Going after Greenland

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Callatoroy said:
If you believe our superpower status is driven by both economic strength and military strength. Then protecting the long term health of the economic strength is equally as important as protecting the military strength. If you allow your enemies to act in a manner that strengthens them in a manner that creates dependency or leverage you slowly lose your economic advantage and rely solely on your military strength for security. Russia's security lies solely in their military strength. There is little geopolitical influence russia's economy creates. Covid should have been a wake up call given the amount of goods we are dependent on China providing. It was to a degree, but not at the level it needed to be imo. I'm not implying any of that is a justification for attacking greenland, but it sure is justification for keeping china / russia out of latin america and greenland.
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Serious question...

Has our economic and military strength been under threat since Biden took office or the 50 years before that ?

Our true power had derived from using our soft power to lend assistance and promote global democracy in 3rd world countries and to stand shoulder to shoulder with our traditional democratic post WWII allies.

Trump has abandoned that commitment to be the shining city on the hill and so we now join Russia and China as the bullies on the hill...sad
 
When the self-proclaimed “Peace President” determined the Department of Defense should be called the Department of War, that should have indicated his intentions. He intends to go to war if other countries don’t bend to his will. Playing defense isn’t in his playbook.
 
Paine said:
There is no plausible scenario where the United States loses its economic power because it does not control Greenland. We became an economic superpower without it, and we could remain one through industrial policy, planning, and negotiated supply chains rather than coercion.

Treating resource dependence as an existential threat turns political choices into false necessities. Once that move is made, domination stops being a last resort, as you seem to understand it, and becomes a standing justification. That’s the line I’m pushing back on because that is where your original argument implicitly led.
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In fact this is almost exactly the line of thinking that led Japan to attack its neighbors, and then attack the US, UK, and other allied possessions in the Pacific in 1941 - that they needed the natural resources (oil, steel, rubber, etc) to keep up militarily.
 
rodoheel said:
In fact this is almost exactly the line of thinking that led Japan to attack its neighbors, and then attack the US, UK, and other allied possessions in the Pacific in 1941 - that they needed the natural resources (oil, steel, rubber, etc) to keep up militarily.
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One core tenet of MAGA seems obvious to me: it’s okay when I (we) do it.

Too many examples for anyone to claim that isn’t true.

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It has not. It isn't the past 50 years that matters. It's the next 100 years. I think we have been negligent in not being forward thinking enough. Covid, AI development, china getting serious about space exploration and its relatively new interest in global influence, etc. have all moved the needle to a degree.
 
Callatoroy said:
It has not. It isn't the past 50 years that matters. It's the next 100 years. I think we have been negligent in not being forward thinking enough. Covid, AI development, china getting serious about space exploration and its relatively new interest in global influence, etc. have all moved the needle to a degree.
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Whether or not that's true, none of that justifies us potentially making up for our prior complacency by simply taking resources or land we think we need, by force, from other sovereign nations. That would make us every bit the "bad guys" that Germany and Japan were in WWII, and make other countries justified in opposing us militarily.
 
Callatoroy said:
If you believe our superpower status is driven by both economic strength and military strength. Then protecting the long term health of the economic strength is equally as important as protecting the military strength. If you allow your enemies to act in a manner that strengthens them in a manner that creates dependency or leverage you slowly lose your economic advantage and rely solely on your military strength for security. Russia's security lies solely in their military strength. There is little geopolitical influence russia's economy creates. Covid should have been a wake up call given the amount of goods we are dependent on China providing. It was to a degree, but not at the level it needed to be imo. I'm not implying any of that is a justification for attacking greenland, but it sure is justification for keeping china / russia out of latin america and greenland.
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Connect the dots for me between "we are over-reliant on China for cheap goods" (don't necessarily disagree) and "China/Russia can't be allowed to have economic influence/presence in Latin America and Greenland."
 
rodoheel said:
Whether or not that's true, none of that justifies us potentially making up for our prior complacency by simply taking resources or land we think we need, by force, from other sovereign nations. That would make us every bit the "bad guys" that Germany and Japan were in WWII, and make other countries justified in opposing us militarily.
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That reasoning, once accepted, could literally be used to justify anything. And it will be.
 
rodoheel said:
Connect the dots for me between "we are over-reliant on China for cheap goods" (don't necessarily disagree) and "China/Russia can't be allowed to have economic influence/presence in Latin America and Greenland."
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That’s what I’m trying to understand as well. The missing step seems to be an unexamined assumption that he keeps dancing around: that the U.S. is uniquely entitled to exercise economic and political influence in its “sphere,” while China or Russia doing the same is inherently illegitimate.

It’s a Cold War framework being applied to a world that no longer exists. We are already in a multipolar moment whether we like it or not. From that reality, there are really only three options:

1. Openly embrace imperial domination of our sphere.

2. Continue pretending U.S. primacy is still attainable if we just try harder.

3. Accept sovereign pluralism and reduce the risk of great-power war through managed interdependence rather than exclusion.

Complaining about over-reliance on China for cheap goods is a fair critique of our own political economy. That’s something leftists and liberals have been talking about for a while. But it doesn’t logically justify preventing other countries from trading with, investing in, or cooperating with China or Russia.

That leap only makes sense if one starts from the premise that U.S. dominance is the natural and necessary state of the world.
 
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Paine said:
That’s what I’m trying to understand as well. The missing step seems to be an unexamined assumption that he keeps dancing around: that the U.S. is uniquely entitled to exercise economic and political influence in its “sphere,” while China or Russia doing the same is inherently illegitimate.

It’s a Cold War framework being applied to a world that no longer exists. We are already in a multipolar moment whether we like it or not. From that reality, there are really only three options:

1. Openly embrace imperial domination of our sphere.

2. Continue pretending U.S. primacy is still attainable if we just try harder.

3. Accept sovereign pluralism and reduce the risk of great-power war through managed interdependence rather than exclusion.

Complaining about over-reliance on China for cheap goods is a fair critique of our own political economy. That’s something leftists and liberals have been talking about for a while. But it doesn’t logically justify preventing other countries from trading, investing, or cooperating with China or Russia.

That leap only makes sense if one starts from the premise that U.S. dominance is the natural and necessary state of the world.
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Just a continuation of the mental thread for myself more than anyone else:

The original Cold Warriors who genuinely believed U.S. primacy was permanent either died off or were forced to reckon with reality decades ago. The last serious attempt to update that worldview came from Obama/Biden–era liberal internationalism, which tried to square primacy with rules, institutions, and restraint. The Gaza genocide more or less exhausted whatever coherence that project still had.

What’s left is a set of inherited instincts without a consistent theory behind them. Calla seems to be holding multiple frameworks at once that don’t fit together: skepticism of globalization, anxiety about supply chains, acknowledgement of declining U.S. leverage, but also a reflexive belief that the U.S. can and should police who has influence where. That’s why I think that’s the missing step. Those positions only reconcile if you quietly assume U.S. dominance as a given rather than something that must be justified or sustained.

Thus, his reasoning ends up circular. China’s influence is bad because it challenges U.S. influence; U.S. influence is necessary because China’s influence is bad. There’s no external standard being applied, just a Cold War premise smuggled in as common sense. At least the new imperialists are coherent in a perverse way.

In that way it feels less like a response to the world as it is and more like a holdover from an earlier Republican era. A Reagan Republican mindset operating in a party that has already moved on to something else. Which may explain why there’s such a disconnect, not just with the multipolar reality abroad, but with the political movement that actually brought his party back to power at home.
 
rodoheel said:
Do you really feel this way? Like you would rather be living through WWIII, death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale, than what we're going right now?

Part of the reason we're in this position is that it's been so long since the World Wars that people in countries like the US have forgotten the horror of total war and what it really means. Since the conclusion of the Vietnam War the USA has suffered something like 8,000-10,000 deaths from war or other armed conflict, almost all of which occurred thousands of miles from American soil. The vast majority of those came in Iraq and Afghanistan. You have to go back to WWII and the bombing of Pearl Harbor to find a time when US civilians on US soil had any fear of a military attack, much less experienced one, not including the 9/11 terrorist attack which was obviously horrific but also a one-off event.

Like, I am as depressed as anyone about the current state of affairs. But it's about ten standard deviations better than having to actually live through a large-scale military conflict. We desperately need to reverse our slide towards fascism and greater risk of global conflict, but I just can't get behind the idea that those things are so inevitable that we should wish for them to come faster.
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Can't disagree with any of that. And, really, I doubt anyone here is interested in WW3. I remember WW2. But, the "leadership" we currently have is like a drunk teenager in a hot rod, we are going to hit a tree. Our current "leadership" is drunk with power and greed and is letting nothing get ahead of their aims. They don't even have empathy for the people that create much of the wealth they greed for.
 
Callatoroy said:
It has not. It isn't the past 50 years that matters. It's the next 100 years. I think we have been negligent in not being forward thinking enough. Covid, AI development, china getting serious about space exploration and its relatively new interest in global influence, etc. have all moved the needle to a degree.
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Almost all because of Republicans focusing on what was good for them instead of the country. Just the damage your ilk has done to education and respect for experience and achievement is astonishing. The same can be said for any neutral approach to anything at all. The attempt to focus on the petroleum industry, cut all alternative energy programs and revisit the restoration of the coal industry is more an attempt to drag us 50 years back than prepare for the future. That's almost as bad as what you have done to science and medicine. Revanchism is even dumber when you're trying to restore the science and technology along with the politics, et al.
 
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Can we just level-set on this Greenland thing by acknowledging that in no way, shape, or form, is this about "national security?" It's not. Denmark allows us military presence there, and is more than willing to allow us to increase that presence.

This is about resources, just like Venezuela was.
 
rodoheel said:
In fact this is almost exactly the line of thinking that led Japan to attack its neighbors, and then attack the US, UK, and other allied possessions in the Pacific in 1941 - that they needed the natural resources (oil, steel, rubber, etc) to keep up militarily.
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We went to war with Japan over China.
 
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