I guess this was the situation for us for decades. US was the leader of the west (or still is), but I reckon the trust towards the team leader is questioned. Therefore I understand Canada forming treaties with China too. Having treaties towards multiple actors leaves more room to move.
Finland has always had this situation. Our first decades, we we’re leaning heavily towards Germany. They actually helped us in the civil war etc. So it was no surprise we stayed along with Germany a bit too long, and bailed out in 1944.
After the wars we we’re tightly in Soviet Union’s grip. Unwillingly we pleased soviets and had close relations towards them, but tried to remain independent at the same time. Often it was a blurred line to walk by.
After Cold War we’re full in EU and tightened our relations towards US. So it’s understandable to fear that we are again heading under new “master”, similar thoughts have been brought up in several European countries.
And here you are today, sandwiched between Russia and Sweden, who went a very similar route that Maine and Minnesota did by importing a new voting bloc with public money.
Most of the howling and screeching about MAGA being anti-intellectual is just sophistry. We’re just cutting off public funding for our own Marxist revolution, not throwing them in jail for being socialists. If MAGA was an actual fascist movement, which it isn’t at all, that’s what it would look like.
I actually made a public comment to that effect this week when our Mayor declared that “fascism is here” in Lewiston, Maine because federal agents are arresting guys like Ali Ali. I explained that if fascism was here, he would have already been arrested for violating The Malicious Practices Act and placed in a concentration camp with no legal recourse whatsoever. I explained that the first amendment is the first and best clue that we do not live in a fascist land. He deserves to be censured for making such a foolish comment to rile up his base to become the next Renee Good here in Maine, but I doubt the council will see it that way.
If Maine wasn’t actively participating in a confederacy to defy the federal government, Ali Ali would have been picked up by ICE at the Cumberland County jail a few years ago. Instead, Maine has been refusing to cooperate with ICE and treating people who should be deported as American Citizens because of their Democratic Socialist idea that we’re all just citizens of the world and that anyone who occupies the geography should share the same rights, including voting rights.
Now ICE has to come here and hunt these people down with no help from local and state law enforcement, who let Ali Ali back out on the streets multiple times instead of just calling ICE to come get him.
We don’t have the geopolitical luxury of US, which is protected by oceans. For you, war is your boys going overseas to die somewhere. For us, the war means you might see your loved ones dying during Russian air raids.
Russia is again a hostile faction. Sweden does not provide much. I trust more to our allies in south (Baltics and Poland).
I guess this explains why I am a bit jumpy when it comes stuff conserning our national security and allies.
Yeah we’ve got the best geography on the planet, no doubt about it. Even better now with Greenland opening up to long-term defense infrastructure and resource development. The Mississippi River system is a logistics and economic cheat code, too. Our fortress-like nature that Mark Carney seemingly bemoans is the entire reason we spit out the largest navy the world had ever seen in just a few short years when some really wild ideas were taking off across both of our oceans.
The truth of the matter is that war on US soil is what we’ve been experiencing with ideological subversion, precisely because we are so well-guarded against conventional attacks. It is the CCP buying influence, training VP candidates like Tim Walz in Maoist thought and praxis, and ensuring that his political rise is well-supported.
The totality of the situation is really pretty mind-boggling, and average Americans are just now beginning to understand that the deep state is very real and we’ve been paying for ideological subversion to be done to ourselves with our own resources. Some will never accept that such a thing is true.
My boy Yuri Bezmenov tried his best to warn us decades ago, along with many others. Better that we start listening to him later than never.
In good local news, Portland Police dispersed the crowd of self-righteous and insufferable woke white women who gathered outside of a hotel they thought ICE was staying at to blow whistles, bang pots, and engage in the same kind of performative protests taking place in Minneapolis.
The difference in Maine seems to be that our local police departments are much more independent from our woke mayors and city council compared to Minnesota. Just last week in Lewiston our Mayor rushed to the Mogadishu Market under the mistaken belief that Mama Shukri’s fraud ring was being raided by ICE. It was being raided by Lewiston PD and USDA federal agents, and he had absolutely no clue about what was going down.
I know our new chief and I do not think she will allow insufferable woke white women to have Minneapolis style rioting in Lewiston, even if they put a lot of effort into it.
And thats the kind of middling fickleness that we saw at the run up to and beginning of the Russia/Ukraine war that allowed the time for Russia to become entrenched and fortified in Ukraine.
We might shoot first and ask questions later, but at least the questions we ask are like “WTF were you thinking by holding international shipping lanes hostage?”, and not “How can we better serve you, Supreme Leader?”.
You’re welcome. No need to apologize to Houthis for trespassing on their sea.
At some point, other nations will realize that you don’t want to be a team player on a team full of buddy fuckers.
Excactly. Do you think Canada wants to do deals with bloody China? If they would trust USA, they would not keep the back door open.
Yep. I have my doubts, but maybe now European leaders can prove their worth. And America did the same mistake under Obama. I remember some hawks in the government demanded actions, but he did not want to escalate. When has the appeasement worked with Putin?
Russia should have been stopped right at the 2014.
It depends on the context which approach is better. America is famous for it’s aggression and the fuck ups that has followed.
Sometimes fast and ballsy is the answer, sometimes more cautious approach leaves less bodies to the ground.
I hear you. I feel like this whole Greenland thing acomplished nothing for the US but a small market crash.
Trump is calling it a win, saying he has a concept of a deal that will provide the US access to everything they want, but the access was always there. What am I missing?
It’s clear the ”gain” US seems to get is not worth the hassle and potential damage to relations. If somebody thinks otherwise, I would say he’s delusional.
For me Trump in foreign policy is kind of a loose cannon. He throws things around and sometimes he hits, sometime misses. You can not ever be sure what he is going to say/do next.
I really have no idea what he hoped to accomplish, but his 3 minute ‘‘conversation’’ with Macron and other leaders with regards to increasing the price of drugs was hilarious.
It never happened, but the logic of trying to increase the price of drugs in other countries so that they’re cheaper in the US comparably (while prices rema the same) is a nice one.
He seems to have a very superficial knowledge (if any) of most subjects he adresses, but Joe Biden wasn’t even alive while in office, so I duno.
Some smart people here like his policies and feel they’re better off with him so I cannot say whether he’s doing a good job or not. DEI and race based policies were certainly out of control and needed to be stopped.
I agree he’s a loose cannon but to me, he’s the most hilarious political figure I’ve ever seen in my like. His story telling is second to none. I hope he gets a Netflix special after his term, especially since right wing comedy is on a steady rise.
I think Trump’s knowledge goes deeper than most people realize, and he is far more intelligent than most give him credit for. He’s not a polished actor like Obama, and he certainly lacks the same fawning press coverage Obama enjoyed while he was busy selling out the nation and placating all of our European friends. He is surrounding himself with a wide variety of very smart and capable people who are all aligned with MAGA, but still hold much more diverse views and beliefs than Biden’s advisors, who were all woke cultists.
Plain-spokenness is typically mistaken for a lack of sophistication and even intelligence by American leftists. As I get older, I tend to view people who can distill complicated issues into clear words as far more intelligent than someone who can “explore nuance” with a long-winded screed of technically correct ideobabble.
If we look at Carney’s speech as an example of something that resonates with Europeans, what did he really say in those 16 minutes? Not a whole lot of concrete ideas, but lots of nuance with lots of mush-words that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. He’s sad that we didn’t elect Obama to a fourth term, and it shows.
Obviously, most leaders of our allies would prefer the post WWII order. They’d be fools not to. The USA subsidized their defense while they all pursued high-minded social welfare policies, replete with all kinds of nuanced arguments about what is right, just, and moral in their idealistic visions for society. Now they’re in the position of having to explain why it is a bad thing for the world if the USA stops doing what we’ve been doing for 80 years, along with rejecting open border internationalism domestically.
Democrats here have the same problem of trying to explain why Trump’s policies are somehow bad, which is why they are shrieking about Republicans as Nazis instead of making any coherent argument.
Emotional blackmail is losing political power in the USA, and more people can see right through it. Not the insufferable woke white women, though. They still fall for it every time.
This takes immense skill and intelligence. As Feynman has stated.
The difficulty is to get the important points through without watering their meaning. In more complex topics it is very difficult.
That west has pretended that the rule-based world has worked, since it has been in their interests. Then he proposed that middle powers need to play along more to be the counter force against hegemonies.
He surely hides it well. My 2 cents is that Trump is clever. He has certain instincts and he can figure out stuff fast. He has the so called “business sense”.
But I don’t see him having much of knowledge about the world. It seems he reads some posts from X abd makes statements based on them.
Yeah, he does stuff like repost X posts, but he also does stuff like eschew all of the “experts” and appoint a guy like Pete Hegseth in spite of many well-credentialed people objecting to it. The result? A recruitment surge, a woke purge, and improved morale among our actual warfighters.
I don’t think we ever really had a “rules-based” international order at all. If we did, there wouldn’t be 42 languages currently spoken at Lewiston public schools, as international asylum laws meant that most of those people should have ended up somewhere besides Lewiston, where they just so happen to be able to collect full social welfare benefits on day 1, vote in our elections with a near-zero chance of prosecution, and do things like start a home healthcare company that bills the government for 100 percent of their revenue.
Whatever the “rules-based order” was on paper and in rhetoric, it was always an illusion to a certain degree. Rules were always thrown out when convenient for international elites.
It seems obvious to me that Trump has a great deal of knowledge about the world insomuch as he keeps making a lot of moves that seem to benefit Americans, promote peace, and project strength. As we type we have assets headed to the waters near Iran and negotiations continue between Russia and Ukraine. China hasn’t invaded Taiwan. Russia hasn’t invaded Finland. India and Pakistan aren’t going at it. The USA is back on steroids and hitting the gym hard, becoming stronger instead of weakening ourselves with wokeness.
Back to the bar analogy, a lot of people would prefer if bar security was done by effeminate, polite, and deeply empathetic people thoroughly trained in de-escalation instead of some hulking goon who can simply rag-doll and pummel anyone in the room. What they (often willfully) overlook is that there is way more violence and more people getting hurt when your bouncer lacks the ability to rag-doll and pummel the bad actors. It’s the same idea with law enforcement. All of the so-called compassionate and empathetic policies have produced a Lewiston with far more crime and suffering. Funny how that always works out.
I agree. And for the long time it benefited the west to believe in it. US probably never has believed in it, but it has served you well, since it has kept other team in the line for you.
See? You agree with Carney in this.
This does not actually tell much about Trumps knowledge.I don’t know Hegseth enough to comment his capabilities.
And Trump does not need to be learned or knowledgeable to rule the US. Top politicians usually aren’t the most intelligent or have deep understanding of the world. They use other traits to get to the top. Trump of course seems to be quite extreme case in this.
Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
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