Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland | Hacker News Reader

Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland

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417 pointsmariuz615 comments

> 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.

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"

Sounds kinda like why they founded the League of Nations

> 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 They have not invested in the military for a very long time and most of their equipment is completely outdated.

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...

France is never going to send a nuke to the US.

It happened in the Simpsons.

They already nuked America economically twice in the 20th century.

The first time the French involvement in gold markets caused the Great Depression and the second time the repatriation of gold caused a financial system crisis which severely damaged the dollar and forced the US to decouple the dollar from gold entirely.

Nuke means no return and MAD. Not a word you use lightly.

Your attitude reminds me of this old meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-are-you-gonna-do-stab-me

So explain yourself instead of using memes.

I thought it was obvious, but let me explicitly spell it out for you:

You speak with an unfounded arrogance that will earn you a bloodied nose if you don't course correct.

France's nuclear policy isn't unique in that they are willing to launch a first-strike (all the serious nuclear powers claim to be). France's nuclear policy is unique in that they are willing to use nuclear fire as a warning shot: before they launch their full strategic stockpile, they'll (probably) erase a military base or aircraft carrier with a tactical nuke. That lower threshold to break the nuclear taboo is what's interesting.

Yup. No other country had an official Force de Frappe.

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.

Iran is no joke. Everybody knew it and yet they went full ahead with it for some reason.

It's more that "military power" per se is not the be-all-end-all of conflict.

USA has not gone full force into Iran.

Need you be reminded of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

What has happened to this site? Its all these leftie pro MENA talking points.

You can disagree with the tone on the user above but the fact is NOBODY can stand up to USA military.

t. Swede

America below the President and his appointees is an unbelievable dream team. That's why the whole machine works, regardless of who is at the top.

I agree in principle but actually much of this system has been gutted in horrific and hard-to-reverse ways.

For now, but it's working less and less well as the rot spreads.

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.

You don't need a lot of nuclear weapons to be able to say "Fuck off, or everyone dies". You just need enough, and the widespread belief that you'd actually use them.

France probably has enough, and is definitely credible in their willingness to use them.

After the failure against countries with no military might like Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, and now Iran, I wouldn’t place a lot of importance into how much tech and quantity in the military plays a critical role into winning wars today.

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)

All this is very funny if you take into account how the United States originated.

What's going on right now makes a lot more sense when you consider that what's now the US was populated not so much by people of English descent, but specifically super religious Protestants who were often causing trouble.

Part of the solution to Europe's wars of religion was to pack off some of the most swivel-eyed ones to the new world to let them build their New Jerusalem there, and it worked for a bit

Even as an American reading some diaries of English colonists provided a lot of insight into the culture to this day.

I remember one where a man decided to move to America to escape religious persecution. Of course said religious persecution was his neighbors laughing and dancing and enjoying themselves.

It often gets somewhat glossed over in modern secular readings of history but the Protestant Reformation is one of the most important events in European (and Western more broadly) history.

We're still feeling the reverberations of Martin Luther (allegedly) nailing his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg today

> 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.

> I long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world

There is very good reasons why De Gaulle was always a bit doubtful about American military protection and why post-war France put a strong emphasis on military sovereignty.

That has nothing to do with any French stubbornness or a so called French anti-American feeling.

The main reason is that De Gaulle experienced the fact American leadership can be untrustworthy first hand.

When he was the leader of the exiled French force during the 40s, Churchill supported him.

Meaningwhile Roosevelt refused to give him any support and actively acted to make him replaced by a puppet, General Giraud. Mainly because it was better aligned with American interests to setup a puppet state in France on the longer term.

The situation changed only later when it became pretty obvious that Giraud was antisemite, an openly nazi collaborationist and a pretty poor politician.

Only then, America started to support De Gaulle officially. Initially only indirectly through the relation between De Gaulle and Eisenhower.

You can always trust americans to do the right thing after we have tried everything else.

Never trust america unless our last option is the one you want. Otherwise, let us stubbornly do it wrong until we come around.

I can't wait.

I don’t think that aphorism is actually true. What’s the right thing that’s going to follow being complicit in Gaza and bombing Iran?

I think it was a quip strategically designed to make the Americans feel better about themselves even as it clearly puts them down, and to become an aspiration at least. In some sense the history of the US is about unleashing a powerful idea and always falling inshort of living up to it.

It was even more than that. In the late 1930s the US told France not to worry about those aggressive Germans next door, if things go pear-shaped we'll stand by you, you can rely on us to help defend you.

This is why France went with its own nuclear deterrent, among other things.

Ukraine gave up their nukes due to American assurances as to Ukraine's defence.

Not this talking point again...

I am very pro Ukraine, but those nukes where never "Ukranian", they where Soviet nukes, staffed and manned and made by Russia.

This is like if USA puts nukes in Sweden under NATO, are they suddenly Swedish nukes? No.

Nah, this is like if the US puts nuke in California and the US falls apart.

Are they Californian nukes or DC nukes? Possession is nine-tenths of the law...

Well, does it matter if California never had the staff/manpower to use them, and they were all administered & maintained by DC staff?

I can see you aren't french, nor know the culture, else you would have known that those were only words. false promise and pretending isn't seens as really bad in france. Words are just words. Foreign naive beliefs about our culture is realy cute.

As a Brit it’s been very obvious CdG was right since the start.

The final straw was almost 50 years ago when Thatcher gave up the UKs space program and satellite plans in favor of giving the money, in cash, to the US.

In return for paying for 1/3 of the keyhole satellite network Regan said we could borrow them when needed.

Then we asked to use them to look at the Falklands and Regan said no.

That was the same period where we traded British missile technology for renting D5s from America. So though we make and own our own nuclear warheads, the delivery systems are American and must be returned to the US for maintenance on a regular basis. Essentially robbing the UK of an independent deterrent.

I am all for unilateral nuclear disarmament but if we are going to have nukes in the current climate they should be entirely homegrown and independent.

The British support of the US military industrial complex doesn’t benefit the UK as it means we have no ability to act alone or in opposition to the US. We are as dependent on resupply as the Israelis.

Obviously that’s great for the US.

French is a lot more American in terms of doing the right thing than the Americans like to think they are (or really, propagandize they are).

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.

> 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.

> 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...

You don't understand Russian mentality. The closer ally you are, the more likely you'll find yourself being defenestrated.

And this is why Russian states seem to always end up collapsing in on themselves...

If I fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years and am asked what is happening in Russia, I will answer: drinking and stealing.

Putin needs higher oil prices a lot more than he needs either Iran or Venezuela (or Cuba, for that matter).

> 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.

> 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.

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.

I agree with you too but

> from personal experience, as an American living in Europe for the last decade, I've had basically zero negative interactions with people or hostile accusations. Most people do understand that the American government is a bit out of control, and American culture is in a tumultuous period. If anything I'd say it tends more toward sympathy than anger

Imagining that America attacked Greenland Thus Denmark/EU and the fact that Denmark was genuinely preparing for this, Just imaginging America attack Greenland and I do feel like that the sentiments might change. (This is what had happened to Muslim people not even people of specific country but negative interactions against whole religions after 9/11)

I would agree with you if this was the last day of Trump administration, but far from it. We have to handle so much more of this current administration. It's literally only been a year to see so much shift. I hope you realize it that for the most part, America is busy with the Iran war but any assurances about the sovereignity of EU or any country in the world for that matter isn't made by America and everything is off the table and anything might happen. I am sure that both of us wasn't predicting an Iran war or a greenland invastion but here we are.

It just feels natural to me that if a single year can have this much impact and you have four years for something like this and the most important fact which I want to highlight again, people technically voted for this and can still technically vote for it again , there are no safeguards and the most important part was a belief that if shit hits the fan, then American Judiciary or checks and balances or congress would stop something like this from happening but we all saw how nothing really happened.

My point is, 3 more years, let that sink in, into this level of turbulent times when an war is currently active and gas prices are rising all across the world solely because America and Israel started the Iran war :/

I can only have so much patience but if gas prices are double the price because of America/this war, Sadly I might lose my patience.

I lost my patience somedays ago when I heard that the local fast food shop was talking about the gas price increases and how it hurted them. I had true resentment to this war and America/Israel for starting it and having this poor guy suffer so much from the gas prices. I know that America and American people are different but till how long/how much especially if some people are still supportive of such war. It sort of left me speechless when he was talking about how hard it is to stay in this business.

To think that the world will forgive America so easily might not be accurate, that's all I am saying.

My point is, Even if party changes next time from red to blue, It's just really really hard to undo all this harm that it has done to its soft power.

On a more fundamental level, I think something is wrong with the American education system and results in so many low information voters who believe any words from their "hero". And fixing education takes decades to even see the result.

They definitely can vote for another Trump-like guy and they have proven it by voting Trump back the second time. Honestly this is crazy to me this can even happen after Jan 6. The Brazilian Trump-like President went to jail, yet Trump returns to the White House. My take is this trust issue takes at least 10 years to recover, most likely more.

That's not an accident.

We're talking decades just to undo the last 10 years. And it is still getting worse.

Unlikely, I think, because geopolitics has other players, and forgiving the US is still a better option for the EU than the other choices available.

Forgiveness is not the same as trust.

America will be begun to be trusted only once the last MAGA dies, not once before that. So at least a generation.

> This all happened 20 years ago with Iraq.

I think your argument falls apart here. The US built a coalition of on side allies before invading Iraq. They went to the UN too. There was significant opposition to the war, and I was a student at the time in the UK so was surrounded and involved in that. However, European countries were not politically blindsided. Some were going in with the US, including Denmark I believe.

They also didn't quite expect the USA to be blatantly lying about the intelligence that they brought to support their case.

Lol. They knew it was lies and they went along with it anyway.

I don't think so. Colin Powell sold it and he had a stellar reputation. A lot of people found it very hard to believe that he would stake his reputation on this if it wasn't true. It wasn't, and he rightly never recovered from that. His UNSC presentation will go into the history books as the thing he is remembered for.

The Apollo missions were the greatest scientific accomplishment by the Soviet Union. History repeats.

Could you elaborate ? Intrigued.

No USSR = no Cold War = no space race which lands us on the moon

Ah ! makes sense.

Meta point, I know it's considered line noise to respond to a comment with "I see", "I agree", "Yes".

But just upvoting seems so unsatisfying. Almost rude, like standing someone up who actually took the time to answer you.

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 could be wrong, but I've experienced the opposite. Seeing Putin and Trump openly undermine and threaten the EU forced countries to address the situation and take action. It's encouraging. I'm looking at this situation from Hungary tho, where Russian influence began 10–16 years ago. It seems Hungary has a chance to get rid of Orbán, and the rest of Europe is also taking measures finally. It's nice.

The war in Ukraine is literally at the EU's border. It could be destabilizing in many ways. It's not just about moral reasons. By the way, I see similarities between Putin and Trump as they both started wars against big countries without thinking ahead more than three days. It's one more reason to strengthen the EU.

It is pretty scary how many Hungarians are willing to jump back under the Russian boot. Much strength to you in the coming election.

Damage?

It has strengthened us.

Nordics and the Baltics are very pro Ukraine, we have a common enemy now to focus on.

Poland has stepped up too militarlity.

Sweden where I am has seen a HUGE uplift in military spend, and the companies like SAAB and Bofors (heheh)

Germany is the big loser as they had cheap Russian energy and shut down their nuclear plants.

Where in Europe are you from exactly?

EU overall is pro Ukraine except for Hungary...

In summary, what are you on about? And post your passport.

Oh, and Israel is our ally. I am sick of EU being so pro Hamas and pro Iran. Thankfully our government cut down on grants to the MENA and increased to Ukraine!

Israel is our ally

Israel is Europe's shame, not ally. The UK, France and the US share full responsibility for the creation of the state of Israel, and every day that Europe refuses to denounce Israel, its culpability for Israel's actions grows.

Okay good that you are honest, you do not what Israel to exist at all?

Well, the west disagrees with you.

What country in Europe are you in and who do you vote for?

Oh stop being so self-loathing: Israel was created by a mandate from the League of Nations.

So, most of the planet (1)

(1) Well, excluding Ethiopia because they still thought it was cool to have slaves.

[flagged]

Funny that you should mention that mandate. A "mandate territory" is simply a transfer of colonial rule from a loser of World War I to a victor of the war. In no way should the term "mandate" here be construed as an agreement that was supported by broad consensus.

A little context: The League of Nations was established by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WW I. That treaty was fully drafted by Britain, France, the United States, and Italy; the first members of the League included all allied victors of the war, their (former) colonies, and the colonies of the losers of the war, which became the mandates you refer to. Many countries that were neutral in the WW I were extended an invite to join the League, but they were not present during negotiations in Versailles.

So, contrary to what you suggest, the League of Nations never voted on the establishment of these "mandates", as they were simply the result of the World War I victors divvying up the spoils of war -- and for Palestine specifically, the so-called "Principal Allied Powers" explicitly reserved those powers for themselves without any input from the rest of the League [0]:

> The San Remo Resolution passed on 25 April 1920 determined the allocation of Class "A" League of Nations mandates for the administration of three then-undefined Ottoman territories in the Middle East: "Palestine", "Syria" and "Mesopotamia". The boundaries of the three territories were "to be determined [at a later date] by the Principal Allied Powers"

So no, "most of the planet" did not weigh in on the establishment of the Palestinian territory; that burden of responsibility squarely falls back on Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the US.

Also, your claim that Israel was created by the League Of Nations is an anachronism. The League of Nations was disbanded on 18 April 1946 (subsumed into the United Nations), and Israel did not become a nation state until 14 May 1948. Before that date, the territory was known as the Mandate of Palestine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Remo_conference

I’m your neighbour. The damage is done to the system of laws and conventions small non-aligned countries like Finland wished would protect us before and after our combined Nato accession. The very reason we are and continue to be pro-Ukraine is for empathy as well as pragmatism: the rule-breaker has to be shown the line that can’t be crossed, so that ours won’t be either.

You’re more than welcome to disagree with me, but it is quite objectively been a balancing act that we hoped to not have to take between our most militarily and economically powerful ally and values (our own and international).

The times of finlandization were supposed to be behind us, but a united front (militarily and politically) has shown cracks due to the unilateral decisions and threats the US has made these past couple of years. Hypocritical application of international law waters it down even further, and the results are already visible.

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.

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.

> but what people tend to forget is that an all-in Russia is a formidable enemy

So you're saying they've been keeping their best in reserve?

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

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.

> It is true that the EU didn't and still doesn't have deep ammo reserves, though

Indeed it is true. But it is also changing, the stockpiles are growing.

Absolutely. The EU is now finally but rapidly adapting to these geopolitical changes. Defense budgets are now far higher than the 2% that used to be the goal that nobody met.

In the 1990s everybody was eager to believe that war was finally and forever over. Some held on to that delusion for a bit too long, but not anymore.

Merkel has a lot to answer for. Handel durch wandel... pull the other one. After Grozny there should have been absolutely no doubt.

Eastern European countries warned us, but western Europe, Germany in particular, but other western European countries too, assumed Russia was now a normal country we could just trade with. Under Yeltsin we might have been heading in that direction, but Chechnya should have been a warning. Putin's comment about "countries that don't matter" was a warning. Russia taking chunks out of Georgia should have been the alarm. We continued trading even after he took Crimea and Donbas. We have been way too naive.

Politically, absolutely. Fortunately the intelligence communities are not as stupid as the politicians they serve.

That's not true. Even including military aid to Ukraine, EU average defence spending remains at 1.9%.

It's also the most expensive region in the world to raise a military.

That was the 2024 figure. In 2025 it rose to 2.1% and this year it is expected to rise further.

And that's just the direct allocation, not the under water part including venture funding of some of the defense industry (obvious overlap: anything including AI & drones, it's pure VC bait).

What are you talking about, 2025 defence spending is coming in below 2024

That's straight from the EU figures.

No way we are below 2024, the trend is accelerating, not diminishing.

Is it true? Most analyses show EU stockpiles overall still falling, especially for precision weapons.

Reporting is messy and due to the EU's fragmented linguistic nature harder to come by than it probably should be.

The balancing act is to increase stockpiles whilst supplying Ukraine which is consuming almost as fast as we're producing. Precision weapons you are right about, those are dwindling, but at the same time this is the one area where Ukraine internal production is beginning to outnumber imports (and their motivations are not so much quantity as 'no strings attached', which is very understandable).

Artillery shell production is up, 2.2 million shells/year or thereabouts, but here too the Ukraine war is consuming them very fast, either way, it is sixfold or so of what it was prior to 2022. Many new factories have been built and opened and are since a few months adding their output to the stream.

I think what held things back for a bit is that the EU was - wrongly - under the impression that Putin would back off but now that it is clear that that is not the case the longer term investments make sense. But it took a while for that to get underway.

This is absolute fantasy. Stockpiles are only depleting, production hasn't and won't come close to meeting demand, and until there's a shooting war inside the bloc, it won't.

Unless you are privy to secrets at a level that they contradict the EU official figures + the figures from the defense contractors that I am tracking this is as accurate as I can make it.

I do not have access to information from the military other than what gets published but that's good enough for me as long as I don't see contradictions.

Here is one article from a while ago:

https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/04/07/rheinme...

They were aiming for a 100% supply to Ukraine + stockpile increase for 2026 and I see no reason to disbelieve that other than your comment, if you want me to re-calibrate my position on that you're going to have to supply some sources.

The ~2M figure was a 2025 EOY nameplate capacity target, not actual output for the year. Even those capacity numbers are widely overstated - it’s well known in defence circles (where you claim to be) that real capacity is running at about 40% of official claims, with some shortfalls being made up by international procurement, but the majority remaining unfulfilled.

As for EU motivations, Orbán is the visible blocker, but the Western states are even more constraining than Hungary. It’s Spain, Ireland, Germany, France, etc. that have no appetite for war or economic upheaval, which would immediately topple governments across the bloc. EU defence policy requires unanimity across states, and it doesn’t exist.

Rhetoric is strong but thin, and almost everybody apart from yourself sees it. Let’s come back to this in a year, when production figures and defence spending for 2025 become public and see.

>"but the second most powerful military is NATO without the US"

I am curious how much of NATO's hardware originate from the / depends on the US and and what will suddenly stop working if the US decides to break military alliance.

Short answer is: a LOT, but that's a two way street. BAE, for example, builds America's tanks (or at least their armored infantry fighting vehicles).

BAE Systems Inc, a US-based subsidiary that operates entirely in the US and whose leadership operates under an SAA which means they report to the US Government and the parent in the UK.

It's not like they will suddenly stop working completely, but some do depend on US data, which could be cut off. No idea if they have a fall back solution for that, but I'm sure they're working on that.

Geopolitical moves like illegally invading a country aren’t necessarily planned to be the one grand thing that weakens the opponent. In particular it strengthening Nato is not necessarily ironic, and it seems like an oversimplification to even suggest it.

This isn't true.

People hated Americans in the 2000s invasion of Iraq. There were popular rock songs about it and students were hesitant to say they were American.

It seems to go in cycles. Next president many will forget.

Such is the power and fickleness of the American system.

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.

Preparation is an ongoing thing. And not just in Denmark.

> 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

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?

> France/UK/Spain/Italy/Germany/Greece all very clearly stated they won't send jack shit to Hormuz while the war is active

Then what is this statement from the UK government where they say many of the worlds biggest powers are ready to support it? Countries say a lot of things publicly to change it the next day. To me it looks like them helping protecting it is still on the table.

"We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning."

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-...

They also have said they will send drones to help clear mines, but they still feel ships are probably a bit too risky. But that means sending ships is still on the table if things change in the future, he said all options are considered to open the straight, meaning no option is off the table.

"He added: “All of these things are being looked at in concert with our allies … Any options that can help to get the strait reopened are being looked at."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/15/uk-plans-mines...

> Then what is this statement from the UK government where they say many of the worlds biggest powers are ready to support it?

Pure copium as usual, like Trump's "many great nations already accepted to send ships", where are they? Who are these nations? Which ships? it's posturing at its finest.

"we may be ready to maybe consider some plans about potentially helping nations who might want to hypothetically commit ships to restore the safe passage through the Strait"

They won't send jack shit until the US are out of the region and the war is so cold you can't call it a war anymore, and they're right.

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.

> * 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.)

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.

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.

If it wasn't Trump it would be someone else.

There are very few people in history that are that pivotal individually. Had Franz Ferdinand not been shot, something else would have sparked WW1. Had Hitler not existed, then someone else would have emerged.

Maybe Churchill was more of a pivot than most, had the UK gone for Hastings after Chamberlain then perhaps the UK would have sued for peace, allowing Germany to fully concentrate on Russia, but it's still a stretch to have Germany ultimately prevailing over Stalin.

Had the US not won independence in 1776 (which is unlikely to be the sole cause of a single person), it would have been gained anyway, just like the other new world colonies from Canada to Brazil.

The conditions that exist are far bigger than one man

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.

Neither Genghis Khan nor Napoleon were democratically elected. The fact that Trump was makes it harder to see him as the root of the problem. He may have been a catalyst, but the root cause is something else.

I haven't seen almost anyone suggest that everything will go back to normal post-2028? Every Democrat I know is expecting a painful and protracted fight for the soul of the country.

I'm sorry, this is just Republican apologetics. This is about a single party. How in the world could you possibly suggest otherwise?

I'd love to hear how Biden, Obama, or Clinton got us into forever wars. Or how they threatened allies. Or how they destroyed our trade or deal-making reputation. Where are the Democrat newscasters saying we should invade Canada? The figure heads calling for internment camps?

Are we all affected? Sure. Does everybody in the world view us through the lens of our worst (people/behavior)? Of course. But it IS about a single party on every. single. issue.

If the Democrats were to regain control and we had public trials for all involved for war crimes, constitutional violations, etc, it would do a lot to fix the damage. Not pretending it would all go away, but actually holding the one party accountable would help because everyone on the planet knows who is responsible.

The Iran war has demonstrated the US cannot adequately defend its allies in the region, regardless of bases, whose existence was predicated on them having that capability. No?

All the current conflict has done is make obvious that reality.

It is interesting how many people seem to have failed to notice this absolutely crucial detail. Suddenly US bases are no longer seen as an asset but as an immediate risk.

This is what specifically caused me to make the late stage empire comment. When the flip comes, you know you are in that phase. Speaking as a Brit. Other indicators are loss of reserve currency status, inward looking elite factions (can be of any party, it is not a partisan matter), and a few other things. One might have said “changed from creditor to debtor” but almost everyone is these days!

The US economy is so fragile it is scary. And meanwhile they continue to make more and more 'frenemies', some of whom might start to wonder what happens when you kick the table the house of cards is built on. At some point the continued price of trying to pretend things are normal versus the price of forcing the problem to go away is going to reach a tipping point. It almost happened over Greenland, the general atmosphere in Brussels was 'ok, if you insist'...

It's difficult to reply to a comment like this because the existence of it disproves what it is arguing for.

I wish this was just a Republican thing, or that people abroad perceived it as such but the reality is that people around the world no longer care about this Democrat - Republican split.

No one outside of America cares a Republican party started this shit. They care that this shit was started at all, because it means that the American system is out of control.

No one outside of America cares ifyou're a democrat or a republican. They just see you as American. And they see America as the source of so many of the world's problems.

Which means they see you as the source of those problems.

Israel's actions horrify me, but I still disagree when people totalize Israelis. They assume the entire citizenry signs on to the atrocities, easy to do but it's bullshit. It's not good when random Israelis get hit by an Iranian missile, same when a US soldier gets hit, or when an Iranian one does, or an Iranian civilian, or an IDF soldier, and so on. Totalization is always a lie. If the world wants to blame me for some crazies I despise making the world worse then that's what it is, but it's just another case of the world being stupid. No better than when those crazies in my own country totalize Iranians to justify their own bloodlust.

It is interesting to me, as an Australian, that it almost seems like Osama Bin Laden won. The fall of the US commenced when they let the fear in, and that was September 2001.

I occasionally "joke" that it was 9-11 where we shifted timelines to the alternate universe. 1 minute Fukuyama announces the end of history and our future will consist of abundance and TV and shopping, the next...

That is a very reasonable response to the threats they faced.

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.)

In a way that would be great. Then we could grow up a little bit faster.

Yeah at some point we need to know.

Well if that were to happen, that would be the end of a lot of defense business that the US does with many countries around the world.

I mean it has already happened. The F-35 relies on very thick (10cm+) layer of radar absorbing structures with special internal geometries (don't wanna go into detail regarding this).

Unfortunately if the precise construction of said structures is known, it becomes vulnerable to specially crafted radar pulses which make it generate strong returns.

So it's paramount that the exact layout be kept secret (and likely there's some variation between manufacturing batches, but this is just conjecture).

Needless to say, the US very likely has this info on every jet it sold, and a sufficiently motivated and sophisticated adversary can likely figure this out if the plane spends a long enough time in front of their radars.

That's why the US has been extremely careful about where and how the F-35 gets to fly.

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.

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"

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."

> Keep in mind that militaries are always preparing for war.

There's preparing and there's preparing. They sent soldiers to Greenland with orders to resist an invasion, packing live ammunition, explosives to destroy runways and blood bags to treat wounded.

That's more than a bit of wargaming.

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...

Danish public broadcaster. Probably the best reputation in the world on Danish news.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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?

What soft power is the Chinese capitalizing on?

https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/images/0421/mapoverviewofchine...

https://africacenter.org/spotlight/china-port-development-af...

Two maps that show a small selection of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa. See all those harbours?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power_of_China

For example, one-third of the top 100 mobile games in Japan currently come from China.[20]

I'm short on time right now, so no more examples.

> For example, one-third of the top 100 mobile games in Japan currently come from China.[20]

China is indeed taking the mobile game world by storm. Go to Akihabara and you will see these huge billboards of Chinese games like Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail. China is starting to outplay Japan at their own otaku game.

the idea that Russia is a world power but Europe isn't is fairly silly. Europe had 3x the population, 10x the gdp. Russia has a bigger nuclear arsenal, and 5 years ago had more conventional stockpiles, but for all the ammo they had, they weren't able to topple the government of a single post Soviet country with a fairly unpopular leader. Russia is a fairly strong regional power but they're no where near the power that the Soviet Union used to have

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.

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 Euro, Yen, Pound, and others are all reserve currencies.

The USD is the dominant currency, in part because the US is in the Middle East right now doing exactly what it is doing by using the military to enforce trade for oil in USD. But if the US loses that "status" it just.... reverts to being more like the EU? Doesn't seem so bad to me.

There's also pros/cons with being "the reserve currency".

> The power of allies (see Trump begging for help in Hormuz).

See Europe begging for help in Ukraine. I don't think this is a good argument. If 4 years of Trump being mean was all it took to erase all soft power the US ever had, then it never had it in the first place and it wasn't worth caring about.

>If 4 years of Trump being mean was all it took to erase all soft power the US ever had, then it never had it in the first place and it wasn't worth caring about

That's a weird statement. Like all it was were some empty words. The current system, which you don't think is worth caring about, has been exceptionally good for the US. The US is the wealthiest nation in the world. Do you think this is simply because Americans are superior human beings?

Also,

>See Europe begging for help in Ukraine

..what, exactly, are you trying to say here? Other than yes, the US does in fact seem to be siding with Putin in spite of a few attempts at acting neutral.

> That's a weird statement.

What do you find weird about it?

> The current system, which you don't think is worth caring about, has been exceptionally good for the US.

I'm not against the current system, generally speaking. Critical of it, at times, absolutely. But not against it. Apologies if I gave you the wrong impression there.

> The US is the wealthiest nation in the world. Do you think this is simply because Americans are superior human beings?

I think our culture and policies were superior, and then toss in a gigantic country with access to both oceans, incredible natural resources, and well protected and you have a recipe for an economic and military super power. So it's a combination of things really. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the cultural attributes though.

> ..what, exactly, are you trying to say here?

Idk, people are making fun of the US "begging for help" against Iran. I'm going to make fun of the EU begging for US help against Ukraine.

> Other than yes, the US does in fact seem to be siding with Putin in spite of a few attempts at acting neutral.

US isn't siding with Putin. China and Iran are though. Or have you forgotten that Iran [1] is building and selling drones to Russia who is using those drones to bomb innocent civilians in Ukraine? Or have you also forgotten that China is supplying Russia with equipment and weaponry, often times under cover to evade sanctions? But sure, saulapremium, it's the US who is siding with Putin and we certainly didn't give Ukraine tens of billions of dollars in support, we certainly didn't rush missiles to Ukraine to help them fight against Russia, nor did we sanction Russia to hell, stop Venezuela from skirting those sanctions, and we can't possibly still providing intelligence and targeting support to Ukraine.

This is what I'm talking about. If all it takes are a few mean words from our idiot president and now all of a sudden it's the US who is siding with Russia, then what are we even doing here? Why should Americans even bother caring about our allies?

You need a recalibration in your understanding of who is doing what here and who the bad guys are.

[1] Iran is also funding militias in the Middle East to try and start wars, today is hanging people for peacefully protesting, killed an estimated 30,000 of its own citizens this year over protests, and when the US attacked its military instead of just targeting military bases, or even the oil infrastructure, Iran is lobbying missiles at apartment complexes, threatening to kill people at amusement parks worldwide, and more.

>a few mean words

...right...

>and now all of a sudden it's the US who is siding with Russia

No, it's not the mean words that indicate this, it's more the open and obvious siding with Russia that does that. And before you go and collect a list of things that Trump has done which have hurt Putin, let me respond to that right away: The fact that he is a bull in a china shop who hurts everyone, whether they're on his side or not, doesn't change the fact that it's clear to anyone and everyone who's side he is on.

>people are making fun of the US

..nobody made fun. Eupolemos was showing you that you are losing soft power, the thing that you don't see any value in.

“Losing soft power” in this context is “US does something we disagree with”. It’s like my sitting here saying the EU is losing soft power by not taking on Iran and stopping their government from all the bad things they are doing.

> No, it's not the mean words that indicate this, it's more the open and obvious siding with Russia that does that. And before you go and collect a list of things that Trump has done which have hurt Putin, let me respond to that right away: The fact that he is a bull in a china shop who hurts everyone, whether they're on his side or not, doesn't change the fact that it's clear to anyone and everyone who's side he is on.

Trump is a bull in a China shop and still helping Ukraine. But the US is the bad guy and losing soft power while Iran and China help Russia prosecute its unjust war against Ukraine.

Let’s talk about the soft power China is losing by supporting Russia, or Iran for that matter.

You know there was a famous and accurate saying by Winston Churchill that America will always do the right thing after it has exhausted all other options. I think that’s more true of the EU today than it is of the United States.

For the record, I love the US. I grew up watching almost nothing but US movies and TV. I've lived in SF and New York.

We fully agree that the dictatorships are bad, of course they are. And the US is not that, yet. But it sure appears to be flirting with the idea.

The point I am making is not that the US is bad or good, but that it's are losing soft power, and no, that doesn't just mean "doing something we disagree with".

There is an election in my country right now. Key items that parties now profile themselves on are:

* decoupling from US defence tech

* decoupling the public sector from Microsoft and AWS

* decoupling from Visa and Mastercard

Now, even if all of this happens (and it obviously won't just happen as all of those are hard and expensive), my tiny country won't move the needle in any way. But these talking points were completely unimaginable two years ago.

And I see another trend: my peers in the local startup scene are now reconsidering YC and Delaware encorporation as the default for startup creation. Importantly, this is not because of left wing ideology. Most of them, like myself and I think yourself, are somewhat right-leaning in the traditional sense, not MAGA. We all agree that the EU is over regulated and almost detrimental to entrepreneurship. But at this point, betting on the US looks like a liability.

If these trends are similar elsewhere, and I strongly suspect that they are, the long term loss for the US will be significant. It's the kind of effect that we wont see before years have passed and by then, other things will be on the radar, so I doubt that there will ever be a reckoning of this fact. But I don't doubt that it will happen.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

Are you unaware that Ikea is Swedish and that the ARM comes from a long line of UK products?

> Ikea (Denmark) desk

I was just going off what you wrote. I buy locally handmade furniture and haven't bought anything from Ikea since college. Anyway, Sweden doesn't build all of this stuff either.

> ARM comes from a long line of UK products?

Again, global supply chains when it's convenient for your argument.

Both my iPhone and MacBook were bought from Apple Switzerland AG and shipped directly from china to me. The money will stay in Europe unless Trump does another tax holiday where American companies can send money back to the USA without paying taxes on it - otherwise it's a pretty hefty tax bill.

Sorry that's not how that works.

First and foremost, Apple is still an American company and even if it isn't repatriating some amount of income because it doesn't want to pay taxes on it American shareholders still get the benefit of the reported cash position. Apple still owns the assets.

Second, the products are manufactured/assembled in a variety of countries including China, Taiwan, and more - US obviously designs the products and all that. But in each step of the way Apple is paying suppliers, suppliers pay other suppliers and so forth and when you finally go to Apple Switzerland AG and buy your MacBook Pro you're just paying the sum total costs of the profit for Apple, each individual supplier, and manufacturer. All that money has left Europe, Apple Switzerland is just charging you the diff on the imported product and what profit margin they want to make. Maybe it's $250 or something, of the supply chain that is pretty much all that stays in Europe, of course subtracting out where European companies are suppliers.

> while ignoring other incredibly important products and services that you can’t or are unwilling to boycott.

Its about operational risk.

right now AWS is a key dependency, if that get turns off, we're fucked. we have mixed estate of end user devices, so its hard to turn them all off at once.

You're indulging in catastrophe fantasy.

If AWS gets "turned off" (the implication being the US is doing some big mean thing against all of Europe) for European countries then something absolutely catastrophic has happened and you're going to be hoping you have heat, electricity, food, and water.

If AWS gets "turned off" your MacBook Pro isn't going to work anymore because obviously the US will just whoops turn that off too! Your Google OS on your Android phone won't work anymore, and if you turn it on bam drone strike! Gotcha! Meta will shut down your WhatsApp, and you'll have to import all of your oil from Russia or something.

I don't think there's anything wrong with European countries or the EU as a whole looking to build more homegrown products and restore their manufacturing capacity - that's what we're looking to do in the US too in various ways and I encourage it. But I do think there's a problem with this fantasy, and indeed it is a fantasy of somehow decoupling from American tech companies or being isolationist or whatever and it's not good for you. We have global supply chains and in those supply chains you're going to have American products whether you like it or not. You can work on building better businesses in the EU and you should, but lay off the grandstanding, otherwise you just sound like the freedom fries enthusiasts.

What do I mean by "turned off"?

Right now if I want to process data in compliance with GDPR, I need to make sure there are sample clauses that provide equivalence in data protection standards.

Those clauses only hold if the US and EU agree that they won't fuck with them.

but thats fairly fragile.

It's also, frankly, very unimportant in the context of the geopolitical and geostrategic "USA has lost soft power" discussion that's being had.

>You're indulging in catastrophe fantasy.

Nobody would have agreed more with you than me, two years ago. But with Trump, the only thing that is completely clear is that nothing can be safely assumed about the US any longer. The explosion of corruption and corrosion of the legal system screams "liability". Hopefully his power will soon diminish but the damage that has been done, especially to trust, is going to last a lot longer.

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

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.

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 can't install a motto in my drone. None of the alternatives will allow me to put a physical drone part in my hand with any degree of reliability.

How?

As near as I can tell, the vast majority of the parts are made in China. When I look at the few alternatives, they're full of Chinese circuitry. If I look at circuit components, they're all made of Chinese raw materials.

Both Ukraine and Russia are planning to deploy (and use up) several million drones over the next year. Iran just joined them as a major procurer.

Where are all the US and EU component factories?

In Spain, the Netherlands and Ukraine.

Do you have any links?

Already in that other comment.

I checked both the links in the other comment.

While they satisfy the technical requirement of, "there exists an alternative" neither of them is generally available as a viable alternative to China.

They are for me.

This whole thread is in response to an attempt to someone trying to source parts to manufacture something in the US.

If "for me" is limited to some rich guy in the Netherlands, that doesn't solve the problem "for anyone else."

Well, we could counter that and say that the whole thread here is exactly about how the US is losing its soft power position and the import situation you are facing is an integral part of that.

And 'some rich guy in the Netherlands' is a nice target for you but I know plenty of people that are in other parts of Europe that seem to have no problem ordering from both of these. You asked for alternatives, you got them. You could have just left it at that but you feel the need to explain why those alternatives are not the alternatives you wanted. What did you expect? A 1-900 number and someone taking your credit card?

You could counter with that or you could read what's actually in this sub-thread.

"Some rich guy in the Netherlands" isn't about being a nice target. You keep saying it works for you but you can't demonstrate any way that works for others.

I can point you to a number of places that sell any number of Chinese drone parts that don't involve a "1-900 number". You can find them on Amazon. Any number of drone vendors sell them through normal sales portals. The manufacturers will ship them directly.

A handful of companies that require a bespoke procurement process and are operating at a tiny fraction of the scale do not have any appreciable impact on the market for drone parts today.

I perused the links that you provided in another comment.

How much of these products are sourced from EU materials? Like is the copper in the wires from the EU? Is the wire made in the EU and coated with insulator there too? Are the motors wound in Europe?

> Like is the copper in the wires from the EU?

Mostly Latin America afaik but copper re-use is so high that it is hard to tell what the original source is.

> Is the wire made in the EU and coated with insulator there too?

Not in the EU but close by.

> Are the motors wound in Europe?

Yes, there are multiple drone motor manufacturers in Europe now. Annual production is in the millions.

It's hard to tell without the spec sheets.

The magnets are almost certainly from China.

The top copper producer in the EU is Poland so that's a possible source of copper. They're pretty far down the list though so it's likely that a large part of the copper is coming from places like Chile (top producer in the world).

The thread is about manufacturing in the US so tariffs do have to be factored in.

On those specific parts:

Motors: T-Motor F90 1300KV - $119.60(incl shipping) + Tariff

ESC: Holybro Tekko32 F4 50A - $88.97(incl shipping) + Tariff

FC: Matek H743-SLIM V4 - £88.12(incl shipping + VAT) + Tariff

Radio: Radiomaster M2 $95.99(incl shipping + sales tax)

The FC was from a UK store but it originated in China. I already had the radio so I don't have current prices on it.

I'd love to find a list of vendors that have comparable parts, in stock, and without being insane multiples of those prices.

edit: formatting

https://motor-g.com/en

https://www.arctus.ai/products

Motor-g doesn't seem to ship outside of Ukraine. That's totally understandable but for anyone outside of Ukraine, they effectively don't exist.

Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info. It seems they just raised 2.6M in seed funding 3 months ago. It's great that there are startups in NL but that's not even close to a replacement for China's scale yet.

Both of these may change the landscape in the future. For now, neither of them is a practical way to get drone parts without China.

> Motor-g doesn't seem to ship outside of Ukraine.

They absolutely do.

> Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info.

You can order as much as you want from them, the price is right and the quality is extremely high.

Indeed, they're not on AliExpress, but that's roughly the difference between being a producer in Europe and in China, and that is precisely the difference that you should be happy with.

Can you show me? Is this some privileged access that you get as an investor?

Its easy to verify that Motor-g does not ship outside of Ukraine. I just put 4 of their motors in a shopping cart and tried to check out. The drop down menu for destination country has a single option, Ukraine.

Arctus does not list a single price on their website. That's also easy to verify. Every single product on their website only says, "request product data", or "coming soon".

I have both their products quite literally on my desk in front of me.

All I did was mail the manufacturer, asked for a quote, got a mail in return, they sent an invoice, I paid the invoice and they sent me the goods. Just like I would expect.

You claim it works for you.

Can you demonstrate a process that others can follow?

eumotors.eu

>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.

>"and likely most of Europe and Canada would also go to war against the USA."

Canada and the US share border and almost all meaningful infra of Canada is located in that thin border area. The US can obliterate much of Canada with artillery, various types of missiles, bombs etc. etc. Canada has nothing to counter it with. So no, I doubt Canada is that suicidal (I am Canadian btw).

They could. Destruction is easy after all. But then they'd have to hold it. That might prove to be a little harder.

> 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.

From military consequences pov, EU isn't a military alliance but it would of course also be attacking NATO.

The EU absolutely is a military alliance as well.

That's a heterodox interpretation. Something akin to it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_Union but it's no more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_defense_pacts_of_...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/collecti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_alliances

The EU treaty has a clause that calls for assistance for part of the members (who are not neutral) but there's no military structure outside NATO.

There's also a perpatual public debate about whether EU should become a military alliance. eg https://theloop.ecpr.eu/can-the-eu-form-an-autonomous-milita...

In practical terms, in event of a invasion, only NATO has a organisation set up for coordinated response.

You are really completely clueless, I have no idea why you keep posting comments that contradict your own comments but fine, whatever.

There are four different mutual defense pacts in Europe and there is an umbrella one and they all operate independently of NATO. And then there is NATO, with or without the USA.

Hey, a bit of civility please.

I assume the contradiction you refer to is that EU has this clause but it's still not considered a military alliance? Maybe you read the term differently. It doesn't mean it has zero defense dimensions, it's that its mission or capability are not military. That's why NATO is the one a would-be invader needs to worry about wrt military consequences.

In WW2, was there an existing organisation for a coordinated response? In the Korean War? Was NATO the organization that coordinated allies in the Persian Gulf War?

Of course military alliances can be formed after wars start, I'm not saying this couldn't happen in Europe. But it's different to have a military alliance existing responding to a conflict (or better yet preventing the conflict, as the military alliance served as a deterrent).

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.

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.

I'm sure they'd be grateful for your expert analysis. Maybe you could offer to teach at their war college?

I'm not sure what lesson they are supposed to learn from the Falklands. It was somewhat swung when we sank the Belgrano using a nuclear sub.

Sometimes these billion dollar high tech things work.

Source: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/groenland/danmark-forbered...

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.

> If it weren't for the observably fair elections

Hehe, that's a good one.

You would not trust a bridge that reeked of wood rot.

Why should they trust a country that smells of corruption and lashes out at random like a shambling corpse?

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."

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

How is Greenland a vital interest to France? Especially in the context of initiating a nuclear war with a friendly nation?

Europe is of vital interest to France, as is not letting American imperialists touch it.

A nation that invades us is not friendly.

Should I give you a pass for only pulling a ten from my wallet when you mug me? Or do I defend myself knowing that next time you'll be taking more?

So you don't want to answer the question?

NATO dictates that an attack on any NATO nation should be seen as an attack on every nation, so yeah.

> 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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> In an actual war there is absolutely no possibility of success for Denmark, even with the help of allies.

Assume that Denmark's strategic success criteria is not "win up-front battles with US armed forces". And that they understand the difference between "lost battle(s), got occupied" and "nation permanently removed from existence".

Also, US service members are not slavishly loyal Clone Troopers. That I've heard, the greatest fear of most senior American officers is that the CIC will issue orders sufficiently offensive to the lower ranks that they will be disobeyed at scale.

Fortunately enough Americans remember their roots. For now.

So your supposition is strategic national defense game theory should be based on hoping for a mutiny from the opposite side? Is rationality dead? What are you lot talking about.

> So your supposition is...

No. But Denmark lacks the armored divisions, bomber wings, carrier task forces, etc. to pursue a "we've got a bigger stick" strategy. And undermining your opponent's will to fight was routine back when the Old Testament was written.

> Is rationality dead?

By a couple accounts I've heard, desperate senior US officers used the pre-February situation with Iran to lure Trump's attention away from Denmark/Greenland.

(If you want rational behavior from the current POTUS - um, yes, my deepest condolences, but...)

Keep going. Denmark capitulated and suffered relatively little damage. Austria capitulated, and what happened to them? Czechoslovakia capitulated, and how did that work out for them? Sure, neither suffered losses in the initial invasion. Their people still got to die fighting for Hitler, though. They still got bombed and bombed and bombed and then invaded by the allies, though.

And, Norway did fight back, and lost. How much worse did that work out for Norway than for Denmark?

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.

They will not go back to anything resembling the old normal :-/. Trump & his cronies have obliterated the Overton Window so hard you cannot even tell which side of the house the window used to be in. The successors for Trump will be worse, because they will not be senile old men who sabotage themselves, and the checks-and-balances against this millenia-old crap have now been pretty well dismantled :-/. We are entering an age where US will behave like a weird sort of Russia#2, run by oligarchs. In a way it was of course always run (or influenced) by oligarchs, but nothing like the scale we are going to see from now on. But.. look at the history of US, the last hundred or so years, and how they behaved south of Mexico (I am not particularly calling out US here, of course Europe has also been bad).

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.

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.

That's not true. Ukraine was well prepared, they had spent since 2014 on this because they knew the day would come. That's the only reason the country still exists.

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.

> 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.

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 makes the aggressiveness of our team justified, or at least understandable, or at least ignorable, or at least not quite changing our deep feelings.

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.

I really wish hard that Europe gets it shit together.

They are adults now (rare commodity), but can still be pushed around, have their leash yanked.

They have to come to terms with their islands of racist tendencies.

My hope hasn't died yet

The only one of those that's really new is Greenland.

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...

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.

"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The thing is, look at all major military alliances in history.

How many of them have a wealthy hegemon and wealthy minor partners?

It's <<extremely>> rare for that to happen and the US managed that for about 80 years.

Ignore all the propaganda and look at the results. Actions, not words.

In the modern era there are basically 0 wealthy Russian (similar story for the Soviets) or Chinese allies.

That’s a different topic. This is about how America acts towards the world, historically the so-called second and third world but now apparently to potentially everyone.

They're related, though. Most other hegemons sought absolute domination and a weakening (and impoverishment) of everyone else. The US was generally confident in its security and prosperity that it allowed others to become prosperous, too.

No they are not. Second and third world countries, not buddy first world countries. They don’t get to just do their own thing. Need I go on.

South Korea and Taiwan were definitely not first world countries when they started. Not even inhabited by white people (so less likely to be favored by 60s America, for example).

The Persian Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE).

Israel also wasn't developed in 1947.

Let's not ignore facts when they're inconvenient.

In the Western Hemisphere the US track record has been a total mess but in the Eastern Hemisphere I'd say about 30% of the time US allies tripped on their own feet on the way to prosperity.

Your whole side topic here is an exercise in ignoring the inconvenient facts of murder and destruction in favor of some supposedly rosy alliance narrative.

Yeah I remember elementary school too. Where people don't care if one of the kids is an a*hole because "he's nice to me".

Yes this is I think the key thing... the "rising tide raises all boats" strategy. The deal was, if you play by the US rules and let their corporations in, they'll leave you alone or even give you back something useful in return.

Now the rug pull... you've been operating this way for the last 50 years, and suddenly the US is out to extract as much from you as possible no matter how close an ally you are or how friendly to their corporations you are.

I'm tired of the both-sidesing that I see on places like HN to justify the current administration's actions. The US historically didn't shake every country down (even allies!) under the implicit threat of its military might, because global stability and prosperity was good for US business interests.

It did try to overturn unfriendly regimes but it was far less brazen and reckless about this, operating over longer timelines, and the instability caused by those disastrous interventions seemed like it was a lesson learned (but now has clearly been forgotten).

This shit is terrifying.

Reading these statements in isolation they all look like damning with faint praise. But they are all sincere.

So strong is the instinct to pay tribute to the nice hegemon of the previous election.

> USAID was a testament to this.

Absolutely. Credit needs to be given where it's due.

Reminder that “Born in the USA” was not a “patriotic” song.

Neither was "This land is your land"

Where is Guthrie's guitar ?

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.

You are seeing a side that always existed. Arguably in the past it was worse.

> 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.

I wouldn't be that cynical. From the interactions I've had with people from mainland China, particularly those in the educated classes, I can say for certain that it was soft power that drew them towards the West and the US in particular. China already beat back the West in the Korean War.

Yes and they had a lot of soft power too.

As an American I feel this way too - there is a nostalgia and disappointed yearning for what was probably a propaganda pipe dream. I find myself disappointed and indignant at the long list of bullshit we are doing right now but I'm surprised by my own extreme sense of betrayal over how we don't even -want- to be "the good guys" anymore. I know the US has a long history of evil, dont get me wrong, but until recently (~covid) I thought most of us at least wanted to be a positive force in the world.

For me, Dan Carlin said it perfectly - I want the America from the promotional material.

I think a lot of us do. But right now that promotional material looks more like a rigged Microsoft demo than the real thing.

> 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?

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.

'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...

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, and to be complete I should mention I am aware of multiple other HN'ers doing their bit too.

> 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.

> How about Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Canada, Iran and other countries the USA seized / controls or plans to?

Do Americans support this violent annexation and expansion? As a European I'm feeling threatened. Very few countries have Atom Bombs and can say NO to the USA.

Check this thread. Examples aplenty. Fortunately not even close to a majority, but yes, Americans like that exist. Europeans too by the way, but at least we have managed to mostly keep them out of power.

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!"

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?

> 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”?

Totally! I intended to imply that hypocrisy :)

And partisan hacks will say that a stubbed toe and terminal cancer are both bad.

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.

I've seen actual people (mostly this year) who write stuff like, "sure, I can't deny that this is fascism now, but you've been calling lawlessness for the rich, concentration of power in the public and private sectors both, militarization of the police, the war on drugs, free speech zones, surveillance capitalism, voter suppression, pushes to roll back civil rights, and many of our wars, fascist, for decades! It's not my fault I didn't realize it was for-real this time."

They're so close to getting it. So very, frustratingly close.

At least one of them got published somewhere recently, might have been The Atlantic. You just wish you could smack them with a clue-stick.

C'mon, everyone was saying this in 2024. It is just that people hate women and people of color more.

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.

Europe and the rest of the world.

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.

Imprison based on what and seize assets based on what exactly? You not liking the administration is not a valid reason for asset seizure

>"You not liking the administration is not a valid reason for asset seizure"

Civil forfeiture would do just fine. Such a wonderful tool. /s

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.

I care less about what the UN says is legal than I do the local traffic cop

International law is not about what you care about. It just is. If you break it by starting a war, then it is an illegal war, ad definitionem.

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.

Not even a formality. A formality means that he would get it from Congress, without Congress judging the war on merit. We don't even have that.

Speaking not just of this administration/war but also of past ones

> The war isn't illegal.

You're going to have to specify a framework if you want to make statements about legality.

US law, which is the only relevant law to discuss the actions of the president of the US.

Under which "law" is President allowed legally to start a War - citation needed :)

It's been the established president since the Korean War when the US began ignoring the constitutional provision that gave congress the power to declare war. Additional examples are the Vietnam War, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq I & II, the Libyan regime change, and the current Iran conflict, and there are plenty more. The written law still states that the president does not have this power, but the actual unwritten law has been that he can. And that is the only law that matters.

> US began ignoring the constitutional provision

First, not US but Presidency and second, breaking Constitution is not very legal last time I checked but I could be wrong... /s

Yes, the US and not just the presidency. If it was just the presidency then he would have been impeached by congress for usurping their constitutional authority.

he was impeached (more than once cause he's a special kind of guy) and will be impeached again in 2029 :)

again, you are saying something is legal that is both clearly illegal and unconstitutional. you can say "it is illegal but we have no way to enforce since our congress and senate do not work for the people but are simple extension of a given political party in power" but you can't say that it is legal

I already had you labeled as a climate denier and a troll, now I'll have to add one more item.

Add what you like. I can't possibly take anyone who uses the term "climate denier" seriously.

The US constitution specifically calls out treaties signed by the US (such as the UN Charta) as supreme law of the land. Article VI, the "Supremacy Clause".

Thus, US law, too, defers to international law.

Please at least read the legal framework you're so confidently misdescribing.

It isn't obeyed or enforced and, therefore, is not the law. I won't read it as there is no point in doing so because it is not the law.

By that incredibly circular definition, laws don't exist. All it takes is ignoring them and then they disappear!

That's obviously not how things work. If you don't obey the law, you are a criminal. That's the whole point of laws.

That's exactly correct. Laws are not a physical entity and therefore their existence is predicated entirely on collective agreement.

So if you and I agree laws don't matter, we can go rob a bank together and it's all good?

If you and I, the president, congress, and the judiciary agree, then yes, and that's kind of the situation regarding the laws around starting a war.

Why only these local institutions? What makes those special?

They have the power to enforce laws

So do the mall cop and the ICC. Why does this arbitrary level in-between matter?

The mall cop much more so than the ICC

That sure is an attitude that explains why US soft power (and with that, Empire) has been crumbling at an unprecedented rate.

You might not care about the rules, but the rest of the world takes notice. This is how you break a world order carefully designed to further your own interests.

A law defines the nature of collective action in response to certain violations. Words on paper themselves are impotent. If there is no potential for enforcement, i.e. there is no counterfactual state of collective action, there is no law.

US constitution says that starting a war must be authorized by Congress, president has no authority to do it on his own.

The problem is: over time the US grew so powerful, that the definition of "war" became blurry. "No, we are not at war, our soldiers are just dropping bombs on Iran for fun and profit".

EDIT: Another problem, of course, is that current member of Congress have no balls to stand up to Trump and reclaim their constitutional powers.

Congress made its mistake a long time ago. Power is very difficult to reclaim once it has been relinquished. And it didn't even take a Caesar crossing the Rubicon in our case.

>"The war isn't illegal. The president has that power"

Well you can say the same about Putin then. All nice and dandy

Of course I can. He even uses the same trick of not calling it a "war"

Epstein files for one

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

There is absolutely evidence he is a foreign agent. He is likely too stupid to realize it, tho. Israel and Russia both have paper trails on him going back decades. People around trump and his businesses have deep ties to russia and that isnt private. His own sons have bragged about being close to russia. Oh, plus the eastern european wife.

This isnt a conspiracy. Epstein was an israeli agent and him and trump were bffs for years. Trumps family is also heavily in debt to Russia and theyve been very open about it.

You seem to be a weird trump supporter who is mildly trolling by saying false stuff like the iran war isnt illegal when it very clearly is. Your comments are either very ignorant or youre trolling. The only folks still defending trump are p silly folks. The evidence is overwhelming at this point.

You can't be an agent without realizing it and you don't get to call me silly when you list having a foreign wife as evidence that someone is a foreign agent.

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.

Trump has immunity for anything that is an 'official act', thanks to the SCOTUS ruling.

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.

Treason.

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.

Americans turned the presidency into a pop figure.

Our president should be boring and relatively quiet. Congress should be our focus, not the president.

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.

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.

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...

I don't know about the rest, but Clinton when he left the presidency was actually in (legal) debt. He raised to the actual 100+ million way after his presidency, so Newsweek is presenting it wrong.

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.

Lets also include the Rothschild and BlackRock then

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.

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.

Abu Ghraib, and deliberate violent destruction of a nation is a deeper offence than being "not great".

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.

I am very eager to understand the down votes. Corporeal punishment too harsh to allow in exceptional cases or too mild for the warcrimes and other crimes in question ?

I will not judge the responses. Just curious.

We need a Nuremberg trial for the genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the illegal attacks on 7 countries in the Middle East.

We need to prosecute both the Biden and Trump administration, the Israeli leadership, and the leadership of most European countries. Never again is never again.

If so, then also do the leadership of Hamas, Putin, etc. The US is not uniquely evil.

What Israel and the USA is doing in the ME is uniquely evil. There are likely hundreds of thousands dead in Gaza. Children intentionally killed by snipers, famine as a tool of war, the displacement of millions of people.

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.

They don't necessarily have to be show trials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Yoon_Suk_Yeol

And change the constitution to fix the issue of an administration just ignoring the law.

Lol we cant even change the electoral college. No way we amend the constitution.

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.

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 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.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" ...

Thanks. I did not know of this quote.

The Anti-NATO pact.

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

Corey Doctorow's speech was noteworthy. For anyone who missed it:

The Post-American Internet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509019

> Make sure to check /active

Thanks, TIL.

We call it 'the better homepage'.

tbf, less flagged posts hitting /active lately

either they kill them early (delete them) or hn policy quietly changed

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.

I don’t.

ok, the I apparently read different threads. Which is very well possible of course.

They can be tough to spot. (Which it sort of has to be to be a dog whistle.) Did you spot the one in that resignation letter the other day?

Could you give an example maybe?

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?

Much better.

China is far more reliable and dependable than dealing with a lying narcissistic paedophile and his cronies.

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.

Generally, historically it didn't because of what happened during the Sui Dynasty, which was short lived. The lessons from that period is still fairly engrained in the mindsets of Chinese people.

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.

> not even the Holocaust will survive

Which one ?

I didn't understand the question, can you expand on it?

My interpretation is that you're asking "which Holocaust won't survive historical revisionism", and there are two options (both are red flags):

- you're deliberately trying to dilute the designation of Holocaust, by stating there are other "holocausts", by which you're probably referring to other genocides - when in reality the Holocaust is the name given to the genocide at the hands of Nazis; it's the same has asking "which Holodomor?" in the context of my statement.

- you're implying the Holocaust didn't exist, as if there was a list of "many holocausts", some historically true, others historically false;

I am questioning the idea that there is one "the holocaust". I understand that is not a very popular notion at some places. (As I anticipated, here comes the downvotes)

Being at the other end of colonialism, we are aware of many holocausts and acknowledge them if not equally we don't identify any one as 'the holocaust'.

Don't get me wrong, I suspect our values mostly agree.

I literally have a 3ft by 3ft Anne Frank's photograph as a poster in my bedroom as a reminder. Lest we forget.

I wrote the code myself to enlarge and distribute, with minimal pixelation, a small photograph of her at her desk. I printed it out split over multiple letter sized sheets. I did not have access to a wide form factor printer then. I still remember figuring out the libpgm libppm libraries from source. Assembled and glued the jigsaw puzzle and framed the result. There are some millimetric misalignments due to printer roller slips.

This was from many decades ago, when I was in college. It is still there on my bedroom wall.

Ok, thank you for clarifying because I thought you were coming from a different place.

Well I disagree.

I don't think the Holocaust took away the word "holocaust" and stripped it off from it's meaning, and from being able to be used to describe other events. I also don't think that was the intent behind the choice.

So much so that I've capitalized the Holocaust.

If it's the right choice or not to name it, I trust the institutions that studied this event.

I also don't think it takes away from the crimes against humanity and genocide of other cultures, some from colonialism, others from racial and ethnic hate.

There's still genocide and colonialism happening to this day, for example at the hands of Russia we have the current genocide in Ukraine and attempt to colonize it. Or what's happening in Gaza.

Maybe it's a cultural difference, but the word "genocide" to describe these crimes strikes me as a very loaded and meaningful word, and accurate word - the Holocaust was a genocide, it carries everything that the Holocaust, Holodomor, native American, Chechens, Armenian genocide, and many other cultures suffered.

Also genocide not only has a definition as a word, but also has a specific legal definition.

While holocaust has its own definition which I don't think it applies to all genocides and crimes against humanity.

Perhaps a Hebrew word would have been the most appropriate in this case. Holocaust is an English word and it is not a proper noun. In any case it's too late to change anything.

Upvoted because I think your comment was downvoted out of emotions this topic triggers.

It is actually a Greek word, that's why it is the same in most other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(sacrifice)

Thanks. I did not know about the etymological roots.

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.

>> 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.

Goes against pretty much all of history. I guarantee you the Chinese officials dont think this way and if your head is in the sand and its up for grabs they will grab it. They exert influence on geopolitics heavily and think in centuries rather than political cycles. Who owns AI and social media/tech will basically excert their values on the worlf

Not really? Technology spread fairly quickly for the last few hundred years, at least in the western world.

Bunisess and technology. Culture ? Highly debatable and certainly not in the last 10 years.

Why couldn't China be better? It can't get much worse than what the US is currently doing. It's getting dangerously close to 30s Germany levels of madness. China at least at the moment seems like a better run country, and much less interested in forcing its will on other countries.

I figure china would be pretty similar for the rest of the world honestly.

This thread doesn't appear on the homepage, it is only on /active

So uh, threads with wrongspeak in them are still hidden.

As an American, can’t say I’m too worried about Canadian opinion of us, let alone Denmark. Most Americans don’t know the name of a single politician in Denmark.

Most Americans also dont know that most of the world is laughing at us. Americans are oblivious by choice cuz we pretty eagerly consume misinformation, always have. We love our alternate histories that make us feel superior.

> As an American, can’t say I’m too worried about Canadian opinion of us, let alone Denmark.

Maybe you should be. You might need them one day.

> Most Americans don’t know the name of a single politician in Denmark.

Ignorance is nothing to be proud of.

Why would we need to know that? I spend my time focusing on important things and Danish government or opinion isn’t one of them.

As a non-American, it’s attitudes like yours, quite widespread actually, that make me rejoice this moment in history where the US is taken down a peg or two.

It’s not gonna be nice and fun for anybody, but it’s time to learn that you guys are just one country in a whole world, and you need friends to thrive. The ignorant bully attitude has run its course.

No American I know except for far leftists feel like they’ve been knocked down at all. Seriously not worried about your opinion at all - never crosses my mind. I’d worry way more about China than Canada or Europe (or any of their colonies).

The same should be said of the senile old women that damage Europe's reputation. That is, if they were actually elected and not appointed by bureaucrats.

Probably it's true from reputation standpoint.

Some people in Europe were not that happy when Biden told on public television that the Nord Stream pipeline will be blown up somehow, but luckily the media was good in not talking too much about it and later he listened to his own advisors better about how to communicate.

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.

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.

They'd win it, too. An alliance of Denmark, Canada, Mexico, and Iran should sack Florida and plow all the golf courses under.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

This makes me think of a thought I had the last weeks and months with the geopolitical chaos currently in the world:

While understanding the danger of dictators and technical mistakes and the chaos that would ensue, besides that, what would happen if just every or even just most countries had nukes? Just give them to everybody, and I'm really not convinced we would end up in a Fallout situation but maybe quite a peaceful one? No expert in that but tbh when you think about it most of the countries getting fucked don't have them and the aggressor always seems to do.

I realize this is very simplified and many things I'm probably not seeing but I'm open to learn.

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.

What else would they be doing, watching TV?

Other side-effects of Trump's unwise, anti-strategic hastening the downfall of hard and soft American power and respect for ego and personal gain: alternative defense pacts and nuclear proliferation. Kratocracies only respect North Korea because it has the bomb and an absurd amount of hardware pointed right at Seoul so Ukraine, Cuba, Taiwan, and Iran best get their underground tests on pronto if each desires survival.

I wonder how many countries have - reluctantly - decided to pursue nuclear bombs after many years of holding off the boat.

The next decade will be a complete disaster for non-proliferation.

Breaking: country that a head of state threatened to invade was preparing for invasion.

> The Danish public broadcaster DR reports that officials in Denmark, France and Germany say that Donald Trump's threats to seize Greenland were taken so seriously that wide-ranging preparations were made to forcibly resist a US invasion of the Danish island.

Breaking (2): small country was preparing to forcibly resist (?) an invasion. That was threatened.

You mean, they are not anymore?

The goldfish prez seems to have moved on to Cuba now

France offering support to little ententes to prevent facist revanchism. Seems familiar.

World tension continues to increase.

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.

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.

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.

lol Denmark yea i'm sure no one was concerned

Lol there is posturing and there is whatever this is.

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.

Does US care about diplomacy anymore ?

Yeah, otherwise why would Trump only attack hated countries? He would have already started bombing Canada since its the closest.

Iran has been in a war with the USA since at least 1979. I was about to say "soft war" but that would be ignoring all the deaths.

This is one battle of many and the USA will win it. Whether it is warranted or whether the USA will win 'the war' is another thing.

C'mon people, no NATO member is going to attack any NATO ally. Be real.

Fake report, ignore, move on

Bare assertions don't count for much. What is your evidence that it is fake?

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.

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.

> 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?

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...

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.

aw man, I thought I would finally find out whats really going on :(

Well, thanks anyway.

Where was this kind of movement when Russia invaded Europe in 2022?

I think Europe's inaction in 2022 will go down as the greatest moral failing of the century. You can't say "they didn't act because Russia is a nuclear power" - the same is true here.

Not everybody can be painted with the 'inaction' label, there are plenty of people that are doing a lot of good work.

I think most people in Europe figured the US would oppose Russia invading as that's mostly what has happened for decades. In the Denmark case I don't know if they can count on the US opposing the US invading.

It wasn't until that thing with Trump and Vance shouting at Zelensky in the oval office that Europe figured the US had kind of flipped and it was on us to support Ukraine.

>"Where was this kind of movement when Russia invaded Europe in 2022"

Russia has invaded Ukraine. There is no political entity called Europe. And if you're talking geography than good chunk of Russia is in Europe.

If the article is correct (a big if) then many in the Danish government and many Danish people, along with a bunch of people/officials in other countries, may not be as stable mentally as I once thought they were.

Critics never miss a chance to sit around and bitch about orange man.

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