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Agreed, prior to this war I thought that Trump was at least better than Bush Junior but he's dived a whole league beneath Bush with this. At least Iraq wasn't strong enough to be a big pain like Iran.
This is what happens when you can't think soundly in strategic terms. The value of Greenland is microscopic compared to the value of Europe. 2 nuclear powers, ASML chip equipment, machine tools, 600 million people, precision optics, a fairly advanced defence industrial base and about 2 million troops. Europe could be a decisive factor in a world war with China, they provide the numerical weight to somewhat counterbalance China. There was coalition-building where Britain and France were going to help send fleets to Asia, that was part of the strategy.
Greenland is a frozen wasteland. The only vaguely valuable thing there is basing and radar that the US already has! Trump wanted to map-paint there, antagonized much more valuable countries over it. Same with tariffs. Tariff your enemies and not your allies.
The Iran war was predictably a terrible idea. The US seems to be getting kicked out of Iraq, while Iran has secured the straits of Hormuz de facto, possibly soon formally. Trump is reduced to telling other countries to go in and secure the oil themselves, since Iran has been 'decimated'. If Iran is so beaten then why not just go in with the US Navy and secure the oil, secure a big W for America? It's obnoxious to falsely declare victory and then usher allies into the death zone to do some futile bleeding, demand their assistance in a war that worsens their interests, a war they lack the power to win.
It's worse than Suez. Britain and France and Israel were crushing Egypt militarily, they landed troops and took Port Said in a week. There was no doubt they had the power to prevail on a purely military level. British troops weren't 'working from home' sitting in hotels because their bases were getting bombed out. The US is not just losing strategically but hasn't made any traction at all with regard to the strait. There has been no traction with regard to regime change either. Maybe that will change in future but it's looking really bad.
I don't know, my view from Europe is that our elites are so firmly in the US pocket that European non-participation on the US side in the case of a serious showdown of systems is still inconceivable. Europeans are mildly unhappy with Trump, but are only so in a way in which a battered wife is unhappy with her husband's temporary alcoholised and violent state but will still tell the cops to piss off if they come to investigate reports that he sexually abuses their child.
If they were willing to break with the US for real, maybe they would follow the Cory Doctorow suggestion and return US threats with threats to cancel DMCA analogues that were imposed on them, or perhaps even remember that their stance on the Ukraine war and EU eastward expansion in general are largely cuckoldry for US interests supported only by the barest minimum of rationalising wordslop to let the "politically well-informed" crowd maintain their self-image as such. In such a setting, the Greenland thing just serves as a reminder of who is boss, and/or anchoring device to make future humiliations seem relatively more generous in comparison.
(I expect that in a couple of years it will come out that Spain did everything it could to proactively help with the Iran campaign behind closed doors, while maintaining the public posture with restricting the usage of their airspace, as it turned out Germany did with Iraq.)
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