, that adjective applies to many things which the US has attempted, often "successfully", recently.
Lots of what Trump says is utterly ludicrous. But he does lots of what he says (though not everything), so the rest of the world is right to prepare.
So is the idea that the US would start bombing Iran without a plan, goal, or any thought to the consequences, yet here we are...
There is a difference, basically the entire world hates the Iranian regime and wants them gone, USA bombing the Iranian regime wont get that much pushback from the world even if the war was started in an underhanded way.
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.
I live very close to one of the USAF's largest European airbases.
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.
> It's fairly easy to work out what's happening
off you go then, what is it?
Dunno, start by reading the national security strategy and count the number of times it mentions the words "Arctic" or "Greenland"? (hint: it's zero).
Then maybe look at the Nato chain of command and who was interviewed and what was said in mid-Jan?
Please lessen the snark and dictate what you're saying here. Sources to published docs would be even more preferable.
I'm not going to serialize the past 60 years of US foreign policy in to a pithy post on a meaningless internet forum. For free.
Amazing how outdated that document became. We all knew it was written for an audience of one, but still such transparent Emperors New Clothes vibe.
im still waiting to find out whats happening...
This is exactly right. The liar who lies to control the narrative is lying again. The chance he’s lying is high but as adults the (likelihood * hazard) of an invasion is worth preparing for.
The narrative he wanted to control was about Epstein. Denmark could have simultaneously prepared for that, but it wouldn’t be on OSInt Twitter.
The problem is that his "lies" and "jokes" sometimes suddenly turned out to be not lies and jokes.
More precisely, propaganda is always fake. After verification it’s possibly true, but it still began fake. Trump could try supporting his utterances with fact, but he doesn’t.
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.