Please, people, let's deal with the latter. That's crazy enough.
Even if Trump never actually invaded Greenland everything he's done so far has been completely insane anyway, in violation of ethical norms and international laws, and counter to the treaties in function. He's already crossed lines that shouldn't have been crossed ever.
That does not make Trump sane, it does not defend his actions, it is merely stating a fact.
It would be nice if facts mattered here.
To be clear, the article it is a comment on was entitled "The Suicide Pact: What Happens the Moment We Invade Greenland".
That has since been changed to "The Suicide Pact: What Happens the Moment We Touch Greenland".
If Europe "dumps the dollar" - what does that mean in practice?
This article suggests that Europe could also call in US debt. Presumably the US could grandstand and not pay it. What are the consequences of that?
Europe needs US financial markets (dollars) to finance its debt as all European bank together could fit into JP Morgan.
Switching away from SWIFT or Visa/Mastercard is also improbable as Europe lack tech skills to run such complex systems.
SWIFT sits in Belgium, why would anyone in Europe need to switch away from it? Is the US able to handle their (international) financial transactions without access to SWIFT?
The financial market being significantly smaller, sure, but will it stay like that?
Quickly summing up total spending of the European countries on this list, the Europeans seem to spend about half of what the US spends on the military, quite a lot more than I expected. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...]
As for SWIFT it is US executive branch that decides who to take off the system
> SWIFT’s data centers, located in the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, act as the network’s central hubs, processing and routing messages across the network. The centralization at these data centers is critical for swift (no pun intended) and secure data transmission. These data centers are designed with redundancy and failover capabilities, so if one center is disrupted, the others take over, ensuring no interruptions to the SWIFT service.
[https://ahrvo.substack.com/p/how-does-swift-really-work]
To me, this sounds like SWIFT would posibly be split into 3-parts, without any redundancy. A US and a EU datacenter handling "local" business, with Switzerland possibly be able to interact with either?
ggm•2w ago