This isn’t really about Greenland’s strategic value; it’s about the category error. You can trade goods, sign treaties, and negotiate basing rights. You can’t “buy” a people or their sovereignty especially when they don’t consent. That’s why Europe responds with process and principle: normalize coercion-as-bargaining among allies and you’re reviving a pre-1945 model of politics Europe built institutions to prevent.
It’s also lose-lose for the US. There isn’t a positive outcome. If it’s dropped, the damage is “just” reputational and partly repairable. If it’s pursued: tariffs, threats, coercion. It burns trust inside NATO, accelerates European strategic decoupling, and hands a propaganda gift to every US adversary. A forced takeover would be a catastrophic own-goal: legitimacy crisis, sanctions/retaliation, and a long-term security headache the US doesn’t need.
And the deeper issue is credibility. The dollar’s reserve status and US financial leverage rest on the assumption that the US is broadly predictable and rule-bound. When you start treating allies like extractive targets, you’re not “winning” you’re encouraging everyone to build workarounds. Part of the postwar setup was that Europe outsourced a lot of hard security while the US underwrote the system; if the US turns that security guarantee into leverage against allies, you should expect Europe to reprice the relationship and invest accordingly.
The least-bad outcome is a face-saving off-ramp and dropping the whole line of inquiry. Nothing good comes from keeping it on the table.
Yes. Ian Bremmer keeps pointing out that if the "law of the jungle" becomes the norm for relations between countries, the USA will not benefit as much as autocracies like China and Russia.
Autocracy isn't a switch you can flick. To establish one, you first have to win a protracted civil war, likely between loyalist paramilitary groups like ICE, the standing US Army and regional defense paramilitaries that would spring up. The likely result of this is a stalemate that leads to secession into separate countries.
Why? Russia didn't have a protracted civil war between 2000-ish and now?
Isn't Trump busy replacing US Army leadership with those loyal to him? Why would Army and ICE be on opposite sides?
Seems MAGA just have to continue the present course and apply just enough pressure to the election system to keep "winning" half-credibly and autocracy is there in not too many years.
I mean they are already past pardoning those attacking congress for not accepting the election result.
It is just a gradual process which is well underway, at what point would California and Washington suddenly prop up a militia?
Warren Buffett once said: "You can't make a good deal with a bad person"
Which is exactly the case as long as Trump is POTUS. There's no good deal to be made for Denmark, Greenland, or Europe in general. Trump is a bad person, and can not be trusted.
Any deal that is made will either be altered or voided. And he'll continue to move the goalposts.
There are two outcomes with Trump:
1) He tries to bully someone into submission, and keeps coming back for more if successful.
2) He is slapped so hard that he gives up entirely.
Unfortunately (2) is a bit shaky these days, as he views the US military as his personal muscle.
Yes, people expect SCOTUS to rebuff Trump on the tariffs. [0]
Lately SCOTUS has been providing stricter textual interpretations of Constitutional questions. Many of these have aligned with Trump administration arguments based on the power of the executive as outlined in Article II. The text says, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," and, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.
One thing the Constitution is very clear on, though, is that only Congress can impose tariffs ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"). Furthermore, recent rulings of this Court have established the major questions doctrine, which says that even if Congress delegates the specifics of implementing its powers to the Executive branch, that delegation cannot be interpreted broadly. It can't be used to create new broad policies that Congress didn't authorize.
Therefore, because the text of the Constitution explicitly grants the right to impose tariffs to Congress /and/ Trump's imposition of tariffs is both very broad and very substantial, many people believe that SCOTUS will deny Trump's tariffs.
The case as argued is about Trump's right to issue tariffs under the IEEPA (a law Congress passed to give the President some ability to take economic actions due to international emergencies, which do not explicitly include tariffs), and there is some debate about what a negative ruling would mean for the return of tariffs to merchants who have paid them. Both of those points require careful consideration in the decision. Will the ruling limit itself to just tariffs issued under the IEEPA or to the President's ability to establish tariffs under other laws? If the Court rules against the tariffs, will the government be required to pay people back, and if so, to what extent? It's not surprising that the decision is taking some time to be released. There's a lot of considerations, and every one is a possible point for disagreement by the justices.
> One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.
Just want to comment what an incredibly piss poor argument that is, because if you take it to its conclusion, it means all of the power rests with the Executive and none with the Legislature. That is, by definition, the Executive branch has all the people that actually "do stuff". If the executive has full, 100% control over the structure and rules of the branch, why bother even having a legislature in the first place if all the laws can be conveniently ignored or "reinterpreted".
You could argue Congress still has the power of impeach if they believe laws aren't being faithfully excited, but I'd argue that is much too much of a blunt instrument to say that laws should be able to constrain what a President can do within the executive branch.
Picking better next time won't be enough unless a lot of work is done to put in place safeguards to make it impossible for a future government to act the same way.
I think people should realize that, in a democracy, it is virtually impossible to put these safeguards in place if people at large don't want them.
The reason Trump is able to get away with so much right now is because Congress is letting him. They could easily constrain his tariff powers, or his warmongering powers (they actually were close to doing that WRT Venezuela before some Republican Senators caved like a bunch of wet blankets), but they don't, because this is what people voted for. Trump is so much more powerful in his second term because at this point everyone knew he was a convicted felon, they knew he fomented the attack on the Capitol, and still a majority of voters voted for him.
Safeguards only work of someone is willing to enforce them.
It may not be possible to do perfectly, but here are many things that can be done to make it harder.
E.g.:
- no direct elections of a president with such broad powers.
- Separating the head of state and head of government, and split their powers.
- Proportional representation to reduce the chance of the largest party obtaining so much power alone.
- Not letting the president appoint supreme court justices.
- No presidential pardons; basically removing the chance of getting out of protections against legal sanctions after leaving office, and removing one of the strongest means of protecting loyalists.
The US isn't uniquely vulnerable, but it is a whole lot more vulnerable than governments in countries where the head of government is easier to replace and have fewer powers vested in their own personal mandate.
A direct election of a single powerful leader is also fundamentally creating a less democratic system - it reduces the influence of a huge minority of the electorate far below what their numbers justify.
Indeed, but it might be many decades - once this lesson is first learned, it will take a long time to unlearn because it tends to become self-reinforcing.
To give an illustration of how long institutional memory over things like this can be:
As of when I went to primary school in Norway in the 1980's, we were still taught at length about the British blockade of Norway during the Napoleonic wars due to Denmark-Norway's entry into the war on Napoleons side and its impact on Norway (an enduring memory for many Norwegian school-children is having to learn the Norwegian epic poem "Terje Vigen" about a man evading the blockade).
Norwegian agricultural policy to this day has had a costly cross-party support for subsidies intended to provide at least a minimum of food idependence as a consequence of learning the hard way first during the Napoleonic wars with a reinforcement (though less serious) during WW2 of how important it can be.
A large part of the Norwegian negotiations for EEA entry, and Norways rejection of EU membership was centered around agricultural policy in part because of this history.
The importance of regional development and keeping agriculture alive even in regions that are really not suited to it is "baked in" to Norwegian politics in part because the subsidies means that on top of those who are about the food idependence a lot of people are financially benefiting from the continuation of those policies, or have lived shaped by it (e.g. local communities that would likely not exist if the farms had not been financially viable thanks to subsidies), so structures have been created around it that have a life of their own.
Conversely, a lot of support for the US in Europe rests on institutional memory of the Marshall Plan, with most of the generations with first hand experience of the impact now dead.
Create a replacement memory of the US becoming a hostile force, and that can easily embed itself for the same 3+ generations after the situation itself has been resolved.
Interesting; as a British person myself, we don't get taught any of that about Norway or Denmark, not even knowing that they were once joint together in a union.
I'm not surprised. From a British POV it was a relatively minor part of a much larger conflict that Britain was done with when Napoleon defeated, and Denmark-Norway was for most practical purposes treated as "just" Denmark, since Denmark was the more powerful part of the union by far.
From the Danish and Norwegian side, Britain annihilated or captured most of the Danish-Norwegian fleet because Britain expected Denmark-Norway to enter the war on Napoleons side (as a consequence, Denmark-Norway of course entered, but severely weakened), and Norway was blockaded and faced famine from 1808-1814.
After the war ended, the Norwegian mainland was handed over to Sweden (Iceland and Greenland were also Norwegian at that point, but stayed with Denmark), but Norway took advantage of the process and passed a constitution and briefly went to war against Sweden to force a better settlement, resulting in a relatively loose union. So this whole affair had a very significant effect on the formation of the Norwegian state.
Trump's passing and his admin getting tossed won't erase the memory that a good third of America was always happy with him and wanted what he actually did. America is now branded with MAGA in a way that will take generations to fade.
At this point, I'd say terms rather than generations.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember people saying "Never Forget" about 9/11, but it's barely in any discourse at this point, and that was a single generation ago and had two major wars a bunch of PoW scandals, war crime scandals that led to Manning, and domestic surveillance that led to Snowden. And yet, despite all that, I've only heard 9/11 mentioned exactly once since visiting NYC in 2017, and that was Steve Bannon and Giuliani refusing to believe that Mamdani was legitimate.
So, yeah, if Trump fades away this could be forgotten in 8 years or so; if this escalates to a war (I'm not confident, but if I had to guess I'd say 10% or so?), then I see it rising to the level of generations.
It's different. 9/11 was an outside foe, which was dismantled by US forces, and its leader was executed. America "won" against the perpetrators of 9/11 in the conventional sense.
You cannot defeat MAGA the same way: the "enemies" are among us, and they aren't going anywhere.
From my point of view as a European asking if myself if or when I will be able to trust the USA in the future, the Taliban is to Afghanistan as MAGA is to the USA.
You're the outsider, to me. The pre-9/11 Taliban were seen as "kinda weird but we can do deals, oh dear aren't they awful, never mind", the post-9/11 were not even worthy of talking to. The USA is currently in a similar "pre" state, an invasion would make it a "post" state.
There's how the people in general remember, and then there's how the politicians and the institutions remember. If nothing else, the changes in institutions will have effects reverberating for decades, with the most obvious institution being the military in each country that expected to fight a war under a NATO umbrella with an American general in charge.
If I'm a German or French or Swedish officer, especially if I'm suddenly in Greenland, I'm going to be thinking hard about the changes to come in the next few years so that they're not all dependent upon a friendly America. If nothing else, they're all getting ready now to operate without any Americans in the loop, since it might be Americans they're fighting. That means the entire NATO command structure, which presumes American dominance of it, is now an obstacle to avoid rather than a resource to share. Every PM is asking the head of their air force if they can fly their F-35s without the Americans knowing about it and possibly shutting them down remotely.
There's a story going around today in French newspapers about how French and Ukrainian intelligence fed US intelligence some false strategic info to see if it ended up in Russian hands, which it did within days. Now Ukraine is consciously breaking its relationship with US intelligence because it can't be trusted, while getting closer to French and German intelligence. I suspect that the UK is also carefully looking at what's shared via the Five Eyes and decided what it can/needs to withhold.
I'm saying "never forget" fades. That's a human condition we all share.
I mean, I live in Germany these days, and this country absolutely got the multi-generational thing, and I'm from the UK whose empire ditto, but… the UK doesn't spend much time thinking about the Falklands War and even less about the Cod Wars.
Nobody disagreed with that it eventually fades, they were all saying it is going to take decades. The consequence of 9/11 of was mostly TSAs, following the USA into wars and the erosion of privacy at the mention of terrorism. The first and the last are still ongoing and I think the current US admin is still using the latter as a narrative, the second one may come at an end currently, because the USA is trying to use it against its (former) allies.
What you describe is called "to historicize an event". The WW1 has been historicized by WW2 (some argue it's the same war). But not even WW2 has been historicized yet (at least in Europe) and it already ended 80 years in the past, so I doubt an atlantic conflict is going to be forgotten in the next few decades.
Edit: I originally linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicization, but this does not describes what I mean. It is weird, because the supposed German equivalent does. The German article is about a concept from the science of history, while the English article is about a literature concept.
Aye, and thanks for the link, will read the german version as per your edit.
> so I doubt an atlantic conflict is going to be forgotten in the next few decades.
If it gets to one, yes. Was writing late at night, so sloppily, sorry about that.
Right now, I think we're not that far gone yet. Absolutely agree it becomes as you say if it becomes hot war. Not sure about which step between will be the drop that overflows the bucket.
If we don't reduce conflict to mean military conflict, then I think there is definitely some diplomatic issue ongoing.
> Not sure about which step between will be the drop that overflows the bucket.
True, this is kind of the open question, because the EU both needs to be the adult in the room and deescalate, but also can't do compromises with territorial integrity otherwise it has already lost. This will of course have an impact on the "time to forget".
But I don't think if there is a uprising today in the US, Trump and the whole admin is gone next week and they improve their constitution, that the whole issue will just be forgotten. The whole pro-, neutral- or even contra USA debate has been ongoing for decades know. For example the trade deals aren't exactly concordant with EU law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I) and the USA has been boycotting multilateral institutions, that the EU wants to have authority. I mean it is new that they openly sabotage the ICJ, but that they have the capability to do that is not.
Yeah, one thing the EU could do that wouldn't hurt them/us (much) would be to stop bringing up fake replacements for the data sharing agreements that get shot down.
The damage would mostly hit the top performers of the US stock market (amongst others) while not damaging the EU as much.
It'll probably be tariffs first though, followed by the ACI if things get really bad.
Sort of. Those of us outside the US are aware his support hasn’t cratered. There’s going to be the concern the US will just swap him out for someone similar.
If past history is anything to go by, the US will elect the current opposition, who won't be nearly strong enough to enact the reforms that would prevent an extremist party from returning to power in 4 years' time.
You have to be incredibly naive to give that much credibility to the US system. A lot more than just a switch of parties would be needed.
Personally I highly doubt a possible democratic would return a conquered Greenland. And even if it did, it would have to ensure that kind of derailment doesn't happen again. The opposition so far seems to be about as ineffectual as centrist parties across Europe at dealing with the far right.
For Americans, many foreigners use the word “government” where we would say “administration”. So, a “new government” or “the government falls”, would be a “new administration” or “the administration’s party loses the next election”.
Exactly. The fixes that would go some way to restore my trust are changed to the mechanisms surrounding the democratic process. Things like no more gerrymander, get rid of allowing corporations influencing the voting by flooding the system with money, somehow fix social media every ad is seen by everyone rather than allowing personalised lies be shown to specific voters, fix your electronic voting systems to a maintenance man with a screwdriver can't make new votes pop into existence (as happened once), stop disenfranchising voters - even to the extend of implementing compulsory voting. The distortions the USA allows now to the democratic process are beyond belief.
Oh, and a system that allows a politician to incite a mob to attack the sitting parliament, and get away without punishment, then pardon the perps is a joke.
And the opposition party has proven itself to be unable to take actions necessary to prevent this sort of thing. The democrats could have used the Biden administration as an opportunity to try Trump for his crimes and establish new boundaries on the power of the president. Instead they just hoped he would vanish into the night and left space for his return.
If the dems win in 2026 and 2028, what is there to stop a return to fascism and further collapse in 2032?
> and hands a propaganda gift to every US adversary.
This demonstrates, again, that Trump is the prime domestic enemy of the US. Where are the agencies that are sworn to protect the US against enemies foreign and domestic?
But it's not US who is in charge of US, unfortunately. It's Project 2025 who is in charge of US, and it has a vastly different win and lose criteria. For Project 2025 dissolving NATO, UN, WTO and whatever is a win. For Project 2025 weakening dollar is a win. For Project 2025 isolation in the Americas is win. And US is no longer in charge. Congress has voluntarily surrendered its power and others are following the lead. Project 2025 may or may not become future US, we'll see how it goes this year.
Greenland already has the right to independence from Denmark, via chapter 8 of the law for the self-governing of Greenland, that was enacted in 2009 [1]:
> The decision on Greenland's independence is made by the Greenlandic people.
Technically, the Danish government has to OK the decision, but this is largely viewed as a formality by Danish politicians, should Greenland choose to move forward with independence.
If it truly is a pure formality, why is the condition written into law? The legislative branch (the branch that writes and changes laws) can simply remove the condition of Danish acceptance, instead of proudly proclaiming that the condition of Danish acceptance is a pure formality.
“Optics” is the wrong frame: this is about legitimacy and consent. A referendum demanded by outsiders under pressure is just coercion with a procedural costume. Imagine Cuba proposing a referendum on Puerto Rico joining Cuba and calling it “bad optics” if people won’t play along, the absurdity is the premise, not the lack of voting.
Maybe that's the answer - the USA needs to hold a referendum on becoming a British colony again. It's 250 years since they declared independence, maybe they've changed their mind on having a king? (/s)
I fail to see what is damning here. What would you even hold a referendum on? Independence? Replacing the arrangement with Denmark with whatever unclear arrangement the US is proposing?
If you trust independent polls, you can get a pretty clear picture of where Greenlanders stood as of Feb. 2025:
Danish citizenship or independence are overwhelmingly favored over US citizenship in these polls. And for independence, only really if it does not affect living standard too bad. And there, it's hard to imagine the US being able to match Denmark's social security system...
I believe you write in good faith, and that you sincerely and non-agressively hold your opinion, and that you believe you don't lack a well known piece of information.
But first let me quote a short piece of text, and later in the comment I will reveal where it comes from.
"After World War II, colonial power was increasingly frowned upon on the international stage. To ease pressure from the United Nations, Denmark decided to reclassify Greenland, not as a colony, but as a region. A new Status that required Denmark to guarantee EQUAL LIVING STANDARDS for both Greenlanders and Danes."
Hold on to this "EQUAL LIVING STANDARDS".
So now on towards the poll.
Back when I was studying physics, one of the courses was statistics. Now statistics in physics or mathematical courses is very different from "statistics" in applied / social / political sciences where students are merely required to execute a procedure, like linear regression to fit a line, or the steps to calculate average and variance, ... Those are fixed formulas without rearranging terms and applying mathematical deduction to statistical statements. One can't fully grok statistics in this light form, it needs more rigorous foundations, only then can students learn to derive their own original conclusions in a correct manner and be able to see through the honest mistakes or manipulations of statistical results by others. The professor recommended a booklet called "How to Lie with Statistics". Of course the goal of the book is NOT to breed dishonest statisticians, but to show the myriad of ways statistical results are depicted and phrased to convey intentionally convey an incorrect impression or conclusion, so that we can detect and see through it.
One of the classic things is for example the distribution of top classes: consider mortality rates for different afflictions, lets pretend we buy into the mono-causal paradigm, so tree like, not DAG like. Then if some entity is embarrassed about the top entry, you can just split it up in similarily balanced subcases (instead of a category cancer, splitting it up into all the different kinds of cancer might result in say cardiovascular diseases becoming the top category, simply by splitting up the top class. (My example is arbitrary, I care naught about top mortality, personally).
A false dilemma (false trilemma etc.) is when all the options combined don't form the universe of possibilities, like "would you prefer pestilence or cholera"?
Please take a careful look at the actual poll options [0]:
1. I want independence unconditionally, regardless of the impact on the standard of living
2. I want independence, even if it would have a major negative impact on the standard of living
3. I want independence, even if it would have a small negative impact on my standard of living
4. I only want independence if it doesn't have a negative impact on my standard of living
5. I don't want independence
6. Don't know
It's almost like some Dane made up the vote-able categories and decided to troll the Greenlanders with a reference to the broken promise: LIVING STANDARDS ?!? Some Good Old forced contraception foisted of as the required EQUAL LIVING STANDARDS between Danes and Greenlanders ?!!
So we can classify already: Don't Know (option 6: 9%) vs Know (presumably options 1 through 5: 91% claim to know what they want), so far so good since we have mutually exclusive but exhaustive split.
Now consider the universe of possibilities for those who Know:
Those who know they want independence (from Denmark; options 1 through 4: 84% of all respondents) and those who know they don't want independence (from Denmark; option 5: 9% of all respondents)
So far so good.
Those who want independence (from Denmark) unconditionally (option 1: 18% of all respondents) and those who want independence (from Denmark) conditionally (option 2 through 4: 66%)
Here it gets vague because the boundaries one is asked to get classified in (divide and conquer style) are subjective: on condition there is no "major", "small" or "negative" impact on standard of living.
Is "negative impact" more or less negative than "small negative impact"? I want to see HN commenters discuss if "negative impact" is better or worse than "small negative impact".
This is just non-quantitative gerrymandering.
But let's ignore the gerrymandering: the phrasing is not neutral, as if it is a given there will be negative impact on standards of living!
Imagine the poll stated not the above but:
1. "I want independence unconditionally, regardless if the Danes perform a new round of population control as a goodbye present for old times sake"
2. "I want independence conditionally, regardless if the Danes perform a new major round of population control as a goodbye present for old times sake"
3. "I want independence unconditionally, regardless if the Danes perform a new small round of population control as a goodbye present for old times sake"
4. "I want independence unconditionally, regardless if the Danes perform a new round of population control as a goodbye present for old times sake"
It would be the exact same logical fallacy, but probably with different results, thousands of women (and men) would keelhaul their nearest Danish officials under the nearest ice shelf.
It's just insulting for an (unverifiable) poll to pull these tricks, especially if the poll was co-organized by a Danish newspaper.
> The poll, which was carried out by Verian on behalf of Danish newspaper Berlingske ...
Something else that is insulting: I saw pictures of immense crowds protesting Trump's comments, and read the number of protesters involved: practically the population count of whole Greenland... until I saw the fine print: the numbers were for a protest in Denmark, not Greenland!
Let people speak for themselves, and don't gerrymander polls, its just doubly insulting, and shows that the colonial mentality is still present, sigh!
that power goes both ways, what happens if the Greenland population demands the full list of doctors involved, what type of doctors: military or civilian?, their extradition for legal proceedings on Greenland soil, the confiscation of their pension funds, ... the whole shebang, or else --- who knows they might become a state joining a Union of States, perhaps EU perhaps US. The US has a similar history, from a similar time frame, but the Danish government took a remarkably longer time to even acknowledge what happened.
Check this documentary (about 30 minutes), horrendous crimes. And then "apologizing", apologizing is when all forms of help have been exhausted, instead of apologizing reveal the lists of doctors, so the Greenlanders can question them, who they got commands from, and were those people got their instructions from, extraditions, confiscation of their pension funds (think about it: having been raped by the doctor, or sedated (another crime if for non medical reasons). The normal order is acknowledge, then help, help, help, and only when all forms of help have been exhausted, apologize.
And Europe is angry how Trump plays the realpolitik game, but by not insisting a Greenland run referendum, but instead backing Denmark, they are playing the realpolitik game just as well, you know "maintaining good relations"
Recommended viewing (30 minutes), its where the quote comes from:
It doesn't seem to discuss Trump's "offer". Voting independence from Denmark is different from being given the option to join the United States.
As Chomsky would say "whenever there are multiple pictures, the darkest one tends to be closer to the truth". What if natural resources would be more expensive (for both US and EU) to buy if Greenland were independent, than if it were still half-colony of Denmark. Then EU and US would have a common interest in manipulating in the same direction the referendum you referenced (for independence). Both US and EU might have cheaper access to natural resources if the population votes no for independence. Good Cop Bad Cop stuff, to scare the population to stay subjugated (and enjoy imaginary protection from EU against imaginary threat from US).
his comment was not specific to Western nations, it would apply equally well to asian, african, south american, russian,northern, southern, ... nations, but you are right, he wouldn't treat Western nations with an exception, and that always makes the relevant population feel addressed, and this subjectively feels different, or being picked on with precision, but its just when a population feels addressed.
The referendum is on independence. Which they might want if they weren't under the threat of annexation. When given a choice between the US and Denmark, they chose Denmark, and might choose to go all in rejoin EU.
To people here just a week ago saying it was just insane joking and even MAGA didn't support it, something I pointed out didn't matter, we have moved from 'it's meme'ing' to 'here's why it's good' 'here's why it's needed' 'it's 4d chess' in less than a week. Please NEVER give an inch to this trash that will justify anything. Don't accept 'meme'ing' from an American President by saying 'it's Trump being Trump'. Push back on everything, everytime.
As the nazi's were happening, everyone was waiting for the 'one big thing' that was too big of a line cross. We have waited until the point the US is using it's power to take land. And everyone is still waiting for that 'big thing' or some line (even though we've passed countless lines already). MAGA freaked out over Epstein for what a decade? And suddenly when it's almost released they stopped caring. If MAGA dropped that almost instantly, MAGA is NEVER going to care about anything.
It’s also lose-lose for the US. There isn’t a positive outcome. If it’s dropped, the damage is “just” reputational and partly repairable. If it’s pursued: tariffs, threats, coercion. It burns trust inside NATO, accelerates European strategic decoupling, and hands a propaganda gift to every US adversary. A forced takeover would be a catastrophic own-goal: legitimacy crisis, sanctions/retaliation, and a long-term security headache the US doesn’t need.
And the deeper issue is credibility. The dollar’s reserve status and US financial leverage rest on the assumption that the US is broadly predictable and rule-bound. When you start treating allies like extractive targets, you’re not “winning” you’re encouraging everyone to build workarounds. Part of the postwar setup was that Europe outsourced a lot of hard security while the US underwrote the system; if the US turns that security guarantee into leverage against allies, you should expect Europe to reprice the relationship and invest accordingly.
The least-bad outcome is a face-saving off-ramp and dropping the whole line of inquiry. Nothing good comes from keeping it on the table.