I don’t think there is anyone now alive who will see our international goodwill get back to pre-2015 levels.
It may be that we and Europe and the rest of the world can build something worthwhile out of the wreckage, but the post WWII order of things is irretrievably trashed.
I have often thought that “Brexit” came out of an attempt by certain factions of the English to re-create the post Napoleonic order in Europe that was fatally damaged by WWI finished off by WWII. I fear that there will be factions here in the US that will commit similar acts of self destruction in an attempt to re-create the post WWII order where the US was on top. It may be that history will look back and see the Trump era in that light.
I disagree. 77 million people voted for Trump in 2024. Those people aren’t going away, and the world knows it. The world knows that 77 million American voters are dangerously stupid and immoral, and the world cannot trust us due to this fact.
8 years of a democrat or sane republican won’t change the fact that 77 million people happily voted for a dangerously incompetent fascist, because the second some other dangerously incompetent, rapist felon fascist comes along, those 77 million will vote for him also.
This. Trump is a symptom, not the problem. He’ll die eventually, but the people of other nations have no reason to assume that the people who support him won’t just turn to a replacement lunatic. And that’s made worse by the fact that the people nominally opposed to Trump have made a very poor showing of actually standing up to him.
There’s also the fact that we’ve demonstrated that our word is worth nothing, that as soon as a new President gets in office he’ll think nothing of tossing any treaties or promises issued by his predecessor in the garbage. And nobody trusts backstabbers.
Posters said in 2007 that it was impossible to regain international goodwill due to Bush and Cheney, and now posters are saying in 2025 about the same about Trump and MAGA. In that sense – it’s not confusing at all.
Suppose that Nigel Farage is the next Prime Minister of the UK, and Jordan Bardella is the next president of France. Polling tells me that is all too possible. Then the U.S. would regain some international goodwill without any need for change on this end.
But what if, as I prefer, the international trend, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is in the direction of literalism. Then there will be plenty of goodwill towards the U.S. government. Trust that the U.S. will stay liberal? No. But goodwill, yes.
What cannot be unlearned is what happened after Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons. I cannot say when, but this is likely to lead to nuclear weapons proliferation.
I am strongly against Trump. But if Harris had won, perhaps the situation of Ukraine would not be better. There’s a chance it would have been better with Harris, but only a chance.
As for Trumpist imperialism in Latin America, it is bad and may get worse. But I do not think there ever was a high level of trust there. A lot of the shows of goodwill towards the U.S. were always for show, just like the polite things some normie foreign leaders say about Trump are now for show.
Goodwill is easier to regain than most here think. Goodwill accompanied by more nuclear weapons proliferation – that a likely problem. Trump makes it even more likely.
Without knowing whether Putin will eventually attack the Baltics, or Xi will attack Taiwan, it is a little hard for me to know what is the right tone to take here.
I personally don’t agree that we are collapsing. I think we’ve destroyed our reputation, and the world knows we can’t be relied on due to how stupid and evil voters here are. But I don’t see the US collapsing.
We’re going backwards though, but we will have the largest economy and largest military for quite a while. Even if China surpasses us (in economy, military, R&D, etc), I don’t see us collapsing. Britain didn’t collapse after their empire fell and they stopped being the most powerful nation on earth.
A fascist dictator taking power, the dismantling of the federal government and 40% of the populace being overtly hostile to democracy. Plus, much like the Soviet Union, America has built its society in an unsustainable economic model that cannot be unwound from our political system (radical crony communism for the Soviets, radical crony capitalism for the US). Both systems are completely un reformable without pulling the entire system apart. There isn’t a single American institution that isn’t in complete failure. And you still see people who don’t support Trump refusing to acknowledge that their friends and relatives who are Trumpers are fascists.
I think a slow decline is the more likely. MAGA are pulling at all of the threads that have been the drivers of US hegemony, but even with their “help”, it seems unlikely that we will live to see a time where the US is not the primary military and economic power.
(NB: I’m aware that.by some measures the US is already not the biggest market but China is too closed and the EU (if it got its act together) too fragmented. The US will remain the place to bring new ideas and list new companies, as well as the currency to buy for the foreseeable future).
…which is just as well, because with the status of world markets and the US military’s dominance, I don’t see a scenario where it can quickly collapse without bringing the rest of the world down with it.
IMHO, one factor that will somewhat prop up the USA will be that China, in its rise, isn’t likely to be a nice superpower. The desire for a credible counterweight to balance against China will keep a good number of nations wanting to have the U.S. as an ally, even if the MAGA cancer isn’t fully removed.
The presidents sits dozing in hours long cabinet meetings where his cabinet members praise him on preventing hurricanes, all the while his diaper fills with shit. He randomly kills Venezuelans with no explanation why and he openly ignores court orders. He babbles about annexing Greenland and Canada and half of America voted for this. I realize that Americans are not paying attention, but I assure you the rest of the world is. We’re done.
You should be done with us. We are a nation of dangerous, evil idiots. The world needs to understand Trump is a symptom of how evil, stupid and dangerous the average American voter is. Even after Trump leaves office (one way or another), the 77 million who voted for him will vote for some other evil idiot to take his place. The world needs to learn to move on without us, we are too dysfunctional. I really hope the rest of NATO can push for human rights and democracy, because China doesn’t give a damn about those things and I hope western Europe can push for improvements in human rights and democracy globally.
I really wish the world would actually punish Trump voters more harshly. Nations that are upset about the decline of America should be targeting sanctions directly at Trump’s voters and supporters. I am glad China is targeting Trump’s voters with agricultural tariffs, that is good. The vast majority of farmers are Trump voters. But also tariffs and boycotts of manufactured goods made in rural areas would also be a good way to punish Trump voters. These people won’t stop unless they face consequences for being evil and stupid.
Yeah, this is true. Its kind of like the backlash against Russia. Nations that have been under Russia’s thumb are the ones pushing the hardest against Russia (eastern europe for example).
However I think western Europe will take over this role since the US cannot right now.
One major advantage the US and europe have over China is alliances. China doesn’t really form alliances, while western democracies do have alliances. I think that will provide a major advantage for wealthy democracies vs China.
Also China doesn’t really have immigration. The US will take in immigrants high in human capital to work in business and R&D. China doesn’t do that. So the US’s talent pool will possibly be larger, even with China’s larger population.
Are you sure of that? I don’t think an immigrant right now would consider the U.S. the best possible destination, and even if the Republicans lose the next election (if there is one) what guarantee do you have that they will not be back in 4, 8 years and deport you or treat you as a second class citizen?.
I’d think Canada for example would be a vastly preferable destination.
The work of former Doper garius on the concept of the “trust thermocline” is extremely relevant here. He uses it in reference to business:
But it works just as well with international relations. For example, in Trump’s first term, his tariffs incentivised other countries (notably China) to abandon their traditional connections to US sources (particularly agricultural ones) and to look elsewhere such as South America, and when Trump left office they didn’t all come back. And then Trump came back and has doubled down, and even our closest trading partners in Canada and Mexico are now coming to terms with a new reality where the US can no longer be relied on to act in accordance with either good business nor good diplomatic principles.
We have breached the trust thermocline, and Trump leaving office will not bring back what has been lost. The post-WWII inertia, already slowing after the Cold War ended, has now been almost entirely halted; any future relationships and agreements will have to be built from scratch and with a lot more effort than they used to require when there still existed some international goodwill for the US. Post-Brexit Britain is suffering the same fate in a lot of ways and for a lot of the same reasons.
The old ways are gone. And until the US as a country as well as a government understand that new paradigm, it will struggle to achieve anything lasting at all.
The issue is I don’t think any other developed nation has a large population and spends as much on R&D as the US. So I don’t know if a top tier scientist would want to go to Canada or Germany, since they wouldn’t have the R&D career options you’d find in the US. I could be wrong though.
Also R&D tends to happen in blue cities in blue states, which helps insulate immigrants from the hostility of MAGA.
That was an interesting thread. Both halves of it.
What did I learn?
First: You don’t learn from past mistakes. And sometimes, often even, you double down on them.
Second: It can always get worse. Often it does.
Third: People would rather look the other way and claim it is not so bad than admit they did wrong and are at fault.
The future looks bleak.
And no, the USA will never be trusted again. I read the article in the Atlantic that resurrected this thread and I fully agree. The world knows now how irrational and unpredictable the USA can be and will try to hedge against that. It will be difficult, perhaps impossible, but trust gone is trust gone. We will always we wary and will not put our eggs in the US basket anymore.
How stupid do you think we are?
Trump will depend on the Constitution to cover his sorry ass and pay him when/if he leaves the office, and our allowing him to do this will cement the disdain other countries have for us. Short of us handing him over to the many countries he has screwed over, I can’t think of any way to even partially mitigate this mess.
Right, as well as a population that’s generally hostile to science, and a government that wants to only fund griftable tech; not anything “woke” like vaccines or renewables.
As I said upthread, MAGA is tearing up everything that genuinely made America great; a drying up of talent is just one piece of that.
Incidentally, I worked in China for a number of years and if anyone reading this is considering a scholarship or post-grad position there, I can’t recommend it enough. Living in modern China is fantastic and culturally it’s a population that highly values education and innovation.