Comment by ExoticPearTree
21 hours ago
I'll bite.
Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's that.
France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more than they should and they suck at food.
Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the US, the Democrats can wine all they want and recognize or not recognize whoever they want as president. It will not change the actual situation.
This is some top notch r/ShitAmericansSay material, especially Germany "running their mouth" and having bad food. Add in democrats "wining" and I'm pretty sure this post belongs on a Confederate cooking blog rather than HN.
Europe can’t defend itself without the US. That’s not the Us saying it that is coming from Europe itself.
All this stuff is mostly grandstanding
> Europe can’t defend itself without the US.
It depends on what exactly Europe needs to defend itself against.
And Europe is quite rightly starting to regard this US-dependence as a problem to be solved without further delay, rather than an eternal and immutable fact of the world.
Except that he might be right... if you think there is no chance he's right, you aren't paying attention. These are strange times.
Mm.
One of the criticisms I hear of Merz is that he's not tough enough on Trump; therefore the choice to target Germany at this time, matches a pattern of the target being painted on whoever wants to play nice.
All of that is why I want Europe to take it seriously, even though I think they might be cooling off now that Trump has backed off.
We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland. Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for us to go to war with the USA.
Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't launch properly at all.
I don't know what the order of events would have been given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK) economies are, but essentially the EU banning the purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm thinking emigration more than internment camps like Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the naturalised ones, but that number will be less… unless Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work camps, they're not getting good work out of them).
In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud computing today, the EU is almost immediately screwed. Hence article.
But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US. That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's just from not buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to $3T/year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading) forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US state capital and still have several left over.
And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland, oh boy you should worry about what they do to a catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...
Sorry but you're just wrong. This isn't a situation to be upset about. Its war. There's no universe where the USA invasion of Greenland doesn't end in disaster for Trump.
There's already been articles in Politico where USA lawmakers admit that there would have been a War Measures Act passed if Trump invaded Greenland. Unlike Venezuela.
It would definitely change the political situation if the state governments of California, New York et al stopped recognizing the federal government.