The "rules based" model that the EU promulgated only worked in the 1990s-2000s when we lived in a unipolar world where the US and the EU represented the bulk of global production and those 5 countries had the economic power to successfully negotiate or pushback against the US.
The rise of Asian economies, EU expansion leading to the inclusion of hybrid regimes like Hungary and Poland under PiS who monkeywrenched procedural work within the EU, and the EU+UK's lost decade due to the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit degraded their comparative power.
Additionally, countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, etc also began strategically leveraging FDI in order to negotiate with subsets of EU states unilaterally, which reduced the EU's aggregate negotiating power.
Edit: Can't reply
> Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it?
Access to markets and capital along with defending IP are predicated on mutually agreeing to those terms. When the EU (then including the UK) was at it's peak in the 2000s, it was able to drive favorable IP protection and market access agreeements to help underwrite innovation. The European "rules-based" system also eschewed large scale subsidized industrial policy, viewing these as potentially accelerating trade wars.
This is less true now in the 2020s, with countries like the US, China, Japan, India, and others adopting large scale industrial policy and subsidy programs (IRA/CHIPS, Make in China, GX 2040, PLI) and co-opting pillars of European industry like Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis, Renault, ZF, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Dassault, Airbus, Leonardo, Safran, Rolls Royce, Siemens, EDF, TotalEnergie, etc to join these programs on their terms and having them lobby for their interests in Brussels.
> I think the main "culprit" is energy
Industrial energy prices in Europe only began spiking in 2022 following Russia's escalation of it's invasion in Ukraine (it started back in 2014). The trends I mentioned began all the way back in 2007-12 when energy prices were at all time lows.
There was also significant Facebook involvement in fake news concerning Brexit, Rohingya genocide, anti-EU and anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Now that we have established that US tech workers have significantly harmed free people and societies in various countries, I have to point out that also your reasoning is all wrong.
Brexit, Hungary, and Trump are not an example that the EU "rules based" model is not working, quite the opposite. When the EU flourishes as a free society due to free trade between people with extremely different cultural backgrounds, the people living under autocrats notice that this is could also be an option for their own future.
Due to this fact, the EU has been under massive attack by autocrats for quite some time, and workers at US tech companies have played a vital role in amplifying these attacks.
All the other stuff matters too, but it's crazy to think that paying 2-3x more for fuel wouldn't show up as a negative influence on the economy somewhere. This is particularly the case because Europe didn't go heavily into nuclear and it is one of the worse places for solar power.
Europe is setting up a tripwire force because they know from the past that lunatic ramblings of a leader should be taken serious.
Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.
I wonder how to survive? Nomad lifestyle?
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
The only difference is scale, and with the increasing flood of bot users and throwaway alt accounts, that's starting to matter less and less.
Whist there is often plenty of crossover (think car enthusiast forums), I'd hardly call a technical discussion site 'social media'.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
But definitely higher than any time since 1990. With a possible exception for the days immediately after 9/11, when it seemed like there might be follow-ups.
Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.
We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
In short, everyone had treaties signed with everyone else which effectively guaranteed a WW if any nation attacked another nation. The thinking being "nobody would ever start a war because of what it'd lead to".
MAD suffers the same problem, one demented leader can end all life by being irrational.
What do you mean? Only one country is threatening Greenland/Denmark/EU with military actions directed against the sovereignty of Greenland.
A fun thought experiment, but only that.
- WW1 was a competition of troops: how many soldiers each country was willing to sacrifice for victory. Something like 50M soldiers participated.
- WW2 was a competition of hardware, less troops - how much industrial output could each country pour into the battle. Aprox. 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes , 9000 warships (according to chatgpt), 2750 Liberty cargo ships (wikipedia).
- WW3 can't be a competition of troops (where would they get 50 million people, how would they train them, how would they feed them?), and it can't be a competition of hardware (who could make 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes and 9 000 ships today?, where would they even get that much steel?).
World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.
Cyber war, especially insufficiently defended industrial equipment control systems.
And about those drones: the category scales up and down, all the way from toys to things that rip apart apartment blocks.
And about quantity, Ukraine is estimated to be at the scale of millions of units last year, expended like munitions rather than like vehicles.
Not that high, but I know what you mean. I think there's a reasonable chance that the US system successfully redirects Trump away from actually ordering an attack on Greenland, and a reasonable chance the US military has an actual coup if that order comes through.
But if he gets to take it… the consequences need to be extraordinary, and misjudgement will have already been a precondition and therefore more misjudgement is likely, therefore escalation can be almost arbitrary.
Like, we came, we saw, we gone? How many ppls can they deploy in the long term?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/07/brief-history-...
I suspect the main limit is that nobody wants to be deployed in a dull frozen wasteland for very long.
These kinds of joint exercises are pretty common and largely symbolic.
(The wikipedia page about this contains blatant partisan propaganda. Gross.)
Danish Air force Hercules are doing their best impression of the Berlin air bridge to transport as much as they can to Greenland, airlines have transported personnel, several countries are sending navel ships, planes have already been doing exercises. While this isn't the first exercise there this is absolutely not common and just symbolic. Sure it isn't a force that can fight the US, but it is historic and unprecedented in Danish/Greenlandish history and it is a tripwire.
To put that into perspective the US has around 150-200 staff in Greenland.
(logical consequence of this is that the US invading Greenland is really bad for any US startups, such as one might find on HN, because it makes the EU much more likely to respond with "local only" rules)
We switched their email off would be a political joke compared to tens of thousand soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. And that's all working with assumptions that EU won't nationalize European part of AWS/Azure/GC/(other US cloud providers) to force it to continue its operation.
The only real question is if the US establishment wakes the fuck up in time.
That said: https://news.sky.com/story/trident-missile-misfired-and-cras...
How many "ppls" did Afghanistan deploy, long-term, against TWO different superpowers, with only discreet, behind-the-scenes support from other nations?
Invasion and control of another country that has more than paleolithic technology is pretty damned hard. Harder than anyone who attempst it ever guesses. ("They will welcome us as liberators!" - the stupidest thing ever said by a pre-Trump POTUS.)
It's even harder if a majority of the invading population hates the idea, and a significant part of the military doubt the constitutionality of their orders.
Oh, and two nuclear powers would be openly defending Greenland.
It would be cheaper and more popular to pile $9B in bills on the National Mall and set them ablaze.
People's attitudes often change when their sons and daughters are on the line.
War is also about internal politics. Do you really think someone can invade and potentially kill the military of your allies without repercussions? But let's ignore that and game out the next steps.
So some countries are pissed off for them killing military assets but the invading army think they wouldn't escalate? That's fine. Let's continue from the scenario where this happened.
Let's talk about killing civilians. You don't think that taking over Greenland will be without civilian deaths? Even if that's ok then let's continu to the next point:
Greenland is now part of the USA, this means border protection. This means you need to import border patrol or ICE or whatever into Greenland. How do you think that would work out? Non-military persons overseeing deporting non-greenland people in the artic. The US doesn't have that much equipment or people trained for artic conditions. Most of your guns, tanks, etc... don't work there reliably. Anyways...
Do you want the military overseeing deporting non-greenland people from your now US territory? Even when it's the most peaceful takeover ever in the history of humankind, it's still going to be a mess and people will die.
I've given you the most optimistic situation: Canada will allow overflights to take over Greenland. Greenland won't resist. The EU will do nothing even when their people are killed. etc...
To return to your question, killing an allied soldier will have some effects in the internal politics of the allies of the US.
This is especially the case when the tripwire force is deployed by a nuclear power on the territory of a non-nuclear power facing a conventional threat from a nuclear power.
I'm confident Europe can get its act together against Russia. It has more people, far more GDP etc. But it's stuck an an awful trance of defeatism.
US meanwhile seems to be setting fire to so much of the world that they may soon be calling on allies to help them out. Ironic that the only NATO collective defense response was Europe joining the US in Afghanistan.
Somehow Europeans care more about Greenland than Ukraine, so maybe this is the final straw.
Greenland isn't important because it's Greenland, it's important because taking it shatters NATO. As an attack on Denmark it's actually less important than the deathblow to an alignment that has been foundational to the world order for the last 80 years. If the US takes Greenland, the whole international order breaks down, so yes, they're taking it very seriously.
It's even more striking to me then that the Europeans would draw the line, rather than seek some kind of Trump appeasement. Standing up to Russia in Ukraine does not affect the credibility of NATO, but standing up to Trump does.
Appeasement of aggressors has a terrible track record, both historically (Hitler, Putin) and specifically with Trump (TACO).
Danish military analyst Anders Puck Nielsen argues, IMHO convincingly, that Europe should NOT try to appease Trump, but do the opposite - escalate to de-escalate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRsTDlqU8I
His reasoning is that Trump is a malignant narcissist, and malignant narcissists separate people into two categories: those perceived as strong, whom they admire (Putin, Xi), and weak, whom they abuse. Appeasement will only encourage further abuse. The only viable option is to show strength.
As a European myself, I will support politicians with an uncompromising approach, no matter the cost.
"Somehow" makes it sound like a strange situation, but it seems quite normal that the EU would care more about its own citizens than a foreign land, even if it is a close neighbor.
My immediate instinct is that the average European has far more to do with an average Ukrainian than the average Greenlander. But that might not be right. I'm just surprised at the psychology here. I'm glad Europeans are veery slowly standing up to the new reality, be it through Greenland or Ukraine or anywhere else.
There are fewer differences between a Dane and a Greenland Inuit than between a MAGA and a Democrat. Maybe you should visit?
The same Ronald Lauder then started buying businesses in Greenland.
The Guardian put out a good article on it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...
As usual with Trump, it's just brazen corruption.
Yes, and so have Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg, etc. etc.
A Chinese Panamax ship recently completed the NSR transit in just five days, showing that it's a viable alternative to the Suez Canal route.
The NSR is basically a conveyor belt for Russian-Chinese trade, most of it passing in or near Russian waters. However for that traffic to reach the global markets of the Atlantic, it has to pass through the GIUK Gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK).
Right now Russia is so dependent on China they're transferring valuable military tech. So that just leaves Greenland if you want to isolate China (and Russia).
https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2018/09...
Feel free to try again.
And if I know anything about Trump, he'll start talking about Iceland next. Give him an inch he'll take a mile.
It's on the other side of the north pole. Several thousands of kilometers away.
Edit: I see now why Europe must own and control Alaska.
But Trump said climate change is a hoax!
So I guess we have to look to irrational reasons.
You can't just go mine there. For one no-one can own land. A permit is also not something you just get and the laws protecting the environment are much harsher than US laws.
The whole rationale is quite Russian in style - they have to invade Ukraine because it was an existential threat - it never was - they have to denazifi it - it's run by a democratically elected jewish comedian. And similarly Trump has to take Greenland before Russia or China does - there's no way that was happening. The whole thing is rather mafia style in that the reasons are ridiculous as a way of showing power, like we need money to protect you in that case.
That said the US has been interested in acquiring Greenland for ages.
In any case, the point stands: I would argue that France is willing to put a dozen soldiers in Greenland because it is pretty sure that they won’t be killed by the US, as opposed to sending even a single soldier to Kiev where there is a reasonable chance that they might get killed and we might have to do more than just send money and guns.
If the U.S. seized Nuuk, and Europe mustered a counter-invasion, it would be comparable.
How is that obvious? Unless you have invested in a post-WW3 world.
vinni2•3w ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/world/europe/trump-greenl...
nubg•3w ago
Spooky times, let's hope things fizzle out back to a rule based Pax Americana.
Edit: Interestingly, the likelyhood of things fizzling out would jump up quite a bit if Trump or Putin were to die. I think the US system of government is prone to electing Trumps, but it's not a given, I think the cult of personality would die and things would relax for now.
general1465•3w ago
No resources for that. Russians are increasingly using horses instead of mechanization like IFVs or APCs. If he would try it, then it would open second frontline with Europe in Baltics while still fighting with Ukrainians. Awfully stupid idea.
ben_w•3w ago
Yes. But would that stop him?
MentatOnMelange•3w ago
vinni2•3w ago
cosmicgadget•3w ago
ben_w•3w ago
Remember, the US already has treaty rights to build bases: the defence strategy of Greenland before this nonsense was "be a member of NATO, nobody would be dumb enough to attack us because if they did the USA would defend us".
AlotOfReading•3w ago
The question is whether the US is willing to pay the costs to do so. Sending European troops is attempting to raise the costs of invasion so that any rational actor would decide against it. Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if all the parties involved were rational actors.
arethuza•3w ago
AlotOfReading•3w ago
MentatOnMelange•3w ago
More importantly though, its an incredibly cold and unhospitable place thats inhabited by 50k people whose little kids have more arctic survival skills than US special forces and who really, really don't want us there. Unlike Afghanistan, you can't patrol the skies nonstop with drones either due to the cold.
Basically, this isn't a choice between owning Greenland or keeping all our allies. Its a choice between keeping all our allies vs getting bogged down into the ultimate guerilla war and suddenly having nothing but hostile neighbors to the north.
jfengel•3w ago
If Greenland really did become a state, they'd actually have a fair bit of political power. At least, until oil companies shipped in tens of thousands of employees. I can't see the Greenlanders laying IEDs for American troops, but I suppose I can see them making life very, very hard for civilians.
MentatOnMelange•3w ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
Beretta_Vexee•3w ago
It is a giant island in the Arctic Ocean, populated by Inuit and people born on a pair of skis. If they don't want you here, they will make sure you freeze to death in a troop transporter stuck in the snow.
It would destroy NATO, the global financial system, our supply chains are so intertwined that pharmaceuticals, air transport, and most advanced technologies would be completely disrupted for years.
Intellectual property rights, judicial cooperation, international recognition, and all those things would be dead.
Our lives would be disrupted beyond imagination.
jfengel•3w ago
But it meant that the US will have fired shots at NATO soldiers, rather than just walking in and declaring themselves in charge. That raises the political and economic stakes, if not the military ones.
It's making absolutely clear that this means the end of NATO, and puts all EU/US relationships in doubt. It could even mean that we were automatically at war. They're hoping that somebody around the President will consider that too high a price to pay. Which is a long shot, but is probably the least-worst option.
ryandvm•3w ago
The entire world is just rooting for Father Time on this particular problem.
Dah00n•3w ago
Zigurd•3w ago
pjc50•3w ago