With Donald Trump doubling down on his threats to take over Greenland, saying there is “no going back,” MS NOW host Chris Hayes wondered Tuesday night whether the United States is now the “bad guy” since it appears to be “acting like an Axis power.”
“These allies are becoming aware that the most powerful person in the world is a danger and threat to it, and making the world order unstable,” Hayes asserted. “And that means we’re all in a lot of trouble.”
In recent weeks, the president has resumed his fixation with annexing the semi-autonomous Danish territory, insisting that it was necessary for national security that the U.S. take control of Greenland. At the same time, Trump had initially refused to rule out the use of American military force to seize the large island, further escalating tensions with Denmark and other NATO allies.
“The government of Greenland, and the Danish ministry of defense have therefore decided to continue the Danish armed forces’ increased exercise activity in Greenland, in close cooperation with NATO allies,” the governments of Greenland and Denmark said in a statement last week. “From today, there will be an expanded military presence in and around Greenland.”
With several European nations sending military personnel to Greenland in recent days and Denmark warning that an attack on the territory would all but end NATO, Trump has ratcheted up his threats. He’s said he’d add a 10 percent tariff on Denmark and several other European countries beginning in February if they continued to oppose his takeover of Greenland.
On top of that, the president has suggested that his anger over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize could be feeding into his maximalist desire to snatch the sovereign territory of a NATO ally.
“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 raged in a message to the Norwegian prime minister, blaming him for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision.
Ahead of Trump’s visit to Davos, where he continued to press his case that America was “the only country” that could secure Greenland while now asserting that he “won’t use force,” Hayes devoted the top of his Tuesday night program to sounding the alarm bells about the Trump administration’s apparent push to destroy the United States; long-standing alliances.
“Americans electing Donald Trump is not just our problem,” the MS NOW star bemoaned. “We have made it the world’s problem because we have made ourselves the center of the global order. And the post-World War II global order has been predicated basically on U.S. hegemony.”
While acknowledging that the post-war hegemony has been “abused egregiously” in “unforgivable ways,” such as in Vietnam and Iraq, Hayes added that it has also served as a “world war avoidance machine with the U.S. at the center” and has largely been successful in that goal.
However, with the president now taking an expansionist tack that could blow up the North Atlantic security pact, the progressive host compared the United States’ current foreign policy stance to that of the Axis nations – Japan, Italy and Germany – the Allies defeated in World War II.
“And what we are dealing with today is what happens when the winners of World War II, one of them, realized the order they built is crumbling and that the global hegemon is sounding and maybe acting now like an Axis power,” Hayes sighed.
“Maybe we’re the bad guys. And these allies are getting a daunting awareness that Americans in the anti-Trump camp have had from day one, something that’s been clear from the first day that he was sworn in when he unilaterally pardoned all the January 6th insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol on his behalf, including the ones that beat the cops on the head and the ones convicted of seditious conspiracy,” he continued. “These allies are becoming aware that the most powerful person in the world is a danger and threat to it, and making the world order unstable. And that means we’re all in a lot of trouble.”
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Trump lashes out at Nato and Europe as he renews Greenland threats – latest
Trump promises not to use force to take Greenland but still wants it to be part of US
