I suspect you have puddle-deep insight into global economic dependencies, the fragility of the US economy, the EU + Canada Arctic warfare capabilities, and the likely outcome of an invasion of a northern neighboring country that looks like you, sounds like you, and can hide in plain sight or hop over the indefensible border to bring violence to your homes.
Now say it in German.
Peter Thiel, Steven Miller, and David Navaro, by the look of things.
Serious question: how will a carrier group fare in arctic ice during winter?
Climate change has made this a receding problem, which is one reason why Greenland is suddenly hot property. In another ten years, you may be able to sail the perimeter of Greenland fully unobstructed all year round.
An answer: they can take it, but when winter comes, holding it will be difficult.
Holding it from whom? Nobody in NATO actually has the stomach for the kind of losses they’d take.
That was during very hard economic times for Poland, still recovering from communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcerowicz_Plan#Effects
:-/ Like saying they’re still recovering from a charlie horse after you put a shotgun to their kneecaps.
But yes, Poland limped into the Iraq War and managed to catch several hundred strays over the course of the conflict. In exchange, the Bush Administration kicked the country back $200M in relief (contingent on further privatization and financialization of their nascent market system).
Blood money spends well, at least.
Do you believe that other countries have been training alongside Americans for decades and have never picked up any knowledge of their skills, methods, strategy, tactics, doctrine, weapons, etc?
I think when you’ve got 100x players on the field to their 1x, the learning curve tilts in your favor. EU members in subordinate roles and supporting positions, without command and control access to the biggest pieces of hardware, aren’t going to have the accumulated experiences of US veterans. Nevermind the amount of time the US has spent in the field relative to their European peers.
The Americans are the most visible military on the planet, and the most gregarious, they’re in every country and training with all of these countries, and somehow no one ever figured out how they do it?
I don’t think it’s a mystery at a high level. But that’s like saying “It’s no mystery how Tom Brady won all those football games”. When you get into the finer details, you discover why 13 years of Superbowls never produced a rival defense that could consistently shut down the Patriots’ Offense.
NATO isn’t a partnership between democratic member states, its a partnership between regional militaries.
The end state of the conflict over Greenland will be - if anything - a series of US-backed coups in European countries that preserve NATO by realigning the civilian leadership with the foreign policy of the US.
We’re already seeing this with the AfD in Germany, the Reform UK in England, and National Rally in France. These countries are functionally aligning with Trump as white-nationalist governments working towards the same end goals. And they’ve all heavily infiltrated their domestic militaries.
To date, no US aircraft carrier has been lost in a military operation. You’re using “sunk” to describe military exercises that informed the US of all the strategies potentially deployed by these countries.
Those carriers are far from invincible.
If the Europeans want to put a US carrier at the bottom of the ocean, I’m not going to shed a tear. But you’re pointing to scrimmage runs and exhibition matches, while you’ve been letting Americans see your playbooks (hell, write your playbooks) for the last 60 years.
Put up or shut up.
200, in the year of the invasion. It swelled to 2,500 over the next five years, then trickled away into a final withdrawal a month before the Republicans lost the White House in 2008.
There were smaller deployments - Iceland sent 2 soldiers, for instance. But it all paled behind the the US at 150k and UK at 46k. Which goes back to the whole problem with a NATO internal conflict. The US is the backbone of European defense. Again, what do any of these countries plan to do against an aircraft carrier group? Nobody seems to have a serious answer.
I mean, we’ll see. But if the US really is serious about taking Greenland by force, you’ve got a US military base already on the island that’s been running these defense calculations for decades. It’s going to be an uphill climb just to reach parity with the Americans on securing the territory. I hope this isn’t perfunctory, and someone is asking the question “How do we deal with one or more US aircraft carriers?” seriously.
A government spokesperson for Germany also confirmed to Reuters that soldiers would be sent to Greenland on Thursday. The country is expected to deploy over a dozen reconnaissance troops, according to the report.
:-/
This feels like the time Poland sent eight soldiers in with the US invasion of Iraq.
The number of co-sponsors has risen to 70 since this was published
Only one third of the minority party in the House.
Like, I’m not even mad at them. I just wish the party had over 70 people with more than an ounce of ethics or a gram of self-preservation instinct.
I’ve not been following super closely for mental health reasons, but if it is just Denmark? We are looking at another Ukraine.
Ukraine’s armed forces alone are 15x the total population of Greenland. This is more of a Grenada than a Ukraine.
Whereas, if we start seeing other EU/NATO nations deploying troops to protect Greenland… there is a chance that SOMETHING remains and we don’t just have russia running over everyone else one by one.
I would be much more worried about the power projection of the world’s largest military by a factor of 20 than the country currently caught in a quagmire halfway into the Donbas.
That man looks like he’s staring into the abyss.
Times like this, I really wish I lived in a democratic country
The US has never really sacrificed in a war.
Idk about that…
Pretty much a joke that the American public sector is a trainwreck thanks to how much we’ve squandered invading overseas.
Plenty of Americans have suffered and died to poverty, neglect, and the hideous environmental impact of the MIC, because so much of our economy is routed into immiserating others.
The US cannot win a protracted war with the rest of the world.
Since Its Birth the USA has only had 17 years of peace. None of those years have occurred since 1941. I don’t know how else you describe “a protracted war with the rest of the world”, but given the enormous economic growth over the last 85 years and the near-endless multi-theater conflicts the US has been engaged in over that period, I would say it can and it has.
Unless they’re planning to destroy everything and kill everyone.
The great thing about war is that it churns the economy. And Americans care more about economic growth than any other domestic policy. Would be a shame if everything was destroyed and everyone killed, because then we’d have nothing to enact war on in the following fiscal quarter.
Much easier to just keep the wars at a low simmer and “lose” them endlessly, while contractors and arms dealers grow fatter and happier ad infinitum.
I don’t think there is anything in the French arsenal shy of a nuclear weapon that could deter a US advance.
I also haven’t seen anything to suggest the UK would oppose a US occupation of Greenland. If anything, they’d more likely offer a deal to facilitate it - especially if Parliament falls to Reform UK in the next few years
NATO is outward facing. It can’t handle internal conflict.
We already tested this when Turkiye and Greece began militarizing in the Aegan Sea back in the 1970s. They’ve grown progressively more hostile for decades, with a number of barely averted military engagements.
The agreement would continue to have meaning with respect to external entities - African, Middle Eastern, Russian, and Chinese conflicts. But all the member states can do is roll over (or actively facilitate territory seizure) when they’re threatened by their largest member
Then he’d have told you how much of a bloody mess taking a beach head is with 1930s equipment. Again, nobody in Europe actually wants that noise. That’s why there was no major European intervention in Ukraine. Y’all just let the Ukrainians piss away their best and brightest as cannon fodder while up-selling them on Wundertanken that got stuck in the mud.
If I didn’t, I’d be significantly more blase about a military engagement in Greenland.
I’ll spot you Trump has no concept, and will presumably fling every member of JSOC into the meat grinder if he thinks it’ll win him a 51st state and a Nobel Prize in Bribing The Right People. But the fact that folks in the EU do seem to have a meaningful contingent of anti-war locals would suggest they aren’t thrilled with the prospect of sending their kids and grandkids to die over an oversized ice cube.
There’s simply no appetite for this shit, which is why Trump (very rightly) believes he can take Greenland without a serious fight. That’s the nature of imperialism. The cost of opposing the empire is astronomically higher than the cost of resistance, so people tend to duck their heads until the pain is intolerable. And Greenland isn’t painful enough to fight over.