Trump's offer to drop 56 nuclear bombs on Paris is being discussed with Macron and Putin. 2 bottles of champagne, some ICE and sour grapes and done deal.

He has the concepts of a plan? Fine with me because that means, like his health plan that he promised for a long time, nothing will come of it in the next three years and then he’s gone and forgotten. Glad to see that Europe standing up to this bully made him back down.

aquascoot wrote Yesterday at 6:46am:


His wife, kids and grandkids love him because he’s got money. Come on, can you really see a former model like Melania marrying a slob like him if he didn’t have money?

aquascoot wrote Yesterday at 6:46am:

'The total value of all Nazi-looted assets is impossible to precisely determine, as not all items have been found or cataloged, but estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars in modern terms.'
No-one compares with the Hitler war machine. Genius.

Nor can Trump’s designs on Greenland be reduced to a desire to grab its raw materials. Washington certainly is interested in many of those, which include not just rare-earth minerals, but also uranium, lithium and – important in modern weapons – gallium, germanium and graphite. At present, America buys most of these from the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, the CCP’s restrictions on exports of graphite, relaxed for the moment, are set to be reintroduced in late November. No wonder the Pentagon, in particular, is interested in Greenland.

Yet the fact is that cold, inhospitable Greenland – complete with tricky geology, stormy winters and almost no infrastructure – is far from ideal territory for miners of raw materials. To quote the founder of the Arctic Institute, a security think-tank, ‘You might as well mine on the Moon. In some respects, it’s worse than the Moon.’ It takes, on average, 16 years’ expenditure to take a mine in Greenland from idea to results – and, last year, only one mine there was operational.

..
Greenland and the Arctic sit above the whole Earth, not just the Western Hemisphere. This whole region forms a nexus of routes for Russian and Chinese missiles and trade freighters. Here, too, sea power is critical, as are undersea cables and drones. Moscow’s permanent Arctic fleet at Murmansk includes 41 icebreakers, which is 41 more than America has (some of the Kremlin’s are nuclear-powered, too). In warships, the CCP has a significant lead over the US Navy, both in numbers and the freshness of its fleet. Annexing Greenland, then, is for Washington not some Trumpian whim, but an imperative.
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This leads us to the US’s other geopolitical motivation – dealing with the Old World powers of Europe. As Brendan O’Neill has pointed out, Trump has used Greenland to let the world know that ‘after decades of living like welfare queens off of America’s military largesse’, Europe and Britain are impotent. Washington is furious with European leaders, as demonstrated by its anger towards its European NATO allies over their unwillingness to pay for their own defence.

Last week, in a truly performative and inane pushback against Trump, Europe sent some Danish, German and French troops, plus a single British officer, to conduct and reinforce military exercises in Greenland. This enraged Washington, which took it as a confrontational rather than conciliatory move. In response, it threatened tariffs of 10 per cent on the exports of those countries involved in the exercises, rising to 25 per cent in June.

The minuscule military resources Europe committed to Greenland were always going to irritate rather than impress Trump, let alone intimidate him. Even the EU’s counter-tariffs proposal against the US – worth some $100 billion – has only underscored Europe’s weakness. Indeed, it is now the subject of considerable debate in Brussels, with EU members like Netherlands, Ireland and even Germany voicing caution. Despite their lofty rhetoric, the Europeans are rarely unified and capable of acting in concert.




America’s desire to conquer Greenland is not just about the whims of The Donald, nor even what lies under the ice there. Its considerations are truly strategic. It is about keeping Russia and China out. And in calling time on Europe, Washington has also started to relieve itself of what it deems an unreliable ally. What’s happening over Greenland has consequences for the entire world.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University

I'm guessing the European threat to dump hundreds of billions in US dollars and bonds had its intended effect on the US Congress, which probably guaranteed Trump's impeachment conviction and then the destruction of his family via legal pursuit lasting for years until they were all skint, in jail, or both.

The US is no further ahead as Russia / China can be given a Canadian island. Canada has just visited China on the basis of a new world structure.