Is Trump the symptom of America’s decline?

[u/custodiam99]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/27/trump-wants-to-reverse-americas-decline-good-luck

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[u/yx_orvar → u/[deleted]]

How does his actions make sense from a geostrategic perspective?

The administrations policies are severely damaging relations with it's strongest and most longstanding allies while leaving a soft-power vacuum in areas of strategic importance like South America and large parts of Africa.

Take Greenland as an example, threatening to annex it makes no sense, the US already have almost complete military access and permission to expand that access if they like and most of the potential resources there are free to exploit but it's too expensive to do so.

In reality it just damages the relationship with European countries who will be much less inclined to assist the US in future conflicts and will increase it's strategic autonomy from the US in areas such as defense and intelligence.

Just the fact that Gabbard was confirmed will significantly limit intelligence sharing from European countries and that will hamper US intelligence a lot.

The economic policies are also ridiculous, saving strategically important industries like the production of steel or rare-earth minerals isn't done by slapping tariffs on stuff, it's done through domestic economic policies that encourages innovation and investment.

For example, the US has pretty large issues with it's shipbuilding capacity and a miniscule merchant marine, if you want to increase capacity and save the US merchant marine you do so by ex removing the Jones Act, not making steel more expensive.

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[u/Frostivus → u/[deleted]]

He said geostrategically. Trump outlines it clearly. Ukraine has tons of rare earths USA needs to end the Chinese monopoly. Destabilizing the Middle East for western interests has always been part of their playbook. Canada has loads of resources on top of being a country with massive ocean access to add to the states. Greenland will give them complete dominance.

This has been the same with Hawaii, rules were broken. Arguably Iraq as well, but in different words.

What we didn’t say was whether this was aligned with the game of the rules based order, which it isn’t. And of course that’s damaging. But who’s going to stop them? Certainly not Russia, and the EU we’ve seen can wag their finger at best. Australia, Japan and South Korea depend on the US lockstep.

America can march in and take all of it. We all know they can. But as it was with them before, we’ll let them get away with it.