Greenland

Subterms

    Latest story

    275 Shares20 Views

    Don’t dignify Trump with talk of a ‘new world order’ – there’s nothing new or ordered about this chaos | Aditya Chakrabortty

    by

    The US president’s grotesque theatrics on the world stage are an opportunistic distraction from his falling domestic ratingsOf all the commandments for living under Donald Trump, the first is always this: don’t believe him. Nothing he says can be taken at face value; everything should be fed into a polygraph. Those of scrupulous courtesy can wrap it up in red ribbon, or uncork that aphorism about how the man must be taken seriously but never literally. All the same, scratch a Trump promise and underneath will glint a pretext. Scrutinise his grand plans and you find only shabby tactics.The Manhattan Democrat turns into a Florida-dwelling Republican; the troll who demanded Barack Obama’s birth certificate will hem and haw over releasing the Epstein files. From real-estate deals to Trump University, all that this guy swears is solid gold soon settles into so much bullshit.Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist Continue reading… More

    More stories

    • 250 Shares38 Views

      in US Politics

      If Donald Trump thinks Greenland should be his, how long before he sets his sights on Scotland? | Zoe Williams

      by

      By the expansionist logic of the president and his advisers, the US is entitled to annex just about anywhere‘We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Donald Trump told the Atlantic on 5 January, with the hand-wavy follow-up, “We need it for defence.” His adviser Stephen Miller was more aggressive still in an interview with CNN, saying: “The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? … The US is the power of Nato … obviously Greenland should be part of the United States.” His wife, Katie Miller, posted an image on X of a map of the country papered over with the US flag, with the caption “soon”. It’s hard to orientate sensibly towards things that happen on X these days: if she had posted a Grok-generated image of Greenland in a bikini, would that be more or less concerning?Still, we’re right to be concerned. There is no comfort to be had from old-era ideas such as: “Maybe they’re just sabre-rattling about Greenland to distract from the matter of Venezuela”, or “surely the foundational principles of Nato, a defensive alliance, will prevent the US from any act of aggression towards its own allies?”Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading… More

    • 163 Shares32 Views

      in US Politics

      The Trump doctrine exposes the US as a mafia state | Jan-Werner Müller

      by

      The Venezuela incursion is in line with this logic, made even plainer as the US eyes GreenlandWhen a bleary-eyed Trump explained the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro this past Saturday, he invoked the Monroe doctrine: while the US president sounded as if he were reading about it for the first time, historians of course recognized the idea of Washington as a kind of guardian of the western hemisphere. Together with the national security strategy published in December, the move on Venezuela can be understood as advancing a vision for carving up the world into what the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt called “great spaces”, with each in effect supervised by a great power (meaning, in today’s world, Washington, Moscow and Beijing). But more is happening than a return to such de facto imperialism: Trump’s promise to “run the country” for the sake of US oil companies signals the internationalization of one aspect of his regime – what has rightly been called the logic of the mafia state. That logic is even more obvious in his stated desire to grab Greenland.The theory of the mafia state was first elaborated by the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar in 2016. Such a state is less about corruption where envelopes change hands under the table. Instead, public procurement is rigged; large companies are brought under the control of regime-friendly oligarchs, who in turn acquire media to provide favorable coverage to the ruler. The beneficiaries are what Magyar calls the “extended political family” (which can include the ruler’s natural family). As with the mafia, unconditional loyalty is the price for being part of the system.Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University Continue reading… More