With Donald Trump’s actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States.
Source: We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower
longread, but worth it. combine this with carney’s davos speech. shit’s changed.
fta:
Imagine you were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, which allowed the US to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your marionette other than enact the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has pursued since he became president last year?
…
To watch the push for Greenland is to experience one of the wildest things that any country or head of state has done in the entire history of the modern world, dating back to the very creation of the nation-state era in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.
…
It is hard, in fact, to find any geopolitical parallel. Countries and leaders have certainly made choices and mistakes that ended in ruin—there’s Napoleon setting out to invade Russia or the actions of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the start of World War I—but it’s impossible to think of a single moment when a country so thoroughly set about consciously dismantling its core sources of national strength and influence.
…
And yet systematically over the last year—in ways that Putin or Xi couldn’t have dreamed we would do to ourselves—Donald Trump has undermined all six pillars. In recent weeks specifically, he has done lasting and irreparable damage to the rule of law, global alliances, and the independence of US monetary policy.
…
This is the end of the world as we have known it for 80 years—all for reasons that will confound future political scientists and historians. There is no strategy behind this exercise in superpower suicide other than the president’s own narcissism, greed, and his general frustration at never being respected by the elites whose favor he desires more than anything.
