I know that’s hyperbole, we hope it continues to be so. But the US military will not oblige. No way.
I would not be so sure. A couple of years of replacements with Trump sycophants at the top levels, and then orders coming down the chain of command? With explicit instructions about what will happen to those who disobey these orders?
Think of a whole bunch of General Flynn’s. Do you think he would flinch at Trump’s order?
I don’t think that would be enough.
I don’t think that the US can never be corrupted in that way, but it would take a generation or two.
The Republicans have been trying to do that sort of thing by working from the ground up, doing what they can to infiltrate on the local level then gerrymander the shit out of places to get a stranglehold on state governments, which can then make it so that national elections are biased toward electing Republicans, and then take over the country that way. It is even documented.
I think that kind of thing in time could work, not that it necessarily will work, I sure as fuck hope not. But it could. I don’t think Trump could make a takeover happen over the course of one term.
To paraphrase an old parable, you gotta boil the frog slowly so that it doesn’t hop out of the pot.
Putin has come out and said he wants Alaska back. Russia was swindled. And that claim stretches down to California as well. Not much distance across the Bering strait or to the Aleutians. There still may be some paratroopers left alive from the Ukrainian assault.
I could well imagine Trump making mouth noises about agreeing to that. He would think he was making some sort of “deal”.
Since Alaska has gone for Trump twice (and likely three times), him selling the state back to Russia would be the ultimate leopards-eating-faces moment.
You can not run an army with a whip. That’s my hope at least.
Though Putin has done it. This all really sucks.
Only 3 Electoral votes? Let Putin have it. He promised me a Trump tower in Moscow!
“You look at a map of America, and you don’t even see Alaska. No one even heard of Alaska until I made this deal.”
Especially if Canada doesn’t pay up its NATO dues. Always pay your debts! Trump empahasizes, rather ironically.
On Rachel Maddow’s show last night she drew this line:
In 1939, Nazi apologists – including an American architect – said that it was Poland’s fault that Hitler invaded. Something about them refusing to negotiate.
Nobody has made this stupid “Poland asked for it” argument in the intervening 84 years, until … wait for it… Putin in his interview with Tucker Carlson, where he spent an inordinate amount of time on this history lesson.
Meanwhile, Trump is inviting Russia to invade any neighboring NATO countries.
Coincidence? Meaningful?
Well, we have the advantage that it’s just about physically impossible for Russia to invade us. They don’t have the air or sea power needed to project an invasion that far.
Now, the US invading? That we can worry about.
“Anything not forbidden is mandatory.”
Pat Buchanan at least said that if other nations had just let Germany have Poland and stop making a fuss about it, we’d never have had WWII and the world would have been better off, especially since it would have only led to a war between Germany and the USSR.
Pat Buchanan’s Revisionist Fantasy - Washington Post
Buchanan believes that had Britain and France left Poland to Hitler’s mercy, it would have spared them an unnecessary war with Nazi Germany. According to Buchanan, Hitler was solely interested in expansion to the east. After Poland, he would have attacked Soviet Russia and “the monsters” would have eaten each other up. In Buchanan’s invented history, this would have meant “the eradication of Bolshevism in Russia and China, no Cold War, no Korea, no Vietnam. Instead of six years of World War II bloodletting, we might have seen six months of a Hitler-Stalin war, ending with one dead and the other crippled.”
There’s plenty of batshit historical revisionists about WWII to go around.
That one at least makes some sense, if you come at if from the “We only care about Western lives” point of view. And are okay with one or the other totalitarian dictatorship ruling everything from the France/Germany border to the eastern reaches of Siberia.
And ignore history and facts. As the article continued:
It’s a seductive but wholly unpersuasive fantasy. Among Buchanan’s many misjudgments on the events of World War II, none is as serious as his failure to understand the dynamic of the Hitler-Nazi regime. Had Hitler defeated Soviet Russia, it would have been an inducement to further expansion. Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was built on fierce nationalism and militarism. His regime needed enemies and constant military challenges to survive and flourish.
After Russia, he would have turned his military machine back against the West. And it would have been a West even less able to meet the threat than in 1939-1940. The decision to guarantee Polish security had as much to do with stiffening British resolve to meet Hitler’s threat as with saving Poland from German conquest. A Britain assuming Hitler would confine himself to Eastern conquests would have been a nation as enthralled in 1939-1940 by the appeasement psychology as that which immobilized it in 1938.
Well, there’s a hell of a lot of speculation in any of these “What if?” scenarios. I think the notion that Hitler would have won in six months is pretty whacked. The USSR was just too big, and would have held out longer. Germany in the early days of the war was more propaganda than actual military juggernaut. Hitler’s easy early wins mostly came because no one wanted to pull the trigger on actually fighting him. The USSR wouldn’t have held still for a German invasion, however.
And in addition to that, just digesting such a big win would have occupied a lot of German resources. Every man they used suppressing Soviet dissidents is a man they couldn’t use attacking westward. Germany might have wanted to go for France, et al., but I doubt they would have the power to do it for quite some time.
And meanwhile, I’m pretty sure France, et al., would be building up their own militaries, taking advantage of all the lessons Germany and the USSR were learning while they pounded on each other.
It would almost be worth it for the Schadenfreude.
Yeah, because Hitler proved that when he said, just this one more takeover and that’ll be it, he meant it.
Churchill was absolutely right, and post-war interviews and review of documents showed that the Axis had no plans to ever decide “We have enough,” not until the world (yes, including the U.S.) was under their dominion. Hitler exulted in the thought. It was Germany’s destiny.
The world would have been such a better place that we wouldn’t have found out about the concentration camps until years later, if at all. Hell, Jews may not even exist at all at this point had that been the case.