the parallel between feudal obligations and modern international norms is really well drawn. What makes it especially resonant is how both systems ultimately depend on people choosing to play by the rules even when they have the power not to. John's approach might have worked short-term, but the long-term cost to legitimacy and aliances proved unsustainable. the invisible bonds you describe are what seperates stable order from raw power politics.
Well quite. Something tells me that the UK and France will be checking their nuclear weapons for American kill switches as we speak. What the hell y'all even hope to gain from threatening to seize Greenland at the cost of destroying the Western Alliance is beyond me.
Ambiguity in international relations is what causes wars.
Do you think Trump has any sort of plan or is he just a senile old bully?
Bullying can work as a strategy, as long as no one stands up to you, and NATO has no way to stand up to America militarily. But the cost (to America) of destroying the Western Alliance is surely enormous?
Europe will rearm and become much friendlier with Russia and China, I would imagine. Trade barriers everywhere will hurt everyone. I can even imagine a Europe and Commonwealth bloc forming a fourth great power, with Canada right next to you. Or are you actually planning to annex Canada?
Our interests have been aligned for a long time. I think they still are.
A bully who alienates his own friends is more of a psychopath than a strategist.
If you're going to stab your allies in the back you should do it in such a way that they can't recover! I'm remembering the Onion article "We Must Strike Now While England is Weak"
I am not arguing that what he did was in the interest of the country but that it served Trump's goals. Hence not evidence of senility. He was a bully in the past too.
It does appear that the recent strange behaviour of the US has motivated the EU to hasten the dismantling of trade barriers with Mercosur and with India, and Canada seems to be doing the same, albeit at a smaller scale, with China. Perhaps necessity will turn out to be the mother of good trade policy.
> Europe will rearm and become much friendlier with Russia and China, I would imagine.
From what I've seen, Europe's leaders will make a speech about rearming, then go back home, look at all the vested interests they'd have to step on to actually do that, and decide that Trump's bullying isn't so bad after all.
Put another way, while the Europeans may want their countries to rearm to stand up to Trump, they don't want it enough to have their pensions cut in order to pay for it.
The problem that Western Europe has is that they're in the initial phases of late stage socialist collapse, and as such are in basically no position to stand up to Trump.
A curious mirror of communist rhetoric! I hadn't heard it before. But the collapse of late-stage X seems to be always just around the corner.
I'm happy to concede that the US is wealthier per capita than Europe, and that that's probably due to our twentieth century semi-socialist period and the associated low growth. But it was low growth, not decline.
Are our governments actually that much more bloated and wasteful than America's currently is? (You should probably add the cost of private healthcare to the US government budget for comparison.)
To my eyes America looks a lot more unstable than Europe, politically.
Sorry, I edited my comment above while you replied and they crossed, but I think your reply still stands. But it's a bad habit of mine and I apologise for it.
Yes, and I agree that that is pretty dim. But we are at least covering every available green space with fucking solar panels, so I don't think we're likely to be short of power any time soon. We are learning that we can't rely on Russia for fuel.
If the US starts biting off bits of our territory we might be able to find it in our hearts to build more nuclear things as well. We've been slowly coming round to the idea.
It's been a pretty safe and stable world these last few decades. We got used to it.
> But we are at least covering every available green space with fucking solar panels, so I don't think we're likely to be short of power any time soon.
Except when its cloudy.
> If the US starts biting off bits of our territory we might be able to find it in our hearts to build more nuclear things as well.
Well, the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn't inspire you to do that.
> It's been a pretty safe and stable world these last few decades.
Only because of America's implicit position as the world's policeman. Something you Europeans have been complaining about the whole time.
Yes, I used to think that we needed nuclear anyway so there wasn't that much point in solar, but recently I've been convinced that it's actually possible to store enough energy in huge cheap batteries that solar alone is feasible.
I don't like it though... Solar and wind are some sort of environmental curse, whereas nuclear is cheap and safe and no trouble.
> Only because of America's implicit position as the world's policeman. Something you Europeans have been complaining about the whole time.
Not me, I've always been pretty happy about that. If there's got to be a world hegemon throwing its weight around to enforce international stability I'd rather it was the US than almost anyone else.
Some of us might disagree with some of the details. I understand that some of America's own people disagree with some of the details.
I used to hold your opinion. I'm not sure I do any more.
What cases do you have of this collapse occurring? I know conservatives have been predicting it for centuries, but when has it happened? All the cases I can think of are ones where you didn't get "collapse", you got "1% lower GDP growth which compounds over the course of a century."
Well in the case of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, it happened in 1990.
Western Europe wasn't quite as socialist so it's happening more slowly, but for example in France the average pension is now higher than the average wage.
The fall of the Communist tyranny of the Soviet Union is a thing, but seems to me like it is generally explained by factors not specific to communism. (For instance, Franco's anticommunist tyranny fell at around the same time.) The fall of a democratic socialist country is something that libertarians have been predicting for a long time, but it keeps not happening. Plausibly it will soon, but instead the democratic socialist countries just get grumpier and grumpier and have slower and slower economic growth and occasionally instead elect Thatcher or Milei or someone and buy themselves more time.
Edit - To clarify, I'm not saying they're behaving competently or well, nor denying that your logic looks right. But logic that looks right often fails when put to the test of reality.
What even are these "democratic socialist" countries? Is Sweden such at 47.5% public spending, while the US isn't, at 36.3%? To me, this seems like a difference of degree rather than of kind.
I agree it's a difference of degree, not kind, but consider: The highest tax bracket in Great Britain in WW2 was 99.25%. It remained about 90% until '71%, when to 75% "with an extra 15% for investments," and it wasn't until Thatcher that it dropped below that point. The NHS dates to 1948, which was also around the time they were nationalizing most industries. Again, they didn't stop nationalizing until British Shipbuilders in '77.
This is not what happened in the US - we did similar stuff, sure, but nowhere near that extreme. And yet, if you look at GDP growth rate since that period, they're averaging 2.3 or 2.4%, and we're averaging 3.15% to 3.20%.
They were richer than us, per capita, at the start of the century. They sure aren't now.
Great contribution for understanding some strategic decisions!
I would just add that Trump has not gone down the power route on Greenland. Didn't think he would, by the way. Maybe he understands the rule based stuff. I would guess he does, but nothing hinges on that understanding.
His behavior is more akin to a demanding player who settles even if he doesn't get his best wish.
I would further guess that he learned this in the real estate market in New York City!
I saw an idea on Twitter (by Arin Dube whom I don't otherwise know/recognize) that strikes me as insightful and more plausible than all of this being a negotiation gimmick in the first place:
"The TACO cycle:
The markets want to price in TACO, but TACO needs Trump to see stocks tank.
So we get these cycles where Trump does stuff and nothing happens (because the market has priced in TACO) ... which encourages him to do more stuff until the markets actually thinks he may not TACO and prices start to fall ... which restores TACO."
Detwitterized source that can be seen without an account:
It's all subjective, if you look at it from John's point-of-view, the House of Plantagenet reigned for over three hundred years as a result of his realpolitiking; it was HIS reports, not Arthur's that sat on that throne. England wasn't a modern nation state, John was the sovereign, he had no loyalty nor duty to anyone but himself and his lineage. America, not Trump, is the sovereign and our fellows sovereigns understand that as modern politics is quick to forgive all with a simple change of administrations worldwide, not just limited to America, it's the political equivalent and execute and ask forgiveness later, "my bad, that was the past administration, they are no longer in power, let's move forward".
Greenland has immense untapped wealth and climate change will only increase it's accessibility. Trump would be a fool not to put his big boy pants on do what's best for America long term and seize Greenland, by hook or crook as all will be forgiving in 2029 (or late 2026 in reality). In the end Henry was crowned and the United Kingdom is still going today in some form or fashion with it's most expansionist phases heralding it's twilight. America isn't doing all that great but Greenland isn't going to make it worse off and even has the protentional to make it marginally better.
NATO should have been abolished with the demise of the Warsaw Pact, America needs no allies in Western Europe nor anywhere really. It's always interesting to me how we talk about free markets and how economic incentives effectively prohibit discrimination as a result of competitive advantage and yet those same people will champion cartels of international allies to limit competition or provide regulatory capture in the form of alliances. It's irrelevant to America what's going on in France, if their 70 million consumers don't want our goods, there are a 92 million Iranian consumers that do.
And as Devil's Advocate, it's hard to make an argument against it as well on liberty grounds. If figurative you thinks America is the beacon of liberty, freedom, and Western values, then it’s only pro liberty to bring said values to the oppressed residents, and future Americans, of Greenland. And long Hong Kong, I'm sure we would have no problem repatriating all the Danes that wished to go back to Denmark nor grandfathering them in permanent resident visa should they choose to retain their Danish citizenship.
There are plenty of arguments against it, many of which I’m partial to such as self determination, the fact the US really isn’t a beacon of freedom and liberty, I believe the local Danes as a people would be worse off, etc but those all nominally fall flat because as a nation we have already decided (1) We are the best; and (2) self-determination does not apply to the US cue the Confederacy, the de facto destruction of the dual sovereign duopoly, etc hence by that measure those complaints falls flat. But one argument that doesn’t fly is “oh boo hoo, some people over in Western Europe will cry about it for a couple weeks and then move on with their lives”. Europe is irrelevant to the US practically speaking, always has been at least for the past hundred years.
* Yes I have a ideological blind spot to "citizens of other nations", that whole market place of ideas. Danes have about as much "rights" as my porch, maybe less so even, from where I sit. Their sovereign isn't my sovereign hence any consideration of them has to be taken in the context "what is their impact on me". Conquering Greenland only benefits me, and my children, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm wrong, Alaska was called a folly and I'm sure people said the same about Louisiana as well as railing against our hostile acquisition of California from Mexico, they all worked out for our betterment; and I'd argued the betterment of the existing locals too. I think the only places that didn't work out for us were places we simply didn't want to colonize, i.e. Puerto Rico, Philippines, and American Samoa. Hawaii is still a work in progress but give it a couple more decades, it will be indistinguishable from California sans which flavor of Hispanics (Mexican v. Filipino) you run into.
John inherited a large fraction of France, lost almost all of it.
"England wasn't a modern nation state, John was the sovereign, he had no loyalty nor duty to anyone but himself and his lineage."
It was a feudal state. Most of the military power was in the hands of the barons, the king empowered by their support, which John lost. A feudal king was a coalition leader not an absolute monarch.
> Conquering Greenland only benefits me, and my children, as far as I can tell
Why is that obvious ? It does not seem obvious. It is a fairly large piece of land mostly covered in ice and not very habitable. If it becomes part of USA good chance the taxpayers will have to foot up a pretty large bill to keep it occupied, build administration, military bases etc. It is not clear if climate change if at all will make any difference or even if it does, there is any sizable profit to be made.
If I were to steelman what you quoted, and presuming Peter is American, I’d say it might benefit him because taking Greenland is (conceivably? arguably?) a good strategic move for the US in the grand global game of power, and thus benefits Americans, at least in the long term.
Now, to actually convince anyone of this I think Peter would need to make a more persuasive argument than he’s made, and answer objections including the actual post this comment is attached to as well as the one David directly put to him above.
Alternatively, Peter sees it as a step toward making kiviak more readily available at his local grocery store, and he craves the taste. I’m going to assume that’s what he meant.
I wasn't trying to make a convincing case, just having a casual conversation but you capture gist of it. Likewise the pro liberty case is there and avoided by all unsurprisingly.
A for David above, I actually wrote a response decided not to post it. I believe David is using a red herring there and likewise confusing Trump with the sovereign. No personnel sovereign is de facto absolute and David knows that, it's a gotcha game. The fight between John and Arthur was over who the sovereign is, Trump isn't having a fight with Denmark, he's not the sovereign. The duties are different. If, using monarchy terms, Prime Minister Trump displeases the King (America), the King is free to dispose of him as is the Council of Ministers (Congress) who can both dispose of him AND give the land back to Denmark should they choose. Barons had to pick sides in that fight, you and me don't because a fight between American and Denmark isn't a civil war.
While I can not speak for David, what I understood from his post is that certain bonds (promises/oaths/values to upheld) have no immediately visible benefits (invisibility) and sometimes even a sense of immediate benefit in ignoring/violating them and yet, history tells us that valuing those bonds generally leads to better outcomes in the long run.
I intuitively agree with that. The hair splitting on whether trump is a King or not or whether Greenland has anything worth value etc. is pretty irrelevant to the central point.
I can live with that though I think David muddies the issue with his feudalism isn't an absolute monarchy defense though.
That said your framing of it reminds me of Sir Edward Grey's speech to the UK Parliament in 1914 where he makes a similar impassioned defense about the Belgian Treaty. To summarize a a summary of it by John Charmley during an Intelligence Squared debate years ago (RIP btw, didn't realized he died recently until I just looked him up trying to remember his name as his summary always stuck with me though his name didn't): "We have to send poor people's kids off to die, not because of it's any economic or real value to Great Britain, but because our blue blood honor and that of our nation demands it! No amount of acute economic, material, or lives lost is worth not upholding that honor because we are nothing long term if others can't trust us to our word!". John Charmley then made the excellent point after that that the British Empire completely fell apart just a few years later and the UK never recovered from that self inflicted wound. Also the millions of British lives forever ruined as a result probably would have disagreed as well, Grey and his peers bored no cost from such a high principle.
Bonds between sovereigns can't exist outside the wind for mutual benefit. NATO is a defense pact that has outlived it usefulness thirty years ago. At the time it made sense to uphold those bonds because we had a existential peer competitor, the Warsaw Pact; that no longer exists. And without NATO I'm not confident the US would have been involved in the Yugoslavian wars, Afghanistan as long, GW2, Ukraine, and pretty much most, though not all, conflicts post-1992 conflicts nor do I think we would consider many nations we hold as enemies today as enemies still if our focus was on "what's best for America" rather than "What's best for our allies to our detriment". We are bleeding and spending our treasure for nothing to feel good about our honor to nations that don't matter to us strategically in the slightest; channeling our own Sir Grey.
Maybe, maybe not. We know it has large deposits of finite natural resources, we already fund military bases there so nothing new, etc and don't overestimate administrative costs nor welfare. For example American Samoa, much harder to supply given the distances and climate, has around the same population as Greenland and eats about $300 million of the US budget a year; that was about the same price, if not less, than the cost to arrest a husband and wife in Venezuela recently. On a long enough timeline I'm going to assume Greenland pays for itself; or at least it's not digging a hole any bigger than the other welfare states we accept for national security reasons (American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, Kosovo, etc).
Maybe, maybe not. As I said earlier, the same was said about Alaska "Seward’s Folly", if I'm remember right people were extremely upset with the Louisianian Purchase the same, and while I have no memory of ever reading if Americans were upset with us taking the northern half of Mexico as a spoil, I'm sure today people would cry about that include David here and in those three cases, we profited quite well. I'd agree with you sometimes the risk isn't worth it, i.e. you don't bet the farm, hence I would never advocate trying to incorporate Nigeria on economic grounds, just too many people and too great a cost but Greenland isn't betting the farm, it's not even betting the cow, it's betting one for loaves of bread your wife baked up that afternoon; worst case we just give it back or abandon it and are out effectively nothing, maybe 0.004% of the US Federal budget for a year or three.
I don’t follow politics anymore, much less global politics, but intuitively based on what I’ve seen discussed on places like this (David’s blog and a few others) regarding Trump & Greenland, it looks like there would be an immense cost in terms of international relations.
To put it bluntly, Trump is already pissing off basically all of Europe just by making these gestures, and while maybe controlling a bit of real estate up north of the Atlantic at a time when Russia is acting rather menacing seems like a good idea on paper, actually obtaining it would create a lasting harmful rift between the US and our most powerful & consistent ally (Europe).
Even if we give it back we are not “out effectively nothing”. Seems to me the symbolic equivalent would be something like walking up your neighbor’s driveway and smashing the windshield on his car with a baseball bat, while he watches horrified and trembling from his living room window. Even if you then later shrug and buy him a new windshield, your relationship with him will be forever changed for the worse.
the parallel between feudal obligations and modern international norms is really well drawn. What makes it especially resonant is how both systems ultimately depend on people choosing to play by the rules even when they have the power not to. John's approach might have worked short-term, but the long-term cost to legitimacy and aliances proved unsustainable. the invisible bonds you describe are what seperates stable order from raw power politics.
Well quite. Something tells me that the UK and France will be checking their nuclear weapons for American kill switches as we speak. What the hell y'all even hope to gain from threatening to seize Greenland at the cost of destroying the Western Alliance is beyond me.
Ambiguity in international relations is what causes wars.
Do you think Trump has any sort of plan or is he just a senile old bully?
Neither. He is a bully, not senile. He got a lot of attention and an opportunity to throw his weight around.
Bullying can work as a strategy, as long as no one stands up to you, and NATO has no way to stand up to America militarily. But the cost (to America) of destroying the Western Alliance is surely enormous?
Europe will rearm and become much friendlier with Russia and China, I would imagine. Trade barriers everywhere will hurt everyone. I can even imagine a Europe and Commonwealth bloc forming a fourth great power, with Canada right next to you. Or are you actually planning to annex Canada?
Our interests have been aligned for a long time. I think they still are.
A bully who alienates his own friends is more of a psychopath than a strategist.
If you're going to stab your allies in the back you should do it in such a way that they can't recover! I'm remembering the Onion article "We Must Strike Now While England is Weak"
I am not arguing that what he did was in the interest of the country but that it served Trump's goals. Hence not evidence of senility. He was a bully in the past too.
Yes, that's a fair point. There's no reason to suspect he's particularly pro-America. I do wonder what those goals might be.
Rest assured that your friends are worrying for you as well as about you.
> Trade barriers everywhere will hurt everyone.
It does appear that the recent strange behaviour of the US has motivated the EU to hasten the dismantling of trade barriers with Mercosur and with India, and Canada seems to be doing the same, albeit at a smaller scale, with China. Perhaps necessity will turn out to be the mother of good trade policy.
Also, speaking of bullying, don't get me started on the EU's whole "regulatory superpower" schtick.
> Europe will rearm and become much friendlier with Russia and China, I would imagine.
From what I've seen, Europe's leaders will make a speech about rearming, then go back home, look at all the vested interests they'd have to step on to actually do that, and decide that Trump's bullying isn't so bad after all.
Put another way, while the Europeans may want their countries to rearm to stand up to Trump, they don't want it enough to have their pensions cut in order to pay for it.
I agree that that is probably true short term. We've grown used to peace. It was nice. It will take us time to wake up to the changed situation.
On the other hand AI will probably kill us all long before geopolitics gets really nasty. But you never know!
The problem that Western Europe has is that they're in the initial phases of late stage socialist collapse, and as such are in basically no position to stand up to Trump.
A curious mirror of communist rhetoric! I hadn't heard it before. But the collapse of late-stage X seems to be always just around the corner.
I'm happy to concede that the US is wealthier per capita than Europe, and that that's probably due to our twentieth century semi-socialist period and the associated low growth. But it was low growth, not decline.
Are our governments actually that much more bloated and wasteful than America's currently is? (You should probably add the cost of private healthcare to the US government budget for comparison.)
To my eyes America looks a lot more unstable than Europe, politically.
European governments have recently been at work shutting down their own energy production and thus deindustrializing in the name of Gaia.
To give just one example.
Sorry, I edited my comment above while you replied and they crossed, but I think your reply still stands. But it's a bad habit of mine and I apologise for it.
Yes, and I agree that that is pretty dim. But we are at least covering every available green space with fucking solar panels, so I don't think we're likely to be short of power any time soon. We are learning that we can't rely on Russia for fuel.
If the US starts biting off bits of our territory we might be able to find it in our hearts to build more nuclear things as well. We've been slowly coming round to the idea.
It's been a pretty safe and stable world these last few decades. We got used to it.
> But we are at least covering every available green space with fucking solar panels, so I don't think we're likely to be short of power any time soon.
Except when its cloudy.
> If the US starts biting off bits of our territory we might be able to find it in our hearts to build more nuclear things as well.
Well, the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn't inspire you to do that.
> It's been a pretty safe and stable world these last few decades.
Only because of America's implicit position as the world's policeman. Something you Europeans have been complaining about the whole time.
> Except when its cloudy.
Yes, I used to think that we needed nuclear anyway so there wasn't that much point in solar, but recently I've been convinced that it's actually possible to store enough energy in huge cheap batteries that solar alone is feasible.
I don't like it though... Solar and wind are some sort of environmental curse, whereas nuclear is cheap and safe and no trouble.
> Well, the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn't inspire you to do that.
Well no, but we did get quite angry about it. A direct attack on Denmark or Canada might have a rousing effect though!
> Only because of America's implicit position as the world's policeman. Something you Europeans have been complaining about the whole time.
Not me, I've always been pretty happy about that. If there's got to be a world hegemon throwing its weight around to enforce international stability I'd rather it was the US than almost anyone else.
Some of us might disagree with some of the details. I understand that some of America's own people disagree with some of the details.
I used to hold your opinion. I'm not sure I do any more.
What cases do you have of this collapse occurring? I know conservatives have been predicting it for centuries, but when has it happened? All the cases I can think of are ones where you didn't get "collapse", you got "1% lower GDP growth which compounds over the course of a century."
Well in the case of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, it happened in 1990.
Western Europe wasn't quite as socialist so it's happening more slowly, but for example in France the average pension is now higher than the average wage.
The fall of the Communist tyranny of the Soviet Union is a thing, but seems to me like it is generally explained by factors not specific to communism. (For instance, Franco's anticommunist tyranny fell at around the same time.) The fall of a democratic socialist country is something that libertarians have been predicting for a long time, but it keeps not happening. Plausibly it will soon, but instead the democratic socialist countries just get grumpier and grumpier and have slower and slower economic growth and occasionally instead elect Thatcher or Milei or someone and buy themselves more time.
Edit - To clarify, I'm not saying they're behaving competently or well, nor denying that your logic looks right. But logic that looks right often fails when put to the test of reality.
What even are these "democratic socialist" countries? Is Sweden such at 47.5% public spending, while the US isn't, at 36.3%? To me, this seems like a difference of degree rather than of kind.
I agree it's a difference of degree, not kind, but consider: The highest tax bracket in Great Britain in WW2 was 99.25%. It remained about 90% until '71%, when to 75% "with an extra 15% for investments," and it wasn't until Thatcher that it dropped below that point. The NHS dates to 1948, which was also around the time they were nationalizing most industries. Again, they didn't stop nationalizing until British Shipbuilders in '77.
This is not what happened in the US - we did similar stuff, sure, but nowhere near that extreme. And yet, if you look at GDP growth rate since that period, they're averaging 2.3 or 2.4%, and we're averaging 3.15% to 3.20%.
They were richer than us, per capita, at the start of the century. They sure aren't now.
Great contribution for understanding some strategic decisions!
I would just add that Trump has not gone down the power route on Greenland. Didn't think he would, by the way. Maybe he understands the rule based stuff. I would guess he does, but nothing hinges on that understanding.
His behavior is more akin to a demanding player who settles even if he doesn't get his best wish.
I would further guess that he learned this in the real estate market in New York City!
I saw an idea on Twitter (by Arin Dube whom I don't otherwise know/recognize) that strikes me as insightful and more plausible than all of this being a negotiation gimmick in the first place:
"The TACO cycle:
The markets want to price in TACO, but TACO needs Trump to see stocks tank.
So we get these cycles where Trump does stuff and nothing happens (because the market has priced in TACO) ... which encourages him to do more stuff until the markets actually thinks he may not TACO and prices start to fall ... which restores TACO."
Detwitterized source that can be seen without an account:
https://xcancel.com/arindube/status/2014063471902466336#m
It's all subjective, if you look at it from John's point-of-view, the House of Plantagenet reigned for over three hundred years as a result of his realpolitiking; it was HIS reports, not Arthur's that sat on that throne. England wasn't a modern nation state, John was the sovereign, he had no loyalty nor duty to anyone but himself and his lineage. America, not Trump, is the sovereign and our fellows sovereigns understand that as modern politics is quick to forgive all with a simple change of administrations worldwide, not just limited to America, it's the political equivalent and execute and ask forgiveness later, "my bad, that was the past administration, they are no longer in power, let's move forward".
Greenland has immense untapped wealth and climate change will only increase it's accessibility. Trump would be a fool not to put his big boy pants on do what's best for America long term and seize Greenland, by hook or crook as all will be forgiving in 2029 (or late 2026 in reality). In the end Henry was crowned and the United Kingdom is still going today in some form or fashion with it's most expansionist phases heralding it's twilight. America isn't doing all that great but Greenland isn't going to make it worse off and even has the protentional to make it marginally better.
NATO should have been abolished with the demise of the Warsaw Pact, America needs no allies in Western Europe nor anywhere really. It's always interesting to me how we talk about free markets and how economic incentives effectively prohibit discrimination as a result of competitive advantage and yet those same people will champion cartels of international allies to limit competition or provide regulatory capture in the form of alliances. It's irrelevant to America what's going on in France, if their 70 million consumers don't want our goods, there are a 92 million Iranian consumers that do.
And as Devil's Advocate, it's hard to make an argument against it as well on liberty grounds. If figurative you thinks America is the beacon of liberty, freedom, and Western values, then it’s only pro liberty to bring said values to the oppressed residents, and future Americans, of Greenland. And long Hong Kong, I'm sure we would have no problem repatriating all the Danes that wished to go back to Denmark nor grandfathering them in permanent resident visa should they choose to retain their Danish citizenship.
There are plenty of arguments against it, many of which I’m partial to such as self determination, the fact the US really isn’t a beacon of freedom and liberty, I believe the local Danes as a people would be worse off, etc but those all nominally fall flat because as a nation we have already decided (1) We are the best; and (2) self-determination does not apply to the US cue the Confederacy, the de facto destruction of the dual sovereign duopoly, etc hence by that measure those complaints falls flat. But one argument that doesn’t fly is “oh boo hoo, some people over in Western Europe will cry about it for a couple weeks and then move on with their lives”. Europe is irrelevant to the US practically speaking, always has been at least for the past hundred years.
* Yes I have a ideological blind spot to "citizens of other nations", that whole market place of ideas. Danes have about as much "rights" as my porch, maybe less so even, from where I sit. Their sovereign isn't my sovereign hence any consideration of them has to be taken in the context "what is their impact on me". Conquering Greenland only benefits me, and my children, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm wrong, Alaska was called a folly and I'm sure people said the same about Louisiana as well as railing against our hostile acquisition of California from Mexico, they all worked out for our betterment; and I'd argued the betterment of the existing locals too. I think the only places that didn't work out for us were places we simply didn't want to colonize, i.e. Puerto Rico, Philippines, and American Samoa. Hawaii is still a work in progress but give it a couple more decades, it will be indistinguishable from California sans which flavor of Hispanics (Mexican v. Filipino) you run into.
John inherited a large fraction of France, lost almost all of it.
"England wasn't a modern nation state, John was the sovereign, he had no loyalty nor duty to anyone but himself and his lineage."
It was a feudal state. Most of the military power was in the hands of the barons, the king empowered by their support, which John lost. A feudal king was a coalition leader not an absolute monarch.
> Conquering Greenland only benefits me, and my children, as far as I can tell
Why is that obvious ? It does not seem obvious. It is a fairly large piece of land mostly covered in ice and not very habitable. If it becomes part of USA good chance the taxpayers will have to foot up a pretty large bill to keep it occupied, build administration, military bases etc. It is not clear if climate change if at all will make any difference or even if it does, there is any sizable profit to be made.
If I were to steelman what you quoted, and presuming Peter is American, I’d say it might benefit him because taking Greenland is (conceivably? arguably?) a good strategic move for the US in the grand global game of power, and thus benefits Americans, at least in the long term.
Now, to actually convince anyone of this I think Peter would need to make a more persuasive argument than he’s made, and answer objections including the actual post this comment is attached to as well as the one David directly put to him above.
Alternatively, Peter sees it as a step toward making kiviak more readily available at his local grocery store, and he craves the taste. I’m going to assume that’s what he meant.
I wasn't trying to make a convincing case, just having a casual conversation but you capture gist of it. Likewise the pro liberty case is there and avoided by all unsurprisingly.
A for David above, I actually wrote a response decided not to post it. I believe David is using a red herring there and likewise confusing Trump with the sovereign. No personnel sovereign is de facto absolute and David knows that, it's a gotcha game. The fight between John and Arthur was over who the sovereign is, Trump isn't having a fight with Denmark, he's not the sovereign. The duties are different. If, using monarchy terms, Prime Minister Trump displeases the King (America), the King is free to dispose of him as is the Council of Ministers (Congress) who can both dispose of him AND give the land back to Denmark should they choose. Barons had to pick sides in that fight, you and me don't because a fight between American and Denmark isn't a civil war.
If John displeases the barons ... . He didn't lose against Arthur.
While I can not speak for David, what I understood from his post is that certain bonds (promises/oaths/values to upheld) have no immediately visible benefits (invisibility) and sometimes even a sense of immediate benefit in ignoring/violating them and yet, history tells us that valuing those bonds generally leads to better outcomes in the long run.
I intuitively agree with that. The hair splitting on whether trump is a King or not or whether Greenland has anything worth value etc. is pretty irrelevant to the central point.
I can live with that though I think David muddies the issue with his feudalism isn't an absolute monarchy defense though.
That said your framing of it reminds me of Sir Edward Grey's speech to the UK Parliament in 1914 where he makes a similar impassioned defense about the Belgian Treaty. To summarize a a summary of it by John Charmley during an Intelligence Squared debate years ago (RIP btw, didn't realized he died recently until I just looked him up trying to remember his name as his summary always stuck with me though his name didn't): "We have to send poor people's kids off to die, not because of it's any economic or real value to Great Britain, but because our blue blood honor and that of our nation demands it! No amount of acute economic, material, or lives lost is worth not upholding that honor because we are nothing long term if others can't trust us to our word!". John Charmley then made the excellent point after that that the British Empire completely fell apart just a few years later and the UK never recovered from that self inflicted wound. Also the millions of British lives forever ruined as a result probably would have disagreed as well, Grey and his peers bored no cost from such a high principle.
Bonds between sovereigns can't exist outside the wind for mutual benefit. NATO is a defense pact that has outlived it usefulness thirty years ago. At the time it made sense to uphold those bonds because we had a existential peer competitor, the Warsaw Pact; that no longer exists. And without NATO I'm not confident the US would have been involved in the Yugoslavian wars, Afghanistan as long, GW2, Ukraine, and pretty much most, though not all, conflicts post-1992 conflicts nor do I think we would consider many nations we hold as enemies today as enemies still if our focus was on "what's best for America" rather than "What's best for our allies to our detriment". We are bleeding and spending our treasure for nothing to feel good about our honor to nations that don't matter to us strategically in the slightest; channeling our own Sir Grey.
Maybe, maybe not. We know it has large deposits of finite natural resources, we already fund military bases there so nothing new, etc and don't overestimate administrative costs nor welfare. For example American Samoa, much harder to supply given the distances and climate, has around the same population as Greenland and eats about $300 million of the US budget a year; that was about the same price, if not less, than the cost to arrest a husband and wife in Venezuela recently. On a long enough timeline I'm going to assume Greenland pays for itself; or at least it's not digging a hole any bigger than the other welfare states we accept for national security reasons (American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, Kosovo, etc).
> large deposits of finite natural resources
Buying/Stealing the cow when you only want a glass of milk !
> American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, Kosovo, etc
USA has dug other holes in the name of national security is not an excuse to dig even bigger hole than before.
This resembles more of a bigger hole than anything else.
Maybe, maybe not. As I said earlier, the same was said about Alaska "Seward’s Folly", if I'm remember right people were extremely upset with the Louisianian Purchase the same, and while I have no memory of ever reading if Americans were upset with us taking the northern half of Mexico as a spoil, I'm sure today people would cry about that include David here and in those three cases, we profited quite well. I'd agree with you sometimes the risk isn't worth it, i.e. you don't bet the farm, hence I would never advocate trying to incorporate Nigeria on economic grounds, just too many people and too great a cost but Greenland isn't betting the farm, it's not even betting the cow, it's betting one for loaves of bread your wife baked up that afternoon; worst case we just give it back or abandon it and are out effectively nothing, maybe 0.004% of the US Federal budget for a year or three.
I don’t follow politics anymore, much less global politics, but intuitively based on what I’ve seen discussed on places like this (David’s blog and a few others) regarding Trump & Greenland, it looks like there would be an immense cost in terms of international relations.
To put it bluntly, Trump is already pissing off basically all of Europe just by making these gestures, and while maybe controlling a bit of real estate up north of the Atlantic at a time when Russia is acting rather menacing seems like a good idea on paper, actually obtaining it would create a lasting harmful rift between the US and our most powerful & consistent ally (Europe).
Even if we give it back we are not “out effectively nothing”. Seems to me the symbolic equivalent would be something like walking up your neighbor’s driveway and smashing the windshield on his car with a baseball bat, while he watches horrified and trembling from his living room window. Even if you then later shrug and buy him a new windshield, your relationship with him will be forever changed for the worse.