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- Trump has little regard for the "global order," and thinks throwing foreign partners off balance — or, when possible, steamrolling them — better serves American interests.
- Even if his proposals aren't always entirely serious, they can't be ignored.
State of play: Greenland's prime minister, Múte Egede, hit back at Trump on Monday: "Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom."
- A day earlier, Trump had labeled taking "ownership" of the world's largest island "an absolute necessity."
- People involved in Trump's transition have been discussing how an acquisition or custodianship of Greenland would work, according to Reuters.
- The island's attractions include its natural resources and its location, as the U.S., Russia and other powers scramble for footholds in the Arctic.
Flashback: It was widely treated as a joke when Trump first floated buying Greenland in 2019.
- Then Trump canceled a trip to Denmark, which controls Greenland as an overseas territory, after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rebuffed him.
Meanwhile, Trump pronounced Saturday that the U.S. would "demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us" if fees for U.S. ships to transit the waterway — which the U.S. returned to Panamanian control beginning in 1977 — were not reduced.
- Panama President José Raúl Mulino declared in an on-camera address Sunday that Panama would not hand over a single square meter of the canal, to which Trump replied on Truth Social: "We'll see about that!"
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- The bottom line is that Trump is preparing to eviscerate US alliances in favor of play acting as to imperialism. Why it is a bad idea. The USA is critically dependent upon rare Earth, and a whole other cluster of raw materials. To get an idea of how insane this is, one hydrogen bomb of one megaton placed upon Taiwanese chip manufacturing would at a stroke eviscerate use of chips globally and make many smart devices globally, not to say the least in the USA. The idea is so harebrained, i.e. unilateral US imperialism, that the for now defensible boundaries, with two more or less tractable allies, Canada and Mexico, would at a stroke ruin a geo political advantage the USA has been able to leverage for over a century
We never know with Trump if this is a joke, trolling or serious. But the lunacy in this cannot be overstated
