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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 11th, 2025

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  • As Europe, we have of course made ourselves largely independent from the United States over many years. We are familiar with Trump’s unpredictability. You can say ‘We should now confront the Americans head-on!’, but the question is: A) with what? Because militarily we still depend on them. Economically, we are now roughly half the size or 2/3 of the U.S. economy, whereas twenty years ago we were about the same size. We critically need the United States when it comes to Ukraine.

    Aside from the question of what instruments we actually have, there are other interests at play as well and the complexity lies in the fact that international law essentially came into existence after WWII because the victors of that war, particularly the Western European countries together with the United States, set the norms of that international law.

    What we are seeing now is that the Americans are letting go of those norms which were set after WWII, which in practice means that the new power-holders in the world: Xi, Putin, and Trump are saying: these are the new international rules by which we will operate.

    Two nuances: Trump has not taken over Venezuela with his people; he has removed the president there, but he cannot station an army there. His base does not want that, and Americans more broadly do not want that either. The same naturally applies to Greenland: he cannot send a troop force there without losing his base, because he promised them he would not create new wars. So that will not happen.
    Instead, he will use it as a means of pressure against the Danes and Europe, a form of gunboat diplomacy.