The assumption was - and still is - that the USA wasn't posturing either.
We (and I realize I obviously don't speak for all of Europe but I have my finger on the pulse in many places here) are also not assuming that when Trump is gone the USA will go back to normal.
USA cannot go back to normal. The internal damage / changeover is massive - everybody disagreing with current administration policies has either been removed or departed - whether in health or defense (I'm sorry, War) or science or education or other departments.
And even if they did go back to normal for the next presidency - why trust it? Their entire political system is set up so that the winds can change entirely every 4 years.
If the people voted Trump in to office twice, it’ll happen again. It’s a divided country where propaganda has a strong hold.
Useful stability can be achieved again, either “back to normal” as mentioned elsewhere in this thread or “forward to something different but better (and not crap like it is now)”, but it is going to take at least a few terms, maybe several. Even if it did happen more quickly, it will take that long for those of us on the outside to trust it, reputational damage like this can not be undone quickly.
They will not go back to anything resembling the old normal :-/.
Trump & his cronies have obliterated the Overton Window so hard you cannot even tell which side of the house the window used to be in.
The successors for Trump will be worse, because they will not be senile old men who sabotage themselves, and the checks-and-balances against this millenia-old crap have now been pretty well dismantled :-/.
We are entering an age where US will behave like a weird sort of Russia#2, run by oligarchs.
In a way it was of course always run (or influenced) by oligarchs, but nothing like the scale we are going to see from now on.
But.. look at the history of US, the last hundred or so years, and how they behaved south of Mexico (I am not particularly calling out US here, of course Europe has also been bad).
This is absurd in the extreme. In actual war there is absolutely no possibility of success for Denmark, even with the help of allies. Failure to capitulate results in nothing but death and destruction with no hope of strategic gain to begin with. What you are likely experiencing is a modern belief that screaming and shouting will bring popular diplomatic pressure to bear on the opponent, thus arresting their actions.
There was similar tough talk in 1940 and Denmark lasted 6 hours. Without capitulation the country would have been razed. But surrender saw it able to keep some level of control and thus extricate the Jewish population in relative safety which would not otherwise have been possible.
No, what is absurd is the number of people that can't wait to go back to a world with endless wars of conquest. We already know what that looks like.
If you have never seen war up close then I am happy to forgive you, but trust me, in 'actual war' there is no possibility of success for anybody, there are only degrees of damage and degrees of grief and illusions to the contrary are focused on the few people that manage to get out of war with the profits in their pockets. Everybody else suffers.
I'm sorry but you are not interacting with the rational suppositions of posters in various threads here. No one is arguing for a war except you. People are explaining to you the strategic reality and you are espousing rhetoric that I honestly can't decipher.
1. Denmark cannot win militarily
2. You are suggesting Denmark would not capitulate and indeed enter into a state of war
Denmark cannot win militarily, but can the US? What war has the US won recently? They're great at destroying things, but not at winning. There's nothing for them to win in Greenland. It's an indefensible chunk of ice. They can kill the people who live there, but what would that gain them?
Meanwhile they stand to lose a lot. There have been many NATO exercises that showed US aircraft carriers to be vulnerable to European submarines, so they can't park their fleet too close. They have to fly between NATO members Canada and Iceland. How would soldiers feel if they're forced to fight all their former allies? How would the US citizens feel?
You think there's a game theory scenario in the book where France launches a nuclear weapon at mainland USA over a land dispute between them and Denmark?
France has the only first strike nuclear doctrine in the world, with the specific policy of shooting nukes to "protect it's vital interests", a term Macron has recently clarified "has a European dimension".
Make of that what you will, but if I were you I wouldn't go around poking the hornets nest that has an explicit sign "these hornets will sting" attached to it.
See, this is what is so dumb about this: you are treating this as if it is some kind of board game. It is exactly why the US gets into these messes over and over again, the incredible overconfidence that because they somehow have battlefield superiority they can do whatever they want. You are exemplifying precisely where the rot in the USA is located.
> I'm sorry but you are not interacting with the rational suppositions of posters in various threads here.
The one thing that is common about 'rationalists' is that they share a lot of the viewpoints with other ra*ists and that's not the world many of us want to live in.
Sure, you can take it. But can you afford to take it?
The answer is most likely you can't. And so far every attempt to show John Mearheimers superiority has been the equivalent of 'just relax and enjoy it'.
Guess what? We won't. Alliances are made voluntarily, not through conquest.
> In an actual war there is absolutely no possibility of success for Denmark, even with the help of allies.
Assume that Denmark's strategic success criteria is not "win up-front battles with US armed forces". And that they understand the difference between "lost battle(s), got occupied" and "nation permanently removed from existence".
Also, US service members are not slavishly loyal Clone Troopers. That I've heard, the greatest fear of most senior American officers is that the CIC will issue orders sufficiently offensive to the lower ranks that they will be disobeyed at scale.
So your supposition is strategic national defense game theory should be based on hoping for a mutiny from the opposite side? Is rationality dead? What are you lot talking about.
No. But Denmark lacks the armored divisions, bomber wings, carrier task forces, etc. to pursue a "we've got a bigger stick" strategy. And undermining your opponent's will to fight was routine back when the Old Testament was written.
> Is rationality dead?
By a couple accounts I've heard, desperate senior US officers used the pre-February situation with Iran to lure Trump's attention away from Denmark/Greenland.
(If you want rational behavior from the current POTUS - um, yes, my deepest condolences, but...)
Keep going. Denmark capitulated and suffered relatively little damage. Austria capitulated, and what happened to them? Czechoslovakia capitulated, and how did that work out for them? Sure, neither suffered losses in the initial invasion. Their people still got to die fighting for Hitler, though. They still got bombed and bombed and bombed and then invaded by the allies, though.
And, Norway did fight back, and lost. How much worse did that work out for Norway than for Denmark?
Ukraine is rapidly becoming one of the hardest countries in Europe. They fought a former superpower to a stand still and are innovating on weapons systems and integration at a pace that makes LM's skunkworks look like sloths. And on a budget that is insane.
Just like Ukraine, Europe does not want war, doesn't want to see their kids die for the umpteenth time so that fat cats can line their pockets. But if push comes to shove we would be absolutely capable of doing it, either outright or by slower guerilla like means. Bombing shit is easy. Taking over territory and holding it is much, much harder, infinitely more so if the population holds a grudge. Note that the Dutch resistance killed more German soldiers than the army ever did. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, lots of countries in Europe. Examples aplenty.
The assumption was - and still is - that the USA wasn't posturing either.
We (and I realize I obviously don't speak for all of Europe but I have my finger on the pulse in many places here) are also not assuming that when Trump is gone the USA will go back to normal.