Trump 2.0 official thread

P

PanAsian

Major
Monkey in the middle...
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

She said at one point that “it took a fight, a big, huge fight,” to get colleagues at ICE to walk back release conditions improperly imposed by the agency on some immigrants who were ordered released by judges in Minnesota.

Her warning to them, she said, was that if they didn’t work to clean up the problems, she would put their names on court filings to ensure she wasn’t the only person taking heat over the issues.
Click to expand...
So did she?
 
R

Ringsword

Senior Member
Registered Member
siegecrossbow said:
https://twitter:com/isaacstonefish/status/2019106461977039307

It’s time for the pedophilic elites to warm up on learning “Da Thought”.
Click to expand...
The problem with these super-rich pedophilic ,cannibal monsters is that they do not learn ever in this life-their wealth,sense of entitlement,connections etc have insulated,protected and embolden them to anything-perhaps there should be 10 levels of hell instead of just 9.
 
Lethe

Lethe

Captain
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Since becoming secretary-general, Rutte’s central objective has been to keep the United States fully committed to NATO and European security more broadly. If that requires shamelessly flattering U.S. President Donald Trump and pouring cold water on European efforts to achieve greater strategic autonomy, so be it. One can understand his motivation—having the United States play the role of Europe’s first responder is a pretty good deal—it’s his understanding of the overall strategic situation that is wanting.

His latest effort was to tell the European Parliament that Europe simply cannot defend itself without lots of U.S. help, saying that those who disagree with him should “keep on dreaming.” His remarks can only be interpreted as a thinly veiled riposte to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s justly celebrated Davos speech calling for medium powers to come together to defend their interests and values in a world of increasingly predatory great powers whose ranks—unfortunately—now include the United States.

Carney never mentioned Trump by name, but everyone in the audience at the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, knew who he was talking about (as did Trump himself). Rutte will have none of this, however, and appears to believe that NATO’s members have no choice but to remain dependent upon and subservient to the United States no matter how erratic or greedy it becomes.
Click to expand...

The problem I have with this widely accepted image of Mark Rutte as this figure desperately trying to hold NATO together in the face of profound skepticism from Washington, in large part by telling Trump anything he wants to hear and representing his perspective to other NATO members is just that... I don't buy it.

I'm sure that Trump instinctively despises NATO as an assembly of weak nations sucking on Washington's teat, but there's no sign that he has any real intention of departing the alliance. Presumably, he will have been informed that NATO is an excellent vector for influence over nations that could otherwise theoretically prove troublesome, particularly in concert. The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance as leaked to the New York Times was fairly explicit on this point:

NATO continues to provide the indispensable foundation for a stable security environment in Europe. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security, as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European security affairs. While the United States supports the goal of European integration, we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO, particularly the alliance's integrated command structure.
Click to expand...

The above portion was redacted from the later public release but can be read in context
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
.

Trump's new
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
alludes to this policy and its predictable consequences also:

Instead, with rare exceptions, [allied nations] were too often content to allow the United States to defend them, while they cut defense spending and invested instead in things like public welfare and other domestic programs. Nor were they the only ones at fault. Certainly, it was their own decision to underinvest in their respective defenses. But it was a decision often encouraged by past U.S. policymakers, who imprudently believed that the United States benefited from allies who were more dependencies than they were partners.
Click to expand...

The "past U.S. policymakers" referred to are those who understood that allied material impotence and allied political submission are two sides of the same coin. More capable allies are more politically independent allies -- and we've seen just how enthusiastic Trump is about those.

So Trump is attempting something of a balancing act here: trying to prompt allies into being less useless, while maintaining their subservience. In practice, the only means of achieving this is by making loud noises about leaving NATO and therefore the Europeans to their own devices. But, conversely, leaving NATO is the one thing that Washington cannot actually do, as it is by far the most straightforward path to the formation of an effective independent European security architecture, which remains an undesirable outcome, if perhaps somewhat less so than previously.

So where does that leave Mark Rutte? One could speculate, but I think it suffices to say that asking Rutte about the virtues of NATO is a little like asking Xi Jinping about the virtues of the CPC. Without NATO, Rutte is out of an undoubtedly very comfortable job.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top