Trump wants our attention. Let’s stop falling for his geopolitical clickbait
hen Donald Trump reassured the world that he would not, after all, use force to acquire Greenland – after days of threatening as much – he was doing what he does best: turning geopolitics into a spectacle. Whether Trump ever truly believed the US should acquire a vast Arctic territory belonging to a Nato ally is secondary to the fact that, once again, he ensured that Europe and the rest of the world were focused on his agenda.
Trump is not a politician who responds to events – he seeks to make them. Not because he is deeply invested in policy detail, but because he understands a defining feature of contemporary politics: attention is power. In an era of information overload, there is no scarcity of data or analysis; what is lacking is attention. And whoever controls that controls the debate.
Steve Bannon once described Trump’s domestic strategy as “flood the zone with shit”. In other words, create so many scandals that opponents no longer know which ones matter. The media chases everything, the opposition is perpetually outraged and no one has the mental space to set their own priorities. This logic and the accompanying tactics are now also being deployed by the US in its foreign policy.
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