President Donald Trump has said the U.S. will revisit its stance on Greenland in the coming weeks.
Asked if he expected to take action on the territory, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday: “Let’s talk about Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine. We’ll worry about Greenland in about two months. Let’s talk about Greenland in 20 days.”
He added: “We need Greenland from a national security situation. It’s so strategic.”
Exactly, it’s not booming, but it is kind of carrying on. Russia stopped reporting it’s interest rate when it was around 20% and going up, IIRC. The post-covid US rate peaked at 6% or so. They’ve started figuratively burning the furniture - all maintenance and secondary industries get squeezed, the less-beloved oligarchs get squeezed, production (such as it is) moves to military stuff that’s destined to be blown up anyway, as opposed to future sources of revenue.
Mainstream journalism isn’t the best source about this kind of thing, not because they’re dishonest or incompetent, but because they’re allergic to statistics, and the tone can be anything. On the flipside, you’d think Ukraine is going to run out of territory any moment, going by the reporting, when in actuality the front lines have barely moved since the initial stages of the war. Adiivka and Pokrovsk are not major centers. Perun on YouTube is a military logistics person, and has some nice, really detailed videos.
The question is when he runs out, and that’s harder to say. Yours truly guessed 15 months a few months back. One could also guess years, or weeks. Forever defies basic logic about how the supply chains work right now. There’s also a question about what happens then - can they keep going and sending soldiers through an economic collapse?
Ukraine couldn’t last years, but will last weeks.
My calculation is that China will step in to bail Russia out, as that would sediment Russia as a true vassal to China, and maybe even take some territories from Russia in the process.
I’d argue that having a desperate population is good for the war machine, as the military class are then the only subset of the population that enjoy some sort of comfort (this is analogous to how military families enjoyed certain privileges even as Japan was starving at the end of World War 2).
I really wish I’m wrong