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Calling what Trump did “mean” is not a good faith argument. He declined to rule out using military force. He essentially threatened to invade them. Just like saying he was mean to Canada wouldn’t be good faith. He talked about them being the 51 state. Threatening to annex territory of your allies is insane behavior and a massive escalation. Doing that because you got offended over another country’s response to your “deal” is not a proportional response. I don’t see how you can’t see this from their point of view.
I'm not a fan of the guy, but as far as I can tell, he has a pattern of "declining to rule out" generally that I assume stems from the business world, and keeping options open.
I think journalists have noticed this and run with it, because "Trump refuses to rule out [shocking thing]" headlines are scary and sell papers. Not to say that some of the specifics aren't ill-advised or major policy changes, either: the Greenland thing seems dumb, from what I've read.
But "strategic ambiguity" has been a (IMO reasonable) policy elsewhere for a long time, and frequently attempts to force a commitment ahead of time are intended to limit options in the future. "Would the US enter a hot war with China to defend Taiwan? If yes, exactly how forcefully?" That gives away a lot to anyone planning an invasion. A "no first use" nuclear policy sounds great, but really limits escalation options even defensively.
Correct; the US (not just Trump, this is an existing pattern) will almost never "rule out" the use of military force in any dispute ahead of time. That's why they asked Trump to do so -- they knew he would give the standard answer and then they could beat him up for it. But he eventually did rule out the use of force in Greenland.
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Yes, but there's a time and a place. To take a deliberately extreme example, a businessman who declines to rule out raping your wife isn't keeping his options open; that's not an option you're supposed to have. Or to want, for that matter.
No, if you’re trying to deal with someone and your counterparty suddenly loudly asks you if you’ll rule out doing some shocking thing, the correct answer is no and you should understand why. It’s obnoxious behavior; you return serve.
Anyone stupid enough to be fooled by this sort of rhetorical trick has already been tricked the previous 3,000 times, so this will simply be reason #3,001 to hate you.
And you plainly do hate us.
I just want to make sure you’re being snarky and not genuinely misunderstanding who “you” is in my analogy.
(In my comment you are playing the role of Trump, who is continually baited by journalists with partisan goals.)
If you’re intentionally abruptly breaking the metaphor to attempt to goad a wall of text from me, fine.
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The conflict between American Reds and Blues continues to escalate, with no end in sight. Consensus European values are innately hostile to American Red Values and virtually indistinguishable from American Blue values. European institutions are joined at the hip to uniformly-Blue American institutions, and there is no reason to expect this to change. Anything resembling a European Red Tribe has been thoroughly suppressed and is utterly incapable of meaningful cooperation with American Reds in any but the loosest sense. Given these facts, there is no route for meaningful cooperation with Europe as it currently stands, any more than there is with American Blues. There is no way to get along, because our values are flatly incompatible; "Cooperation" means securing support for Blue Tribe in their efforts to remake America into something much more like what Europe is now, and that is not a form of cooperation worth pursuing.
I sympathize with European Red-analogues, but there is very little to be done. The overwhelming consensus in your societies is overwhelmingly hostile to everything I value, so it needs to be fought vigorously.
Would European Red-analogues, if they were had their day in the limelight, even be natural allies to American Reds? The existence of a "Blue Ummah" is, in a way, the intrinsic advantage of Blues; globalists everywhere have common cause, but nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience. I forget if it was SSC or some other blog in the general sphere that proposed the thought experiment of some lizard species where a subset could be identified as cooperate-bots with a visual signal only visible to fellow cooperate-bots and thereby outcompeted all the others (as a metaphor for certain mind-killing minorities), but it's kind of like that except the signal is not even secret.
Yes, I think so. Mutual admiration, mutual support and mutual cooperation are completely possible, provided there's a foundation of shared values. I like England and Japan, I want them to continue and to prosper. We've been allies with England for well over a century at this point; we've been allies with Japan since the end of World War II. There's no reason in principle that we shouldn't continue to be close allies with these nations for centuries to come. I'm not sure where this argument that "nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience" actually is supposed to come from. Numerous western countries engaged in both nationalism and durable alliances spanning decades or even centuries; numerous Communist countries fought wars with fraternal socialist allies even in the short span of formal Communism.
Many communist countries were not actually particularly globalist (North Korea in particular, but also e.g. Albania; North Vietnam came out of a nationalist movement of colonial liberation that was just desperate for backers after the US sacrificed them for the sake of their European postwar order political project; I think Laos might even still forbid its citizens from marrying foreigners). On the other hand, what are actually your Western examples? I won't take mere decades as evidence of durability here, on historical clocks it should at least be 100 years to transcend the realm of suspected expedience. England and the US are, well, the same nation; I wouldn't consider German-Austrian alignment to be evidence that nationalists can trust other nations either. Proper nationalism has not even been around for that long (it is commonly taught as really taking off with the revolutions of 1848, though arguably the English and French both woke up to national consciousness earlier than that), and the whole story of Europe is that up until the Pax Americana the alliances were constantly shifting.
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See, I get that, when put politely.
I think it's a bit sad, and I do think that to some degree it lines you up with "if it please you m'lud, grandpappy was a Kenyan terrorist" Obama and "did I mention I'm Irish" Biden in the queue of people happy to drop a long-term ally in the cacky for internal political reasons. (I know it looks different from the American side).
But if that is how you feel, I'd prefer America just separate. It's the current attitude of "we despise you pathetic cucks, now give us the land we want and buy our helicopters and pay us eighty bajillion dollars or we'll bump up tariffs even more and if you think of cooperating with China we'll destroy you, though even the Red Chinese are more impressive than you, cuck" I object to. I'm as pleased as anyone that woke is severely weakened, but I wish it hadn't come with all the other stuff.
If there were a cleaner way to do it, I'd be all for it. The situation is several different flavors of fucked due to multiple decades' worth of disastrous errors. Any possible plan has to account for the fact that Blues will get back in control and try to reverse any actions made, and staying inside the bounds they've dictated makes this a lot easier for them to do. Their plan for a decade now has been to play off Trump as an aberration, soon to be forgotten while their consensus resumes the reigns of power. This is wrong because Trump is the effect, not the cause. The fact is that, so long as the paradigm for cooperation Europe is planning for involves Blue-consensus dominance, we fundamentally are not reliable allies and probably aren't capable of being allies at all. Trump is the most effective way we currently have to send that message in a way that can't be ignored; maybe the democrats sweep the election this year and maybe they grab it all in 2028, but whether they do or not, Europe will have to remember that we elected Trump twice, and a large portion of us are willing to do worse yet.
Obviously, European leadership and the population at large aren't fully getting that message, probably for the same reason American Blues haven't gotten it, for the simple reason that it isn't a message they're particularly interested in hearing. So much the worse for us all. What doesn't change is that the world we were sleepwalking into prior to 2016 is not a world I or people like me are willing to accept, and we will do whatever is necessary to prevent the foreclosure of our future that such a world represents.
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This is how Trump responded after being disrespected. The original dispute was that Trump mused to some aides about the possibility of purchasing Greenland, which everyone treated as a priori absurd. That was 7 years ago, it's only now that Trump's ideas have been taken seriously.
Maybe he should have clarified the misunderstanding instead of assuming disrespect. Or is that only an onus placed on countries that aren't USA?
"Assuming disrespect"? Danish politicians called Trump absurd and crazy because he wanted to negotiate a land deal. Danish politicians were far, far more disrespectful to Trump than Trump ever was to them, unless the concept of wanting to negotiate a land deal is inherently disrespectful.
See? You do get it, even if you don't agree with it.
That would be one of the craziest positions I have ever heard.
And there is the trademark American response to being told no. Congratulations. We have successfully laid bare the source of Trump's recent diplomatic problems.
I'm not even being sarcastic, really. This is literally it. This is how it went down, recreated live.
If you want to defend the position that asking to buy land is inherently disrespectful please do that in plain language.
What are you expecting me to say? There are things that are commonly understood to not be for sale. You do not peer through someone's window and then ring their doorbell and ask how much they want for the plush sofa. You don't negotiate for someone's virgin daughter. You don't try to purchase the largest part of a country's territory, especially when said territory is nominally self-governing. Doing these things is not going to be greeted by interest or by a long explanation of the sociological details that lead to such requests being considered inappropriate. It's going to be greeted by an invitation to take a long walk off a short pier.
Ignoring people's desire not to give you something, up to and including refusing to rule out taking it by force, then makes that 100x times worse.
If you must have a long discussion on the long-term effects of postwar American third-worldism, and how WW2 affected people's understanding of the appropriate relationship between large strong nations and smaller weaker ones, especially ones who were already loyal allies, and how economic interests (don't) trade off against sacred values, I suppose we can, but frankly I don't want to and I doubt it will make any difference to you.
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He went to them for a deal and they said no. Then he threatened violence. If I go to you to negotiate purchasing your home and you say no, I don’t get to threaten to violently invade your home and take it from you for disrespecting me when I won’t take no for an answer. What you are not describing is a good faith negotiation. I don’t think you understand what a “deal” is. Or negotiations.
Yes, this is the part where they disrespected him, as I’ve elaborated. It doesn’t sound like you dispute this because the rest of your post is switching to a different argument.
America paid for that house. America secured Greenland when the Nazis invaded Denmark and the Americans later freed Denmark itself.
This is really dramatic. There is actually a deal that was negotiated and signed right in front of us.
Trump is incredibly disrespectful so it’s not very shocking that people are disrespectful back. You would have to be a total cuck not to return it in kind. And yes, you clearly don’t understand what good faith negotiations are or just have changed it to fit your needs. But this is par for the course for you as you are in the habit of changing the definition of words so Trump can never do anything but win.
You seem more invested in being offended by Trump than the actual politicians who signed a deal. I guess it's fine if you are incredibly offended by Trump, and I guess it's fine if you want to be offensive to Trump back, but I don't know that you can have your cake and eat it too. Trump wanted to negotiate for Greenland, the Danes became hostile, Trump got nasty back. What are we even disagreeing about?
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