Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK(bundesregierung.de) |
Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK(bundesregierung.de) |
The knee jerk reaction is to run your party’s candidates and platform to the opposite extreme. Instead you should move towards the center. I really hope the democrats realize this (some do and are speaking out) soon.
You need to hold your political leaders responsible with your vote. Don’t just automatically vote for the politicians that are “saying” the right things. Find out what your representatives are “doing” and hold them responsible for their actions or more importantly, inactions.
That way they could vote in Republican primaries. Many if not most of those districts actually have Republican candidates in the primaries who are center right but they lose because primary turnout is very low, largely consisting of just the most extreme voters.
For example consider Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG). In the primary the first time she ran against a perfectly normal Republican. I don't remember all the details, but I believe he was a decorated military officer who after the military was a successful businessman and who had server in state offices.
MTG was a full on QAnon and other conspiracy theorist believer. But it is mostly the fringe that votes in primaries so she won. And it is a heavily Republican district with many people who don't really follow politics so she got their vote in the general election because they always vote R.
Register as a Republican if you are in such a district and vote in the primaries and then maybe we can get back to having sane Republicans winning those districts.
For safe Republican districts where they do elect sane Republicans, it is still worth switching registration. Let the current representative from that district know that you are doing this, and promise that if Trump gets upset at their vote on something and bankrolls a primary challenge, you will vote for them in the primary.
Also these voters are dumb but they aren't that dumb. Unless you know a person who actually has presented as a Trump supporting republican for the last decade and is secretly willing to switch sides after the election, you're not going to trick them.
Congress is too beholden and scared of Trump on the GOP side to do anything meaningful. The democrats are generally spineless.
The federalist society and GOP have created a severe ideological imbalance on the supreme court that will have serious ramifications for years to come unless there's a serious effort to pack or reform the institution.
A subtle signal that war with United States is a possibility.
Trump will use this as a pretext to not only take Greenland but to invade Canada as well.
He has gone utterly mad. Congress needs to act. Yesterday.
After a short time, and some casualties, I think the US military would have real problems internally, not counting that popular support would disappear.
The question is what would happen to the US staff land-locked on NATO bases within the EU. They will automatically become under siege, vastly outnumbered by European counterparts.
Since any attack on Greenland is an attack on the EU country the Kingdom of Denmark, and any attack on any EU countries automatically trigger EU Article 42.7, which mandates the full support from all members, to which all EU countries have committed, it would imply full-scale war.
Also if any french military asset is present when the US attack, we will see how determined the french military is following it's own doctrine (which dictates a 'warning shot' 24 hours before sending the tactical nukes).
I’d say that I prefer him to go about it a different way, except that I can’t see what that different way looks like when you want territory from another country that doesn’t want to give it to you.
And I say this as a European. Europe is not credible from a defense perspective and lacks the will to do very much of anything quickly or effectively. The best you can expect is a series of talking shops and some policy documents to be drawn up while the ice continues to melt.
If we build a Rammstein- sized base the US would already outnumber the native population.
Would the Danes or French open fire on us while the US is setting up shop? Highly unlikely.
Trump is pushing a total takeover but I suspect he would rather leave a small pocket of southern Greenland to the Danes to continue supporting the indigenous people, and then taking the bulk of the rest for mineral rights, arctic sea lanes, and defense.
See:
>NATO invoked Article 5 in response to Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001
https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/coll...
Now take a look at the European countries who helped the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
Then scroll down to "Dead". Those Europeans died for the United States.
What the EU wouldn't be able to handle, I suspect, is would be a full ground invasion by China, not that China would/needs to do that.
If the US was genuinely concerned about the security of Greenland they should have discussed this with the EU and encouraged them to reinforce the island, and/or offered a joint base.
This is where it gets stupid... well, stupider.
The US already has a base on Greenland, namely the Pituffik Space Base / Thule Air Base [1].
The US used to have a larger military presence in Greenland, including other bases, but choose to downscale their presence following the end of the cold war [2].
This presence was predicated on the 1951 Defense of Greenland agreement between Denmark (and later the autonomous government of Greenland) and the US, which allowed the US great freedom in establishing their military presence in Greenland [3].
If Trump had just wanted a stronger military presence in Greenland, then all he would have had to do was ask, and Denmark and Greenland would most likely have agreed. Denmark, in particular, has done its best to align itself with the US, and Greenland, prior to Trump, was also interested in a closer relationship with the US as part of their move towards greater independence from Denmark.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#United_States_and_th...
The point is that center right Republicans (the kind that used to win most Republican districts before 2012) could still win if they could make it to the general election. They often can't because most Republican voters, like most Democrat voters, aren't into party politics enough to bother voting in the primaries.
It is the voters who are most likely to be to be farthest from the center who vote in the primaries, and these are the ones who don't want a normal center right representative.
If Democrats switched parties and voted in the primaries they might be able to counter the usual extreme primary voters so a center right Republican could win.
We have to remember that we aren't all working from the same perceptual or moral framework. This is a struggle for me, as I love my parents but our believes have diverged considerably.
I think the challenge right now in the U.S. is that for many, it doesn't feel socially safe to question your own side. In reality, we need to feel free to judge actions individually, and judge leaders as a true accumulation of their actions. If we fear rejection from our party/family/friends for not walking in lock-step with the official party stances, that influences a lot of our thinking. No one wants to feel continually guilty about their own views (especially when there are social consequences for changing them), so we often shove aside conflicting details, make jokes, and signal to others that we're still a part of the tribe.
It sucks.
The EU response to the rhetoric from Trump is to send 30 men and put out a press release telling everyone how harmless they are. The action “Poses no threat to anyone”. Their military show of force, poses no threat to anyone.
This is who you’re dealing with.
My guess is as yours - the US military's focus on middle east and east Asia is of great disadvantage for them. Do they even get below -20 C for any longer periods at any base located on US mainland? Alaska, and some regions close to Canada, perhaps, leaving them with only some 10.000 personnel having anything near arctic experience, majority of which are based at the bases, not trained for front-action in artic climate.
For some real-life insides:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Msfrit12u0M&lc=UgwDlvf-UEzzhBzZJ...
Greenland is an island full of a vast nothingness, there is enough space for those kinds of bases. Greenland and Denmark have repeatedly said as much, and allowed the US to build any number of bases of any size. Building bases is totally possible, and always was possible, because Greenland and Denmark have always allowed it and would have continued to allow that.
I mean, they even turned a blind eye towards the US loosing a nuclear reactor and contaminating quite a bit of ice while trying to build tunnels for their ICBMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
This isn't about building bases or military strategy or even resources. If it were about those things then the US could take over Greenland slowly with little effort. My understanding is the population there would have welcomed investment. The US could have done some minor leg work and in 10-20 years Greenland would have been closer / keen to join, or whatever.