Comment by embedding-shape
6 hours ago
> Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months.
There are troops deployed on Greenland right now ready to defend the island. The threat is not gone from the minds of the people there or in the rest of Europe just because you stopped reading about it on CNN or whatever.
Edit: I got curious if this part is even possible:
> leaving NATO completely
Apparently not. Congress enacted a specific prohibition in 2023, now codified at 22 U.S.C. §1928f. It says that the president may not "suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw" the US from the North Atlantic Treaty unless either two-thirds of senators present consent, or Congress passes an Act authorizing it. It also prohibits federal funds from being used to carry out an unauthorized withdrawal.
Seems some parts of the US has indeed managed to setup defenses against such idiocracy.
The threat is not gone from the minds of the people there or in the rest of Europe just because you stopped reading about it on CNN or whatever.
I don't watch CNN. I live in Europe, read European newspapers. It's just something that I noticed observing people. In January, a lot of people started thinking about moving away from US services, there were even newspaper articles about alternative smartphone OSes, etc. Now most people are back to business as usual. (Which doesn't mean that some countries aren't moving to alternatives, etc.)
Apparently not. Congress enacted a specific prohibition in 2023, now codified at 22 U.S.C. §1928f. It says that the president may not "suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw" the US from the North Atlantic Treaty unless either two-thirds of senators present consent, or Congress passes an Act authorizing it.
Agreed that complete withdrawal is hard currently. But it's a toothless tiger (as least with respect to the US) when the commander in chief says he will not defend a country because they have been unfair to the US.
My personal opinion is that the EU should just do what it needs to do, because NATO is effectively dead and reboot the alliance without the US in parallel.
Is a law going to stop it from happening? The destruction of USAID was against the law but it still happened. Let's say that the president announces we're leaving NATO, all troops stationed in Europe are leaving immediately, and we will no longer be bound to collective defense. What would actually prevent that from happening? Maybe we'd still be "in NATO" in some technical legal sense, but would it make any difference?