The verb most frequently used was threaten
Anne Applebaum on Trump v Denmark:
What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.
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In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.
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Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland.
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The Danes were loyal U.S. allies [in 1957], and remain so now. During the Cold War, they were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked. “So what did we do wrong?” one Danish official asked me.
Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.
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Of course, Trump might forget about Greenland. But also, he might not. Nobody knows. He operates on whims, sometimes picking up ideas from the last person he met, sometimes returning to obsessions he had apparently abandoned: windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland.
Could we combine them somehow? Sharks living in windmills with Hannibal Lecter while singing songs about life in Greenland? Maybe throw in a narwhal or two?
H/t Tim Harris
JFC! Can the world just harden up and ignore Trump’s brain farts? Every time he opens his ignorant gob, some dumbarsed lackey, supposedly a nation’s leader, rolls over for a tummy tickle.
We need strong leaders (not strongmen) who will just ignore Trump and the USA’s idiotic politics for the next 4 years.
its OK to say NO!
I wonder what would happen if other countries’ chief executives just refused to talk to DJT directly. Don’t take his calls.
One can hardly ignore those “brain-farts”. They are dangerous. People are not, unless they are billionaires, rolling over for a tummy tickle. Both Mexico & Canada are standing up to him, and I have small doubt that Denmark & Europe will stand up to him too.
Elon Musk X-ing about: “Had this election not been won by Donald Trump, civilisation would be lost,”
It’s bloody well been lost as a result; what’s he on about? Status quo was civilization more or less fine… Revolutionaries destabilize the whole thing.
I think we know very well what Elon is on about, Blood Knight: feathering his nest. But, after all, to be wealthy is to be a good person, so to be more wealthy is to be an even gooder person. It doesn’t matter what you do, how you suck up to power, you’re richer, so ethics & morals don’t matter – or perhaps one should say that ethics and morals do matter since the ethical & moral thing to do is to get richer, and screw everybody else. It’s the American Dream, after all! – at least in the eyes of Felonious Musk and his sycophants.
I must say that I find Steve Bannon despicable, but he’s got it right on Elon.
Trump as the savior of civilization – I’m not really seeing it.
There’s that primal fear of total annihilation again, as Nullius pointed out: civilization would be lost!. That’s the level of anxiety and delusion felt by some people at the prospect of losing their tribe, either by being personally exiled from it, or by the tribe’s defeat at the hands of the enemy. It’s not unlike the anxiety felt by some at the prospect of being abandoned by a romantic partner, which often leads them to unwittingly sabotage the relationship with irrational behaviour. Some people are wired up to perceive the threat of a romantic breakup (or, as I propose, a tribal breakup) as the primal fear of total annihilation — it’s the literal fear of death. It’s a deep-seated instinct, established in some of us during childhood, that hijacks the cerebral cortex to see that its own irrational needs are met at all costs.
Needless to say, escalating the culture war rhetoric to life-and-death stakes is highly dangerous. But it bears noting that unfortunately a lot of the life-and-death rhetoric began on the left with its unhinged panic over “dead trans kids.” Personally, I’m not opposed to drawing a direct line from the left’s transactivist hyperbole to the dangerous reactionary far-right politics currently threatening to topple the world’s democracies. I really do think that trans madness is a major catalyst in the global geopolitical shitstorm we’re heading into. Looking back, gender will prove to have been the Franz Ferdinand crisis that kicked off World War Three.
In short, catastrophizing is contagious. Thanks a lot, trans activists!
When I read this, I can’t help hearing it to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme song. The minnow – pardon me, civilization – would be lost.
Given the post on ecological overreach, it’s pretty clear that civilization is in the midst of self destructing. Trump is only going to help hasten that. Unfortunately, I don’t think either of these statements is hyperbolic at all.
My theory is similar but I think goes further.
Trump has been told there are many opportunities to mine Greenland. Mining means money. If Greenland mine, me give all mining to USA. USA mine everything. Me make money. Friends make money and praise me.