Trump dreams of a Maga empire – but he’s more likely to leave us a nuclear hellscape | Alexander Hurst

[hellsbelle@sh.itjust.works]

During the cold war, the world narrowly escaped (nuclear war) more than once. Among the near misses, two are particularly harrowing. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, 36-year-old Vasili Arkhipov, a senior officer on a Soviet submarine, averted nuclear conflict after his two fellow commanders thought non-lethal depth charges exploding around them were the outbreak of war. In 1983, the Soviet officer Stanislov Petrov refused to believe that a launch warning flashing on a radar system was actually an American first strike, and simply decided not to report the incident up the chain of command.

A decade later in 1994 Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, relinquished its nuclear warheads as part of a complete nuclear disarmament. It did so in exchange for iron-clad security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia. Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine (or, worse, active sabotage by cutting it off from some intelligence sharing) and in-process realignment of the US with Vladimir Putin’s geostrategic objectives guarantees that no state will ever do anything similar in the future.

For months, maps floating around the Maga-sphere have shown quite clearly what the Trump regime’s vision of the world is, and what its intent is. It’s a vision Trump has made little effort to conceal. As if they were playing the board game Risk, they have decided that the “winning strategy” is to take and hold North America. The first economic shot has been launched at forcibly making Canada the “51st state” – and during his address to the US Congress, Trump was equally explicit that Greenland (“we’re going to get it one way or another”) and the Panama canal will be next.

Their dark vision is that an imperial America will do as it wants in its corner of the world, as will China and Russia in theirs. The European Union, however, will be a special target of their hostility, ire and predation because it stands for everything that they appear to want to bury: the rule of law, constraints on the powerful, equal sovereignty for the small, government as a bulwark against corruption rather than its enabler, multilateral action to tackle grave ecological and climate crises instead of the wanton spoliation of the earth.

[arghblarg@lemmy.ca]

Can someone make a filter that auto-converts x.com links to xcancel.com? No need to give the fascist grand vizier extra clicks. (Scary map BTW - BC, AB, SK each split into north and south states?)