His speech is over.
10m ago • Trump says he wants to build ‘greatest Golden Dome ever built’ over Greenland
25m ago • Trump: We will remember if you say no over Greenland
28m ago • Trump: not sure Nato would be there for us
36m ago • Trump: I won’t use force to take Greenland
42m ago • Trump: Seeking immediate negotiations for purchase of Greenland
44m ago • Trump: US ‘takes great care’ about the people of Europe, but they are ‘destroying themselves’
45m ago • Trump: You’d be speaking German and Japanese without us
53m ago • Europe ‘not heading in right direction’, Trump says
1h ago • Trump: Inflation has been defeated
1h ago • Trump’s speech is under way
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Edit
On Minnesota, Trump criticises the “mass import” of foreign cultures, citing Somalia. He then hits out at “fake congressperson” Ilhan Omar, criticising her for “telling us how to run America”
I don’t think there were any serious invasion plans, the whole point is to purchase Greenland.
Look at the military budgets of the rest of NATO vs the United States. The US spends considerably more, more than double, than the rest of NATO combined, despite having half the population. Even in % of GDP, only the USA, Greece and Poland were above 3% before Trump started his second term. In terms of technology, NATO is 100% reliant on the USA for stealth aircraft, strategic bombers, and numerous other things. This is not a sustainable state, an alliance cannot be this one sided long term. Look at what European NATO members were doing during the cold war vs now. The UK had its own strategic bombers, a large air force, forward deployed tank battalions to West Germany. Now, most of that is gone.
Is NATO even really an “alliance” in the true sense though? Or just a formalisation of american imperial hierarchy
Debatable, they’ve never used their military power for collective defence of a member(libs will debate this as article 5 was invoked to ‘protect’ America by the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, but imo that doesn’t count as a defence since it wasn’t fighting on American soil and was essentially a ‘pre-emptive strike’ to prevent further Al-Qaeda attacks(accepting the official 9/11 story, and ignoring the Taliban’s over to hand bin-laden over to a neutral country for evidence-based prosecution, and taking the US’s casus belli as legitimate) despite the Al-Qaeda cell allegedly responsible operating out of Germany and having no Afghan members ), only for aggressive military acts that support the US’s geopolitical ambitions
‘An alliance led by the US to enforce its empire’ maybe accurate, but I guess ‘organisation’ or something similar better describes the unequal nature of member states as ‘alliance’ suggests members are equalish peers
Art of the Deal 101: Use leverage or perceived leverage to threaten the other party in order to get a better deal. Irrelevant that the net result is the destabilization of modern society, if he saves a buck and gets to swing his orange, shriveled dick around. He’s been doing it since day one.
Hard to say which of his threats are real until he backtracks, though. I would not have guessed actually kidnapping Maduro, for example. But, you’ve got tactibro Hegseth frothing to be seen as tough and likely stoking the fires which changes the equation a bit.