### When Donald Trump first started talking about turning Greenland into US property, he pretended to care about what its people would like to see happen. Trump and his associates are now dropping the pretense and threatening to use brute force. * * * A poll last January showed 85 percent of Greenlanders are against becoming part of the US. Efforts to influence the Greenlandic people since then haven’t shifted the dial enough for Donald Trump’s liking, so he’s ramping up the coercive pressure. (Nicole Combeau / Bloomberg via Getty Images It’s that time of year again. On December 22, 2025, exactly twelve months after appointing venture capitalist Ken Howery as US ambassador to Denmark with the message that US “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Donald Trump named Jeff Landry as his special envoy to Greenland and brought the Arctic island back to the front pages. Since then, in a repeat of last January’s pattern, a one-sided war of words has escalated, with various figures close to Trump attempting to present a takeover of Greenland as an inevitability, and the Kingdom of Denmark, of which Greenland is one part, as a liability. Landry, the governor of Louisiana, is a stalwart of the current Republican Party. As his state’s attorney general, he fought against efforts to limit air pollution in “Cancer Alley,” an eighty-five-mile stretch of chemical industry in a majority Black area of southeast Louisiana. Since becoming governor, he has attempted to force every public school classroom in his state to display the Ten Commandments, classified two abortion pills as “controlled and dangerous substances,” and appointed fossil fuel executives to key state environmental jobs. After calling for Nicolás Maduro’s execution, he offered an ICE facility that he had renamed Camp 57 in honor of himself, the fifty-seventh governor of Louisiana, as a potential future home for the kidnapped Venezuelan president. Landry’s illustrious history of personal loyalty to Donald Trump seems to have overridden his complete lack of foreign policy experience. Then again, the role of special envoy to Greenland doesn’t come with many responsibilities, as the positions of the US, Greenlandic, and Danish governments are so far apart as to be almost unbridgeable. # Two Motivations, Neither of Them Coherent The United States, as far as we can ascertain from various interviews with Trump and his advisers, wants complete control over Greenland for the sake of “national security.” This desire has provoked worries over an invasion, or what the BBC (among others) uncritically referred to as a plan to “acquire Greenland” using the US military. The United States effectively has this military control already, with the Pituffik Space Base in Greenland’s north and a long history of engagement. However, the Trump administration now expects greater recompense for its foreign commitments. That, and the logic of “getting” Greenland, seems to come at the expense of existing alliances. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, warned on January 5 that “if the US chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of World War II.” A month prior, the Danish intelligence services had labeled the United States a threat to the country over its use of economic power “including against allies and partners.” "Arguments of security threats around Greenland from Russia and China are illogical." Arguments of security threats around Greenland from Russia and China are illogical. Russia has no great presence in the vicinity of Greenland, and China’s motivations in the Arctic center around the reduction in shipping time and costs offered by the Northern Sea Route along the Russian coast. In any case, China has backed off far more in Greenland in recent years than it has in, for example, Alaska. Jeppe Strandsbjerg, associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College and University of Greenland, argues that the status quo is no obstacle to achieving US objectives in security. “The defence of North America has never been a Danish task or a Greenlandic task. It was something that the US did in Greenland, and that was part of the defence agreement,” he says. If national security is no justification, what could be? Control of rare earth minerals has been cited as a driving force behind Trump’s foreign policy in genera, and his advances on Greenland in particular. Strandsbjerg says the current discussion demonstrates either a lack of knowledge or a lack of respect for Greenlandic autonomy, as “the conditions for mining have been decided by the Greenlandic parliament.” As such, US companies are already free to apply to the pro-business Greenlandic government for licenses to mine. Standing in their way is the fact that mineral deposits in Greenland would be extremely expensive to develop, since the country lacks the infrastructure to develop mining and is still struggling to construct its first ever road between two settlements. Ownership, other than likely eradicating environmental restrictions, wouldn’t change that fundamental fact. On security and minerals, Strandsbjerg says, “if those were the issues, these things can be dealt with. The only thing that is left, logically, is a desire to take over.” # Domestic Concerns All this commentary ignores events in Greenland itself. Assuming — and this is no longer as safe an assumption as it once was — that the United States doesn’t invade Greenland, Greenlanders will have at least some say in their nation’s future. Having granted Greenland self-rule in 2009, and being keen to maintain its Arctic presence in the face of US pressure, Denmark is highly unlikely to sell the territory. Therefore, Greenlanders would have to vote for independence and accept some form of arrangement with the United States to come anywhere close to Trump’s vision. Under the current government, led by the center-right Demokraatit, that seems highly unlikely any time soon. Demokraatit were elected on a platform of economic liberalization and a cautious approach to independence. Their manifesto advocated for a referendum at some point in the future, without offering a time frame and with economic self-sufficiency in place first. The limited progress to date on diversifying the Greenlandic economy away from seafood exports has illustrated the difficulty of developing a rare-earth mining industry largely from scratch. Under those conditions, such self-sufficiency won’t be reached any time soon. Some Greenlanders might be receptive to a US offer to replace the current Danish block grant, which makes up around half of the Greenlandic national budget. However, Trump’s rhetoric of “ownership” is highly counterproductive to any such aim. A poll last January showed 85 percent of Greenlanders are against becoming part of the United States, and that seems to be the only “deal” Trump is offering. Efforts to influence the Greenlandic people in the intervening months clearly haven’t shifted the dial enough for Trump’s liking. "The idea of Greenlanders welcoming American saviors with open arms was always a fabrication." If the Greenlandic government and the Greenlandic people aren’t interested now, they are unlikely to change their minds before the end of Trump’s second term as US president. For a notoriously impatient man, with an apparent desire to create a legacy for himself with a territorial purchase like that of Alaska during the presidency of Andrew Johnson, this may not be good enough. # Ignoring Greenlandic Will The foreign ministers of both Denmark and Greenland will meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio next week, but such meetings are no guarantee of stability. Strandsbjerg of the University of Greenland says that before Landry’s appointment, Ambassador Howery had failed to mention the imminent creation of a “special envoy” to Greenlandic officials during a visit to the capital Nuuk. Denmark and Greenland have made efforts to reason with the US administration, he says, but “every time you try to normalize lines of communication, something else happens that disrupts it.” The same poll that revealed the extent of Greenlandic opposition to US ownership also showed a roughly equal split between those viewing Trump’s interest as a “threat” (45 percent) and those who viewed it as an “opportunity” (43 percent). But those hoping to leverage US interest to obtain a more equal relationship with Denmark, or an independent country free from colonial influence, have been disappointed. The current pressure campaign on Denmark appears designed to use brute force to compel some sort of “deal” over the heads of Greenland’s government and people. Last year, when discussing Greenland, Trump said that the Greenlandic people “want to be with us.” Now, he just says “we need it.” The idea of Greenlanders welcoming American saviors with open arms was always a fabrication, but there was a sense that it mattered to pretend otherwise, and efforts were clearly being made to bring reality in line with Trump’s declarations. In this new world order of naked displays of power, the United States doesn’t even see the need to tell such lies anymore. * * *

Outrage at the US, close ties with Venezuela and mounting domestic challenges have prompted Pedro Sánchez to take a stand, says the Spanish journalist Maria Ramirez

Today's links Writing vs AI: If you wouldn't ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for you, why would you ask it to write a college essay? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: WELL State of the World; A poem in 30m logfiles; Weapons of Math Destruction; The cost of keeping "13" a British secret; Congress v. "Little Green Men"; "Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air" Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Writing vs AI (permalink) I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher. I am, however, a good teacher. The difference is that a good teacher can teach students who want to learn, whereas a great teacher can inspire students to want to learn. I've spent most of my life teaching, here and there, and while I'm not great, I am getting better. Last year, I started a new teaching gig: I'm one of Cornell's AD White Visiting Professors, meaning that I visit Cornell (and its NYC campus, Cornell Tech) every year or two for six years and teach, lecture, meet, and run activities. When I was in Ithaca in September for my inaugural stint, I had a string of what can only be called "peak experiences," meeting with researchers, teachers, undergrads, grads and community members. I had so many conversations that will stick with me, and today I want to talk about one of them. It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students' attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they're afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning. At that same discussion, I met someone who taught Cornell's version of freshman comp, the "here's how to write at a college level" course that every university offers. I've actually guest-taught some of these, starting in 2005/6, when I had a Fulbright Chair at USC. Now, while I'm not a great teacher, I am a pretty good writing teacher. I was lucky enough to be mentored by Judith Merril (starting at the age of 9!), who taught me how to participate in a peer-based writing workshop: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians In high school, I met Harriet Wolff, a gifted writing teacher, whose writing workshop (which Judith Merril had actually founded, decades earlier) was so good that I spent seven years in my four-year high-school, mostly just to keep going to Harriet's workshop: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/30/merely-clever/#rip-harriet-wolff I graduated from the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop (where Judith Merril learned to workshop) in 1992, and then went on to teach Clarion and Clarion West on several occasions, as well as other workshops in the field, such as Viable Paradise (today, I volunteer for Clarion's board). I have taught and been taught, and I've learned a thing or two. Here's the thing about every successful writing workshop I've been in: they don't necessarily make writing enjoyable (indeed, they can be painful), but they make it profoundly satisfying. When you repeatedly sit down with the same writers, week after week, to think about what went wrong with their work, and how they can fix it, and to hear the same about your work, something changes in how you relate to your work. You come to understand how to transform big, inchoate ideas into structured narratives and arguments, sure – but you also learn to recognize when the structure that emerges teaches you something about those big, inchoate ideas that was there all along, but not visible to you. It's revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It's alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write. The freshmen comp students I've taught over the years were amazed (or, more honestly, incredulous) when I told them this, because for them, writing was a totally pointless exercise. Well, almost totally pointless. Writing had one point: to get a passing grade so that the student could advance to other subjects. I'm not surprised by this, nor do I think it's merely because some of us are born to write and others will never get the knack (I've taught too many writers to think that anyone can guess who will find meaning in writing). It's because we don't generally teach writing this way until the most senior levels – the last year or two of undergrad, or, more likely, grad school (and then only if that grad program is an MFA). Writing instruction at lower levels, particularly in US high schools, is organized around standardized assessment. Students are trained to turn out the world's worst literary form: the five-paragraph essay: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3749 The five-paragraph essay is so rigid that any attempt to enliven it is actually punished during the grading process. One cannot deviate from the structure, on penalty of academic censure. It's got all the structural constraints of a sonnet, and all the poetry of a car crusher. The five-paragraph essay is so terrible that a large part of the job of a freshman comp teacher is to teach students to stop writing them. But even after this is done, much of the freshman comp curriculum is also formulaic (albeit with additional flexibility). That's unavoidable: freshman comp classes are typically massive, since so many of the incoming students have to take it. When you're assessing 100-2,000 students, you necessarily fall back on formula. Which brings me back to that faculty discussion at Cornell, where we learned first that students want to learn, but are afraid of failure; and then heard from the freshman comp teacher, who told us that virtually all of their students cheated on their assignments, getting chatbots to shit out their papers. And that's what I've been thinking about since September. Because of course those students cheat on their writing assignments – they are being taught to hit mechanical marks with their writing, improving their sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. What they're not learning is how to use writing to order and hone their thoughts, or to improve their ability to express those thoughts. They're being asked to write like a chatbot – why wouldn't they use a chatbot? You can't teach students to write – not merely to create formally correct sentences, but to write – through formal, easily graded assignments. Teaching writing is a relational practice. It requires that students interact extensively with one another's work, and with one another's criticism. It requires structure, sure – but the structure is in how you proceed through the critiques and subsequent discussion – not in the work itself. This is the kind of thing you do in small seminars, not big lecture halls. It requires that each student produce a steady stream of work for critique – multiple pieces per term or semester – and that each student closely read and discuss every other student's every composition. It's an intense experience that pushes students to think critically about critical thought itself. It's hard work that requires close supervision and it only works in small groups. Now, common sense will tell you that this is an impractical way to run a freshman comp class that thousands of students have to take. Not every school can be Yale, whose Daily Themes writing course is the most expensive program to deliver with one instructor for every two students: https://admissions.yale.edu/bulldogs-blogs/logan/2020/03/01/daily-themes But think back to the two statements that started me down this line of thinking: 1) Most students want to learn, but are afraid of the financial ruin that academic failure will entail and so they play things very safe; and 2) Virtually all freshman comp students use AI to cheat on their assignments. By the time we put our students in writing programs that you can't cheat on, and where you wouldn't want to cheat, they've had years of being taught to write like an LLM, but with the insistence that they not use an LLM. No wonder they're cheating! If you wanted to train a graduating class to cheat rather than learn, this is how you'd do it. Teaching freshman comp as a grammar/sentence structure tutorial misses the point. Sure, student writing is going to be bad at first. It'll be incoherent. It'll be riddled with errors. Reading student work is, for the most part, no fun. But for students, reading other students' writing, and thinking about what's wrong with it and how to fix it is the most reliable way to improve their own work (the dirty secret of writing workshops is that other writers' analysis of your work is generally less useful to you than the critical skills you learn by trying to fix their work). The amazing thing about bad writing is that it's easy to improve. It's much easier than finding ways to improve the work of a fluid, experienced writer. A beginning writer who makes a lot of easily spotted mistakes is a beginning writer who's making a lot of easily fixed mistakes. That means that the other writers around the circle are capable of spotting those errors, even if they're just starting out themselves. It also means that the writer whose work is under discussion will be able to make huge improvements through simple changes. Beginning writers can get a lot of momentum going this way, deriving real satisfaction from constant, visible progress. Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay. Freshman comp was always a machine for turning out reliable sentence-makers, not an atelier that trained reliable sense-makers. But AI changes the dynamic. Today, students are asking chatbots to write their essays for the same reason that corporations are asking chatbots to do their customer service (because they don't give a shit): https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice I'm not saying that small writing workshops of the sort that changed my life will work for everyone. But I am saying that teaching writing in huge lecture halls with assignments optimized for grading works for no one. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/ If you get promoted at work, keep it a secret from your landlord https://www.reddit.com/r/shitrentals/comments/1q38sh4/if_you_get_promoted_at_work_keep_it_a_secret_from/ Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-police-report-frog Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP) https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/ Patrick Nielsen Hayden Retires https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/05/patrick-nielsen-hayden-retires/ Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago The annual WELL State of the World, with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-Sterling-Jon-Lebkowsky-Sta-page01.html #10yrsago NZ police broke the law when they raided investigative journalist’s home https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/05/new-zealands-raid-investigatory-journalist-was-illegal/ #10yrsago Someone at the Chaos Communications Congress inserted a poem into at least 30 million servers’ logfiles https://web.archive.org/web/20160106133105/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/chaos-communication-congress-hackers-invaded-millions-of-servers-with-a-poem #10yrsago Bernie Sanders on small money donations vs sucking up to billionaires https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34452-this-is-not-democracy-this-is-oligarchy #10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: how Big Data threatens democracy https://mathbabe.org/2016/01/06/finishing-up-weapons-of-math-destruction/ #10yrsago Charter schools are turning into the next subprime mortgages https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2704305 #10yrsago New York Public Library does the public domain right https://www.nypl.org/research/resources/public-domain-collections #10yrsago UK government spent a fortune fighting to keep the number 13 a secret https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35221173 #5yrsago Congress bans "little green men" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#ndaa #5yrsago Mass court: "I agree" means something https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#i-agree #5yrsago Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day#5yrsago Upcoming appearances (permalink) Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28 https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/ Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30 https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/ Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5 https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/ Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3) https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet Enshittification with Plutopia https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/ "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money) https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894 Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767 Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1013 words, 1013 total) "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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### Despite rising inequality, poor job numbers, and Donald Trump’s mass deportations, the economy grew by a remarkable 4.3% last year, mostly thanks to the AI industry. This success masks an economy highly dependent on debt and state subsidies. * * * Much of the recent growth in the US economy has been driven by spending in the AI sector. (Ömer Sercan Karku / Anadolu via Getty Images) The Federal Reserve closed 2025 by cutting rates by a quarter point for the third time this year. The decision was not unanimous: nine of the board members voted in favor while three voted against the rate cut. The decision was made as the US economy continues to reel from tariffs, mass deportations, cuts to government spending, and stalled hiring. To make matters worse, official price and labor market data remain murky since the government shutdown. On the other hand, the US economy expanded at the fastest pace in two years, increasing 4.3 percent. This has produced a confusing picture of the real state of the economy. However, things become clearer when we take into consideration the fact that much of this growth is driven by spending in the AI sector. On its face, the US economy appears pulled in two directions: on one side, severe inequality, inflation, slowed hiring, and high youth unemployment; on the other, a seemingly unstoppable tech sector, wealthy stockholders responsible for a disproportionate share of consumption, and expanding federal spending on defense and border enforcement technologies reliant on artificial intelligence. In the words of a Brookings Institution economist, we have a “two-track economy.” The “AI gold rush generates excitement and papers over a drift in the rest of the economy.” According to the Budget Lab at Yale, investment in AI accounts may reach 2 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP) this year, or the equivalent of $1,800 per person. Analysts at Deutsche Bank have gone as far as to argue that the United States would be close to a recession this year if it weren’t for tech-related spending. But the image of a two-track economy oversimplifies the reality. These two halves, which may initially seem distinct, exist within the same system of uneven capital accumulation, and they are held together by access to cheap credit. The “winning” or “growing” half relies on the extraction of rents from the other. As such, Donald Trump’s repeated pressure to cut rates takes on deeper significance. First, despite the undeniable pace of technological progress and capital expenditure, the gains from AI innovations are concentrated within an increasingly enclosed system. Tech giants monopolize access to scarce or irreproducible resources, from water and the power grid to human social relations. The owners of these companies act simultaneously as landlords of digital terrain and utility providers. This allows them to extract surplus rent, while the users and workers who train the systems and generate data receive none of its returns. They face precarious work conditions, layoffs, surveillance, and exclusion from the systems they help create. The AI economy is not bifurcated but reliant on the dispossession of low-wage workers and the precarious labor markets in which they are embedded. Skeptics of the AI gold rush often say the bubble will burst and that the speculative finance that fuels it is crisis-prone and parasitic. They point to the sector’s extreme concentration and circular financing as signs of its fragility. The seven largest tech companies are responsible for 60 percent of the gains in the S&P 500 this year, and actors in the AI economy increasingly fund, supply, and sell to one another in a closed, mutually dependent loop. For example, Oracle, Nvidia, CoreWeave, and SoftBank trade $1 trillion worth of AI deals among themselves, and Amazon is in discussions to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, which signed a $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services this November. Writing in the _New York Times_ , economist Natasha Sarin has said that this “situation is worse than having all your economic eggs in one basket. It’s closer to putting all your eggs in one basket and stomping on all other baskets.” However, it is wrong to dismiss finance so easily as self-destructive and external to production. Even if specific investments fail to yield profits, the US financial sector has shown the ability to repeatedly adapt and innovate to give these companies endless access to credit or render their debt sustainable. The $29 billion financing package for Meta’s data centers exemplifies this dynamic. Global asset managers Blue Owl and PIMCO combined debt and equity into a special purpose vehicle that funds the project while keeping the debt off Meta’s balance sheet. Meanwhile, tech companies and their financiers alike celebrate Fed rate cuts, which pushes up stock prices and lowers the costs of borrowing further. Households participate in the same debt-driven system. Facing inflation, layoffs, and stagnating wages, they take on debt to sustain consumption and withstand the rising cost of living. Finance acts as the connective tissue: preserving profitability for some, while embedding labor extraction and inequality for others. It is a disservice to understand this as peripheral to the economy’s functioning, when it is central to its reproduction. When these dynamics deepen political, ecological, and social instability, tech giants turn to the state to secure their position and rents. In addition to monetary policy, the state funnels taxpayer money into public-private partnerships, many of which are AI technologies. This occurs across federal and state governments but most notably in defense and security spending. Tech firms also benefit from permissive regulations and targeted exemptions. For example, the AI half of the economy is exempt from Trump’s tariffs. A recent article in _Bloomberg_ described the president as having carved out a “VIP AI express lane where no one is hitting the brakes because there are no tolls.” This growing interdependence between tech and the state feeds state repression and retrenchment and further undermines the conditions necessary for working-class solidarity and resistance. Understanding the economy as a single system helps clarify the resilience of the current arrangement and the stakes of monetary policy decisions. We cannot be distracted by narratives of a two-track economy or the sudden collapse of a bubble. Instead, we must understand how this growth actively extracts from middle- and low-income households. AI investment is not holding up the fragile half of the economy; it is one of the drivers of its underdevelopment. * * *

The more European countries act as colonies, unable and unwilling to stand up to Trump, the more they’ll be treated as such, says Guardian Europe columnist Nathalie Tocci

Trump vil ha olje, ikke demokrati og menneskerettigheter.

### The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is a crude act of Trumpian aggression. Yet it also illustrates the US leadership’s weakness, as it moves to lock down control of the Western Hemisphere. * * * Donald Trump used to pose as an antiwar president. Yet as the United States asserts its control of its backyard, its government asserts an ever-more blatantly imperialist policy. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images) In the depths of a winter night, US airborne forces scream over Caribbean waters. Jets rain fire on key infrastructure, while attack helicopters deliver raiding parties of special operatives to targets on the ground. Amid the spectacle of shock and awe, a president is kidnapped and indicted on drug-trafficking charges. It’s a key test case for how an ambitious Republican administration intends to handle an era of seismic change. This was December 20, 1989; the operation in question was the ouster of strongman Panamanian leader and erstwhile CIA asset Manuel Noriega. But there’s an unmistakable parallel with Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. It illustrates everything that has changed, and stayed the same, in the three decades separating these two acts of aggression. The first occurred at the start of a new age of American hyperpower. The second is a symptom of that age’s chaotic and violent decline. # Two Abductions George H. W. Bush’s deposition of Noriega signaled a new, post–Cold War age of American world-making. Within a few years, the United States let rip in the Persian Gulf (like Noriega, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would quickly learn that serving US interests is no guarantee of protection), alongside new wars on three continents. The collapse of the Soviet Union surely watered down the appeal of anti-communism as a rationale for constant warfare. But the War on Drugs had already been built up as a replacement justification for forever wars, devouring lives and resources on a global scale. Soviet retreat brought Latin America little peace from US militarism. If anything, the reverse was true, with Washington playing a key role in feeding Colombia’s civil war. The region also provided a unique study in leftist resurgence during a period of neoliberal dominance. Venezuela’s _barrios_ delivered Hugo Chávez to power in 1998 and a new, indigenous-led alliance brought Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) to power in Bolivia in 2005, in the continent’s so-called Pink Tide. "Trump’s attack on Venezuela looks like a fairly straightforward piece of imperial theater." That project saw a revival at the start of the 2020s but has faced severe setbacks: the collapse of MAS rule in Bolivia; economic and political fragility in Venezuela producing one of the world’s largest displacement crises; and the victories of staunch Trump backers such as José Antonio Kast in Chile, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and Javier Milei in Argentina. US support is just one variable in these complex processes, but a significant one. In this context, Trump’s attack on Venezuela looks like a fairly straightforward piece of imperial theater. The abduction of a president, smoke rising from ports, ships held in place, and the lack of likelihood of Venezuelan capability to retaliate even if its government holds firm, all bring succor to Washington’s reactionary friends and fear to its enemies. This is part of what’s happening, but not all of it. # Circling the Wagons In Colombian capital Bogotá two years ago, while researching US foreign policy in the region, I had a long conversation with a former immigration official. While not necessarily an enthusiastic supporter of Gustavo Petro’s leftist administration, the official heralded a possible new era of strategic independence. The government had just refused a deportation flight returning Colombians accused of illegally entering the United States. While Bogotá was still cooperating with US attempts to prevent migration across the deadly Darien Gap at its Panama border, it was willing to show an independent streak. When Trump took power, the limits of this approach were tested. Petro’s renewed attempt to refuse flights was quickly battered by punitive tariff threats. He appeared to have overplayed his hand, which undoubtedly informed the more cautious approach to handling Washington taken by Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum. This controversy reflects the extent to which immigration control has supplanted specters such as communism, drugs, and terror as the justification _du jour_ for US warmongering. The Beltway foreign-policy industry’s lurid tales of a “narco-terrorism” spanning Hezbollah, drug gangs, and the Venezuelan state may have anchored Washington’s Caribbean buildup in recent months. But hawks’ attribution of blame to Caracas for irregular migrant flows has been central to selling war, both within the Trump administration and to the US public. "Immigration control has supplanted specters such as communism, drugs, and terror as the justification _du jour_ for US warmongering." There is a strangely European air to all this. The claim that hostile actors are using migration as an undermining tactic has been central to developing a regime of militarized human rights abuses at the EU’s eastern borders. Meanwhile, impunity for lethal conduct at sea — as seen in US strikes on alleged drug boats — has echoes in European backing for militias that attack migrant boats and rescue ships, or attacks on vessels bringing aid to Palestine. More directly, the United States is pursuing deportation deals with a variety of countries where European states have long been active, like Uganda, Kosovo, and Libya. But it’s now going further than Europe. After being forced to accept the return of a Salvadoran man illegally deported last spring, the United States has embarked on a spree of hyperactive deal-making with dozens of African countries, strong-arming some of the poorest places in the world into accepting ICE deportees. This isn’t really about immigration numbers. None of these deals involve especially large numbers of deportees. Evidence suggests that Trump ignored warnings that US intervention in Venezuela is a driver of refugee arrivals at the southern border. Nor is it solely about the appearance of being tough on migration, although this does play a role. Trump’s Africa strategy has been accompanied by broader weight-throwing in the region, from Christmas Day airstrikes in Nigeria to a fictive campaign against “white genocide” in South Africa. There is a strong correlation between countries where deportation arrangements (and presumably lucrative contracts for US carceral firms) have taken place, and where the United States has interests in critical minerals, as Washington overtakes Beijing in African investments. As Trump’s fixation with Venezuelan oil demonstrates, resource control remains fundamental. The totemic focus on immigration reflects a more underlying evolution of US thinking. The vision of Washington as a guarantor of world order — so central to both liberal and conservative Cold War and War on Terror politics — no longer inspires at either the public or even the strategic level. It has been replaced with something far more parochial and defensive. External aggression is still painted as a threat, but it is sold primarily as a method of drawing higher walls around a fragile, threatened state. This is not only about the border so much as a wider sense of strategic threat. Immigration control has become central because it is one of few points of foreign policy unity in a government that lacks a shared mental model for strategy and is lurching between different attempts to reconcile its fantastical ambitions and a striking reduction in its material capacities. # Strategic Ambiguity Trump’s approach to international strategy seems to contain two key elements. The first is an acceleration of a George W. Bush–era approach where small units of key personnel rush through legal, political, and military interventions while bypassing institutions. In the Venezuelan case, this has led to a series of extrajudicial executions on the high seas condemned as war crimes by a medley of officials. The second is a dynamic redolent of kings who allowed courtiers to fight about strategy so that the best option could emerge through a form of Darwinian selection. In the Venezuelan case, this seems to have led to a confluence of interests emerging around a Caribbean center of gravity. Immigration hawks spied an opportunity to escalate mass deportations to a post-intervention Venezuela, oil watchers saw profit and energy security, and ideologues saw an opportunity to remove a long-standing thorn in their side. For Trump, it is a chance to do what Karl Rove might have called “making our own reality” — establishing circumstances where Washington does whatever, wherever, whenever it pleases. A convenient concordance over Venezuela belies a deep disunity between camps. There remains a tendency that genuinely objects to “globalism” as a liberal conceit and shares some ground with the antiwar left in believing that putting “America First” means pulling back from “forever wars.” Other and larger camps are animated by a desire to focus on one particular area over another. The Latin America hawks, those staunchly obsessed with arming Israel and shredding Iran, and those who have clashed over Russia, policy are the most obvious examples. While his methods have frustrated administration insiders, Elbridge Colby has attempted to provide a bridging logic for internal compromises on Russia and the Middle East — a relentless focus on containing China. Such zero-sum framing has intensified for a reason. In the waning days of Joe Biden’s administration, it became clear that simultaneous arming of Ukraine and Israel was stretching US military-industrial capacity to its limit, despite absurdly bloated military budgets. The rapid redeployment of the _Gerald R. Ford_ , the world’s largest aircraft carrier, from the Middle East to the Caribbean last autumn underscores this impression of a flailing empire running from place to place putting out (or in reality, starting) fires. So, too, does the United States’ willingness to tear up its traditional social-military contract with Europe, where it contributed disproportionately in return for European acceptance of its strategic priorities and dependence on its matériel. This reckoning with shrinking power emerged during the Biden administration, in its attempt at a “foreign policy for the middle class” characterized by increased “friend-shoring” and industrial strategy (the inverse of Trump’s trade wars with allies) and in its chaotic Afghanistan drawdown. A common critique of the attack on Venezuela is that the United States has given up on any pretense at maintaining the liberal world order. This is true but misses the point. That order, where the United States promises steadfast support for allies, economic aid when needed, and the maintenance of global financial and political architecture, in exchange for consent for its preeminence, is no longer structurally capable of existing. The question is what comes next. The attack on Venezuela provides many of the answers. # When Empires End While as a piece of operational art the attack superficially resembles the Panama invasion, its intellectual roots are closer to the unhinged Venezuela coup attempt undertaken by a collection of freelancers in 2020. It’s short-termist and haphazard. It doesn’t look especially “strategic” in the grand scheme of things — and that’s the point. The Trump administration has found an answer to the problem of constraints on its global power, by “flooding the zone with sh-t”, as Steve Bannon called it. Like the prison guard in Michel Foucault’s Panopticon, Washington lacks the resources to lash out everywhere, but it _might_ unpredictably lash out anywhere. Nigeria and Venezuela today; tomorrow, who knows? The message is: brace for more random kidnappings and bombings. "Washington is intentionally flexing a lack of moral restraint." Much of US foreign policy can now be read as an attempt to manage decline through ambiguity and threats. Its unyielding fealty to Israel as that state trashes the foundations of international humanitarian law should be seen, at least partially, as a signal of commitment to clients elsewhere. Washington is intentionally flexing a lack of moral restraint. Its preoccupation with resources is nothing new, but in the context of climate stressors and new geoeconomic competitions, it is likely to take on more frenzied and existential dynamics. The beleaguered US economy’s Hail Mary on the AI revolution and the subordination of the state to millenarian tech oligarchs and the prison-military-border-industrial complex is almost certainly framing its carceral deportation deals in Africa, and probably much more. Empires do not go gently into the good night. The European imperial age was cut decisively short by World War II–era destruction. Even then, its exit was decades-long, bloody, and in many places remains unresolved. It’s _de rigueur_ among leftists to talk about the decline and fall of the US empire, but that decline is relative to others and descends from an age of historically unprecedented hyperpower. Even US strategic defeats such as Vietnam and Afghanistan shattered the countries they took place in. Meanwhile, the United States does not exist in a vacuum. Clearly, Trump faces few internal constraints, and many of his opponents fall in line on foreign affairs. For all of Brussels’s carping, the EU cannot and will not exert a moderating influence. Among everyone else, this will inevitably strengthen the incentive for a cynical, Hobbesian view of international relations, where constant imitative displays of aggression and unpredictability are necessary for survival. Through the fires in Caracas, myriad bleak futures can be glimpsed. Amid such bleakness, it’s worth mentioning something else that has happened in the United States in the last few days — new democratic-socialist local leaders like Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson taking office, based on stridently internationalist campaigns. In the United States and beyond, the forces of rampant militarism have attempted to insist that their destructive, nihilistic approach to the world is the only thing that can protect people at home in dangerous times. It will take locally rooted leadership with a firm grasp of the national and international dimensions to prove that the opposite is true, to provide better ways of navigating the world’s rapid and traumatic convulsions, and to imagine a different world order. * * *