ladimir Lenin famously said, “The capitalists will sell us the
rope with which we will hang them.” Nowadays, we fight over whether
it was Lenin, Stalin, or somebody else who made up that quote. And in an
ironic turn of events, we buy all our rope from Communist countries.
Thanks to modern economic theory, also known as magic, we also know that buying all that rope makes us fabulously rich. But what to do with all that wealth?
That brings us to President Trump's leadership strategy, which is to propose something like buying Greenland, which sounds totally crazy to the Europeans. His strategy is to propose some action without giving any reason whatsoever why it might be a good idea. That gets people imagining what in the world he could be thinking, and soon enough they conclude that in fact it's a great idea and start wondering why no one ever thought of it before.
That's how Trump got the Europeans to decide that they'll spend more of their GDP on defense, which is what he wanted them to do in the first place. It's also how he got them to realize that the Russo-Ukraine war can't go on forever.
Elon Musk, being a very smart guy, picked up on this strategy and tricked the liberals into doxxing each other in their attempts to drive Tesla out of business. This means the environmentalist left is now opposed to the big government left: a massive split in their ranks that could ultimately bring an end to Net Zero and global warming fanaticism and force scientists to investigate the real reason it gets so hot in the summer.
Electric cars weren't viable anyway. They're terrible for the environment and they need vast amounts of lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements. So Trump proposed a deal with Zelensky to buy them in exchange for military support, knowing Zelensky would refuse, thereby giving him a reason to begin mining lithium in Arkansas and Nevada, just as I predicted last week, though I unfortunately forgot to write it down.
We will, of course, sell this raw material to the Chinese, who will turn them into more electric cars and sell them to us, making us filthy rich.
The idea of treating all of foreign policy like a giant real estate deal is fairly new. It makes sense, though, because what are countries but big pieces of real estate? This grand strategy has certain other advantages. Wars between big corporations aren't fought the same way as those between nations. Companies don't usually advance on each other with tanks and infantry and massacre each other's board of directors. The usual strategy in business is: if your competitor is making trouble, you just buy them out and fire everybody. If Trump were to buy Russia and fire Putin, the war would be over in ten minutes. America would be bigger than ever and we'd have all their nuclear missiles and space technology as well as all those 19th century Russian novels that nobody ever reads.
Buying parts of other countries is not a new idea. It's how we got the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska. Russia is now in the dent/scratch bin, so it's as cheap as it's going to get. If Putin says Russia is not for sale, that just means he's negotiating for a better price.
Once that deal's done, Canada, Mexico, and South America are no-brainers. The conservatives better watch out. Maybe Trump is a globalist after all.
mar 25 2025, 7:33 am
