Americanswers… On 5 Live! Can Donald Trump be talked down over Greenland?

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The twentieth of january twenty twenty six marks a year since Donald Trump took office for his second term. What a year it has been, a year of activity, no question about that. A year of talk. Quite wild. Um a year of achievement? Well we'll come to that in just a second. So uh for this anniversary week there is of course a lot of news, a lot of news as well, a lot of things that are happening.

Never mind the anniversary. Uh and we're going to answer some questions about that news right now. So how far is Donald Trump actually prepared to go when it comes to getting what he wants in Greenland? Are there Republicans who can talk him down? People are also asking about the threat. um to impose tariffs on countries that oppose his plans for Greenland and um we're talking about RFK as well. Really interesting question about whether RFK

uh after he said that he was surprised the president was still alive given what he ate, whether RFK is actually managing to change the diet of the whole country. So we've been answering your questions. Mariana Sarah and Matt Chorley on Five Live. Welcome to Americans. Americast. FBC. Yes sir. in the world. Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

Does a year in office get marked at Washington Sowe? Uh surprisingly not. I thought Donald Trump would be throwing himself a party for this, uh and not least to crow about all the achievements that he says he's made over the course of the last twelve months and And and to point out how much he's gotten done. But in fact Uh I don't think we're even gonna see him um on the anniversary. I think he's gonna be which is technically tomorrow. He's gonna be on a plane to

Davos where he's giving a speech on Wednesday. And he's out of sight today as well, down at his residence in Florida because it's a public holiday today. So we're not gonna see very much of him at all. thinks, well, I can talk about these achievements but also people will use it to evaluate whether I've actually delivered on the things I said I would. Which isn't always that helpful. Well, we have had a lot of questions.

About Greenland. So let's just sort of lump them all together and then we'll we can we can pick through them. Jason asks, What of senior US Republicans will they speak out? on the question of Greenland. Steve's emailed, could you explain, please, what are the other politicians doing? Are they whimpering in their offices? Let's start with the Republicans. Where were they on the Well a few are sort of

Making clear that they're not terribly comfortable with what Donald Trump's saying about Greenland without being too heavily critical. So the House Speaker, for instance, Mike Johnson was actually on the BBC on Laura Kunzberg's show when he said that he doesn't foresee a military intervention but And that diplomatic channels are the way to go. Well, I mean, Donald Trump may not actually have heard that from Mike Johnson given the slightly undiplomatic language he's been using.

more recently about Greenland. But that's kind of typical of mainstream republicanism. Not not attacking Donald Trump but sort of basically hinting they don't agree with it. A few um more fourth born Republicans have come out. Tom Tillis says he is sick of stupid uh when he talks of the advice that's been given to the president on this matter. Uh Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana says that the idea of invading Greenland is weapons grade stupid.

Uh and a few others have come out and said similar things. Lisa Murkowski saying Greenland needs to be viewed as an ally, not as an asset, but I have to say

The list of Republicans prepared to be really critical about this are a kinda list of usual suspects, people who are retiring at the midterms or have been critical of Donald Trump before. What's not happened yet, and actually I suspect may not happen, it's people using this as the final straw to say, right, d Donald Trump has now gone so far I'm gonna have to publicly start criticizing him because I don't think the strength of feeling among politicians in America it's

quite where it is at as it is in Europe. There's a really good example of that with John Cornyn. So the he's the Texas senator, been around forever, weighty figure. But he's facing a primary if he wants to carry on in the Senate. So it's really interesting. You know, we've got these midterms that we constantly talk about in November of this year. If you're a Republican politician

looking to come back to Washington D C, you need first to get over the hurdle of the primary. Either not to be primaried, so you keep your ability to go to the general election, or um win that primary. And in in those terms, those primaries starting actually pretty soon. I think. So so in in those terms they are still as hamstrung as they have been before about going for Donald Trump because they run the risk inside the party

But they actually lose their careers and it and it's a proper risk as well. So that sort of explains I just think the other reason why, uh which I think we sometimes I know American all know this and people who've been to the States sort of do but we you can't overestimate how big America is and how uh uh how much you you are not constantly wondering about Greenland, or indeed about Ukraine, or indeed about the Middle East.

Uh and so as a politician you don't need to have necessarily a view on all this stuff. In the way that here people do and the politicians do and you're liable to be asked about it, etcetera, etcetera. You could you can get through most of your life, particularly if you're a house of representatives person. You just don't this stuff doesn't come. If you live in Baton Rouge

or or normal Illinois or I don't know anywhere the the the middle bits or indeed on the coast as well, frankly. There's an awful lot else going on and and we We sometimes our perspective, I think, sometimes in this country of America and of the importance of all of this is too much.

I was checked out this summary and I went on the New York Times website and the Greenland story was sort of halfway down the homepage. Exactly. I mean it's now at the top, I think because And that's the New York Times. I mean they are really interesting. They're super interesting. So you know, you go to the

I the Houston Chronicle or well the thing is there aren't that many local papers left. But you go you go to somewhere where the New York Times is not read and I can guarantee you they're not talking about Greenland certainly at the top of the agenda. But one thing that's quite interesting is

You know, like there you're talking about traditional newspapers, which if we're honest with ourselves, quite a quite a lot of people don't read anymore. And actually the places that they're looking for what's going on, social media feeds.

are full of like Greenland memes. But these memes are almost like either making a complete joke of the whole thing or like people in absolute meltdown. Like, oh my gosh, how is this happening? Why is this happening? Lots of people outside of America, but lots of Americans will be seeing that content popping up on their feeds. And I think it's quite interesting that it feels like it's such a central topic of conversation online.

And I I don't know, for me it's felt like that ultimate tension between the sort of like memefication of politics, which is like everyone can kind of take take the mick out of things all the time, and then suddenly it reaches a point where everyone kinda goes, Oh, hang on

Hang on, is this fun is this funny? It's a bit like when Maduro um uh you know, when everything happened with Venezuela and Maduro and they're all those memes of him in his tracksuit and everything else, it was kinda like, Oh, okay, this is like being made funny, but also it's kind of quite like pol politically serious, how are we gonna deal with that? That's what this all feels like. It's like everyone doesn't quite know what to take seriously anymore and what not to take seriously.

I've just looked at you on the homepage of the Houston Chronicle. Why Domeco Ryans stood by C J Stroud despite four turnovers in playoff loss is the top stuff. I don't understand any of that. I believe it is America football. And uh yeah, their top story is uh I mean it's i it i it yeah, it's still the the the subheader doesn't make a lot of sense. You have to go sort of two or three chunks down before you get to Greenland. So it's interesting.

Insight there. Right, we've got uh on the uh on the subject of Greenland, we've also had this voice note from Ericaster Sawa in Australia. I keep hearing Donald Trump talking about the risk for Greenland to be invaded by Russia or China and now Europe is actually increasing the military presence there in response to it. I haven't heard discussions about the actual risk for Greenland. Is it real? Are Russia or China really planning to invade it?

Thank you very much. No, it's not real in as much as they're not planning to invade it. But the issue isn't really that. The issue is the extent to which as the uh ice melts because of climate change the extent to which those countries can not only use the territory around Greenland, the sea around Greenland, more for their offensive potentially a military operations and particularly against the United States'cause it's a place where they could base weapons that could reach the US very quickly.

But also i in in the longer term they could have their own bases there because this place was largely ice and in the longer term future it seems won't be. So that that's the issue. It's not so much Russians turning up in Greenland all of a sudden. It's what happens in the seas around it. Eddie, what is your question for the Americas?

What do we think is is Trump's end game? Will he ultimately decide that well the ultimate threat with as the reliance on the States is is to withdraw from NATO? Yeah, his great threat. is pulling out of NATO because Donald Trump doesn't think that would do America any harm. He says again and again and again

It is only because America's part of NATO that anybody, Russia, China, any other adversary, is scared of it in any way. That without America there is no NATO. And he obviously doesn't think that Britain, Germany, Denmark, whomsoever's contribution to NATO is terribly So I don't think he thinks he would harm America's defence or strategy in any way at all. And I think he would rather have Greenland because his end game

is not to get Greenland better defended or to have more American bases there or bigger military presence. He can do any of that right now without making any changes whatsoever. I mean it would appear to be that his end game really is to own Greenland in order to enlarge the territory of the United States, in order to have added something significantly to to the land mass as well as the strategic value he sees in Greenland.

Eddie, good to speak to you. Thank you very much for your question. We need to move on'cause we've got so we've got so many questions on a number of topics.

Mariana, can I ask you about the reaction to the letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister? Jonas Garstor. So this is the letter which says Dear Jonas, this is from Donald Trump. Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize. For having stopped eight wars plus in capitals, I no longer feel an opportunity an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and popular for the United States of America.

Uh Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China and why do they have the right of ownership? Anyway, he goes on to say, and then he finishes it off with the world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland. Thank you. Thank you for your attention to this matter. It's disappointing you didn't say that. But Matt's mug does. No, he only does that for social media posts, not letters.

Um for me it feels like quintessential rage bay. Everybody who doesn't like Donald Trump has quote tweeted it saying, Look at this, can you believe he'd done this? I mean it feels like peak presidential trolling. But it kind of comes back to that question of what I was saying, which is it's quite hard to tell

what is serious and what is not serious. And so with this letter you're like, Is it is he serious? Is he is he kinda joking? Like is he not joking? Is he trolling? Is he and it gets the reaction. It provokes the reaction. But maybe the whole point is that we don't quite know if it's serious or not and And n nor do the world leaders of any of these other countries. But actually it's interesting. That is the line which is leading the New York Times now.

Yeah, so it has pushed it back up to the you know, the news outlets. Yeah, yeah, because it's it's a new thing and it it gets attention and it grabs headlines and it gets loads of eyeballs on places like X because people are re-sharing it.

You know, we're all used to seeing those sort of formal letters that are shared by you know, uh right when someone resigns or something in the UK government. It's like that, except it's completely not following any of the usual etiquette. And if you make as I've seen s some uh media outlets say if you make a distinction between the Norwegian government and the actual committee prize people of the Um uh

Hang on a second, he's wrong because the government doesn't actually award the Nobel Prize, the committee members award the you are falling into a massive trap which of course we've all fallen into at various stages, which is trying to fact check Donald Trump.

It's not a good thing. He doesn't want he knows if you start saying things like that everyone will just completely switch off from what you're saying. Here's a question, Sarah. Would the world be in a different place if they had just given him the Nobel Peace Prize?

Possibly. Although I don't think it would have stunted his ambitions for Greenland. It might just mean that he wasn't, you know, sending communications like that to the Norwegian Prime Minister. Maybe he'd be so happy he would have waited six months before he delved into this. But Uh had he been given the Nobel Peace Prize, would he still have um sent forces in to capture the president of Venezuela?'Cause it was many ways the success of that operation that has

spurred him on to be thinking about the um other things he wants to achieve on the world stage. He's be really, really buoyed up by what happened in Venezuela. And you know, there are a lot of people saying Doing that sort of thing, capturing, kidnapping presidents of other countries not necessarily what you should be doing if you're still campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Um would it have stopped him doing that? Probably not. So yeah, I mean I think

I think uh there's a a couple of things that have happened in the last weeks we wouldn't have seen if we'd been given the peace prize. But ultimately no, he's desperately serious about Greenland I think. It's just it's taken us a year to work that out. It's only in the last fortnight or so. It's re the pennies dropped in our heads.

That he really, really means this, whereas he's been serious about it all along, I think. Right, let's move on'cause we've got another question. This is from Andrew in Edinburgh.

Good morning. There is much current focus on foreign matters by President Trump. How is his domestic dashboard looking? Yeah, how do things look domestically, Sarah? So what's going on in Minnesota is an ongoing issue after the shooting, what was it, ten days ago of Renee Good, the um woman who was protesting against the ice raids in Minnesota.

There have been protests every single day. There are now something like three thousand ICE agents in the city compared to somewhere that has six hundred police officers in it. The governor has readied the National Guard in case they need to come in to keep order. Donald Trump is talking about invoking the insurrection act so that he can send uh military forces into Minnesota.

Uh the mayor and the governor are being investigated by the Justice Department to see if they've committed any criminal offences as they've apparently been

getting in the way of federal officers doing their work. I mean it is An astonishing tinderbox in Minnesota and I wouldn't be surprised if we hear more about that in the coming days or weeks as well because there are protests, counter protests, all sorts of things going on in the city as the ice raids are continuing all the time and more and more protesters are being arrested. So that is a huge focus of um debate still inside America.

And as ever, questions about the economy rumble on with Donald Trump insisting basically, that Americans have never had it so good and that they should be grateful for falling prices and rising wages, whilst most people are saying that they fundamentally do not feel that when they're the grocery store and, you know, it's only got a few months to hope that people's wallets are feeling much healthier, otherwise it's really gonna get punished in the midterm elections for that, I think.

And you have this weird thing which we mean we mentioned before where the inflation figures n haven't been fiddled, but they are probably not very reliable at the moment because of the government shutdown that there was. So

there wasn't the the um ability to get the detail of what price changes there were. So a lot of people uh a lot of the stats just reflect a zero price change where actually there probably was one. So in fact even the official picture for inflation is hazy and in some things, particularly electricity,

it it is unquestionably higher than is comfortable for Donald Trump. So yeah, no, he's he's he's i he's not out of the woods on the economy by any means. Uh before we go, I wanna finish on Robert F. Kennedy Junior.

Uh because we had this voice note from Priscilla. So my question is um Robert F. Kennedy built much of his public profile on reforming the US food and health system. I just want to know since he entered the political mainstream, has he actually maintained any of these reform positions? Or has he gone soft of them? Which ones has he abandoned? Which ones is he still working on?

Thank you. Uh one thing we do know is one thing that he is working on is Donald Trump's own diet. Here's R FK Jr. speaking on the Katie Miller podcast last week. He eats really bad food, which is McDonald's, uh, and then, you know, can be and uh Diet Coke.

But uh he eats the t drinks the diet coke all times. He has the constitution of a of a deity. I don't know how he's alive. If you travel with him you get this idea that he's uh he's just pumping himself full of poison all day long and you don't know how he's walking around, much less being the most energetic person, you know, any of us have ever met. I'd like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to know that I have a normal Coke to drink every day.

Full fat. Full fat. She also has the constitution of a deity tells you something of it. Um So you must have been when you read around Donald Trump, you you must have seen him eating. I have never, in all honesty, seen a meeting. I have however once or twice managed to speak to people who uh an occasion where he was being hosted if he was giving a speech was the person sent out to get him his rider essentially, what he needs and it is pretty it's always um two Big Mac.

and two Cokes. So there is no doubt whatsoever that that is what he lives on and well cooked steak with ketchup when he's in a restaurant. So I mean Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is absolutely right about that. Now one of the things that he has done is come out with new dietary guidelines and Donald Trump slightly goes along with them because he's very into Americans eating more protein and particularly more meat. So Donald Trump does all right on that.

But he is very against uh processed foods uh and added sugar, so the coke uh wouldn't work there. But uh he has kind of inverted the pyramid of foods that people are supposed to eat, so it's not grains anymore uh and it's certainly not low fat food that often has a lot of sugar added to it. uh and whole milk. They're very, very into whole milk this administration and people are advised to have three portions of full fat dairy a day now in America. So there's been a big emphasis on

changing uh what the food recommendations are. And a lot of people in this space who are, you know, left, right wing or or none of the above, uh are much in agreement with Robert F. Kennedy when it comes to food and getting Food dies out of what we eat and other additives.

On the other hand, he's actually moved very fast to change the vaccine regimen as well. And a whole bunch of vaccines that were either strongly recommended or compulsory for kids to get aren't anymore. So although they will still get measles, momstrubella, polio uh vaccinations like that, no longer will they necessarily get hepatitis A, hepatitis B uh other meningitis vaccines, that kind of thing. So there's been a massive controversy about that. So

In many ways, this is exactly what RFK is about. People who are very, very worried about the way in which he's anti vaxxed, but also very, very pleased in what they think he's doing for the health of Americans when it comes to food and nutrition. And I suppose that is an example of that being a sort of purely domestic policy, it doesn't break out internationally quite the same way. I did see that clip of um Donald Trump when he was talking about whole milk.

And he said it's whole with a W for those of you that have a problem. And I wondered whether he'd only just learned that it wasn't whole spelt H O L E.

Okay, we've just come off the air with Matt Chorley on Five Live, the live bit of the show. Marianne has gone to do other things. Sarah's still here, we're still answering your questions. And we want to go back to a year of Trump because we've had this Voice note from Jonas in Denmark. On Five Live, I believe it was Sarah who said that Trump had a habit of doing outrageous things that you could not possibly believe he would ever do, for him to then turn around and actually do them.

My question to you then is, what other outlandish things has Trump said? that you didn't believe at the time, but he might actually do anyway. Oh that's interesting, isn't it, Justin? So I mean the first things that come to mind in terms of outlandish things that have not yet come true are making Canada the fifty first state. Um for a long time he wanted to seize them Panama and the Panama Canal make that American again.

And then of course there were some of the things he said about Gaza early in the Middle East Peace Process where he was talking about turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East. Then there were sort of uh ideas of Trump towers and hotels and things um lining the Gaza Strip, which all seemed very, very

fanciful. And none of those have come to pass yet. Although they do probably still give us an idea of the direction of travel that he's going in, even if we don't literally accept that that's some of the things he wants to do. A year in though, Justin, what what else has he done now that began to seem normal but at the beginning we just couldn't believe?

Well I suppose I mean ice on the streets of Minnesota and and other places as well, other states as well. The degree of violence employed the we were told at first that it was just gonna be uh the people they were gonna chuck out of the country and this was always the plan to chuck out people from America who did not have the legal right to be there, but then they would say, Well, we're gonna start with the criminals, obviously, and then we'll think about the others somewhere d down the line and

To an extent that has been the case, they have chucked out some criminals and they would say I think that they are still prioritising criminals, but it's obviously gone a lot further than that. And I think that So you know, the on the serious side of the ledger as it were, I think he's done much more and much more violently there than than we realised. And that I in a in a sense almost that he's

comfortable with and he's got this advisor, Stephen Miller, and other people behind the scenes who've suggested to him that it's a good idea. He hasn't always suggested, at least in public, that he's completely comfortable um with people being chased around the parking lots of big stores or of or people working on farmland et cetera et cetera. But i I think it's fair to say it it has gone further than people thought at the time or a lot of people thought at the time it It would go.

You know, some of those things you just mentioned, Sarah. I mean obviously birthright citizenship. th they were going to stop people being born in America being uh simply having the right to be citizens because they were born in America, which is this great sort of American iconic thing.

Yeah, I mean they still sort of want to do it, don't they? It's gone to the courts, gone to the Supreme Court. Yeah, we're waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on that before they decide. I don't think realistically,

So I mean there are a lot of things. Although that'll be un that will be unusual in itself if the Supreme Court does step in to stop him doing something. And the other thing that we're waiting for them to rule on at the moment, of course, is whether or not he really does have the power to impose trade tariffs unilaterally without going through Congress. And I guess actually thinking about where we were a year or so ago, I don't think we believed he would be quite so sweeping.

in the tariffs or put them quite as high as he has done on some countries like China. Um I don't think we really expected um even that the UK would be paying a ten percent tariff, um, let alone being threatened with an extra ten percent now that there's this uh Row over Greenland and an extra twenty five percent on top of that, potentially. Um so yeah, he's he's gone further in a whole lot of things.

Then I think we thought it was rhetoric at the time when it was saying, Hey, you know, twenty five, fifty percent tariffs and we thought, yeah, that that was just gross exaggeration. He certainly doubled down on that one. It's funny isn't it though, because there's a a sort of juxtaposition of all the the noise and the muzz muzzle velocity stuff and the flood the zone and some of those things that we just mentioned that he says he wants to do, you know,

free IVF was a thing once, wasn't it? I don't know if it still is, um which upset quite a lot on the the evangelical wing of the party who wondered about it and and didn't expect that that would come from this president um that they voted for. But actually

He throws these things out. One or two of them stick, one or two of them might even be the case, at least until the next democratic president. I just wonder whether What one of the things we're blinded to, I don't know what your view is of this, Sarah, is that the paucity of things in the first year of the f of the second term

that he has genuinely changed, as it were, for a generation. And you think of his first term, He had those appointments to the Supreme Court, they went ahead and and he did it in the full knowledge that they would go ahead and get rid of Roe v. Wade.

And and that, you know, whether you approve it or disapprove it, that is a big change and it's generational because the court isn't gonna make a different decision probably in our lifetimes. But in this first term, with all of this stuff happening, is is there stuff that is not Ever going to return to how it was that he's done?

Yeah, the power of the presidency I think. So the way he has used his executive office to issue these orders uh or has claimed that various different laws give him the power to act without Congress on all sorts of things from capturing Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, imposing trade tariffs, sending the National Guard onto the streets of American cities pursuing the kind of revenge agenda he has been against his enemies.

In many, many ways he's pushed and reshaped the powers of the presidency. And the only potential check on that is people taking cases to the Supreme Court.

and then ruling whether or not the president can do this on his own. And as we say, they've got these rulings coming up on birthright citizenship and on tariffs. But on a whole bunch of other things, he has basically established that the president can do this stuff on his own And you don't hear that many Republicans publicly talking about how worried they are about this, but anyone on the right who like the idea of smaller government, less government power

uh should be quietly very, very worried about this and not least because once you've set this precedent, the next time a Democrat is elected president, he can do e he or she can do any of this kind of stuff as well and you know, change the country much quicker and much more fundamentally. Um because they don't need to wait to pass legislation to do it. Yeah, that's a really interesting point, isn't it? That there are some things that have changed.

That not necessarily policy things, but just the ability to do things, things. that aren't put back in the box for a for a bit anyway.

Okay, change of subject to Iran. We've had a question from uh John in Yorkshire via WhatsApp. Trump last week told the Iranian people help is on its way, previously said the US would come to the rescue if violence was used against him. The best decision he ever made was not hanging more than eight hundred people two days ago, Trump told Politico on

Saturday, uh that was about the Iranian regime, of course, and about um the Supreme Leader Hamani. So John's question is is this another taco moment, Trump always chickens out or not, Sarah? I think not around the corner, down the road possibly, um Donald Trump would very much like to take action on Iran. He would um do quite a lot in order to try and topple the regime and he sees a moment of weakness now.

But um whether he chickened out or changed his mind or however you want to characterize it, there clearly was a change last week. Um now we believe it's in part because he was being lobbied by um allies in the region, by Israel but also by Qatar and some of his other Arab allies who didn't think that now was the time for some kind of um military strike on Iran and that it would actually complicate um things in the Middle East more than make it better.

But I think you could actually hear as Donald Trump was talking to us day by day. him going off the idea. He started strong with um truth social messages saying, you know, that that he would come and rescue um protesters if violence was used against them. Well it was, uh in huge numbers uh and he was getting talked about that.

But then he was asked a question um by CBS who said uh about um one of the protesters who was due to be executed and he leapt on that and said, Yes, if they execute any of the protestors, then we'll have to go in and do something and you thought, ah

Once you start emparsing the language like that a and making the suggestion about what it would take you to act really, really narrow, that's when you know he's looking for an excuse not to do it. And it was very easy for the regime to say, okay, well we won't go ahead with any of those executions. And I mean it seemed like a mass exaggeration when he said eight hundred executions had been stopped. And yet again that was him trying to get away from having

promise to take action and now backing um from it. But it was yeah, it was unusual, I would say, of Donald Trump to behave like that. But you could kind of You could kind of hear him reasoning it out in public. Mm-hmm. And why? What what's the reason, do you think, that that he didn't do it or isn't doing it at the moment? Uh I don't think it would have had the pr desired effect. I don't think there is an easy target or targets that you could hit that would definitely um destroy the regime.

He's already done what he could last year, um, bombing nuclear installations and believes that he's completely set back Iran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon. Beyond those targets, it's much harder to see that there is an easy, clean strike that would topple the regime. And what he doesn't want to do

is get involved in some kind of long and embroiled conflict. So that's one reason not to do it and and and the lobbying of friends in the region as well, I think, who really didn't want him to do it was another good reason not to get involved. And so I mean, if that's true, then that's a fascinating glimpse into Donald Trump listening to international diplomats, listening to wiser, cooler heads and being persuaded. Yeah.

And the other side of that is the Maduro thing that I I think has quite excited him. in as much as it was an extraordinary and you know, whatever you think of the rights and wrongs, the legality or illegality of what they did, it was incredibly successful and used uh an array of American power

uh, including weapons whose provenance we don't fully know, the ability for real time surveillance minutely from you know, t s satellites in geostationary orbit down to drones that apparently can't be spotted, um but all all kind of stuff coming together and being used in that way that will have I mean unquestionably

i excited in his mind the idea that America is actually more powerful than it has recently convinced itself than it is. And and I so so in a s in a way y w w you have to put if you're trying to answer this question properly about what happens for instance in a month or two months or five or six months. uh y you you've got to put those two things in distinction to each other. On the one hand, the real risk of that quagmire.

But on the other hand, this kind of nagging sense of, Oh goodness, we're a bit more powerful than we've we thought we were and we are able to do extraordinary things that no other country on earth probably could do. Yeah, and Donald Trump really does firmly believe when he says peace through strength that you need to demonstrate that strength.

But you don't achieve that uh with military action which isn't incredibly successful. And getting involved in some kind of hideous black hawk down um scenario uh is the last thing that he wants, uh'cause that would m vastly complicate firstly the idea that uh America is this ultimate strongman that can do whatever it wants with its military forces but also

Starts to betray his promise to his supporters that America's not going to get involved in lengthy forever wars in parts of the world exactly like the Middle East. Right-ho, we're out of here. Sarah, see you soon. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to another episode. It's you, the Americaster, that makes Americas the community it is. If you like what you've heard, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. We always want to hear you.

your feedback and we look at every single bit of correspondence we get. You can send us an email, Americast at bbc.co.uk. Our WhatsApp is plus four four three three zero one two three nine four eight zero and of course You can get involved in the Americas Discord server. The link to that is in the description. Until next time, bye. I want to stop losing sleep over this. I want to know Surgery is the right decision. to business. I want a plan that's designed just for me.

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