> Which is exactly what needs to happen. /---/ I don't see a problem with this.
Representatives of the US government do not share this sentiment and throw temper tantrums all the time. One example of many:
BRUSSELS — U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau on Wednesday slammed European NATO allies for prioritizing their own defense industry over American arms suppliers, according to three NATO diplomats. /---/ Landau, a longtime NATO skeptic who spoke first at the closed-door meeting, told ministers not to “bully” his country’s defense firms out of participating in Europe’s rearmament.
https://www.politico.eu/article/christopher-landau-top-us-of...The expectations seems to have been that elevated military spending would flow to US arms manufacturers. Instead, it is flowing to European manufacturers, making them more competitive and reducing the influence that the US government had through export controls, which essentially gave the US veto power over the foreign and defence policies of other countries. That influence is now rapidly waning.
> That sounds like performative politics.
Certainly not. This was an European country preparing for an attack by a NATO ally. The forces on Greenland were issued live ammo and explosives to sabotage airports to prevent US airborne attacks from establishing bridgeheads, and ordered to engage the invading force without further instructions from the high command. Nothing about this is performative, especially given that it was not revealed to the public at the time.
This was the moment when trust was broken beyond repair. No amount of flowers or apologies will restore the trust that was before. It is perhaps one of the most important events of the past decade in US-EU relations and a fundamental shift in the understanding that had stood since 1949 when NATO was established.
> We don't need the US industrial base ramping up for the Ukraine war. We need it ramping up for the war with China.
And how's it going? 400 Patriot missiles were manufactured in 2022. After years of "ramping up production", 620 were manufactured in 2025. The US inventory at the start of 2026 was 2300 missiles, 1700 of which were pointlessly wasted on Iran. It will take years to restore even the fairly small inventory (judging by how many were consumed in the war) that was at the start of the year, let alone anything needed for a major war. The picture with dumb munitions like 155mm artillery shells isn't much better.
> The point of a diplomat is not to go and insult the people you're communicating with, it's to achieve results through diplomatic means.
A fair bit of latitude separates insulting someone from publicly licking their asshole and going, "Yum! So tasty!"
There's a reason why the US government has not achieved any meaningful concessions from Russia since the 2021 ultimatum. The endless talks with Witkoff serve only as a humiliation ritual. Putin even got to walk down a red carpet on US soil while US officers saluted him, all without giving anything in return. Allegedly, that embarrassing Alaska summit happened because Witkoff misunderstood what Russians meant by "withdrawal from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson". He mistook Russian demand for Ukraine to withdraw from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson for an offer by Russia to withdraw its own forces. This led Trump to immediately annouce the summit in Alaska that produced flashy photos for Russian newspapers, but nothing else. My God, what a bunch of retards. They don't even understand what's being told to them, and you're trying to condescendingly convince me that they're playing clever reverse psychology on Europe. It's time to face the reality.