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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24606 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Trump announces plan to hit UK, Denmark and other European countries with extra tariffs over Greenland

Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago. Now Trump has announced 10% tariffs on imported goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. As a sidenote, despite predictions of economic catastrophe, Trump's tariffs have been smaller and done less economic damage than estimated.

For starters, inflation is running below projections. In December, the just-announced inflation rate was 2.7 percent. The Fed’s favorite indicator was unchanged from November when the core inflation rate, at 2.6 percent, was the lowest since 2021.

Tariffs have had surprisingly little impact on higher consumer prices. “Tariff pass‑through to consumers has been much milder than anticipated,” Olu Sonola, head of U.S. economic research at Fitch Ratings, wrote in a recent research note. Yet revenue from tariffs brought in close to $300 billion in 2025, up from about $80 billion in 2024, and is currently on track to produce over $350 billion this year.

The evidence suggests that most costs are being absorbed by foreign exporters or by domestic sellers accepting lower profit margins. And since the actual tariffs on different countries are a crazy quilt of different rates, producers have also become expert at shifting their supply chains to countries with relatively lower tariffs. In addition, it’s easy to overstate the impact of tariffs on household costs, since imports are only about 14 percent of GDP. In other words, there are no tariffs on 86 percent of GDP.

The high tariff rate on China skews the averages. Excluding China, the effective tariff rate on the rest of the world, adjusting for trade share and exempt categories, is not the average 17 percent. It’s well below 10 percent. Thanks in part to the tariffs, the chronic U.S. global trade deficit has been shrinking. The October deficit was $29.4 billion, down nearly 40 percent from September. The decline continued in November, the last month for which statistics are available.

Still, no one knows what's the next step of Trump's master plan. Will it fizzle like the whole "Canada 51st state" thing? Polymarket estimates 27% chance that Trump will take "part of Greenland" in 2026.

Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago.

Do the Europoors understand how insulting and alienating this is given their concurrent begging for US help against Russia? Even under Trump something like half of the military aid Ukraine gets is from the United States alone. This Greenland thing would be good cause to pull out of NATO if it wasn’t so impotent and pathetic.

I assume you mean that around half of the equipment sent to Ukraine has a US origin, but paid for by EU money under Trump? Direct US funding has fallen to basically zero under his administration, so I guess that is a win for those seeking to disengage from paying for the conflict directly - the total funding of which was around 0.2% of GDP annually when it was actually being sent in past years. Regan would have died laughing if that was the bill to cause this much of a headache to the Soviet Union.

However, the US could certainly do all kinds of very painful things to further undermine European security and Ukraine in particular for sure, like forbidding the EU from paying the US for weapons, stopping intelligence sharing or pulling out of NATO full stop. Europe is dealing with a reorientation in our relationship with the US, which is certainly likely to leave us all poorer - with only the reward of staying out of future US led entanglements.

You didn't need to call on Article 5 post 911, but you did and found it useful in so many ways, and were the only NATO country to do so. Lets hope for America's sake it never needs to enact it under this Trump presidency, for this is the stupidest prize to burn all that for - Greenland, really? You already had it in everything but name for as many investments and bases as you wanted, and the Danes were paying the subsidies needed to maintain the island into the bargain. This is insanity and the reckless arrogance of Trump spending on America's checkbook of massive power built by saner, stabler minds over a century. The Republican party deserves much better.

Regan would have died laughing if that was the bill to cause this much of a headache to the Soviet Union.

Yes, but Russia isn’t the Soviet Union. Europe’s persistent fake befuddlement over why the party of Reagan doesn’t want to support a pack of deracinated, satanist, bioleninist bureaucrats over the (nominal) defenders of autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality isn’t helping.

You didn't need to call on Article 5 post 911, but you did and found it useful in so many ways

The other members of NATO pushed to invoke article 5, the United States rolled its eyes and agreed. Then you cucked out the second it became inconvenient and left the United States and Britain to fight alone.

Russia certainly isn't the Soviet Union, it's a weird larp of all the things you accuse Europe of there - high divorce, high crime, high immigration, 10-15% actually practicing Orthodox, high Muslim % and growing rapidly thanks to its war, massive drug abuse and HIV/AIDs, and I'm really confused why you seem to like them or find them in any way preferable to the Danes, who actually have done a lot right and are just chill friends happy to let the US take the lead mostly. 80s Reganite Christians also wouldn't presumably be into the whole weird postmodern 4Chan Pol larp thing of based and cucked and cringe that comes out nowadays and would have recognized where satan sits in the balance of Russia vs Ukraine, but that's an aside.

Anyway, you got what you want surely, the US funding to Ukraine is now tiny and the weapons/all the subsidies are paid for by the EU, isn't that directly opposite to your core point of Europe never carrying any weight? That's the key bit here right?

Then you cucked out

Who is this you in the room? I'm British, but Denmark and the rest of NATO went on all your adventures until pretty late, when the US wrapped everything up and let the sand wash back over all we did in Afghanistan (mostly the US) for better or worse (and there certainly is an argument that it was better to cut our loses). How is that anyone cucking out, other than maybe the US?

By the way, what is the attraction of using the term cucked for international diplomacy? I can never understand it myself.

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