Canada is breaking up with us.

I don't know the song lyrics for this, but a new relationship is being established:

Canada is going to start dating other guys.

Michael Nesmith of The Monkees wrote a song that almost works. Linda Ronstadt, then singing with The Stone Poneys, made the song popular: "A Different Drum," The lyrics don't quite explain the situation:

Goodbye, I'll be leavin'
I see no sense in this cryin' and grievin'
We'll both live a lot longer if you live without me

The problem with the song is that in the song the guy is too clingy and solicitous, and Ronstadt wants the opposite. She wants freedom from a guy being too nice. In the case of Canada, the problem is that the guy is a bossy jerk. The guy has started hanging out and admiring tough guys who get into fights. He barely pretends to be good. He steals stuff. He takes advantage of her. He hits her. The two can still be polite to one another -- after all, they are next door neighbors and have been through a lot together -- but for her own well-being, she is going to date other guys. Lots of other guys. Guys in different cliques. And she is going to start hanging out with other independent-minded girls like herself, maybe form a club with them.

I don't know the song for this situation. But I know the speech. Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote it himself. I have three points to share.

1. This speech is what a national leader sounds like. Clear-headed, reasonable, intelligent. It communicates reliability and purpose. The contrast with Trump's performance is night and day. So was the response by national and business leaders.

2. Carney announces a new era in its relationship with the U.S. There is no walking back Trump's words and behavior. This isn't a TACO -- Trump Always Chickens Out -- kiss-and-make-up situation. The Greenland threats are part of a big pattern that cannot be ignored. The United States boyfriend is now fundamentally unreliable. He isn't trustworthy. And he is violent. He has hit Canada on purpose, and there is no hiding the bruises. If you are dating a batterer, you've got to break up, for  your own safety, and if you want to keep your self-respect. 

3. Carney is letting the U.S. know that there will be other guys hanging out in the neighborhood, doing defense deals, trade deals, joint development deals. The U.S. took for granted that Canada wouldn't do anything to make it jealous. That deal is over. She will date who she wants when she wants.

Request of readers: if you know the right song and lyrics for Canada's situation, please put it in the comments or email it to me at peter.w.sage@gmail.com.

Here is the speech that got a thunderous standing ovation:

Address by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland

Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. 

This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable - the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.

It won't. So, what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. In it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? His answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world, unite!" 

He does not believe it. No one believes it. But he places the sign anyway - to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this "living within a lie." 

The system's power comes not from its truth but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing - when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.

It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, praised its principles, and benefited from its predictability. We could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. 

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

More recently, great powers began using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot "live within the lie" of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP-the architecture of collective problem solving — are greatly diminished. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions. They must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance, and supply chains. This impulse is understandable. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options.

When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. But let us be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. And there is another truth: if great powers abandon even the presence of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from 'transactionalism' become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. Buy insurance. Increase options. This rebuilds sovereignty-sovereignty which was once grounded in rules—but which will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This classic risk management comes at a price. But that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortress. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum. The question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to this new reality. 

We must. 

The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls — or whether we can do something more ambitious. Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumption that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security is no longer valid. 

Our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb has termed 'values-based realism' — or, to put it another way, we aim to be principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, respect for human rights. Pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values. 

We are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for the world as we wish it to be. Canada is calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values. We are prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world, the risks that this poses, and the stakes for what comes next.

We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength. We are building that strength at home. Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, capital gains and business investment, we have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade, and we are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, Al, critical minerals, new trade corridors, and beyond. We are doubling our defense spending by 2030 and are doing so in ways that builds our domestic industries. 

We are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the European Union, including joining SAFE, Europe's defence procurement arrangements. We have signed twelve other trade and security deals on four continents in the last six months. In the past few days, we have concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We are negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines, Mercosur. To help solve global problems, we are pursuing variable geometry- different coalitions for different issues, based on values and interests. On Ukraine, we are a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per-capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future. Our commitment to Article 5 is unwavering. We are working with our NATO allies (including the Nordic Baltic 8) to further secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, submarines, aircraft, and boots on the ground. On plurilateral trade, we are championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, creating a new trading block of 1.5 billion people. On critical minerals, we are forming buyer's clubs anchored in the G7 so that the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. On Al, we are cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure we will not ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers. 

This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on diminished institutions. It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. And it is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact. We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong - if we choose to wield it together.

Which brings me back to Havel. What would it mean for middle powers to "live in truth"? It means naming reality. Stop invoking the "rules-based international order" as though it still functions as advertised. Call the system what it is: a period where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion. It means acting consistently. Apply the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the hegemon to restore an order it is dismantling, create institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion. Building a strong domestic economy should always be every government's priority.

Diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy. Countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. We have capital, talent, and a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively.

And we have the values to which many others aspire. Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse, and free Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable, reliable partner—in a world that is anything but—a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term. Canada has something else: a recognition of what is happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. 

The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just. This is the task of the middle powers, who have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from a world of genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently.

And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

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The REAL message in Davos.

 I had intended to write about what a profound geopolitical error President Trump is making by threatening NATO with tariffs and a direct takeover of Greenland.

Trump has changed the world. 

Our great-grandchildren will learn in school about this turn of events and its consequences.

President Trump, speaking in Davos, this morning.

Instead, I will write about Trump's three messages. 

1. The denoted message about American strength, and our justification for taking possession of Greenland.

2. The real message Trump intends.

3. The received message absorbed and integrated into the world's leaders minds.

The first message, the denoted one, is that the USA is strong and that Denmark and NATO are weak and that realistically only the USA can defend Greenland. Moreover, we possessed it once, after Nazi Germany conquered Denmark in six hours, and then we foolishly gave it back, so it is really legitimately ours. Besides, we have been so generous to NATO and Europe for so long that we have already paid for it many times over. You owe us. Besides, we will put it to very good use, protecting ourselves (and the ungrateful Canada) from Russian and Chinese missiles.

The second message is Trump''s real message. I am strong and smart. You Europeans are stupid and weak. You are destroying yourselves by letting yourselves get overrun by non-Europeans; you foolishly believe the climate/carbon scam; you are cheapskates on your own defense and have sponged off us in trade and defense. The USA is so strong, and I personally am so very good at governing -- I really am, I am very, very good at this -- that I can go there and insult you and you  have no choice but to take it. The real message is Trump's contempt and insult. Trump can go there and shit on the floor and then rub your noses in the shit. Not only can Trump do it, he is doing it right now. And you won't like it, Trump knows full well, and the fact that you weaklings will put up with it, and try to make the best of it, and treat it as normal, proves my point.

The third message is the one with the biggest consequences. Trump has permanently re-positioned the United States. The world sees a president, elected and then after seeing who he is and what he did, was re-elected by voters and enabled by our Congress and courts, to be a raving bully. A loose cannon. A dark force full of resentments, in denial about his political opponents, a man who is so out of touch with reality that he gave a wild campaign rally speech at a meeting of world leaders. The weird, petty complaint about the Nobel Peace Prize isn't a one-off. Trump is really, truly like that. He really is going to finagle a way to seize territory from a NATO ally. He is lucid but crazy.  He is profoundly unreliable, which means the U.S. is profoundly unreliable. The U.S. isn't a bedrock of democracy. It isn't a bedrock of anything. The U.S. is a rogue state.

The world can never go back to the prior status quo. Americans chose this. We tolerate this. He is popular enough to retain power. Maybe every democratic country always has the ability to elect a rogue leader, but the U.S. supposedly had mechanisms in place not to elect and empower a man so flagrantly unsuited to holding power.  Nope. 

It is a bit like understanding that one's neighbor owns a pet lion, huge and potentially dangerous, but in fact generally tame -- then realizing that the lion was in fact very much a wild animal,, willful, absolutely uncontrollable, and hungry. Yikes!

There is no taking back this third message. This president can smile, he can make a deal, he might "purchase" Greenland under compulsion, there might be a kiss-and-make-up phase, but some things cannot be taken back. The world knows that Americans elected and re-elected a man who would come to Davos and rub their noses in his shit for the fun of it, and do anything he darned well wanted to do, other countries be damned.

They are busy making other arrangements to protect themselves.

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A Trump voter returns to finish the job.

A college classmate voted for Donald Trump.

Today he explains why.

I learned that Matt Naitove had voted for President Trump twice. Last Thursday I published his guest post that reported what he didn't like about Democrats. Today he says what he likes about Trump. 

Matt had a long career writing and editing material for Plastics Technology magazine. Matt told me he had Fox News on his home TV 12 hours a day, but that he doesn't watch it constantly. He said that six days a week he performs the chore of reading The New York Times.

I disagree with much of what Matt wrote. I expect many readers to sputter with frustration and objection as they read. But today is his turn.

Naitove

Guest Post by Matt Naitove

The Awful Truth: Six Reasons We Need Trump

After failing my last assignment for a guest post on Peter’s blog, it’s only fair that I complete the job. The question was simple, the answer less so. How did a son of solidly Democratic New York Jewish parents, educated at Harvard and Columbia Journalism School, become a Trump voter?

Last week, I got only so far as to enumerate the failings of the Democrat Party that alienated me. Peter now wants to know what are my positive reasons to vote for Trump.

Some readers will upbraid me for neglecting their litany of objections to Trump and his policies. But, as I said, my assignment is to identify the positives.

So, why is Donald Trump the essential leader for America at this time?

1. He does what so many other Presidents only talked about or hoped for.

• He closed the Southern Border to illegal immigration. Obama turned a lot of people back at the border; Biden (falsely) claimed he lacked authority on his own to dam the flood. Trump started building a modern, durable border wall equipped with electronic sensors in his first term and is completing it now. He has empowered the Border Patrol to do what it was created to do, not serve as concierges for new arrivals. He is pursuing dangerous illegals throughout the nation, not just at the border. His well publicized antipathy to mass immigration alone has staunched the inflow; and he repurposed the CBP One app (now CBP Home) to facilitate “self-deportation.” The results were immediate and (so far) lasting. The benefits to beleaguered cities (like NYC) and the blow to the child-trafficking and human-trafficking profits of the drug cartels are rebukes to the appalling policies of the previous administration.

• He has actively addressed wasteful government spending and rampant fraud. Every president rhetorically targets “waste, fraud & abuse.” Most presidents (Biden excepted) laud the value of minimizing fiscal deficits and the ballooning national debt. Trump created DOGE to attack the problem; its success has been limited, except in drawing public attention to the obscene waste of public tax money on cronyism, beyond-absurd pet projects, and money laundering among a maze of NGOs. Trump has made wide-ranging efforts to shrink, defund or abolish what he considers redundant, unproductive, or counterproductive Federal agencies. Though Trump opponents have enlisted a phalanx of lower-court judges to resist these efforts, Trump’s success, once again, is to educate the public to the waste and outright theft of their tax dollars.

• “Affordability” is not just a slogan or talking point for Trump, but a campaign of action. He has held inflation on a downward curve by curbing wasteful spending, launching an assault on crippling regulations that inhibit business growth and increase costs, and – above all – bringing down energy costs (see below). Prices have declined for some key foodstuffs (eggs!), medicines (rounding up drug companies to cut Medicare costs) and services (home mortgages). He is addressing others by selectively modifying tariffs and import deals. A catastrophic tax increase was forestalled by the One Big Beautiful Bill (with no help from Democrats), and a raft of tax breaks were instituted for all U.S. citizens, especiallythose at lower income levels (not the lie of “tax breaks for billionaires” squawked endlessly by Democrats).

• He is bringing more order to our chaotic healthcare system. Lower drug prices for Medicare is the most immediate effect. Current efforts are underway to design a payment system oriented to patients, not insurance companies, using HSAs to give subsidies directly to individuals, and releasing the shackles of Obamacare (ACA) that impose a limited menu of insurance plans, so that a free market can operate.

• Trump has done more than anyone to cultivate prospects for peace in the Middle East. He is building on the Abraham Accords created in his first term. He has repaired relations with Saudi Arabia, arguably our strongest ally in the region. He did what no other president dared to do in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, ending (for now, at least) their headlong rush to atomic weapons. (In his first term, he made good on past presidents’ promises to move our embassy to Jerusalem.)

• Trump (in his first term) forced NATO allies to increase their military spending that was far below mandated levels. That effort has continued with success.

• Trump acted to end (or critically weaken) the downward spiral to tyranny and alliance with America’s enemies (China, Russia, Iran) in Venezuela.

• Trump is pushing for a resolution of another threat to America’s security that many presidents have fretted about but not acted on: Greenland. Look beyond the bluster to recognize the important underlying issue and the first effort in living memory to move off the dime on this. Let’s also remember that Denmark already sold one of its territories, now the U.S. Virgin Islands, to us as recently as 1917.

• Trump’s capture of Maduro and assaults on drug boats offer the first hope in ages that the “war on drugs” may end better than the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

• While numerous past presidents have wished for a substantial banquet space at the White House, Trump is building it – at no public expense.

2. Trump ended the war on fossil fuels and acted on many fronts to reinforce America’s energy security and affordability. Energy is the fundamental cost component of the overall economy. Making it abundant, affordable and secure is the most basic economic policy.

• Increasing opportunities for oil/gas exploration and leasing.

• Removing environmental and other regulatory barriers to energy production. One of Trump’s first acts in his first term was to reverse the Obama halt on the previously approved Keystone XL pipeline (since halted again by Biden).

• Ending the subsidies for EVs and draconian emissions restrictions on gasoline and diesel vehicles that were intended to help force them out of the market.

• Abolishing regulations limiting market choice in appliances (and shower heads) that do little or nothing to improve the environment and mainly frustrate and insult consumers.

• Halting (or trying to halt) offshore wind farms that are being built over the national-security objections of the U.S. Navy (suppressed by the Biden Administration) and in willful violation of wildlife (birds) and marine-life protection laws. Trump is simply insisting on the environmental and national-security vetting of these projects that is required by law.

3. Trump has helped along a growing international trend toward awakening the public from the “Sleep of Reason” imposed on them by the climate-change cult of junk-science charlatans, careerist academics and opportunistic consultants – abetted by a gullible, ignorant and incurious popular press.

• Ensuring that the U.S. government does not contribute funds or prestige to agencies, international bodies, virtue-signaling treaties or publicity events (conferences) that promote phony alarums of climate catastrophe; fraudulent (knowingly or uncaringly unrealistic) demands for reduced standards of living by advanced societies; preposterous claims for “reparations” to poorer nations allegedly harmed by the environmental emissions of richer societies; and concurrent demands that emerging economies invest in costly and unreliable renewable energy instead of more functional and cost-efficient fossil-fuel power generation.

• Appointing an EPA Administrator (Lee Zeldin) with the good sense and guts to withdraw the senseless agency “finding” that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that is hazardous to humans and thus must be regulated by the Agency. So CO2 – plant food, the basis of all life on earth – is a pollutant? Might as well make the same finding about nitrogen (78% of the atmosphere) or H2O. They’re equally essential to life and equally hazardous under certain conditions. And CO2 has been part of the atmosphere since the earth began (a much larger part back then and only 0.04% now). Oxygen is more deserving of being termed a “pollutant” since it’s a relatively new addition to the atmosphere and had a dynamic effect on the earth’s topography, helping wash much of the early continents into the sea.

4. Donald Trump is restoring our military to be the strategic asset we need. Biden gave this lip service while presiding over the degradation of our services’ readiness across the board. (Clinton and Obama were actively hostile to the military.) Besides increasing Defense (or War) budgets, Trump appointed a new kind of Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has restored the prestige of military service and fostered a radical rethinking of procurement and war-fighting strategy needed to upset the sclerotic systems that threaten our security.

5. Trump is restoring a sense of freedom and fairness that was being eroded over previous administrations.

• The oppressive rule of “DEI” has been challenged. Terms such as whiteness, white privilege, critical race theory, and structural racism are no longer the cudgels they once were to beat dissenters into submission. Words like equity and inclusion have had their fraudulent trappings stripped away.

• Creeping encroachment by governments at all levels – abetted by corporations and academia – to police thought and speech and to disenfranchise promoters of “misinformation” and “disinformation” have been blocked. Threats of debanking and deplatforming – as befell Donald Trump, his family and numerous other conservatives – as well as blocking access to stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop in the NY Post, no longer bite as they did such a short time ago. 

• The nation at large is being forced to confront the motto of Chief Justice John Roberts: “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The Trump Administration is exposing how this applies to a myriad of programs throughout all levels of government as well as academia and corporate America designed to favor one group over others. The Administration denies the fiction that America has not advanced since 1860 or 1960. It dismisses the idea that present discrimination is the cure for past discrimination. It also objects to any group of Americans being regarded indefinitely as wards of the state.

6. Trump is a force for change, for shaking up the corrupt, sclerotic old ways. The Democrats (except maybe the Socialist wing) and the middle-of-the-road Republicans are happy to preserve the old grift and graft and comfy office perks. Donald Trump offers a ladder up from this foul ditch. Socialists offer a blind step into a darker abyss. I can see only one way to go.

 

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Ready or not, it's a new world.

Trump, on Greenland: "It will be done!!!"

Earlier yesterday, Trump wrote the premier of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. He felt snubbed:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Trump no longer pretends to be a fiduciary. He is the principal. He isn't a steward. He thinks like an owner. In either case, he wants his property to prosper, so Trump may not recognize the distinction. An owner can be utterly selfish. Help loyal friends. Punish enemies. Plunder. Graft. Favors. There is no such thing as a bribe. He is the state.

Trump has cleared the air on some areas of feel-good, civics-lesson mythology in America. 

     -- The "rules based order" is a sham and always has been. Trump ended the hypocrisy and self-delusion. Strong countries do what they want. Stephen Miller said it. It shocked people, not because it was wrong but because it was frank. No more pretending there is underlying moral benefit or fairness. 

    -- NATO is a sham and has been for years. The U.S. was never going to go to war and risk American lives to save the Baltic states from Russia, any more than we are now putting soldiers at risk in Ukraine. Trump said the frank truth about NATO's objection to a Greenland takeover: So what? 

"If it affects NATO, then it affects NATO. They need us more than we need them." 

Maybe Western Europe will spend its own money to build a strong unified military, and they will point it east. On the world's chessboard, Greenland is ours and it is about protecting us.

     -- Admit it: The role of the U.S. as global peacekeeper is too expensive to continue. We are abandoning that role and becoming a hemispheric power. Greenland belongs in our sphere. Trump can sell the Greenland acquisition to Americans as a matter of our security. It is a neglected vacant lot. Greenland has 50,000 residents, so Trump could offer $100,000 per resident for $5 billion, less than the cost of an aircraft carrier. They don't have a jungle to escape into to carry out a guerrilla war. We pacify them by occupying them or we can buy them off. We can do this. 

The American public, in its expression of self-government, gave leadership of our nation to Donald Trump. The levers of power that might constrain him are cowed by him, at least for now. The Democratic alternative to Trump is concentrated in prosperous urban centers. Democrats with presidential ambitions, including Rahm Emanuel and Gavin Newsom, say the Democratic brand is a negative.

Democrats are too weak, too accommodating of mass illegal immigration, too willing to allow public lawbreaking, insufficiently respectful of religion, insufficiently patriotic, too accommodating of niche minorities, and too concerned about climate at the expense of practicality. Democrats are unable to create safe, affordable living situations, even in places where they have overwhelming majorities and full operational control of the government. Democrats may not be able to fix their brand -- or want to. The party's most articulate spokespeople are people who come from those Democratic strongholds; they reaffirm those values and policies. 

With that choice, Americans picked Trump. He is venal and crazy, but he is strong and he promised to undo what people didn't like about Democrats.

By choosing Trump, Americans did not mean to make a profound shift in American foreign policy and its place in the world. But Trump comes as a package. We get authoritarianism. We get cronyism. We get rough deportation of immigrants. We get Trump's view of American empire. 

Like it or not, Americans chose this when they chose Trump.

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Easy Sunday: Trump's Nobel medal.

Trump accepted the medal that accompanies the Nobel Peace Prize, a prize awarded to someone else.

Even Greg Gutfeld on Fox had to play it for laughs.  Displaying someone else's diploma! Wearing someone else's Eagle Scout badge! Ha-ha!

I stay in touch with some of my high school, junior high, and elementary school friends. I asked them if they had saved any old awards that they could offer Trump in exchange for not blowing up NATO.

I offered this old debate trophy. DeVere Taylor, my beloved former debate coach at Medford High School, pulled it out of the school's display case when they closed the school building. He brought it to me and I stored it. I would happily offer it to Trump in exchange for ending his trade wars.

My best friend in junior high and high school, Jon Stong, was a much better debater than I was, and I was lucky to have him as a debate partner. He said he did not have a debate trophy of his own -- and he would thoroughly deserve it if I gave it to him. He declined. He has his own tokens, varsity letters from both Hedrick Junior High and Medford High School. Jon was early to mature and get his height. He was probably a full foot taller than I was in the eighth grade. He played basketball, ran track, and played the drums in the school band. He is willing to make a deal with Trump.

Jon ended up marrying the girl I first knew as Patti Clark at Roosevelt Elementary School, a pretty, peppy, and popular girl in third grade, and still. She matured into a woman who became known as Patricia, having outgrown "Patti." She didn't save anything from our Roosevelt Rough Riders days, but she does have this recognition plaque. It has a shiny gold color, giving it good trade value when dealing with Trump. I'll bet she would give it up in exchange for peace in the North Atlantic.  

Stan Horton was a Rough Rider, too. He saved multiple letters from Roosevelt, Hedrick Junior High, and Medford High, awarded for his work as team manager for multiple sports. That role led to sports reporting, calling in box scores that got published in the local newspaper, which was a cool achievement for a high school freshman. That early start led to his long career in journalism. 

Another two high school classmates, Sheryl Gerety and Bruce Winterhalder, married each other. Sheryl kept her Blue Bird and Camp Fire merit badges and displays them on this costume. She would trade them for world peace.

Bruce saved his old scouting merit badges, a pin from a Project Prometheus summer enrichment program, and, on the far right of the second photo, a Red Cross 11-gallon pin, recognizing his blood donations.

My intention in this Easy Sunday post is to be lighthearted. Look at all the stuff we keep! Look at how we hang onto these symbols of merit. We may have moved houses a dozen or more times since childhood, but we cannot quite bear to throw them away. We would willingly join Maria Corina Machado in offering them to Trump to feed his need for recognition, if we got better government in return.

There is a serious point, too. I think Trump looks ridiculous doing anything with the Nobel medal other than returning it to Machado and praising her work. He could have looked generous. He could have shown that he respected the work of other people. He could have looked big, in the character sense. It was an opportunity for grace. 

Couldn't a single aide have gotten through to him and told him what the situation required?  Apparently not.

I look at Bruce's 11-gallon pin with particular admiration and respect. In what world would someone else buy or borrow that pin and stand for photos smiling for the camera while wearing it? We would understand that for what it is: stolen honor. We don't admire or respect that kind of imposter. Quite the opposite.

Even Gutfeld laughs at the absurdity of it.

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American Greenland.

Trump doesn't want use of Greenland.

Trump wants to own it. 

Trump has been talking and posting:

"Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don't defend leases. And we'll have to defend Greenland,"

“Ownership is very important. Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.

“NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES, Anything less than that is unacceptable.”

I thought we were being trolled. Would Trump really destroy NATO in order to mark Greenland as ours? Doesn't Trump realize that the Mercader projection exaggerates Greenland's size? Does he realize that Greenland's 50,000 people are essentially on welfare, living on the generosity of Danish subsidies? 

Heads up: a movement is gathering to seize Greenland. The Wall Street Journal just nudged the U.S. toward making an American-owned Greenland a reality.

I had accepted as dispositive the feelings of the don't-meddle, isolationist portion of the MAGA base. It combines people like Marjorie Taylor Greene from the populist focus-on-people-here part of MAGA and the educated policy-oriented libertarian part of MAGA, represented well by Reason Magazine. They published this on Thursday.

The article quotes a Quinnipiac poll showing that 86 percent of Americans oppose the U.S. taking Greenland by force. It pairs that with a Reuters/Ipsos poll saying that only a "staggering four percent" of Americans favor it. The tone of the article is that this is the absolute-zero of support, since four percent of Americans in polls will favor even ridiculous, impossible things, i.e. that  "human-sized lizards wearing skin suits control the world."  Ha-ha. It was an invade-Greenland-don't-be-silly article.

They have better antenna into GOP politics than I do. They see what is underway, and don't like it. They were trying to laugh it off. Too late. Serious people are starting to legitimize Trump's ambitions.

The Wall Street Journal ran this article yesterday.

The article does not argue that the USA needs to own Greenland to cover it with military bases. That does not surprise me. Establishment portions of the GOP support NATO. The U.S. is part of the "Western" consensus of developed countries with the same cultural roots. Establishment Republicans don't want NATO to splinter. NATO buys American weapons. Europeans buy American exports. 

A shift is underway, however. The establishment GOP is making the serious argument that Trump does not make. Trump cannot help but communicate that Greenland as a trophy, something new to label, like the Gulf of America, and a matter of Trump vanity. The WSJ makes the case that Greenland is serious business.

Greenland is in the middle of the far-north Atlantic:

Greenland is close to Russian submarine routes:

Missiles, if fired from Russia and aimed at Washington, D.C., go over Greenland:

And this isn't some new-fangled dream of Trump. There is history and precedent. A takeover is almost a fait accompli.

We are seeing a shift in what political scientists call the Overton Window, when an idea sometimes goes from preposterous to normalized to obvious.

Trump moved seizing Greenland from unthinkable to radical and has been saying it often enough -- and with the credibility he has with his base -- that it was starting to be just barely acceptable. The WSJ is attempting to make it sensible. After all, look at those missile routes, and, besides, we already have people and equipment there.

A change is happening in the policy zeitgeist. The GOP is starting to like this idea; maybe Trump is right. The U.S. may need to damage NATO in order to get Greenland, but it will survive because it absolutely needs us, and maybe the trouble is worth it. Europe can defend itself. If Europe wants to defend Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and Poland, it's on them. They can do it if they pony up. The U.S. has a hemisphere to defend, and Greenland is part of the Americas.

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I read the news today, oh boy.

"Everything is beautiful in its own way. . .
Under God's heaven
The world's gonna find the way
There is none so blind
As he who will not see.
          Ray Stevens, "Everything is Beautiful," 1970

Donald Trump is a courageous, far-sighted genius, bringing peace, freedom, and justice to the world, and a stronger, safer, well-respected America. 

He was presented the Nobel Peace Prize! 

I watched a little Fox News while I made coffee this morning. 

Yesterday I published a long post by a college classmate who listed what is wrong with Democrats, as part of a longer project explaining why he supported President Trump. He wrote that he had Fox News on his TV 12 hours a day, although he later explained to college classmates that Fox was "on" the TV, mostly just setting the environment, and that he was in and out of the room over the course of the day. I can see why a person who wanted to be happy might want Fox News on TV. It is a reassuring voice in a troubled world.

It is not true that Fox keeps people angry and outraged -- not after Trump was re-elected. Fox tells its audience that it is a dangerous world -- crime, communists, immigrants, Christians under attack, China, antifa, and Democrats -- but we have a protector: Donald Trump! He is anywhere and everywhere, a mix of Superman, a sword-bearing Jesus, Achilles, and Churchill.

Fox News hosts are upbeat.

  -- Trump's courageous strikes on boats stopped the transportation of drugs from Latin America.  

  -- Trump's brilliant removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is already bringing a democratic, stable, pro-American government in Venezuela. 

  -- Trump set the stage for cheap oil -- our oil by right -- to come from Venezuelan oil fields. 

  -- Trump's threats telling Colombia's president Gustavo Petro that he is next to be deposed generated a conciliatory phone call from him to Trump. 

 -- Trump's tough talk against Iran and our Department of War's bunker-busting bombs, inspired demonstrations that may topple Iran's government.

  -- Trump's having federalized National Guard troops brought prompt safety to Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Portland. 

  -- Trump's no-nonsense ICE people are rounding up illegals everywhere.

  --  Trump is frightening anti-American, antifa-loving demonstrators and letting them know they are targets for arrest and worse.

  --  Trump is cleaning up fraud in Democratic cities.

Meanwhile I see liberal tears everywhere. Democrats who consume a media diet outside the Fox News universe are miserable. Some are talking about leaving the country. I read of worry that this is Germany, 1933, or later. Political writers warn people to stop reading their material if they are getting suicidal. Don't tune in, they say; just drop out. 

I have not dropped out, so I awoke today to what I consider inevitable but unwelcome news. Trump has pushed Canada -- reliable, friendly, Canada -- into a closer strategic and trade partnership with China. The U.S. had become an unreliable trading partner, ally, and neighbor.

Trump says he wants Greenland "and there's not a thing Denmark can do about it." Warships from NATO countries are heading to Greenland right now.

China recorded a $1.2 trillion trade surplus, its largest ever. China stepped in when U.S tariffs disrupted our trade relationships with other nations. 

We are losing manufacturing jobs:

Democrats view ICE as dangerous disruptors:

The Nobel Prize is a Rorschach test. Fox celebrated it as Maria Machado's recognition that Trump and Trump alone deserved it, so her giving to him it is a triumph of justice. 

Democrats see a needy and pathetic leader who demands being flattered and pandered to with a participation trophy. What an embarrassment!

So there we have the real divide in the U.S. It is between happy people and worried, frustrated ones. Republican Fox News viewers have a hero amid a sea of trouble. We are in good hands. "Don't worry. Be happy."

Democrats see those hands as malicious and dangerous, and they believe that the world is getting more perilous. "We are on the eve of destruction."

As for me, the Sgt. Pepper album said it:

 "I read the news today, oh boy."  And the news was rather sad.

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