That’s nothing new. In the past the US supported military dictatorships, in Latin America and elsewhere, because they were anti-communist. The difference here perhaps is that previous presidents were looking after American interests, while it’s not clear Trump cares about anyone’s except his own. Doesn’t make much difference to the people living under a dictator, though.
America isn’t there yet, but the first 3 months have been a lot worse than I expected. Worse than Trump’s whole first term. We’ve still got most of 4 years to go.
I think values do play some role in US foreign policy. But I meant values are the reason we as individuals should prefer the US to China, at least for now.
It probably is inevitable. Unfortunately, multilateralism is almost certain to lead to more and bigger conflicts. When there’s only one superpower, or one regional power, other countries know they can’t win, so they don’t start fights. When there are two or more equal rivals, they know they can compete for resources and influence.
C’mon man. The US isn’t attacking Canada over a weapons program. You folks could quickly develop a deterrent in weeks. Just find some smallpox.
With regards to Europe and trust. Where is Europe’s proportionate contribution to global security? At some point hard questions and debates will be had and I’m not sure that that is necessarily a bad thing. Especially when many nations, for whatever reason, believe in nationalism without actually understanding that when the world is divided into nations conflicts of interest including militaristic ones are inevitable.
Those two things are unrelated. The rest of the world doesn’t “trust” the U.S., because we are untrustworthy with sensitive information, supporting the wrong regime in conflicts, and generally being assholes. None of that is related to whether European nations are paying their fair share of defense costs.
If Canada started BUILDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS? (And it’s obvious to be aimed at who.) I mean, of course there’d be a military attack. Trump would lose his shit and he’d suddenly have way more public support for it.
I’m not sure anyone would say it’s very likely but no-one should be ruling this out.
I mean, look at Greenland: up to a week ago, people are still saying it’s a joke, “take him seriously not literally”, all the standard stuff.
But Trump keeps raising it, and steps up the language with things like “we’re going to get it – one way or the other”
Now the Vice President, and his wife, and Mark Kelly are going there, despite Greenland saying they are not invited for talks. What’s going on?
Is it a joke, or is it like the Project 2025 joke that turned out to be 100% accurate?
I just think it’s more complex than “prefer”. There are ways to work with the Chinese and push back in other ways.
I lived out in China for 8 years; I love it there. Will visit again in a couple of months time. There are lots of things I could criticize their government for, but lots of things they do pretty well TBH.
It’s weird for me how it’s just depicted as Mordor on US news, and British news is only slightly better. I’ve had people tell me that, e.g. what China is doing to Taiwan is just as bad as what Russia has done to Ukraine (and of course such people use such logic as part of their rationale for supporting Russia SMH)
Not per capita or proportional to Gross National Income; in which case the US goes way down the list. Nations with considerably smaller economies, like India and Germany each give over 60% as much as the US.
If we’re saying only the absolute figure matters, not proportional to the size of the donor country, well the EU, if we consider it collectively, donates about twice as much as the US.
Of course we would. If they have nukes they can defend themselves and that’s unacceptable; the only question is if we’d invade as soon as possible or skip straight to exterminating them with our own nuclear weapons.
So why wait? Why not a pre-emptive strike with the full fledge of WMD against all weaker nations? Why are we waiting for a situation where we are going to get hit back?
Partly because the fascists haven’t been in power that long, and partly because they aren’t as valuable if they’ve been nuked. But I do think we’ll eventually depopulate Africa and South & Central America with nuclear weapons as part of our race war, they are too large to occupy, conquer and genocide with soldiers. We’d nuke Asia, too, but China and Europe have nuclear weapons as well, and by then I expect they’ll have allied against us in self defense.
I don’t think @Beckdawrek or any of you need to worry if you land in Denmark. You will be judged on your own behaviour, not on your moronic government.
In my job as a taxi driver, I see lots of tourists. None of the Americans have told of unpleasant experiences.
Let’s just call it the last half of the 20th century.
Now, speaking of the last half of the 20th century and who was openly hostile to democracy, want to talk about all of those little wars that were fought in Africa, Asia, and the Americas to maintain European colonialism in opposition to democracy?
