>>87980
I hope not. I really, really hope not. Trump likes the over-the-top crazy talk and I hope that's what this is.
I think that in the future historians will say "Putin, Xi, and Khameni fur 20+ years said 'might is right! no rules! fluff you all, we do what we want!' and Trump said 'oh, is that the game we're playing now? hold my beer."
I will admit to having some reservations about what some memers are calling "the Yoinkening," in which a certain tinpot despot who had spent the past decade saying "Come and get me, you cowards! you don't have the balls!" quite abruptly found himself a guest of the President. Trump may or may not have said "The elites don't want you to know this, but Maduros are free. You can just go to South America and take them home. I have two Maduros in the White House basement." I won't say he wasn't an enemy and a brutal dictator, or that he didn't have it coming, but to the rest of the world it had to look really heavy-handed. If the whole world is thinks it resembles a visit from the Marines on behalf of the United Fruit Company I can hardly blame them.
If Trump wanted to be feared it was a good first step.
I can only conclude from it that he has decided that the US doesn't need allies, just vassals kept in line by fear and only fear. "Oderint dum metuant" sounds totally badass but when you make it the animating spirit of your fureign policy, it means no one anywhere ever trusts you again and no one anywhere ever cooperates with you willingly again, ever, in even the gravest of matters.
Making these kinds of open threats against another NATO member nation is the kind of thing Putin and Xi couldn't ever even have dreamed of asking their propagandists to write up as preposterous fiction, yet here we are. It makes China look like the adult in the room and it's going to bite us on the ass. It leaves me shaking my head. Of all the things upon which Trump could have chosen to spend his very finite political capital, why this?