He simply wants to make America bigger
https://www.wsj.com/politics/the-painting-that-explains-trumps-foreign-policy-c387323a
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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I don't know what people find so confusing about this. This is the business mindset. If you're not growing your failing. Empires get bigger by taking more land. Therefore the American empire must take more land. It's not rocket science. It's a child's view of 'winning'.
Exactly. Makes Putin look less bad for annexing Ukraine
This is his (stupid and selfdefeating) way to tackle four problems:
- US industry, especially those close to him, needs rare earth minerals. Canada and especially Greenland might provide those.
- Climate change will render large parts of the US uninhabitable in a few decades time. The US therefore needs Lebensraum. Now that’s a word he and his right-arm-raising friends love.
- Combining 2 and 1, the Arctic is melting. Exposing all sorts of new mineable goodies, and opening up new waterways. That will provide new economic opportunities as well as create new military threats. Owning Canada and Greenland would go a long way towards mitigating that.
- Trump sees a future in which a few large power blocks control the world. Currently, the US is one of the smallest of those: only 350 million where China and India are over 1 billion each, Europe is more than 500 million, etc. So the US needs to expand and grow its population size.
He's much too stupid for any of this, so I assume we're talking about the architects of project 2025 and/or putin?
Point 1 will be underscored regularly by his oligarch cronies, like Musk, Bezos and Brin - those that want to build rockets, electronics and batteries. They would love for the US to become totally independent of China, in minerals but also production capacity and price levels.
Point 3 will be mostly military talking points, and although it’s not in the media much, the race for the Arctic has been on for a while.
Points 2 and 4 are about raw power on the world stage, and that’s something Trump does understand. He doesn’t believe in cultural, diplomatic or economic power - only military. It also rhymes with nazi ideology about Lebensraum, a homeland for the ‘pure race’ that derives its global power from its purity. It might also involve a breeding ideology.
100%. T rump is just a tool that they put in place to do their bidding and to be a fall guy when the people finally get off their asses.
I think that's why they have musk around. Not only is he doing a lot of the controversial stuff but he's loaded
Could find some lebensraum in Russia instead?
- Expand and grown population size by deportig?
Yes, because they want "the right population." Fascist ideals are often contradictory and self-defeating. The Nazis could have had atomic weapons if they hadn't treated Jews as subhuman; that would have been a big help in their plans for world domination.
Their plan for solving their shrinking population is simple though; force everyone to have more babies. Remove all access to abortion, remove all access to contraception, destroy same sex marriage, destroy the ability for women to get divorced, destroy any form of social support that could help women who leave their partners, and offer incentives to families who have more children. Oh, and if course remove all child labour laws so families can afford to have more kids by sending them all off to jobs at Amazon when they're 12.
(There are concrete examples of Republicans pushing every single one of those policies, in case you weren't aware)
Basically, if you see women as nothing more than baby factories who don't deserve anything frivolous like rights, population growth seems like an easy problem to solve.
Republicans also question Trump's strategy, noting annexation would add millions of liberal-leaning voters and complicate American politics.
You mean millions of insurgents literally trying to murder every Republican politician and burn America to the ground. Not sure why their voting habits would be relevant in the face of that.
I think a lot of Americans are completely unaware of just how fucking furious we are at this flippant talk of destroying our country and subjugating our people. Even a lot of the ones who are unsympathetic to Trump don't understand just what this kind of talk means to us.
Yeah, voting in an American election would be the very last thing I’d be doing. There’s no way in hell I’m becoming American while I’m still alive (and same goes for everyone I’ve talked to here in Canada)
Even the most non violent people I’ve heard say they’d fight to remain sovereign. Nobody here wants this
Yeah they don't realize they're getting into an Afghanistan or Vietnam but where their homeland is wide open to cross border attacks.
So is the poster in the illustrative photo
I mean it really isn't confusing if you look at it through the lens of Putin told his lackey to fuck up everything he could concentrating on wrecking our strongest trading and defense relationships.
Seen through that lens it's very clear what the agenda is: Weaken the US and its allies.
The Canadians are our homies, why would orange want to hurt our homie? They've been with us thru thick and thin, and now orange wants to fuck things up for us? Don't think we want this either dear Canadians, those ball guzzlers just regurgitate whatever orange says. Even if it hurts us, by Canadian goods only until orange leaves office, if not sooner because homies should only kiss, not attack.
It’s not confusing - they know climate change is real and they want more northern territories for when the shit hits the fan so they have somewhere to go
Can’t stop big oil though because you can’t run a military on batteries yet and besides, muh Raytheon stock
It's not really confusing. His whole strategy, as we saw during his first term, is to do and say so much outrageous stuff that no particular scandal can stick with him. He also thinks being a bully is being a good businessman.
I doubt he would actually want to annex anywhere, but it's easy ragebait that he can keep bringing up to keep news on that and off of his crimes.
Bull pucks. The man isn’t playing 4-D chess with the News, he’s not even do a deliberate Gish-Gallop. He’s just saying the first thing that pops in to his head. And right now that’s I want to go down in history as the greatest president ever. He thinks if he expands the US he’ll be bigger then Jefferson.
I don't agree. I think he will really do it. Spewing out everything at once is benefitting him/project 2025 but it would be a mistake to think it's just talk at this point. That's why Canadian politicians are being so strong on this. It's really happening.
Agreed. The outlandish stuff is actually a little bit safer. Actually dangerous geopolitical stuff that might kick off something he can't control, because it might realistically happen, he avoids like the plague unless it carries some kind of strong benefit to him personally. He just likes to talk shit because it's fun. I don't think it is any more complicated than that.
I suspect that this is why Musk was brought in. Musk is actually willing to take an axe to the main pillars of the building, in a lot more energetic and systematized fashion than Trump would be inclined to.
"Canada only works as a state," Trump said Thursday. "We don’t need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be the most incredible country, visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense. It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state."
They're all "artificial" lines Donald
Trump sees the world through the lens of autarky. It's like the man fell out of the 18th century. He thinks nations are these self-sufficient organisms living on the planet, competing for resources, etc. He thinks trade means dependency and weakness, rather than mutual benefit and specialization. The man has never had to share anything with anyone in his entire life; it's not surprising he would have such a warped world view.
That is what he means by "Canada only works as a (US) state." The US really could make a decent play at autarky. The US gets about 30% of its GDP from trade; Canada gets 70%. It's foolish to try to do it overnight. But if the US wanted to make an attempt at autarky, and made the transition over decades? The US could pull that off. It would mean being poorer than we would be otherwise. We would have to accept more expensive and lower quality goods, but we could do it. The US has a large enough land area, population, and resource base that it could, on its own, maintain an industrial society completely from domestic resources.
Canada? It would have a much, much harder time at autarky. If both the US and Canada forever closed all their international borders tomorrow, Canada would end up a lot worse off than the US. Canada, as an island nation unto itself, would have a really hard time surviving.
Of course, there's no damn reason that nations need to survive by autarky. They're not independent islands. And we all grow richer by specialization and trade. But that fundamentally is not how Trump sees the world.
It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state.
Wrong word, Donald. You mean "coveted." You don't cherish Canada, you covet it.
Yet the line south of Texas is inviolable, sacred, a proud bulwark...
"We don’t need anything they have [...]"
I say again, "okay, Dougie, blink the lights a bit."
Shut down 4 red states for the weekend and see how it goes.
Each province should be a state! We will be come blue as a country and can have Medicare for all and high speed rail.
No chance. Canada would be a guerilla war zone for many, many years. One of Canadian’s most important identities is being not American.
Why believe Congressional Republicans at their word when they say they don't support this talk or don't know where it is coming from? They're collaborator filth. They will "suddenly" fall in line when something actionable is put forth.
They could show their disapproval by impeaching Trump. They would never though.
The cost both monetarily and in manpower to invade Canada would be astronomical
Don't forget the cost on the souls of the American people for the betrayal.
It might be confusing dumb muricans, but its pissing canadians off
It's not confusing, he's a megalomaniac who thinks foreign policy should resemble a game of Risk. Outside a tight circle of influence, everyone else is disposable meat that annoys him and deserves whatever punishment they receive. It's not new behavior.
How tight is that circle? Mr Trump seemed to abandon Mr Giuliani at a crucial time, and I thought the two were thick as thieves.
Giuliani was a useful idiot with a law degree and a certain amount of 9/11 good will. Better idiots with fewer ethical standards and law degrees are throwing themselves at him, and he doesn't need to pretend to give a fuck about American lives or first responders now that he's in power. Like everyone else who rode the 9/11 wave and thought it was amazing for poll numbers and easy fundraising.
Republicans: I vigorously maintain that dementia is, in fact, pretty fucking cool.
Climate change will make the southern 2/3 of the USA unlivable within a few decades. Canada has a lot of land. Trump’s teamwants it and the resources within.
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