I don't read (listen to, pay attention to, watch coverage of etc) current affairs or political broadcasts sorry propaganda... but I'll make a brief exception when it includes authors or intellectuals I respect (like here #1417322) and their work happen to come before my eyes #1417578 (delivered by the same algos, I presume, that I try urgently to avoid and reject...)

Turns out Trump won Davos

I was watching the handball euros (#1416318), so I wasn't sure whatever the fuck "politicians" were doing in Switzerland this month could be won.

Here at Davos, I’ve heard numerous versions of this sentiment: “We Europeans/Canadians stood up to Trump and forced him to retreat. This is a major victory for the rules-based international order.” [...] My long-standing contrarian rule is that the Davos consensus is always wrong.

"This is a very wrong take""This is a very wrong take"

Turns out:

Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.

In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe’s elite, not to mention Canada’s. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States. “Greenland has to be acquired,” he wrote on the eve of his arrival in Switzerland. “Denmark and its European allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” He did not rule out military action. He threatened to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all countries that resisted. And he posted memes of maps of Denmark (and Canada) cloaked in the Stars and Stripes and an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on “Greenland—U.S. Territory Est. 2026.”
To stoke up the crowd ahead of the president’s arrival, Trump’s cabinet members chimed in.

That is, I suppose(?), how you high-jack a meeting of the utmost elites.

As I’ve argued, the second Trump administration’s allusions to the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt lend a historical veneer to his threats of annexation.

(apparently Roosevelt tried to get his hands on Cuba; and maintain Alaskan Yukon coast).
LOL:

In a show of force that must have made Bessent reach for the smelling salts, the Baltic states, Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden all called for retaliation if Trump followed through on his tariffs threat.

Beautiful Mr. Orange:

The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing.

why did he threaten it? Just for the lolz? Certainly, there was much hilarity among U.S. government staffers at Davos as they watched the president’s speech in the USA House at Promenade 95. They certainly were in on the joke. But I am pretty sure there was more going on here than mere presidential trolling.

So yeah, it was all a complete disaster, a ruse, a nonsense, a waste-everyone's-time play. R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S.

Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally.

I therefore offer the hypothesis that all the fuss about Greenland was a classic example of Trumpian maskirovka—a distraction similar to his claim that peace negotiations with Iran were continuing, just one day before the U.S. air strike on the Fordow nuclear facility.

archived: https://archive.md/hqXEF