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If I had a hammer…
To think Ted Cruz was partially on the money when he said in 2016 that "Donald might wake up one morning and nuke Denmark".

What has happened to the US...

Never thought I'd see NATO under such pressure in my lifetime.
A badge of honor. Although it's good to be cautious about retaliatory measures, it is perhaps time to think about imposing a digital services tax.

That being said, it's quite weird that these tariffs are imposed only on some EU countries (plus UK). How could that possibly work? EU companies can just export goods via other EU countries.

We will soon discover if the EU actually as a spine or is just a bendover for the US...(My money is on the latter, and I'm from EU)
I am wondering why Trump seems so eager to turn America back into a 19th-century. Slavery next on his agenda?
He's on a race because he knows his time is limited, eventually the Epstein files will be exposed. Time will tell.
I thought you guys were already doing slavery but just calling it penal labor.
This is great news, though a higher percentage would be welcome. The sooner Europe rips off the bandaid, the better.
I'm not sure how it's great news? I miss they days when the US didn't behave like Russia.
Totally bizarre to watch the US transform from the endearingly crazy and rich friend to the one who holds you at gunpoint and robs you.
Putin's asset, propped to dismantle the US and western alliances.
And the question is, What the hell is in the Epstein files that this is needed.... :-)
There's no reason for the US to own Greenland except for the hyperfixation of one man. I hate that this is the world we continue to live in.
As a American, given what the US is becoming now, also given that Denmark actually has reliable public healthcare and the US canceled it for its own people, Greenland is better off staying with Denmark than with the US. If Russia were to invade, NATO still holds.

This is about more oil mining, about Trump appeasing to his oil friends, considering Greenland very likely has a substantial quantity of it.

> Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland would face the tariff and that it would climb to 25% on June 1 if a deal is not in place for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by the United States
Me wonders how many millions of peasants he is ready to throw into the wood chipper to pay for this. Just kidding, of course I know it's all of them.
I wish Europe would just push back. More than what they are currently. There is so much potential there, but somehow the EU all look at the US as some form of idealogical father figure. Excuse the hyperbolic-talk.
The EU is the more reasonable actor here. Making a reactionary move, even one that would feel good, wouldn't be the best move.

The USA is in the process of systematically demolishing it's soft power around the world.

The EU is like a super tanker that takes a long time turning and, make no mistake, it is turning away from the USA.

The push back will be felt for years and decades.

What a time to be (still) alive.

When we look back in a few years and ask the question: who actually got to pay for the Epstein crimes and coverups, we come to the surprising answer it is the Greenlandes and other innocent societies that got ripped apart by this maniac and his supporters.

Also the entire economy. Stocks are at an all time high on both sides of the Atlantic but the real world economy is struggling.
Since the only thing Trump understands is force, I am looking forward to the retaliation from and military positioning of EU member states to defend Greenland. Perhaps it is what is needed to finally impeach.
I liked this bit by Doctorow recently https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/

If you're getting tariffs anyway, why not just take the yoke of American business protection laws off your shoulders? Let French engineers sell jailbreaking hardware for iphones, or Romanian developers sell unlock keys for John Deere tractors.

reverse engineering -everything-technological- was a national/state-funded (amateur and also professional) sport not so long ago, in quite a few countries around..
So they will make the paperwork to ship from an EU country that doesn’t face the extra tariffs? EU is a single market. That’s the whole point of EU.
That would be falsifying the country of origin. The fact that the ship sailed from Greece or whatever doesn't change the fact the part was made in France say.
With this the EU-US tariff deal from earlier goes down in flames. It apparently wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Not surprising given how Trump and the fascist MAGA crowd acts.

The UK are in a precarious spot though due to not being inside the EU single market and are forced to find their own way out with a much weaker hand.

Brexit forever and ever coming back to haunt the UK.

Why didn't Russia think of that? They could have just placed tariffs on France, Germany, the UK, etc. if they don't facilitate Russia purchasing Ukraine for a price of their choice /s
See the recent news about Canada strengthening economic ties with China and welcoming them into their auto market. This wouldn’t have happened in a million years had it not been for US tariffs and hostilities towards Canada. America is truly uniting the world (against them).
Whitelands or Anglosphere will always be cooperating and coordinating because blood is thicker than water. So all these developments of Canada moving closer to China are superficial. When push comes to shove, the real affinities or allegiances will be revealed, ie the anglosphere will stick together.
So you think that the Canadians or the Danish love you for your skin color(?) but you don't do the same, and just threaten them and take their lands? This doesn't make any sense.
So in order to threaten our great continent and civilisation, Trump is threatening to raise taxes on Americans. The USA is so cringe.
It's about time for EU to put 50% tax on American digital services, and get rid of all Microsoft products in public sector.
The downstream effects for America of this can be so insane that this might be the reason that the bubble might pop in the first place when reality sets in.

Somebody should do a cost analysis of this and how it would impact S&P and the downstream effects of that as well and so on.

Let’s see Europe survive without American tech
My impression as a European is that trust in the United States has now been burned, and that companies are slowly, but inexorably, completely rethinking their dependence on the U.S. I believe this is a process that is not reversible in the medium term.

Trump, like any politician, will sooner or later pass. How many institutional reforms will the United States have to undertake, and how long will it take before the world trusts them again?

The thing is that, even if Trump never becomes a full-out authoritarian, sooner or later someone will follow that path and do so (unless there are institutional reforms with teeth after Trump is gone). I don't trust the US to remain a real democracy long-term, even after Trump is gone.
This is correct. Our company (about 40 people in the engineering team) just did a painful move from homegrown orchestration of EC2 instances to containerized ECS/Fargate.

We will now move to some form of "pure" EU-hosted K8s. No more AWS. I bet we will end up saving lots of money too.

Kubernetes was always the next step. We just didn't know the trigger would be the US going _this_ hostile.

Our marketing director chipped in and thinks it will be worth quite a lot if we can show/say that our service is completely independent of the US - but she wants to say it more diplomatically - exactly how is tbd. I disagree. We should just write it out loud and be proud about it. We'll see.

Perhaps: "We work and live in X land. We run all of services in X land, in facilities owned by people living in X land.

That's happening all over Europe but very quietly. The thing to watch is earnings reports of Q1 2027, that's when these chickens will come home to roost. Lots of contracts renew at the end of the year, or not...
So Trump doesn't like the fact that some European countries dare to oppose his dictat, so in response he's going to... raise the prices on US consumers?
Yeah, it's crazy. Punishing Europe by increasing American's cost of living.