US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s(ukrainetoday.org) |
US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s(ukrainetoday.org) |
The sophistication of the F-35 cannot be debated. But the rest of the world doesn’t trust the US anymore, so it doesn’t matter how good it is - people would gladly explore a worse product because they see it as lower risk.
That’s the reality of where America is at the moment. There are many Americans on Hacker News (if not the majority) and naturally the merits of the product that America produces are being discussed, and its superiority is front and center.
This viewpoint is not relevant to the rest of the world. We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore and the only thing that can save that relationship is full software control. If America wants to make sales it needs to adjust to that expectation, or buyers are going elsewhere.
The argument is missing the forest for the trees - the relationship is more important than the product itself. The sooner that is acknowledged the more likely a political course correction is possible. Otherwise, sure, you might see a few short term F-35 sales conclude. But the purchasing will stop as soon as it can.
The vast majority of the comments I am reading on this site are not stating this. The vast majority, even the Americans, are agreeing that this is a bad decision. Unsure where you got this from.
Sure "tech" is hard to avoid but all the rest is still a massive loss for US companies and I suppose we'll see Europe and Asia working even hard to avoid American tech dependency now.
If political change is going to happen swiftly back to something more sane, it's going to be because of poor economic policy, and right now, that's looking like a given.
I wonder why this sentiment is not reflected in stock prices. It seems like major defense companies are close to ATH and keep growing. Not trying to argue, just wonder what is the reason for it.
>We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore and the only thing that can save that relationship is full software control.
This is not how this works... You do have full software control when doing deals of this size. However, that does not mean that you have to provide software updates. The program in question is about find the different frequency's the russians are using so the f-16 can continue it's jamming capabilities. This is not "Full source control" It's whether the US should be using US Cyber Assets to be manually update the frequency's detected.
Why do you even ask this question, did the answer really not seem obvious, or was it rhetorical?
1. The sale of planes like the F-35 is not just about the plane. It’s about the ability to be a nation with nuclear power by “renting” the US nuclear missile it can launch. People bought it mainly for that. The pilot and YouTuber ATE Chuet did a video talking about this if you want to dive into it.
2. The plane in itself is not as capable as say the Rafale. They tried to do way too many things with it. The vertical takeoff capability in particular made the plane worst in every other aspect and its own design is very questionable. A Dassault engineer talks about it in this video [1]
Also F35s don't need to be ALIS enabled. Israel's Adir version of the F35 uses a separate set of parts and systems co-developed with France and India.
Realistically, I don't see Ukraine getting the Dassault Rafale in the near future. They'll probably go with either the Gripen due to it's lower cost or the Eurofighter due to Germany's strong relations with Ukraine.
I also wouldn't rule out the potential of Ukraine potentially rolling out it's own jet fighter program - much of China's jet program owes it's origins to Ukrainian firms in the 2010s
One problem remains if politics decide to scrap the F-35 deal in Germany:
While the Eurofighter was an alternative to the F-35, it is not certified to carry tactical nuclear weapons. The phased-out Tornado was the go to platform for this particular scenario.
Source: German Luftwaffe personel
The Gripen has advantages for Ukraine. It's a more rugged aircraft, with lower maintenance demands and lower operating cost. It can operate from very basic airstrips and roads. Saab boasts about this.[3] Their pitch mentions that servicing an aircraft between missions requires just one trained tech assisted by five other workers. The USAF likes to operate from big, well-equipped, secure air bases, and US aircraft tend to be designed for that environment.
The US has, in the past, tried to discourage other countries from buying the Gripen, to protect US manufacturers. That sales advantage just disappeared.
[1] https://min.news/en/military/a409faa4bc530b328f75ed6ccff23b7...
[2] https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/04/saab-ceo-pushes-for-s...
Vietnam wasn’t a conventional conflict either. If you’re willing to lose complete control of most of “your” country and sustain 10x higher casualties than your opponent you might have a chance, but that’s an extremely steep price to pay.
You can flag here, but the mainstream press has picked up the issue:
"Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons?"
https://www.ft.com/content/1503a69e-13e4-4ee8-9d05-b9ce1f7cc...
"Such is the concern that debate has turned to whether the US maintains secret so-called kill switches that would immobilise aircraft and weapons systems. While never proven, Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said: “If you postulate the existence of something that can be done with a little bit of software code, it exists.”
In practice, it may not even matter because of how already reliant advanced combat aircraft and other sophisticated weapons — such as anti-missile systems, advanced drones and early warning aircraft — are on US spare parts and software updates."
There you go, finally mainstream press and politicians are mentioning the kill switch.
Shouldn't be to hard for Europe to make the required pylons for the planes who don't have the ECIPS and for those that do, some of them might already have CJS installed.
It's a problem for sure, but it's a manageable one.
> But the Russian air force could sidestep the jamming by reprogramming their radars to operate at slightly different frequencies. Under Biden, the USAF team might’ve kept pace with Russian adaptation by constantly adjusting the AN/ALQ-131s own frequencies. Under Trump, Ukrainian airmen are stuck with pods whose programming may soon be out of date.
Some people were asked why this got flagged, by I think there's some justification for that given the fact that it's a misleading headline for an article editorializing another article, and that most people here used it as a jumping off point to talk about politics and not what was actually being discussed.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...
> U.S. President Donald Trump has halted U.S. aid to Ukraine, including vital support for the F-16s’ radar jammers.
> That could deprive the Ukrainian air force of its most important aerial countermeasures at a critical moment
That does sound really bad, I think.
Can’t the Ukrainees (?) reverse engineer the update format and make their own on the down-low?
Yes, I'm talking about the totalitarian governments of China and Russia.
It could be framed as "cancel culture overruled the courts". The second Putin became the "literally Hitler" of the moment well anything could be done - even things they didn't do when actual Hitler was around.
This meant extra-judicial seizures including "preventive" seizures. No law was broken or sanction placed yet, but they're going to seize your assets now and figure out how to make it "legal" later on.
Even the Swiss - neutral during WW2 - abandoned over two centuries of neutrality and went along with the EU in this.
The message these countries sent was clear: if you ever oppose us, rule of law will not protect you.
Personally I think the reason the US got strong, especially economically, is because of stability, rule of law, global trade and economy of scale due to large enough population. Not because of specific incidents of screwing someone.
The biggest empire in the world paid for the US to re-tool its economy to produce arms for them. Later on the USA provided loans to continue that expansion.
Then Japan entered the war and it got personal.
Sure bretton-woods was a humiliation, but the Marshall plan was there to stop those humiliated allies from going communist.
Lots of critical things for the US is made exclusively in Europe.
Lots of medicin that people rely on daily would be unavailable if EU/US trade broke down completely.
About half of the US companies over a certain size run on ERP software from an European vendor. And it is not trivial at all to change that, even if they wanted to.
In the very Forbes article the OP's article cites it links to info about this F-16 reprogramming effort[1], showing it was collaboration between the US/Norway/Denmark and that the US electronic warfare team wasn't familiar with the system, yet within two weeks they say they managed to reprogram them to meet the initial deadline.
> The 68th EWS assembled a dedicated team comprised of a mixture of seasoned experts and bright, young engineers to approach the reprograming challenge. Their first task was to understand the unfamiliar EW system and how to reprogram it.
> Relying on data provided by Denmark and Norway, then adapting new processes and approaches to the usual process, the team was able to understand the system and start their work.
> After understanding the system, the 68th EWS deviated again from normal methods and sent its members overseas to a partner-nation lab to collaboratively develop and test the system alongside coalition teammates.
[1] https://www.dvidshub.net/news/479401/dominate-spectrum-350th...
I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.
Project is so far along that Denmark is probably stuck with them.
"The weak are meat the strong do eat."
It's electronic warfare capabilities have reportedly surprised Nato pilots in exercises before.
Also, they could have bought European planes (Rafale).
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.
I think there’s a fatal misconception among many Americans about where their prosperity comes from. They’re not special or exceptionally capable by any means. It comes from wielding tremendous economic and military power gently, preferring cooperation over conquest.
My concern is that the consequences of the current strategy are too far into the future to act as a sufficient deterrent. It’ll feel like it actually works for a time. But then eventually everyone hates you and adapts to exclude you.
Guess where our network gear vendors are? (Currently using mostly Arista, but also some Juniper core routers, used to have Cisco gear too).
Guess where our OS is being sold from? (Even when use Linux, much of it is RHEL).
We use VMWare products (yep, US), and Openshift (RHEL, also US).
We use F5 and A10 load balancers. Both US.
There's sooo much off-the-shelf hardware, software and firmware from the US; replacing one of them would be a big to huge integration project; replacing them all would be an endless nightmare, especially if the only alternative is from China. If there even is a practical alternative.
It is so shameful and disgusting.
It is not about a chunk of the territory.
That is not at all evident. Russia's economy is in a terrible spot, and might collapse entirely without the war ('special military operation') effort.
There's various ways of tracking support and by many metrics there are European countries that have given more than the US once you account for population & GDP. It gets more complicated for EU members as the EU has given financial support, so the largest funders of the EU, like France, have paid proportionally more via the EU than directly.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s... https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/these-co...
Also worth remembering that 70% of that aid from the US never left the US and was spent on procuring weapons from the US.
https://econofact.org/factbrief/does-most-u-s-aid-to-ukraine...
But I wouldn't expect a businessman the calibre of Trump, who has managed to bankrupt multiple casinos, to understand any of that.
Maybe more tariffs will help the American tax payers.
But I'm not surprised that our prime minister recently did not leave out the possiblity of hosting nukes on Danish territory.
Given the theatre in the US one could even say we'll need nukes to defend Greenland.
Hmm, the US welcome to liberate us from sour tax burden. I suspect the invading force will surrender when they see the liabilities :)
On a map, it looks to be bigger than all of North America, although in reality its only about 1/5th of the size of the US.
(although granted that's still a very large area that they probably see as 'up for grabs' since Denmark is small and far away and the US already have airbases there)
A new world order is being established and the US wouldn't be a leader in that world.
In country if 40 Million desperate people as educated as the Ukrainians there should be quite the talent pool to try to hack this.
https://bsky.app/profile/tatarigami.bsky.social/post/3ljxhgc... https://bsky.app/profile/tendar.bsky.social/post/3ljx3esi74k...
I can’t imagine what the internal struggles look like right now, but it definitely hasn’t dawned on most of the Trump people that whatever budgetary gains they make by randomly firing people will be offset - to put it mildly - by the effect fucking up the arms export market will have on the federal budget.
This happens all the time. "Russia did X." "The UK just did stupid thing Y." "Why are Germans suddenly authoritarian again?"
There are always lots of people who disagree with the actions of their government. Some governments -- the US government increasingly so -- punish dissent. Russians, for one, have almost no say over what their government does. Americans in general are not making these terrible decisions. Some cabal is, but even the Republicans, who have all the power at the moment, are mostly just knuckling under to decisions they know are terrible.
I know it's tempting to blame and hate people as nations, but I don't think it helps. In fact, it's how we got here in the first place: firebrands telling nitwits that everyone in Europe or New York City or wherever hates them.
This is just the language that is used to refer to the governments as well as the people/culture. It may help to presume that, in most cases, they’re referring to just the governments.
he did win the popular vote this time, unlike last.
True, but if Americans do not stop it, they own it.
Nobody cares much if you meant to make an accident, you should have been more careful - especially if you run away from the scene.
The middle finger is by a larger portion of the working blue collar middle class that has had their economic base wiped out by free trade or trade policies like negative tariff's (ex: China subsidizes shipping of products to the US, hiding the true costs and incentivizing higher carbon/energy consumption practices like shipping raw products overseas to be processed and shipped back, its why you can ship something from Shenzhen for 30 cents when it costs $50-$80 to send the same small item the other way). The few manufacturing facilities and industries here view this as a hostile predatory business practice, similar to when Walmart or chain moves in, cuts prices to cost/loss, drives local competition out of business, then raises prices after they're gone to at or above what the prior businesses sold at. You'll never see this reported on because its a practice that benefits the very rich and people in cities who like cheap goods and don't care where it came from. They view this trade war as a return shots to a war or attacks that's been ongoing for 20 years.
If you frame this as anything outside of working class politics or rural vs metropolitan you're still viewing politics from a view point of 30 years ago. People in rural or less populated areas don't care if people in NYC pay more for goods. They've had their entire economic infrastructure ripped out from under them and were told to learn to code or move to an expensive city or something after they're already barely surviving. They've seen the cost of living raise as they're outcompeted in lower cost housing segments by an influx of migrants who need housing and buy up/rent out the few affordable lower cost areas of a city or location to live. Meanwhile everyone living in the nice neighborhoods thinks its all racism and enjoys the novel new ethnic restaurants popping up. They're experiencing none of the downsides and all of the upsides so find it easy to say its entirely xenophobia. People not affected by it at the same levels in academic or corporate jobs are able to talk in idealist terms about how great these things are because they don't have to deal with the base realities of the issue or fentanyl epidemic, etc. So yes, that segment of the population is very much in a mood of "if we have to suffer, you'll suffer too until you start giving a shit about us instead of entirely what just benefits you". Whether or not this is entirely correct or nuanced doesn't matter. That's the overwhelming sentiment. If you still keep thinking of politics from the viewpoint of what's discussed in bars and dinner tables in cities with a population >500k or everyone in your friend group has a 4 year degree and gets their politics from major outlets, you're dealing with outdated information and context. Even highly educated conservative pundits who live in high population density areas don't get it and have struggled to catch up with the huge shift over the last 10 years.
A real untangling of the US and European economies seem both impractical and really inefficient.
I've worked with airgapped Windows XP machines still in operation running scientific instruments.
If you deleted Microsoft and Apple from world it world it would be a Y2K event but the world wouldn't end, it would just be a lot of work.
Every other country was either recovering from being a colony, or not as far along industrially as US
This is the wrong view. The US got strong because it was able to convert its considerable industrial might to wartime footing within a very short timespan (which was frankly an incredible undertaking), and also because its geographic isolation allowed it to focus almost fully on offense.
(WWII^W) The US has had free reign to screw with dozens of countries since the end of WWII. And they did. But it wasn’t your[1] country so then it doesn’t count. Which is high school clique logic.
[1] Except if you were a politically active left-wing organizer post-WWII. Then the US and government-backed groups in Europe could have screwed with you through Operation Gladio, for example in Italy.[2]
[2] This is just an example. And I’m not terribly educated on the matter. I can’t learn about this by watching the tellie. So it takes more effort than the stupor that a slogan like 100 years of building trust hints at.
For the record, I dearly hope it doesn't come to this, but right now I'm not sure.
Maybe a cooperation with French (Safran) or British (Rolls Royce) industry could remove their reliance on the Americans? (Not suggesting overnight but over the next 2 - 7 years.)
You may be correct on this, but I'm trying to keep in mind that we still have 4 more years of this and I think this may sorta be the new normal for the time being. I'd hate to see HN get distracted by every new drama Donald gets himself involved in till 2029.
It doesn't matter it wasn't 50%. He actually won the popular vote this time.
It seems like most folks in the comment section didn’t even read TFA.
Per TFA, this impacts F-16s NOT F-35s
Per TFA, the US is not actively “turning off” any piece of equipment, they are no longer providing updates (something with which we are all familiar.
Per TFA, this means that the US is no longer providing active support in a country-vs-country battle of electronic warfare. Which is what the title and article says, and very different from what most of you actually READ.
But this should absolutely worry F-35 operators.
Title it about F16s
> Per TFA, the US is not actively “turning off” any piece of equipment
From the article: "the Trump administration has cut off vital support for their [the F16s'] jamming capabilities"
What article are you reading?
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2025/03/no-more-viable...
Would you rather a centrally planned government where companies no longer care about their value? That, in a nutshell, is socialism.
Not unless its heavily modified to scale past 10k nodes sensibly. its security/secrets model also needs a boatload of work before you can think about hosting untrusted parties on your kit.
Jet Fighters need a lot of maintenance, they are not like cars.
So a kill switch in software is not needed. If the US stops shipping parts, then it is only a matter of time before the Jet Fighters is an expensive paper weight.
Also core routers, interxions, sealines, Level 3 et al.
But retracting support is the nuclear option.
Figuratively, because you can probably one do it once, so you better pick a good reason for doing it.
And literally, because small European countries do now have to consider nukes.
A more realistic outcome is that French nukes will be stationed in other European countries. But France is also not willing to give up exclusive control over those nukes, and the next French government could very well be far-right, and thus become as unreliable as the current US government. It’s a difficult situation.
It wouldn't be all that surprising to see Poland and Finland doing atmospheric tests in the next few months. Given that Ukraine gave up their weapons for a totally vacuous security guarantee it would make sense for them to build bombs too. 2025 could be the year of global nuclear proliferation.
"US support to maintain UK's nuclear arsenal is in doubt (theguardian.com)"
The UK has produced its own nuclear weapons in the past and has weapons grade processing at Sellafield. There’s ~140 metric tons of separated plutonium stored there.
It is apparently enough material to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Not every warhead has to be a billion megatons to be a deterrent.
https://news.liga.net/en/politics/news/china-appalled-by-tru...
The statement of the named Chinese official is either a psyop, or he is, in the parlance of intelligence agencies, "going native". I'm leaning towards the former hypothesis.
More reality - the Muslim world is organized and very wealthy in spots. By confrontational and arrogant (see above) posturing and actions by Westerns, it drives power alliances to the Muslim world. So then there is one third of the actual population of the entire world, embracing the Muslim world economically and politically.
Secondly and perhaps more importantly, the backdrop economically for all parties is substantially about Oil and Gas. In the USA, the Oil and Gas interests have gained the upper hand, and they know very well how to apply it. Oil and Gas industry has all the capital and all the ambition to expand, fortify and entrench for the next multiple decades. It is rarely mentioned in the provocative and divisive social "news" that fills the media in the West each day.
I'm only discussing Trump's behaviour and its effect on totalitarian governments, I don't have enough knowledge to discuss the rest of what you wrote.
I think the recent series of Trump's actions against Ukraine have failed to send a message to totalitarian governments that matches his own words. This has nothing to do with how much of the population Trump rules.
Is this changed?
Evidenced by most comments on HN at the time I posted not being about the software support per se being withdrawn but jumping off the premise it was only programmable by the US, with comment chains ranging from US software and supplied aircraft can't be trusted to going so far as talking about kill switches. This led to a very noisy, knee-jerky discussion based on an incorrect basis.
Quotes from the OP's article:
> Ukrainian pilots are not receiving updates, and the programs could soon become obsolete [...] France’s Mirage 2000s are equipped with their own powerful jammers, and the Americans are not involved in their programming.
> In the longer term, the Ukrainians could refit their F-16s with non-American electronic countermeasures [...] But that could take time and money...
Now contrast to the original Forbes citation which explained the US team doing the reprogramming wasn't even familiar with the system until being tasked to reprogram it for use in Ukraine, doing so in just two weeks and it being a multi-national effort with two European countries and an overseas facility.
Had the discourse began with that there would still be criticism of the government's decision, given the US was leading the reprogramming effort, but with clarity on what was occurring.
Especially now that the U.S. government is also talking about not living up to its NATO obligations.
This is not gonna hurt the rest of the world. Defense is where the U.S. exports a lot. So cutting back on U.S. weaponry will only help other nations.
The same is true of Tech. Currently the tech industry is global, but expect it to become increasingly national. Considering this is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the U.S. and one of its biggest exports, again, this is only gonna hurt thenUS economy.
And the US’s dominance in this space is so high the rest of the world will simply push for open source at no loss to their own economies, since it’s only the US’s profit making will be hurt.
AWS, GCP and Azure looked unbeatable a month ago
but today, if you're a government official in the UK, Poland or Germany, would you be recommending AWS as your cloud provider?
absolutely not
they now have massive geopolitical risks associated with them due to being under the control of the increasingly unstable and authoritarian US regime that will sacrifice 80 years of foreign policy and soft power for a soundbite on fox news
Maybe Europe should open source a fighter jet and let the world compete on how they'll manufacture it.
I'll not be able to leave some companies outright, but I'll be taking backups and reducing my reliance fast.
Now there are new ideas getting pushed (through influencers like Musk): that Ukraine "should be sanctioned", that Ukraine "should give their minerals to the US", that Ukraine "should give up their lands", that Zelensky "should resign" and finally that "US should leave NATO".
With such allies, you don't really need enemies.
Trump talks about invading Canada or Greenland and people act like it is a joke. I don't think it is.
The US is in a position to completely dictate to Europe what they will or won't do, using Russia as a proxy for now. We are 48 days in. A couple of weeks ago I replied to someone suggesting the US could provide weapons to Russia with disbelief. I no longer consider that an impossible scenario. Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia. I mean that's a relatively tame response compared to the options on the table.
Right now the only chance for Europe is to stop this madness in the US. We have this "take it down" act, the executive order to produce a report advising whether or not to declare martial law, the January 6th pardon of the Proud Boys who are now effectively a paramilitary force of thousands waiting for Trump to deploy. These are all familiar elements in history and I think we are in for a bloody, bloody summer. I think we're going to see government forces opening fire on protesters, martial law declared, and the implementation of Chinese style suppression and crackdown on dissent online. Maybe attempts to strip US citizens of their citizenship and "deport" them for good measure, anything to try to sow fear into average people to not step out of line. If the administration is successful in quashing the opposition and getting everyone to go back to work, Europe could easily next on the chopping block. Remember all the things Bannon said about the EU during the first administration.
Let's not forget that American history is riddled with interventionist failures, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and CIA-backed operations that destabilized the Middle East and Africa, leaving behind suffering and chaos.
Meanwhile, American corporations have shown blatant disregard for local laws, privacy, and security while exploiting loopholes to dodge taxes, further eroding global trust. Europe literally had to fine them millions, just to get them to start paying _minimum_ attention..
The recent instability in American and the division between its own citizens has exacerbated the issue and now with Trump, I believe it has reach new heights, even causing conflict with its (arguably) closest ally and loving neighbor: Canada.
As a Canadian, it saddens me to write this, because I have nothing but love for American people.
I think that in a few months, we will see the U.S. economy doing very well and somehow rebuilding its industrial base. In the long term, U.S. influence and wealth will make up a much smaller share of the world’s wealth than it does today.
Nope, turns out that the American Empire is being dismantled by something else entirely. A subset of the populace that feels jealous of those with more and scared of social change, reacting to try to hurt their fellow country men? A megalomaniac leader who is somehow completely controlled by Russia? It's hard to get the full picture.
The two sort-of examples in Western history I can think of are Spain after Franco, and the UK in the 1930s. In Spain a monarch's left-shift was perhaps the deciding and surprising variable, and in the UK it was a powerful civil rights movement.
The US has neither, so I don't know what to expect. The two-party system also makes it very hard to bootstrap meaningful change, since both parties tend to try and chase the Overton window, but only one is really pushing to move it right now.
Most leftist political parties in Scandinavia and the Baltics manages to be be both pro-Palestine, pro-NATO, and pro-Ukraine. They don't seen any contradiction because there aren't any.
Why do some American leftists follow this 3rd worldist neo-Maoist thinking that Western civilization needs to burn down before you can get free healthcare and free college?
This is precisely how half of the US media characterized Barack Obama, who pioneered an even more impersonal style of American imperialism with drone warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.
You are saying this as a hypothetical that never happened, right?
The combined nominal GDP of California, Oregon, and Washington is approximately $4.1 trillion. If these three states were considered a single entity, their combined GDP would rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy.
To me it seems to be a bit like what the Böckenförde-Diktum points to, which is: "The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."
Basically the modern capitalist secularized society is so void of deep human values and only emphasizing legality and profitability that it brings out a certain kind of elite. An elite which is decoupled from all real human connection and value leading to a thinking like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-...
Well and now we have to cope with this. But until we understand that these elites are no accident but logical results of the system we foster, nothing will really change. Or better: until we accept that the reductionist approach to human society and value that this system is based on is flawed and act accordingly everything we do is basically just flex-taping it and waiting for the next escalation.
What you're saying here is "we're better than everyone else and everyone else disagrees with my positions because they envy how awesome we are".
I knew that democracy was fragile and that losing it could happen to all of us - except the US. somehow I believed their separation of powers would always work, that the pretence of freedoms would always be in the interest of Western oligarchs.
it's been a tough 6 weeks for me.
It's part honest desire to do something good with the position history has afforded the empire, and part self-serving rationalization, depending on who is doing the talking.
Yeah, about that... Analysis by Grok says "75-85% likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset"
https://x.com/i/grok/share/WQepvCpIJl2EJ0F7tHNbLAhm6
Can you imagine if this were true?
Playing nice with foreign empires, economic protectionism, domestic military action, an "all or nothing" attitude towards foreign wars, taking chunks of our neighbors back yards, etc.
This isn't new at all. It's exactly what FDR had to overcome to build the American Empire.
At the end of the day, the problem isn't really Trump. The American Empire isn't going to end because its only exporting $300B of military might to the world instead of $600B, when no one else on the planet is scratching $50B (I made these numbers up as an illustration).
It might end because it seems like the media landscape has entirely striated the US population into two groups: One group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions are necessary for the continuity of the US way of life, and another group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions will destroy the US way of life. No one makes any good faith effort to understand the other side; even my suggestion that this division is the real threat will get downvoted by HackerNews' overwhelmingly leftist bubble. American political discourse is now dominated by people who cannot allow even a single imperfection in their coat of armor, Trump cannot possibly be wrong about anything, his supporters cannot admit they might not have known the implications of what they voted for, the left cannot possibly be wrong about any of their criticism of him, we're screaming past each other.
Interrogate your inner thought process right now; were you thinking "What side is this person on?"
Its so difficult to get the full picture of understanding of the other side. Trump is rich, egotistical, and doesn't listen to the counsel of others; but Russia is controlling him? Trump wants to reduce the federal debt levels of the United States; but is hellbent on spending anything to deport economically productive illegal immigrants? Trump is silencing the media and kicking them out of the white house; while streaming more than Pokimane, direct from the Oval Office, just rambling for hours a day? Trump supporters were hoodwinked and lied to; yet more than any President america has had for decades, Trump is doing exactly, to the letter, what he said he'd do on the campaign trail; its just that the left didn't believe him back then, because we're so used to Presidents that do nothing. America's children have the worst test scores in the G20, and cost the most to educate; we should continue what we're currently doing? America's healthcare outcomes are among the worst in the G20, and most expensive; we should continue the path we're currently walking?
We're in a crisis of understanding right now. We need more moderates. We need people who understand both sides of the coin, and can have a reasonable conversation about why the past 20 years hasn't worked for most Americans, and also why Trump's policies also won't fix things. My fear, however, is that we won't get that in 2028; instead we're just going to move into our camps further, with a leftist version of Trump v JD Vance, and we'll dig further down the hole of two sides that need each other to solve the problems we face, but refuse to work with one-another.
They even say this - Rubio said that we do not live in a unipolar world any more - a comment which attracted weirdly little notice.
Biden's approach assumed a unipolar world which did not exist. That's why the Ukraine war, from the American imperialist perspective, backfired.
The achilles heel of the American empire was, ironically, always profit and greed. If there is one thing that could be used to persuade America to let its industry rot it is profit and its industrial malaise is largely responsible for the ever-more-obvious decline in hard military power.
The good news - form my perspective - is that the GROWTH in the percentage of the workforce living off pensions is slowing dramatically and is now under REAL growth, which means working folks might feel like life is getting better again.
The reason people have complained that life hasn't gotten better for workers over the last 20 years is because nearly all growth has gone to more people being retired and the 0.1%.
If you keep the same growth, but the number of people retiring slows, there's a little more wiggle room with the pie.
I've seen these "people in party x categorically do y" comments a whole lot more recently, and it really feels like a net negative to political discourse. Based on the source I pointed to earlier, there seems to be a plurality of support for at least continuing aid to Ukraine, with only 30% believing we're sending too much. Us vs them mentality won't help people recognize and voice disapproval of decisions within their own party that they don't agree with; we need to concede that people may vote a candidate for a narrow set of reasons (thanks to the two-party system) and have political discourse that encourages disagreeing with certain of your own party's views.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/14/americans...
if it was only half of the US population they want to hurt, it's also the rest of world, even the environment.
They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.
Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.
Briefly, the parts of the map that voted for Trump are largely known as flyover country. To oversimplify things, the people in this area have been neglected and talked down to by some portion of the political apparatus as far back as they can remember.
In some cases, the vote for Trump wasn't meant to be anything more than punitive. To get a rise out of the politically aligned groups that can afford to fly over and - literally - look down on.
Pulling the cord with such little respect will not be forgotten. The USD will be lucky to still be the reserve currency in 5-10 years time. The rest of the world is likely to sanction the US at this rate. It is violating all of its agreements in bad faith.
if the US regime carries on at the rate it has over the last month I expect it will be gone considerably faster than this
What Ukrainians need most are the low-cost drones made of commercial parts from Asia which have made it hard for the Russians to fire artillery and supply the front. To produce these drones, they need cash. The Europeans have mastered the art of sending cash to Ukrainian vendors that serve actual battlefront needs, and doing so under strict supervision to prevent fraud. Europe can fill the gap the Us is leaving in military aid if they spend their cash right.
For the last two years, I have supported a US non-profit sending non-lethal aid to Ukraine, my CB if it used for drone defense and EW.
https://ukrainedefensefund.org/
Cheap is a technological frontier. If you operate on that frontier, you are able to trade less expensive pieces for more expensive pieces, pawns for queens. This is the cost-exchange ratio. All other things being equal, the country that best lowers the cost basis of its materiel will win a war of attrition; ie the other side exhausts its resources first. The US does not operate on the frontier of cheap because of bad incentives, namely cost-plus procurement.
Sounds like another reality distortion field.
Sometimes people are more interested in inflicting pain to others than to improve their own situation.
The actual Taiwanese people are breathing a sigh of relief that they are increasingly avoiding the "primrose path" of Ukraine: Catastrophic death and destruction based on lies, marginally enriching foreign countries and a corrupt domestic elite.
I'd rather not engage a hot war with China over it.
We're going to have enough on our plate keeping China out of the Caribbean and our half of the Pacific.
Buckle up.
https://www.independants-senat.fr/post/claude-malhuret-situa...
This is just HNers being late to the party.
Back in the 1990s, the US blocked sale of F-16s to Indonesia due to human rights concerns (eventually worked out).[0] Thailand has F-16s but more recently switched procurement to Swedish Gripens, partly to avoid reliance on a single combat aircraft supplier. Thailand also does bilateral training with PLAAF (Chinese Air Force), and their F-16s are apparently barred from participating. [1] There are rumors Egypt is switching from F-16s to Chinese J-10s, largely because the US refuses to sell Egypt modernizations and air-to-air missiles that would make them competitive against the Israeli Air Force.[2] The move away from the US as a combat aircraft supplier has been building steam for decades now. In the past there simply weren't many options competitive with the F-16 (both affordable and capable), but that's not the case in 2025.
> This is going to have a massive effect on the US economy, internal consumption will not save it.
I guess this really is the question: what is the expected overall quality of life for the average American when our continent-sized economy is largely functioning under conditions of autarky? The US's imports and exports are lower in 2023 than they were in 1913. Even in 1913 the US had the world's largest GDP (but not GDP/capita, was still much lower than the UK's at the time).
[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA441694.pdf
[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3279377/why-t...
[2] https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/2024/egypt-is-rumored-to-have-s...
In normal peace-time procurement, there is usually significant locally made content required, plus much deeper training. I'd suspect that countries who acquire arms in that way are much more able to continue without US support.
When Iran was still in the US good graces, they bought a bunch of F14s. After their 1979 revolution, they kept operating their F14s. The US actually retired and destroyed all their F14s during the retirement to prevent spares from finding their way to Iran.
Or think about Boeing and Airbus stopping servicing the planes they sold to Russia. Other countries are still buying from them as if nothing happened.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/story/venezuela-threatens-to-sell-f-...
US's republicans still don't grasp what a diplomatic mess Trump is causing, which will surely affect all trade. Actually, I'm expecting consequences for the entire US tech sector, not just the defence sector.
At this very moment, Apple and Google have the ability to disable communications for billions of people. They can make computers and phones totally unusable. Not just some features but everything.
EU was trying to legislate around this risk by forcing companies to bring data on EU soil and open their platform to alternative providers. They always tried to be gentle with it as companies will claim that they are taken advantage of but as the things unfold at this pace I'm pretty sure that it EU and probably the rest of the world will be very heavy handed the moment there's an instance of US president or US tech oligarch decides to shut down group of people from their devices to teach them a lesson or to compel them into something like they did with military systems in Ukraine. I was afraid for years that people will be insulated into groups and the global community will be destroyed and now I feel like its happening.
The way almost all societies have allowed themselves to be completely dependent on a few providers is mind-boggling.
Someone else 10,000 miles away has the kill switch for your phone, your credit card, your brokerage account, your TV, likely your HVAC if you're into home automation, maybe your car.
Empires are not good.
> I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests
Self-interest is a middle-class religion. I think that a lot of Americans think that what we are doing is morally wrong. I also think that the idea that everybody else is going to shun our military exports over ditching Ukraine is absolutely hilarious. Ukraine isn't paying for any of this, they don't even count as a customer. Everybody has been free at all times to buy from the UK, France, and Germany, and if they don't see the difference between themselves and Ukraine, they should make decisions about their futures accordingly.
I might remind them in passing that borrowing money from Germany to buy weapons from Germany was what brought Greece's economy down. Also I'd remind them, for what it's worth, that again they're partnering with Germany or France or the UK to invade Russia for unintelligible reasons.
Can we stop this nonsense on both sides? Russia does not want to invade NATO countries, and for sure Germany, France and the UK do not want to invade Russia.
Britain is hawkish because they love continental powers fighting against each other and pulling the strings. They will not send their 50,000 soldiers to Moscow.
I think we have passed the Rubicon for quite some time. There's no turning back now. The equilibrium will be found in another configuration.
The United States is still being taken for granted. And I have to laugh at the implication that the American economy will be ruined by the effect on the American arms industry when almost every American ally was neglecting their own military, instead taking American security guarantees for granted.
It's an attempt to pretend that real USA screwups, like Vietnam and Iraq II, are at all similar to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So, philwelch, please compare and contrast. Without just echoing what you've heard, what are the pros and cons of supporting Ukraine in fighting off Russia?
ETA: Also "on the hook." As though Ukraine is forcing us to give them money?
About defense of Kyiv, it has nothing to do with usa generosity and everything to do with creativity and a lot of luck. i'll suggest to read about how it was managed. there is a 50 pager released by uk miliary on this topic
Sure there’s plenty about US policy and actions that have been normalized, but that doesn’t mean they should have been adopted. It doesn’t mean those things should persist without thought or challenge. Even going about that the wrong way is more productive
Yes, The System is fragile (as opposed to antifragile). But then let’s discuss that, not insist on the persistence of fragile-ness.
[Not a US citizen/resident; never worked in MIC-related area]
a). MIC is an industrial sector creating jobs, doing some R&D (which can trickle down into the civilian sector) and bringing hundreds of billions they do in exports into country; all of those seem benefitial for the overall economy. Of course those can be achieved in non-military-related areas, but so far there was a working machine - and a wrench is already thrown into the gears.
b). The last three years have shown that large-scale wars are still on the table and having a working and oiled MIC is much better than having a degraded one.
Is this really the case or only a long term problem? The F-35 is a totally different story.
Most people everywhere generally believe what their social reference group tells them to believe. Human nature, I guess.
Best example of that is to take a look at HN in 2022 when Musk announced the Twitter takeover. A good half of the comments were quoting Voltaire and Snowden and applauding Musk for 'protecting free speech'. The other half saw it for what it was. When Musk stories come up now, there is no one still pushing the free speech angle.
Yes, but any country selling military hardware would do the same if it turned coats in a conflict.
They aren't thinking, really. If you look at the online comments from people who support these actions, you'll notice these characteristics: they are usually listing the same talking points, using the exact same collection of key words or "facts" (even in different languages, across different cultures) often strung together like chants, have a conspiratorial notion of a hidden puppeteer directing events or people they disapprove of, conversely they often have a messianic belief in their chosen prophet, and they are usually inexplicably very angry.
You will also notice that the vast majority of them very rapidly, and across cultural boundaries, start parroting the latest talking points. Talking points that didn't exist days before and weren't on anyone's minds.
It's a form of mass hysteria.
Some idiots, but mostly bots.
I disagree. Their interests matter greatly to them, they are just totally unequipped to understand who, and what, they are voting for.
Imperialism is not good, so this is welcome.
This means that no country will buy any US-supplied military equipment.
Trump has destroyed the trust in the US defense sector for years to come.
Absolutely irresponsible action.
Oh no! We lost our "shine" because we aren't the premier weapons dealer on the planet anymore!
> a massive effect on the US economy
You see the problem. You just ignore it. You pretend it's a secret virtue.
> end of an empire
Good. I'm absolutely tired of being a citizen of an "empire." Take your dusty imperialism and go away; please, your warmongering ways absolutely disgust me.
> a direct attack against their own personal interests
It's not. You want it to be for propaganda purposes. See what I mean about living in an empire? This is completely churlish and gross.
The U.S. has long leveraged this strategy to control governments. Do you think Saudi Arabia could use its American-made jets to attack Israel?
Now, Trump is pressuring Ukraine to start negotiation under these terms:
1. Allowing parts of Ukraine to be annexed,
2. Permanently blocking NATO membership, and
3. Signing a “mineral deal” to sell resources to the U.S. at cut-rate prices.
China will laugh all the way to the bank.
US needs to diversify and have an industrial policy. It also needs to rethink capitalism. Maybe new capitalism with US characteristics and more humanism thrown in. As to the defense industry it needs to shrink and be part of the industrial policy, not depend on warmongering to exist. You can have peace and a defiance industry without wars.
The Ukrainian people deserve sovereignty, full stop. If someone believes in traditional American values, (e.g. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) they should support the fight against russian aggression, and IMO the flimsy and poor arguments being made about focusing on our economy reek of dishonesty when someone thinks about how integrated the US economy is with the world's.
Yes, the amount of direct CAS and amount of direct air to air engagement is low.
Making an argument that "everyone knows" something without a basic effort to inform yourself is not great.
Their loss will be felt both in lives, and in the cold of winter when homes are unheated.
Fighter jets are extremely valuable, they are not a magic weapon though, but just one of the very important tool for the military to have.
Even if this wasn't the case, they would still not be useless in that the firearms in your house aren't useless if you aren't actively shooting a home invader.
There's a lot of bloviating from the chattering class about cozying up to Russia, but I've yet to hear a cogent alternative. And no, I don't think "endlessly funding Ukraine to a forever stalemate" qualifies.
Plus if Russia wins, its appetite will only grow, and another war is just a matter of time.
Any ceasefire or peace without security guarantees will be used by Russia to rearm and try again in a few years time. It will be a continuation of the conflict that started in 2014. That, too, isn't hard to understand.
You want the war to end so that Poland, Japan, Taiwan and Australia no longer trust that the US will help them and develop their own nuclear weapons!
You (and Donald Trump) seem to be using "Ukraine and Russia stop shooting at each other right now", while Ukraine operates more under "Russia stops shooting at us for the foreseeable future, 20 years at least." Russia has previously broken a number of ceasefires and written agreements (including the infamous Budapest memorandum) and so Ukraine is not super trusting to agreements not backed by anything.
"Britain’s BAE Systems rose by 15% on Monday, Germany’s Rheinmetall gained 14%, France’s Thales increased 16% and Italy’s Leonardo was also up 16%. In London the surge in defence related shares helped to push the FTSE 100 to a new record high"
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/03/european-de...
Spoiler alert: it did not end well for them.
Putin is setting another trap.
1. They already had an enormous weapon stockpile from the 60s and 70s that was becoming rapidly outdated, and was manufactured with few basically no limit on the unit count being made, resulting in tens-of-thousands of surplus weapons being funded by the state and the economy bending to support an oversized MIC.
2. Soviet Russia had a struggling economy in the 60s and 70s, and an almost nonfunctional one in the 80s. The idea of developing new digital weapons was basically trashed, and the "next generation" Soviet weaponry became the surplus analog stuff they stockpiled. Research and prototyping ground to a halt as Russia lost self-sufficiency on the technology that mattered.
3. The Soviet-Afghanistan war weakened the USSR's traditional force composition to the point that it was doubtful they could fight a traditional war, even with a relatively untrained adversary. Thousands of Soviet soldiers died to prove that Russia's doctrine wasn't going to win a pitched battle against a well-funded enemy.
Europe already avoided over-arming themselves like the USSR, they have a modernized economy, and they aren't fighting proxy wars against forces they can't beat. As an American citizen I'm more concerned with our own country resting on it's laurels, struggling to modernize it's supply chain and threatening to fight wars in the Levant with no clear goal.
Russia on the other hand may have issues similar to the 80s/90s if we get serious with sanctions on shipping oil.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/13/defense-stocks-drop-after-tr...
I don’t understand the causality. Trump reaches a new low and the slogans about the benevolent past reaches a new, even more naive high.
> I think there’s a fatal misconception among many Americans about where their prosperity comes from. They’re not special or exceptionally capable by any means. It comes from wielding tremendous economic and military power gently, preferring cooperation over conquest.
For how many years has the US been not-at-war?
The U.S. cooperated with Canada to build cars together for generations. It’s a source of a lot of economic prosperity for both countries. And now the U.S. is threatening Canada with annexation while trying to destroy the current auto industry.
I know there would be bickering about the details because everyone has their own mood on how warmongering the U.S. is, and to whom. But whatever you want to qualify the past as, the present is considerably and undeniably different in contrast.
I guess maybe to Russians this would actually be backwards given the U.S. has always been aggressive towards them and now America and Russia are quickly becoming BFFs.
Don't kid yourself for one second into thinking that your safety and security are tied to some "Kumbaya good feeling" that random strangers have towards you. The stick may be silent most of the time, but everyone knows it's there.
The stick being silent only works if people believe you won't randomly start swinging it if they cooperate, and people trusting you not to swing wouldn't matter if you didn't have a stick.
Same with China. Get rich first then buy guns.
Except it might backfire if Europe understandably decides it must buy European.
"U.S. President Donald Trump complained Thursday that his country's decades-old security treaty with Japan is nonreciprocal, as he steps up pressure on allies to increase defense spending and buy more American products." [2]
It's about buying more American weapons.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-13/trump-tel...
[2] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2025/03/fd3521d51353-upda...
E.g. he might be solely responsible for getting the Liberals reelected in Canada, something that a year ago you would have thought was absolutely impossible. But Trump is so deeply hated in Canada now that every time he mocks Trudeau it makes the Liberals more popular. Liberal support, which before Trump was elected was so low as to make a Conservative election win seem inevitable, has skyrocketed since Trump took office. It's now pretty much a dead heat, and that's before the Liberals have elected their new leader.
So I don't know, maybe he just really, really wanted the Liberals to get reelected and he pulled off the only way to make it happen. Maybe he felt sorry that Canadians seemed so internally divided, so he threatened to annex Canada to unite us.
Or maybe he's a moron that can't even understand cause and effect.
I think he'll continue to be the main cause of constraints to realizing his visions maximally.
For this reason, once we can look back on this time in retrospect, there's a way this plays out where he may just be a horse that ran away. [0]
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse
Is this really what the US wants?
I'm curious: Where can I read more about this? Which parties (and how many) are saying this? Is there any pushback from Merz?
Of course Europe always had some ability to defend itself, but I think it's clear that some of that ability was outsourced to the US(with reciprocal benefits for the US, but still). Yes, this introduces some redundancy into the Western sphere, but that's a good thing.
Now every actor needs to have the strength to deter all others, which means everyone gets stronger, which means everyone needs even more strength to deter others, or deterrence simply breaks down. We had a multi-polar world in the past, it went terribly and led to massive wars. Now we are returning to that system but with nukes.
Is increasing traditional military spending the way to go in the 21st century? If the decision is left to military leaders,they might spend massive amounts of money preparing to fight yesterday's war.
If you set aside alarmist positions, it may very well possible that Russia has no interests in military conflict with rest of Europe beyond Ukraine.
In that case what is the best thing Europeans could do?
There is danger and risk in military over spending at this juncture, and Europe needs to be level headed about it.
So, no.
Calling anything "alarmist positions" now is just uninformed; Putin has said Russia wants the USSR territory back, their entire industry is now turned to produce weapons, their schools are "Putin-Jugend", they are currently invested in the first "great war" since WW2.
And the US isn't just getting out of Europe - they have gone full turncoat.
This is an unmitigated disaster for both US (citizens) and EU, and the EU is trying to manage what they can.
I think it’s much easier to just hunker down and appease the United States for four years and hope the next administrations are more merciful.
Anders Puck Nielsen on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNZ56C-f4a8&t=422s That's starting at the Ukrainian plan but it's worth watching the whole vid if you are interested.
Another commenter suggest sent a video about this that I'll watch later, I suspect the answer lies there, but thought I'd share with you so you can have some understanding of what someone who sees both side's surface level plans as confusing and problematic .
Nothing will stop Putin but force.
Russia has no allies, just cronies such as Lukashenko and Russia is de-facto at war with the west. The front line just goes through Ukraine.
The main goal in Ukraine should be to make sure that Russia has as little benefit from their invasion as possible. Luckily this is effectively wholly compatible with Ukrainian goals.
> The main goal in Ukraine should be to make sure that Russia has as little benefit from their invasion as possible
But how? Is it mostly to prolong the war until Russia gets tired of spending money and resources on it?
Rather the have adopted the doctrine of "Ukraine can't lose, but Ukraine may not win". Always supplying just enough arms to keep the Ukrainian front from collapsing not to "stir up" Russia.
If at all possible, take back any Ukrainian territory. Reduce whatever gain they got from this invasion. But even if the current line stands, the more Russia can be made to bleed, the less it will think that war can be a net postive for them.
Either we have the spine to defend our allies against unambiguous breaches of international law, or we don't.
Apparently, the entire US Navy was okay with that volunteer assignment.
China: 1,419,320,000
Russia: 144,820,000
World: 8,005,176,000
Russia + China = ~1.56 billion
(Russia + China) / World = 0.195 aka 20% or 1/5 of the world population
Where the competition is less slanted, yes you see countries selecting Leopard for their MBT over Abrams (the US won't sell the advanced Abrams armor packages). But when it's F-35 vs. literally anything else, the competition is for second place. You only really choose something else when F-35 isn't an option at all. Threats aren't needed when you just have to do a fly-off.
Sure, technical capabilities are crucial, but don't political and economic factors significantly influence the adoption of the F-35? Factors like strengthening alliances, diplomatic influence, cost sharing, job creation, and export strategies.
My point is: you don't just buy a plane. You buy into an ecosystem where supply chains, political partnership, trade deals and long-term support are just as important. Take away some of that, and I'm sure for a lot of buyers the Typhoon or Gripen suddenly start looking a lot more attractive.
Obviously many countries have bought the F-35 because of some pressure from the US or as a way to buy protection. Nobody would do that again today.
Let's be fair, you said "some". We also have some of those in Europe.
But to answer, with a guess: perhaps the difference is that in European countries there are way more political parties. But I'm not an expert on American politics so feel free to say this is BS.
The reason why they feel overrepresented in the US is simply because a real, progressive leftist political project is essentially impossible, so the most extreme of the extremes are proportional more audible.
Electing Trump has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It's about being mouthpieces for Russian propaganda.
I assume he was trying to allude to Obama, which at least in the recent decades came the closest to that in terms of media image, but the claim that there has been an anti-imperialist president of the US (on any relevant timescale) doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
The difference now is that the plutocrats are high on their own supply.
There used to be an understanding that if they didn't give something back they'd end up hanging from a lamp post.
Now they've decided the little people and their silly little planet are disposable, and AI, magic robots, and a cult of narcissism will replace them.
Absolutely lunacy, with consequences as expected.
Every article I've seen parrots the same language and they all point back to this same article[1] as the source of the information, but the article itself provides no proof whatsoever or explanation.
This smells like propaganda. And it seems to be quite effective here. Before going for each other's throats on this maybe it would be better if we verified the facts.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...
Both sides have a lot to say about F-16s and it's both sides' interest to flog various angles to death.
I suspect you won't see real appraisals of the impact for a while yet, and maybe only after the war ends.
For additional context, here's an article from August about how the USAF helped to upgrade the F-16 electronic warfare capabilities: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/ukraine-f-16-electronic-wa...
The words "lose support" is carrying a lot of weight in this reporting.
I don't think US arms manufacturers should expect many future orders from the EU.
What Trump and MAGA people don't realize is that 11 carrier groups sailing around the seas alone are not that big a threat. Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) and Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) provide unsinkable airfields, supply depots for the US all over the world. They are massive power multiplier for the US military.
Complete ignorant of strategy, international relations and power dynamics here.
Is it nagging anyone else that the "Forbes Analyst" gets called Aks, Aske and Ax in just 10 lines or it is just me?
I'm hoping that people eventually understand that "losing credibility" isn't a deterrent when the offending party is entrenched enough that they believe (correctly or not) that everyone will keep buying their stuff anyway.
Everyone who for voted for this scum should be blamed.
> the Biden Air Force was able to keep up with the Russian adaptation by constantly tweaking the AN/ALQ-131 frequencies, under Trump, Ukrainian pilots are not receiving updates, and the programs could soon become obsolete.
If so, title seems inflammatory. Not that I support the action, just saying it should be characterized accurately
"it depends on what story you read" - which is what i alluded to in my other comment. You have to choose to believe Zelenskyy, who isn't acting like someone who wants the war to end, or not. That's it.
It is possible there was "miscommunication" - as that's what they're blaming the White House Zelenskyy meeting a couple weeks ago on. But Zelenskyy was supposed to be in Saudi Arabia at that time, and that's why the talks were planned for that date.
the whole "no paper invitation, and we don't want to participate if Russia is going to be present" is quoted in several stories. So which is it, they don't want to participate, or they weren't invited?
And in that clip it is explained that Kellog nearly immediately went to Kyiv to keep communication open.
I get the feeling that people merely don't like the way this is playing out, and that somehow gives them the right to make claims on shaky evidence.
i think that there is a lot of nuance to this ukraine thing, and a lot of the problem can be directly blamed on the US.
Lindy Hop and McCain in Ukraine in 2016, setting up a proxy war: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1740092403.145_redux2016linds...
There are factions in the US that are warmongers, and a lot of americans don't like that. We don't want to be the ire of the world by constantly meddling in affairs. "strategic deployments" and "Strategic bases" and all this, yeah. We should have stopped. I don't even know if we can extricate ourselves without completely destablizing the global economy and "peace" - but i think we oughtta try.
every article, when directly quoting, uses weasel words like this. "Ukraine" decided they didn't want to participate because Europe wasn't involved, or Ukraine "didn't get a paper invitation". even though Zelenskyy was supposed to be in country at the time, he decided not to.
I will source the actual facts later, but keep downvoting stuff you don't like.
Downvote this comment too, here, i'll help:
Russia was promised by the US that NATO would not expand. by someone named Baker. Stuff shifted, but under no circumstances was russia going to let Ukraine "join NATO". When Ukraine started saying they were in talks to join NATO and get their own nukes, russia perked up and started fucking with the border. Russia warned Ukraine about the murders occuring in "ethnically" russian "speaking" areas of ukraine, near the border. I bet you can name them. Russia waited eight years to actually respond to this injustice, and it was after Ukraine started talking about joining NATO. Again.
So if you are pragmatic, and you don't want an all out war in europe, you withdraw the US support for NATO. Simple as. Now you don't get to threaten russia with US forces anymore. The US doesn't want to fight Russia, and certainly not for a leader that "loses" hundreds of billions of dollars. "whoops, we can't find half of it" is bad enough when it's an amazon order, it's a lot different when you're talking about sending nearly 400,000,000,000.00 USD to ... Ukraine.
The thing that gets me though, is does anyone really believe this is all russia is capable of? moving a front line 10 meters, or a kilometer?
Europe needs to stop prepping for a war, because Europe is the most war-hungry population on the planet, historically. They can't help themselves.
The rest of the world is about to find out what it's like to not have the US backing up your stupid decisions. We, as taxpayers, are tired of paying for the EU experiment, for sabre rattling from the UK and France and Germany.
It boils down to the need to "read between the lines" and not just accept any article put forth in the last 4 years. there is a lot more nuance than "orange man bad" and "Comedian War Hero", ok?
I do and have.
Too many of their issues are simply made-up for me to get much traction, though. You see one outrageous thing after another and go “omg if that’s true it does seem pretty bad!” and then it’s almost always not true when you look into it. You can do this all day long with Fox News, let alone even nuttier sources.
You're right, probably both. Unfortunately the question alone makes HN have much less utility.
One area where this is especially of interest is everyone considering their dependency on U.S. products. If you live in a country under military threat, questions like what happens if the first strike against Canada involved a malicious Chrome or Windows update or holding back a patch for a vulnerability the NSA wants to exploit is quite an interesting problem.
> Most stories about politics, [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
The US killing trust in its export of arms is definitely a new phenomenon. It breaks with +80 years of policy.
All startups in SV will now have to consider if they will have an export market at all.
Which non-US companies would now like to be dependent on whatever export restrictions that Trump might make up in the future?
Ideally, "hacker news" is for people who have a hacker/engineer mindset. Look at the actual facts of the situation, not the flashy sales brochure.
Odds are that your second hypothesis is the correct one. You may wish to start by comparing what you think the current administration is doing with what it is actually doing.
You cannot count on Fox News to be accurate, they have never claimed to present "accurate" news.
You may be interested in the results of this study, where Fox viewers were paid to watch CNN for a month.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...
MAGA is a particular brand of "the right" that is pretty clearly evil/dumb.
Ultimately USA is just 350 million people. Without its allies it's just another country. You can't bully half the world into "better deals" forever. Some countries might agree short-term out of desperation, but long term they'll throw you under the bus.
Consider how you would behave if your business partner changed the price +25% -25% every few days, threatened to cut you off if you don't do what he wants and insulted you randomly. You'd search for a reliable competition.
The latest one for me was a discussion about the Olympic boxer from Algeria. Apparently it was proven through leaked medical records that she does, in fact, have XY chromosomes.
I did some digging. 99.999% of the articles covering this are just circular references to each other celebrating their moral victory. Finally I found the original source which was an online-only French newspaper that as best I could tell publishes like three articles a year from random guest contributors.
Reading the “leaked report”, the only evidence are screenshots of photocopies of… what literally just seems to be a textbook explaining the supposed condition she has. Not regarding her specifically. Literally just a textbook description of the condition.
There are no confirming documents. Nothing with her name on it. Nothing with an actual lab result. Nothing but a random Internet personality pseudonymously claiming that they somehow, out of all the other possible news outlets on earth, received leaked copies of her medical report. And zero receipts.
By all means, read for yourself and determine if this is a credible source: https://lecorrespondant.net/imane-khelif-ni-ovaires-ni-uteru...
Every. Single. Time. that I dive into actual claims from the conservative outrage machine, there is nothing there. This specific topic has the right running victory laps, reposting one another as their primary sources. Nobody has bothered to look if it was actually based on anything real.
Example 1: We sent hundreds of billions to Ukraine, while North Carolina and Florida flooded and people lost their homes. This is a direct talking point Trump has used; maybe we should have spent that money on the homefront. Well: We spent billions on disaster relief for these affected areas, there were reports from Governors that they were getting everything they could meaningfully deploy, and moreover it doesn't seem likely to me that the money we spent on Ukraine came from some funding source that incurred that direct trade-off. The DoD isn't getting a budget increase equal to the amount spent. It was money already allocated.
Example 2: Illegal immigration is raising the crime rate. Well, its not an incorrect statement; Trump has literally deployed this "technically correct" argument that every illegal immigrant is committing a crime by entering the country illegally, and thus it raises the crime rate. Then, they talk more about the homicides and "eating the cats and dogs", and it should be obvious to anyone that: Everyone commits crime. Illegals are no different. Are they committing crime at a rate higher than citizens? I doubt it. Sure, slowing down the rate its happening has reasonably-majority agreement among Americans; but removing those already here instead of finding a path to getting them work authorization benefits no-one.
But remember: Republicans are a Vibes party, and there is something real to the Vibes they run on. These vibes should, in my view, be a mostly-bipartisan issue. Heck, its things I've seen leftists rightly complain about many times: American education sucks, American healthcare sucks, American health sucks, no one can afford a home, unemployment is growing, tons of jobs are getting shipped overseas, or supplanted by AI, what is going on?
The way I've seen it: The Republicans are a party that are quick to admit that there is a problem, but they have all the wrong solutions to it. The Democrats, on the other hand, won't admit there's a problem beyond abstract generalities in a campaign speech, and don't offer any solutions anyway.
Where information input before the Internet might have been: 20% newspapers, 50% face-to-face (at the bar, church, work), 10% radio, 20% TV, now it's more like 80% Internet, 10% TV, 10% face-to-face. And it seems to make it a lot easier to grow hateful without the human element.
Doing it like it just did with basically no notice is a stabbing in the back to former allies of the US. And Republicans are also not saying much.
That behavior should and very likely will not be forgotten by Europe.
The next phase that makes sense is an iron curtain between 4 blocks (US, Europe, Russia, China). Like during the Cold War, it is the approach that will minimize the risk of war.
The savings from DOGE ( if there will be any) will pass on to rich people, not to the average American voter.
"I thought he was going to hurt those other people, not me."
Well. About that.
The problem isn't even left vs right. It's a media system that has parted company with reality and deliberately promoted lies and rage bait for clicks and distraction.
It's a huge machine. It's not just Fox, it's the entire network of neoliberal, now neofascist media outlets - from think tanks and "serious journalists", to bot farms and weaponised social media that promotes selected views and deboosts others, to podcasts, influencers, megachurches, mainstream econ schools, MBAs, startups... all promoting the same dysfunctional reality-denying neoliberal supremacist views under various guises.
Id be curious to see the data if there are any articles or polls that show a large amount of Trump voters regretting their pick. Thanks.
I think your over all point is healthy but you really need to reexamine this assumption. Take a look at /active and see how often topics critical of Trump, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, etc. flagged.
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2025/03/fd3521d51353-upda...
The first is to keep Russia in check, the second China.
The rumours of a carve-up, spheres of influence, begin to resonate.
Problem is, you cannot run a country as if it were a business, because to do is to value influence and power above freedom, human dignity, and human suffering.
And frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if the same weren’t true of Europe as well. Ever since at least the Obama administration, the US has been begging Europe to increase their defense spending. Aside from Poland, none of them have done so. That might be changing now. Europe didn’t rearm when Obama (whom you actually liked) asked nicely. Getting to sneer at Trump and the United States is a much more effective permission structure. And then the next time we elect a Democrat, Western Europe will give him a Nobel peace prize and pretend the whole thing never happened, just like the last time.
No, I haven't. Could you suggest something to read or to watch?
Even though later he claimed that he did not mean that, I guess more people will start thinking about these things.
There are some bots, for sure. There are disinformation campaigns but people are organically amplifying them. While social media is artificially amplifying them to maximize engagement. The social media amplification is why many of these people are so angry. Anger is the ultimate engagement hack.
Not to worry, our MIC is oiled with gold. Even after the WMDs panic was uncovered as a lie, no one was held accountable. Our MIC does media control well too.
These are not things to be proud of.
But yeah, actual experts with access to hardware should validate if there is a kill switch and if replacement parts / weapons could be reverse engineered before buying any more.
People don't want the US to interfere with domestic politics in Ukraine, they want it to help the national government that has overwhelming support from the local populace fend off an invasion from a foreign nation. They're not in favor of overthrowing the government, they want to prevent that very thing from happening.
Those who disagree about this particular topic obviously deserve whatever they get here. That's why ad hominem rules do not apply to them, and there is no need to be civil when replying to Russian trolls such as them!!
If astroturfing were happening, it would show up as most anyone critical of the astroturf comments being downvoted and/or flagged into grey oblivion, while the astroturf brigade would present as an unusually large number of comments that all agree with each other.
Anyway, I have been keeping track for a small study I a doing on information warfare, and look forward to presenting my research on this. Am still gathering screenshots and other data. So far, I am in awe at the deep thinking and high level of civil discourse on display here. I really like that folks here show respect even to those who disagree.
If the point is to piss off every single one of the US' allies in an any% speedrun, the current administration seems to be doing a pretty bang-up job of this.
It's terrifying, though. The world's (current) superpower might have a big military and all, but actively signalling that you don't really need friends can only lead to a decrease in overall geopolitical stability, right?
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/09/trump-pick-for...
At this point, Russia got maximum from this war. These rare minerals deal is just to distract and it's nothing compared to oil, manganese and soil Russia will capture.
Also, I'm struggling to find any reason for Zelensky to sign the deal – no protection, zero chance to get land back. Just thrown under the bus. EU is better option.
(and without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-switch ability - like with the F16s here)
And while we're at it, this time will be different: Instead of the membership criteria being anti-soviet communism, as in NATO, it should be effective Liberal Democracy - and - Freedom from Exceptionalist Exemptions, namely from the International Rule of Law. So, to be part,
1. Compulsory International Criminal Court membership and compliance - hence no exceptionalistic US, and no exceptionalistic Israel.
2. No "Illiberal Democracies": say, for example, composite of a minimum 0.67 score on the WJP Rule of Law Index and others: therefore no Orbanic Hungary, and no illiberal others like it. Poland, Slovakia, Italy: time to make some hard choices if you want in.
3. Democratic backsliding removes you rights in the Alliance, and, can proportionally lead to outright expulsion.
Not one more new military equipment purchase from the US, (and dispreference for other non-qualifying nations procurement). Member nations should use their - substantial - industrial capacity to equip themselves with indigenous military materiel.
Hey, it would be actually great for the economy!
Initially European scope, but bridges to a broader global scope (or even a secondary sister-Alliance) with open-ended partnerships with Canada, Australia, New Zeland, Japan, South Korea, and yes: Taiwan.
US and/or Israel want to join, if a more Democratic future selves? Simple: fully join the ICC, and meet the Alliance's full criteria as every other member. Same applies for prospective new members.
Sweden shows how principled positions can be maintained while building serious defense capabilities. Now multiply that model by Europe's combined industrial and technological base.
We just need the political will to execute - instead of just rolling over and wagging our tail to bullies.
One step could be to replace what Israel replaced, for more independance. Wouldn't buy their solution though, they sell bad pagers.
Trump has the soccer world cup in USA soon. Spectators could make it hell, boo the USA anthem at every game. I think they will.
Also it could explain this stuff which is hard otherwise.
Otherwise, I think what Trump has said about Ukraine is more or less what he believes and wants. He wants there to be peace, quickly, so that he can be known as a peace maker. He wants to be known as the person who can do the undoable. His henchmen repeat it endlessly - "only Donald Trump could bring peace here". He does not care about the details for Ukraine, and he doesn't really care about the details for Europe - he's wanted to cut loose from Europe since the first term.
In addition, there's probably quite a lot of personal apathy towards Zelensky specifically.
Finally it's possible that his China hawks are also shaping his base tendencies to try to deliver a Russia-China split. But I don't think that Trump really believes in that, it's just the people in his admin trying to make something of this situation. And I don't really believe that even a peace favourable to Putin can deliver the type of split that the China hawks might dream of, at least within this term.
That is also a probable explanation for what's happening, if you believe in UFOs and aliens.
Sorry, I mean no disrespect.
As a non-american and non-westerner, it's absolutely wild to see what people are willing to believe when it comes to Trump. Surely, there's a more rational and simple explanation for what's going on ?
Trump is constantly failing the five year old test. A child could tell you that this is the wrong thing to do.
This is Russian propaganda. Russia claims this was promised verbally. Surely if this was something that Russia wanted why didn't they demand in writing, like they did about many other concessions made to them? The answer is that Putin made that up. It never happened.
Same with the Ukraine "coup", I always ask: So which dictator did they install in 2014?
page 5. also in other documents.
It's ok, it was only declassified 9 years ago.
and if we're going to point at everything trump says and react with gusto - like canadian politicians saying they need to arm themselves with nukes to prevent invasion, just to name one - then i question the validity of "oh they didn't sign it so it doesn't matter" The secretary of state said to Gorbachev multiple times "not one inch to the east" of the "NATO" base in Germany.
But none of this matters, because Ukraine is 250 miles from Moscow, and that's a lot different than the nearly 600 miles away Poland is. the closest nato point to moscow as it stands right now is 350 miles away.
if you can't see the difference, i'm sorry. A big point of contention for Russia is the "Ethnic Russian" portions of Ukraine, near the border, who would "gladly" be part of russia, but because of an arbitrary border, they cannot.
Here's infamous socialist George Galloway explaining it better than i can, and with a better accent: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1740955477.979_georgegalloway...
Can you provide an argument why Russia invaded Chechnya?
This is untrue Russian propaganda. There was no independent Russia at that time and Baker didn't promise Gorbachov anything of the sort, as Gorbachov has publicly stated.
> Stuff shifted,
Right this is an important thing to note. Russia isn't the soviet union even if it claimed to be the successor state. And in the 90s Russia under the Yeltsin (the guy who picked Putin to be his successor) agreed that these countries had a right to join NATO. Of course that wasn't needed since there was no such promise but it happened. Oh people will claim that the Poles gave Yeltsin too much to drink but the reality is that Russia needed US support and good relations with their neighbors in the 90s financial disaster just like Ukraine (which agreed to give away its nukes to Russia)
> but under no circumstances was russia going to let Ukraine "join NATO".
First who is this Russia we speak of. It was Putin's decision to invade, a move that many Russians even those who didn't like Ukraine getting closer to the EU were skeptical of.
> When Ukraine started saying they were in talks to join NATO and get their own nukes, russia perked up and started fucking with the border.
That is incorrect. Russia invaded in 2014 when Ukraine was not seeking to join NATO (only became a goal after the Russian invasion). Plus everyone including Russia and Putin knew there was no chance of Ukraine joining nato in 2014 or 2022. Russia must invade Ukraine to stop it from joining NATO is not just propaganda, its stupid and obvious propagnada.
> Russia warned Ukraine about the murders occuring in "ethnically" russian "speaking" areas of ukraine, near the border.
Is it ethnically Russian or Russian speaking? You know there's a difference.
Much of the area was Russian speaking but not all of it. Many of the more rural areas in the east were primarily Ukrainian speaking. And it had an ethnic Ukrainian majority.
Hell a lot more Ukrainians used to speak russian not just in the south and east. The main driver in the change isn't nationalism or discrimination but Russian invasion.
Either way its ridiculous propaganda. Those areas were largely peaceful despite economic issues and crime. Russia invaded and then set up a couple of local thugs and neonazis as warlords pretending this was a local thing or a civil war.
They blamed Ukraine for a war they started and then blamed them for shooting back. Then they massively enlarged the war killing a lot more people (a significant share of whom were russian speakers or ethnic russians because of the part of Ukraine they invaded).
> I bet you can name them.
Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (sometimes transliterated lugansk via russian)
> Russia waited eight years to actually respond to this injustice, and it was after Ukraine started talking about joining NATO. Again.
Russia could not care less about them or injustice. Russia barely even cares about its own citizens (if it's all for the glory of the modern czar, what does an individuals life or rights matter) and despite claiming area for annexation it does not treat them as citizens. It forced them to be used as a meetshield against their own countrymen(no training and ancient guns).
Did you see how they destroyed the mostly Russian speaking city of Mariupol? Or many smaller cities? But then they changed the sign from Маріуполь to Мариуполь and I'm sure the survivors considered it all worth it /s.
>So if you are pragmatic, and you don't want an all out war in europe, you withdraw the US support for NATO. Simple as.
If you're pragmatic you back them to the hilt and try to prevent Russia starting such a war.
>Now you don't get to threaten russia with US forces anymore.
The one threatening to nuke London is Russia not the other way around.
> The US doesn't want to fight Russia
Right neither does Europe. Neither does Ukraine. So Russia can get get out of Ukraine (including Crimea and Dpnbas) and everyone will be better off.
>The thing that gets me though, is does anyone really believe this is all russia is capable of? moving a front line 10 meters, or a kilometer?
Yes because that's all they have accomplished. And if we had done more to swiftly back Ukraine it would have been less.
> Europe needs to stop prepping for a war, because Europe is the most war-hungry population on the planet, historically. They can't help themselves.
Europe is prepping because Russia started a major war. And sadly we the US are not reliable allies right now even though Ukrainian and European victory us clearly in our interest.
>The rest of the world is about to find out what it's like to not have the US backing up your stupid decisions. We, as taxpayers, are tired of paying for the EU experiment, for sabre rattling from the UK and France and Germany.
Again the saber rattling is all coming from Russia. Do you even understand Russian? Do you watch Russian by to hear the stuff the state propaganda news put out?
>there is a lot more nuance than "orange man bad" and "Comedian War Hero", ok?
Sure but being more nuance doesn't stop both those statements from being totally accurate and important. Total nuance is not claiming the Donbas is just russian anyway or that Ukraine provoked russia when even Russian newspapers (Moscow times, Medusa) posted many articles disproving state propaganda.
Portugal endured a dictatorial regime for almost 42 years, one of the longest in modern Europe, which was tolerated by NATO due to its anti-communist stance. [1],[2]
Interestingly enough, Russia is currently spending more than 40% of its budget on the war. [3]
A far more effective strategy to force them out of Ukraine, would be genuine economic starvation. Instead, the West tolerated hundreds of businesses continuing to operate in Russia.[4]
The most likely explanation for agent Krasnov’s, (currently occupying the White House), sense of urgency to halt the war in Ukraine, and use it as a pretext to restart economic ties with Russia is the impending collapse of the Russian economy.[5]
If the USA were to leverage its real and soft power by issuing executive orders that refuse to allow any company to do business with Russia. And by threatening sanctions on India and China for enabling the Russian economy, it would force India and China to choose between access to the US market and economic prosperity, or support for Putin. The war would cease, employing the same tactics Reagan used to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Instead, the US administration chose to betray the entire West, by yielding to Russian demands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_de_Oliveira_Salaz...
[3] https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/1...
[5] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/01/russias-economic-dilemm...
Yet it still took 13 years, combined with the regime’s economic collapse and a shift in the educational background of the Armed Forces hierarchy to spark the revolution.
The US most likely will be in a civil war in eight to six months.... A cut in social security benefits will do it...
If the PRC should actually decide to invade, it is going to be extremely difficult to hold that off on their own for an extended period of time. Which means they need allies who can rapidly deploy a sufficiently large force to stabilise the situation.
But the only way to get there is with a naval force, and air supremacy would likely be critical to the outcome of that fight, which means you need someone with a large carrier fleet, and that is pretty much a pool of one.
Without US help, there is very little hope that Taiwan would not be overrun sooner or later. Their only real hope would be a nuclear weapons programme that would allow them to credibly threaten to nuke Beijing if invaded. But the PRC would never let it get that far and would make sure to strike before that could be completed.
Probably also increased military and economic ties to South Korea and Australia, and an effort to build a NATO of the area, absent the US, perhaps under ASEAN. Or something new.
It’s a tough problem but it’s a real problem and I don’t see how Taiwan could ever go back to trusting the US to defend democracies facing invasion.
1) Trump might be alienating his traditional allies and cosying up to Russia, but he still apparently sees China as a problem or adversary.
2) Thinking purely transactionally, the US is very dependent on Tiawan due to TSMC. Most of the US' largest tech companies are investing heavily in AI hardware (TSMC chips) and/or rely directly on TSMC for their own supply chain. I have no idea whether Trump et al see it this way, or this would be enough to trigger the US to protect Tiawan, but transactionally, it's immeasurably more valuable to the US than Ukraine.
That's not a guarantee at all. The only thing he's every been honest, consistent and truthful about is that nothing is sacred, everything's on sale, no values (economic, patriotic, environmental, political) will stand in the way of his own profit, there's always the willingness to make a deal and sell something (someone) off, and fuck the consequences, no matter how gigantic, embarrassing, and suicidally bad they are. Negative-sum deals are absolutely on the table as long as he comes out richer or more powerful.
China just needs to make a good offer and Taiwan's fucked when it comes to Trump's support.
"Let us take Tiawan and we'll give you TSMC for the next n years" would probably be a pretty strong offering.
It seems to me it's hard to believe anything Donald says, or to think it could not change without warning in the near future.
I wonder if he knows what any of that means.
Even more to my point then. If it wasn’t even the United States that gave them free fighter jets but a third country, how exactly did the US get stuck with an obligation to continue providing support?
> About defense of Kyiv, it has nothing to do with usa generosity
The United States provided six years of military aid to Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion. If none of that aid actually helped them, I guess it was all wasted and there’s no problem discontinuing it.
but to sum up:
- ukraine messed up by not anticipating attack from belorus through chernobyl
- didn't anticipate russian airborn forces flying to hostomel airport on few dozens of helicopters and taking over it (as preparation for full blown deployment on 2 dozen of planes)
got lucky with:
- battle of ivankiv delayed russian forces moving to kyiv
- shelled the crap out of hostomel airport, causing russians to loose control over it (airborn forces on planes literally made u-turn in the air ). i think only a couple of russians survived it.
- blew up a few dams of small rivers, turning large area to impassable swamps what prevented russian forces from getting to hostomel to support paratroopers there.
there was some russian unit of national guard or swat that somehow outrun rest of russian army and they decided to show initiative and play "capture the flag" in kyiv (not clear what exactly they planned), but they did manage to drive into kyiv in a couple of cars, and were all hunted down and killed within few hours
it less comprehensive than i remembered (i was watching everything unfolded in real time back than) but still very interesting
Battle for Hostomel Airport - Animated Analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ji7KqqEqg
Surely my smartphone OEM would fight the entire American government before handing over my data.
Seriously, America, this is like Brexit but 1000x. A voluntary decision, taken with gusto, to chop off arms and legs and ears and fingers and whatnot, cut off the deadwood, be light and free, a lone vessel on the ocean of prosperity, free of the burden of the stupid foreigners who are the sole reason why everything was going wrong.
Hey, at least Ukraine can use their S-300 systems and Sukhois against their maker.
This was predictable though. The markets have already rewarded those who saw this coming.
“On 27 May 2006, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that "Both governments agree that the UK will have the ability to successfully operate, upgrade, employ, and maintain the Joint Strike Fighter such that the UK retains operational sovereignty over the aircraft." In December 2006, an agreement was signed which met the UK's demands for further participation, i.e., access to software source code and operational sovereignty. The agreement allows "an unbroken British chain of command" for operation of the aircraft.”
Again, not ideal, but the first F-35 have been delivered an need to be serviced and maintained until they can be replaced,... or maybe just until the next US election.
They are really busy right now.
This sums up what I've been thinking too - it looks like the USA is sick of being the center of the world and is stepping down from the position right now.
I guess this means it's China's moment. :/
So much winning, eh?
This kind of happened to the US.
"Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), or body integrity dysphoria, is a mental health condition where you feel that a limb or healthy body part shouldn’t be part of your body."
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/body-integrit...
I work in IT. We already have several customers projects (various profiles) that paused all their ongoing projects to _start_ migrating their servers and hosted services away from US-based/owned ones towards EU-based ones.
But that's going up in smoke rather quickly.
That's how the rest of the world has been doing business with America, Europe will get used to this too.
What would a president who was beholden to Russians do once elected? I mean -- what's the point of provoking Canada, of all countries? Canada as the 51st US state would be the new most populous state and would cause a huge change in US politics. Not to mention it could only arrive through conquest. So why even propose it if not merely to cause a rift?
That's like asking whether a child wants the sugar crash that will come after eating the candy bar. They're not able to see that far ahead. They'll only "get it" when their lives have been made significantly harder, and even then it's not likely they'll be able to attribute their misery to the administration's policies--they could very easily be convinced to blame some minority group or foreign nation.
After many long discussions, I can only conclude it less about the values of the supporters and more about their psychology.
His supporters want whatever he wants, as long as it means that the right people get bullied. There's not much deeper thought than that.
It's very sad to see people that I respected debase their own principles so that they can remain proud Trump supporters. Their identity appears tied to the decision, and I know only one person who had the principles to to respond to any of Trump's actions with "OK these people actually have no clue what they are doing." (Which was in response to their treatment of Zelensky in the Oval Office).
The point of all of this is the chaos and destruction of trust in the system. A concept in the early stages of the Russian revolution was that the stage had to be set for a “spark” to light the tinder of the proletariat. Here the Russians had RT, probably fed talking points and material to talk radio and podcast people. Had honeypots seducing strategic politicans and special interests (See Maria Butina and the NRA). Obviously wields influence over Trump.
Once that tinder has been set, the sparks some in the chaos. You have the religious weirdos who think dinosaurs are fake, Elon who believes he’s the protagonist in a sci-fi fantasy, some war-hawks pushing the Artic Dominance thing, and whatever fuckery the gang of oligarchs like Theil, etc have in mind.
I don't know anything about fighter jets but for a lot of other things, Trump could not have done a nicer thing for China. Whatever issues many countries had with China, they are not actively beating most of them in the face. Probably the best years for Xi these are going to be.
Bob.
they are doing what they should've been doing this whole time?
Extend this to other areas of commerce. If the US is no longer a reliable trade partner and its allies lessen their economic ties, is that a positive outcome for the US?
Yeah. What you said has zero relevance. It's not like US is taking away the jets. They are just reducing proactive support because it's a democracy and the people don't want the country to be on the leash of anyone.
It's time for Europe to do its own work on this. As a Finnish guy I know plenty of that, and don't view other European nations as acting very responsible having had their self defense capabilities and believability wither.
It doesn’t matter who owns these planes, the US have shown that they have the power to make them useless and that they cannot be trusted, and that is a dealbreaker when it comes to expensive & important equipment.
PS: I'm from and in Europe. I don't get why it is a good or logical thing that the US should be responsible for the majority of "Western" defense on our territory.
I see this as analogous. US is maybe reaping some short term benefits from flipping on its allies, but burning the bridges it very much relies on.
It also wants to forcibly grow competing defense contractors in Europe.
Group A and Group B build an economic partnership under consensual terms generally favourable to both over a long period of time.
At one point, Group A decides to withdraw due to real or perceived inequality. The timeframe of withdrawal is faster than entering, and is insufficient to unearth the complex network of roots that took generations to plant.
When the trunk is pulled, the pain is felt in vast numbers of small ways that add up. These roots are what contain the vast majority of the surface area after all.
I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees. Fine there’s at least a through line. However; by demonstrating that the US is willing to revoke access to this war material during an active shooting war over some ego thing they’re showing allies who’ve invested in the US military equipment that they’re vulnerable to suffer this same fate. Now Europe is turning hard away from US tech.
To some degree this is a good thing, I think, from USA’s POV. Trump has said it’s unfair USA spends the most on NATO and that member states should pay more (how many don’t hit the 2% target). However; the point was to spend their 2% GDP on American armaments. Now Europe is taking their demand and money and investing in domestic military equipment. Which will inevitably beg the question in the coming years if NATO, a US establishment, is to be made redundant?
This US administration can’t seem to have their cake and eat it too. They want money, demand for their goods, but every time they act out they drive away their business partners.
In any event, maybe NATO just needs go squeak by four years without an Article 5 invocation to be back to normal.
I don't think there are any "security guarantees". What could they be?
The "endgame" as far as I understand it: The US wants access to the minerals as a compensation for the money already spent and, perhaps, to restore some of the support currently put on hold (satellite data access). Once the Ukranian resistance is broken, the US and Russia will jointly dictate a peace, gradually install a Russia-friendly regime and split the profit between them. They will happily invite the EU to finance some of the rebuilding of Ukraine that is then mainly performed by US and Russian companies. The US furthermore hopes that by spearheading the lifting of sanctions it will get priority access to some beneficial deals with and within Russia itself.
That said, I don’t know what more Ukraine would want given the Budapest Memorandum already ties the USA, UK, and Russia to Ukraine’s defense. That’s proven to be a mixed success, as both USA, UK, and other countries have indeed stepped up for Ukraine’s defense.
Do the NATO agreements specify American armaments? Europe could have spent on European armaments and armies too, just chose not too because they didn't see a reason to.
Europe not buying F35 or whatever hurts US arms industry, but probably not the general strategic position of the US. There's even a credible argument (dont know how credible?) that these arms programs actually undermine security by investing crazy money in outdated / ineffective technology. The dumb part would be not learning from the Ukrainians how to fight a modern war.
US participation in NATO may be made redundant, but Europe's need for a credible collective defense agreement is not going away.
I don't think this is true at all, I think Trump wants Ukraine to be conquered and for Russia to win and for people to stop bothering him about any of it.
Trump blew up whatever nonsense minerals deal there was, and is actively sabotaging the Ukrainian defence efforts via this, and ending intelligence sharing, and apparently leaning on random American companies to stop them selling services to Ukraine, and by providing diplomatic cover and support to Russia.
people haven't seem to have caught on yet - the US has switched sides, it is now part of the Russia bloc.
Tell me it doesn't fit.
Edit: this story just dropped off the main page. Currently sitting at 85 points and 77 comments. It had position 2 or so, now it has position 79.
Who will want to buy American military technology, when the ability to employ it is at the whim of whoever wins the next election?
Especially as it's clear now than any alliance with the US is fragile at best, and could end overnight depending on which side of the bed Trump wakes up on.
Low cost, simple to operate, and specially designed to fight Russian aggression.
How do you know they won’t do to your equipment what they did to Ukraine’s F16s?
Indeed though, F35 has become relatively inexpensive per unit, as intended.
At the end of Trump’s term:
- Europe will still be using F-16s and F-35s
- The US will still be in NATO, and will still be actively committed to the alliance
- European defense spending will be massively higher, with manufacturing and supply chains that are far less easily disrupted
- The US forces deployed to Europe will still be there, but will be bolstered by more European troops
- Russia will have maintained its status as simultaneously a threat and a non-threat
- Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, suddenly, nobody will care. The media won’t talk about it, people will have largely forgotten, and some other controversy or distraction will be the story of the day.
All of which will nicely serve the broader long term interests of the United States.
As it always is, no matter who is in the White House.
This is already gone: "US ‘to cease all future military exercises in Europe’" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/08/us-to-cea...
I'm sure the Ukrainians will care, and most of us in Europe will too.
The reason that you care right now is because it is in US interests that you care. As soon as that changes, you won’t. You’ll be too busy caring about something else.
In the middle to long term though, Europe should and will decouple from the US in defense and tech. US influence will be reduced. European almost made a fatal mistake with Galileo that the US wanted to kill [0] and I don't think they will make that mistake again. F-35, Starlink, air defense will be built by European companies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
Also, stop flagging news articles simply because they are slightly anti-Trump.
What would he have done? How would he weaken the USA and strengthen Russia?
At this point, I don't see a difference between Trump + GOP (leaders) and actual traitors.
At the very least this entire 180 and the attempt to humiliate Zelensky in the White House is Trump wanting to enact some kind of revenge.
At the very worst him praising Putin, threatening to leave Nato, threatening other allies, moving troops out of Germany and into Hungary, et all just reeks of something more.. conspiracy theory or not it's pretty disgusting as someone looking in from the outside.
Also he adores Putin and Xi and is doing what he can to become like them. There's no conspiracy, Trump really is that much of a child.
[citation needed]
Then again, even if a global nuclear war broke out, some of his loyalists would still be convinced that Trump is playing some sort of 3D chess and that it's all going according to his masterful plan.
This is why the Democrats lost. All they care about is war in the Ukraine. Bernie Sanders supports the war too, but at least he says a few scraps from the table should go to US workers. But he is thrown aside. The Democrats were for the Ukraine war, Jill Stein and Trump were not, and Americans voted for this.
Americans voted for this, Trump is implementing it, and all the warmongers and war profiteers and neocons have left is some neocon press and downvotes here for the majority American opinion which screwy old Trump is implementing.
It's in the interest of the USA to cooperate and be part of defensive alliances. When USA goes to their wars and they ask for help, Europeans, Canadians and Australians oblige. If USA goes full isolationist, the rest of the world must develop their own nukes and their own forces. Goodbye to the dollar hegemony and the industrial military complex. USA fought hard with the USSR to achieve hegemony, and now that they got it they throw it away?
If that's what US wants, it's OK, but I believe some people don't fully understand the reality or the consequences. The US citizen don't pay taxes for Europe protection; Europe citizens pay taxes to buy american weapons.
Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania are in NATO. "Defensive alliance" means the US bankrolls and guarantees their security, there is no two way street with them, they can do nothing for us.
Finland is the most ridiculous case as Stalin could have easily swallowed it up in 1945 if it was in Russia's interest to do so, with little a peep from the West. Them joining NATO in 2023 is an absurdity. A military alliance which should have never existed in the first place - which both Taft and former VP Henry Wallace said in the 1940s.
> Goodbye to the dollar hegemony and the industrial military complex. Goodbye military industrial complex? Hallelujah!
> USA fought hard with the USSR to achieve hegemony
It's more absurd thinking. In 1917 Russia's economy was about Brazil's size. It was like an NFL team playing against a high school team for over a century. Russia barely even had influence over the communists in China.
In fact, it seems quite many others are asking the same questions - a US Senate Committee has just directly asked,
“is Trump a Russian asset”?
- via Forbes:
Also what does US gain if all countries are using f16?
To put it better, what year would be an acceptable answer? Is the year that they loudly claimed "we should have never given up our nuclear weapons" not acceptable? the year "we need Nukes or NATO"?
I also remember sabre rattling in 2014 and either 2016 or 2017. NATO already has missiles pointed at Russia, and Ukraine joining NATO would allow missiles to be launched from even closer to Russia.
I don't understand why people don't get the nuance. The US did dirty. I don't know how to solve that, but the answer isn't "war with russia" or "proxy war with russia" the answer is closer to "get the fighting to stop, and tell russia to chill out and report issues to the world, not sit and stew for 8 years over their ethnic brothers, sisters, and children being 'rained down upon' with death and destruction."
The relevant article:
ARTICLE 5
Until the completion of the withdrawal of the Soviet armed forces from the territory of the present German Democratic Republic and of Berlin in accordance with Article 4 of the present Treaty, only German territorial defence units which are not integrated into the alliance structures to which German armed forces in the rest of German territory are assigned will be stationed in that territory as armed forces of the united Germany. During that period and subject to the provisions of paragraph 2 of this Article, armed forces of other states will not be stationed in that territory or carry out any other military activity there.
As you can see, it has nothing to do with whether NATO would accept new members or not. Gorbachev and many other top Soviet/Russian officials have directly refuted this myth, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149963
Read some history (everything geopolitics after the second world war), you should ask yourself why for 76 years that's exactly what the US did (and perhaps why this is the first time that question occurred to you).
It's because the relationship between Europe and the US is not a mutually beneficial one, the US benefited the most from its power and influence over western Europe, and that doesn't just apply to Europe. NATO and the roughly 128 military bases in 58 different countries don't exist because the US somehow likes to subsidize the military spending of these countries for some altruistic purpose, it exists because it strengthens US influence across the world.
That's soft power, and if it fails, it means war (in total 123 military conflicts since WW2). It's a less bloody alternative to make sure the US gets what it wants because its the stronger party in any geopolitical relationship.
That's the logic behind it. The same logic applies to military aid it gives to Egypt and Israel (that Trump continues to give).
This is a common talking point, but I think it is totally wrong. The US didn't finance and organize Europe's defense.
They did spend money on their own defense forces which happen to be best positioned in Europe near the best interest as a superpower.
America spent money against their Russian adversary. This money was always well spent as far as I can see it.
Part of the reason many people consider those areas “flyovers” is that minorities, women, gays, nerds, really lots of people, can expect to get treated very badly in those areas.
Now, maybe there’s an obligation to turn the other cheek, reach out, and try to educate people in flyovers. But it is far too reductive to act like the blame points one way here and it’s just snobby elites who have abandoned these populations.
Look at Minneapolis, and Minnesota in general. Wealthy, hugely diverse, amazingly Red rural areas and unbelievably Blue urban areas. It's a lot like California, honestly.
It's not all roses and butterflies but a blanket statement like "women/gays/nerds/minorities get treated very badly" in these areas is laughable and very "online"/detached from reality.
Very snobby elitist take tbh.
It does not. I did not argue that America is not worse than before. I was clearly arguing against your premise that America has been wielding their military might with “cooperation over conquest”.
It was a straightforward question too.
> The U.S. cooperated with Canada to build cars together for generations. It’s a source of a lot of economic prosperity for both countries. And now the U.S. is threatening Canada with annexation while trying to destroy the current auto industry.
By the wars I was clearly referring to places like Latin America and the Middle East. Again, what’s the usual state of the US? At war, or at peace?
I know it hurts when it happens to you. Or your first-world friends. But that’s high school clique logic.[1] We’re talking about the country as a whole here, not just how it acts towards its former friends.
> I know there would be bickering about the details because everyone has their own mood on how warmongering the U.S. is, and to whom. But whatever you want to qualify the past as, the present is considerably and undeniably different in contrast.
Yes you preempted your statement with “bickering”. Too bad for you though that my question directly counters your claim.
How war-mongering of peaceful a nation is on the world stage is not a question of vibes and feels. Or how you subjectively view them based on how they treat “you”. It’s an objective question. No bickering needed.
He has been clear about NATO %'s, very little room for your confusion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-13/trump-tel...
[1] https://www.deutsche-rentenversicherung.de/DRV/DE/Ueber-uns-... [2] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/rentensteigeru... [3] https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/innenpolitik...
Of course, with the US under Trump withdrawing their support we will see what will happen, but currently it is a stalemate.
If there's enough pan European bonds (which there won't be) then the reserve currency status of the dollar could be threatened.
I'd say spending so much on American weapons has hurt it's own domestic capabilities if anything.
Also, you know, literally "what about"-ism.
To be perfectly clear, I am worlds away from today's extremist Republicans and centrist Democrats.
My point is that cult of personality led here, and many on this site ("the rest of us"), even when presented with evidence, ignored their part in it when it came to Musk. It's the same cult of personality lamented in the comment I replied to. Both brought us to here.
https://www.czdefence.com/article/europeanisation-of-the-f-3...: “The F-35's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, states that currently around 25% of the F-35's components are manufactured in Europe.”
That doesn’t say the USA cannot make every part, but I think it’s likely they will have trouble producing some of them.
For example, https://simpleflying.com/how-many-international-parts-us-f-3... states the F35 has Martin Baker ejection seats and the F35B has Rolls-Royce engines.
But I agree there's more than one way to view ownership and I can see your point, even if I don't think I agree so long as the UK can truly operate it in every way, including software that might need adapting (like how I might bend my fork's prong back into shape, or out of shape for adaptations)
The finale had it trying to love itself to China and becoming warehouse 14, but that eventually stopped and American Superiority won over.
Those days seem at an end. The actions Trump had made over the last two months will reverberate for the next two decades at least.
This reminds me of France in the Second World War. My (questionable) understanding is that they were more worried about the enemies at home than the ones across the border.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7435pnle0go US sides with Russia in UN resolutions on Ukraine (the US rejected a resolution that named Russia as the aggressor).
- https://news.online.ua/en/the-us-is-ending-support-for-ukrai... The US is ending support for Ukrainian F-16
- https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cuts-off-intelligence-shari... US cuts intelligence sharing for Ukraine, adding pressure for Russia peace deal
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-08/us-vetoes... US Vetoes G-7 Shadow Fleet Task Force Plan
There's a pattern: Trump wants to force a capitulation of Ukraine.
The United States was never "in Ukraine" in at all the same way it was in Iraq or Afghanistan. There were never American combat boots on the ground.
It's just the way it's done, quite childish and not ally-like. Pulling out from EU and UA could've been done in much less 'rug-pulling' style.
Look at Russia.
Lots of political flaming and not much else.
Upvote to comment ratio is low and people are likely flagging it too because it’s just world news.
> How are stories ranked? Other factors affecting rank include [...] software which demotes overheated discussions, [...]. [1]
Poland has already announced it's looking to acquire nuclear weapons.
They can do a lot of harm when used against you. The part of Europe, which had fallen under Russian domination at the end of WWII, is where the most advanced Soviet weapons were developed and manufactured, because it had the most educated population and most the skilled specialists. Romania, for instance, produced a significant amount of electronics for Soviet weapons. After the USSR collapsed, these factories were converted to producing control boards for Western vacuum cleaners and microwaves. Would you rather see Russia overrun Romania and convert these factories back to producing military radars, missile guidance systems, and sonars for nuclear submarines whose sole purpose is to sneak up on American cities and set them on fire? The Soviet S-75 SAMs on Cuba that shot down the American U-2 spy plane piloted by Rudolf Anderson had Romanian electronics inside, as had many other weapons that killed Americans all over the world. Ukraine manufactured the best Soviet nuclear missiles, now the very same factories are subcontractors for NASA. Poland was known for its shipyards, Bulgaria was a powerhouse of ammo manufacturing.
Denying Russia access to this pool of talent for the promise of helping those countries in case of a Russian invasion is an incredible bargain, especially considering that such a guarantee sharply reduces the risk of invasion in the first place. You get it all for free, as long as the guarantee remains credible enough to deter the invasion. All the US president has to do is appear believable when he says that he'll nuke Moscow if Russia invades Poland. That doesn't cost much.
You have a very small frame. If you let Russia, for example, take all those small countries for free, suddenly you have a bigger enemy. Not saying that they would defeat the US, but they can make worse problems. Because those little countries you despise are historically peaceful, but Russia not so much. Because Russia leaders are unreliable, for example: https://www.newsweek.com/what-putin-has-said-about-russia-ta.... By keeping Russia at bay, the USA keeps the hegemony more easily and for less money.
Please, stop thinking that USA is "bankrolling" no one. USA spending on defense of those countries is basically zero. It's just a few military bases with a few dozens of people (20 in Bulgaria, 20 in Estonia, 20 in Finland, 20 in Latvia, 20 in Lithuania, 200 in Poland and 130 in Romania, the countries you named), and have nukes at home that they were going to have anyway. By contrast, those countries deployed to Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom, answering the USA call: Bulgaria 600, Estonia 250, Lithuania 270, Poland 2500 and Romania 1800. It was a bargain for the USA.
> Goodbye military industrial complex? Hallelujah!
I never said it was a bad thing per se. I only say that being an unreliable supplier of military goods makes you an undesirable business partner. A large share of the GDP of the US depends on military exports, so a large part of the population would have to find another job. Again: this is not bad per se. But, are you sure you (the USA) want this? How many Trump supporters and isolationists don't even suspect how much of the GDP is based on military exports?
Another unintended consequence might be China becoming a more reliable military supplier than the US, thus empowering their military industry. Are the USA interested in that happening?
Another consequence might be Europe becoming a significant player in the military industry, effectively moving jobs and GDP from USA to Europe.
> It's more absurd thinking
It was not about GDP, stop thinking in pure economical terms if you want to talk geopolitics. It was about influence. China has always been a wild card. But the USSR had a lot of influence over half Europe, half Hispan-America and half Africa. It's not about economy: put and support a dictatorship in a country like Cuba or North Korea, and it doesn't matter how uber poor they are. You now have two pains in the ass, one of them with nukes and ICBMs, the other was once very close to be a nuke base pointing to the USA.
For years, for decades, it was the USA who pressed the NATO expansion. It's imperialistic people like Putin the one who despises it. Again, you can be isolationist like Switzerland is in many senses, but then don't complain when others don't buy your shit, or develop nukes, or make friends with your enemies, or make alliances among themselves (like https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250226-trump-says-eu-fo...).
Or "Alnur Mussayev, former head of Kazakhstan’s security service, who rose up the ranks of the Soviet KGB"? Was US intel funding the KGB?
This doesn't account for the actions of Tiawanese nationalists working in TSMC setting off the kill routine themselves, irrespective of the deal struck, but it's still an interesting scenario.
Afghanistan won, period. It doesn’t matter how Americans would like to advertise their loss - you didn’t “lose interest”, you lost, abandoned the people who were helping you, and have left thousands of innocent civilians to fend for themselves. Afghanistan is, and should be treated as, the biggest failure of the American “empire”.
That doesn't mean that the war was handled well, it clearly wasn't. But looking at a small force and confusing that with the entire might of the US military is baffling to me. "Losing interest" is a perfectly reasonable description of what happened.
> Americans would like to advertise their loss
I couldn’t care less about that. Fact is that the defeat was primarily and almost entirely political, not a military one.
> should be treated as, the biggest failure of the American
Trump: Hold my diet coke
So, they won.
Amusing way of putting it, if you ignore the US/UK instigated 1953 coup of Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah who was busy selling out Iran to the western powers, yeah you can assuming US-Iran relations "collapsed". I'd say they collapsed in 1953 and 1979 was the aftermath.
Selling expensive weapons that can never be used against oneself sounds like a pretty significant strategic benefit to me. Are there risks? Sure, but the US could just shrug if exposed. A kill switch seems likely.
The president of peace who is not interested in war, but something much crueler, extortion and retribution which seems to be positioning the world for a real WW3. Not a Fox news theortical "Biden" inspired one.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy83r93l208o
"Poland announces military training plan for all men"
I've had a lot of responses to my comment, yet I've seen no alternative ideas presented that will result in a different outcome. What is your plan for getting Russia to lose this war?
I think everyone is underestimating the changes that are happening. Obviously if Trump wanted a prosperous USA, he wouldn't be isolating it, and destroying the federal government and wrecking scientific research and diplomacy across the world.
but an overall poorer US with a permanent far right government under the control of a small group of rich lunatics is better for those rich lunatics.
Really sorry for Ukraine, though. We knew back in November that this meant certain death for them.
European defense stocks didnt skyrocket out of nowhere.
>Soviet Russia had a struggling economy in the 60s and 70s,
Europe is struggling now.
>The Soviet-Afghanistan war weakened the USSR's traditional force composition
Feeding weapons to Ukraine has severely depleted European stockpiles.
>Europe already avoided over-arming themselves like the USSR
Theyre literally preparing to do just that.
>they have a modernized economy
Im not sure Id feel comfortable rejecting an argument based upon the notion that the country that put the first man in space was a country of backward savages.
>and they aren't fighting proxy wars against forces they can't beat.
Ukraine is quite literally that.
It's a conscious choice for a country to specialize in weapons manufacturing, and the US, well it's the best at it. Does it come for free? Definitely not, it comes at a huge cost. We can't have so many other things because we do this. But we do buy freedom with it. Peace-loving Americans have to do some real soul-searching: Would their success and comfort be possible without those weapons? Would they still have their freedoms? The first thing tyrants do is take away weapons from the public, lest their enemies rise up against them in armed insurrection. Which of the two parties is more likely to do so?
Just a few days ago, Leonardo signed a treaty to develop uavs together with Baykar. A month or so ago, Italian government announced the creation of a joint venture between rheinmetall and Leonardo, sharing technologies to Leonardo and producing some of the >1000 ifvs to buy for the italian army in italy and some in Germany
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
Thieu did meet the same fate, well, he wasn't killed, but he was overthrown and lived life in exile as a recluse.
Zelenskyy will almost certainly suffer the same fate.
Yeah, pretty much. Everyone in this thread should be able to craft a Trump line that's easily digestible by his base on this point by now. In this specific case it's "I don't want to give US weapons to anyone who won't act in our (my) national interest on every issue." Once you empower him to decide what is or is not in the US national interest, there's not much you need in the way of convincing. It's only when his policies start hurting his voters individually that they'll maybe start questioning whether what Trump claims is American national interest is actually in their own interest or not.
What the last decade has shows is relying on external oligarchs for energy and defence is not sensible. The us has encouraged this for a long time. I just hope that Europe actually steps up quickly enough.
It will hurt the us a lot more than Europe, and China will be massively emboldened in the Pacific. It’s a new world order.
With this move, any nation will think twice about buying US made weapons. Trump effectively kneecapped the US arms industry by this move.
Or Russia just invades while being careful not to damage their buddy's mines. Maybe the US even helps the Russians out once the Ukranian "dictator" is forced to begin fighting in too close proximity to the minerals.
Another relevant detail here is that a lot of the resources included in the deal are in territory that's currently occupied by Russia – which Trump clearly envisions Russia keeping in any peace settlement.
All it would take for a pro-China pivot is the right leverage. Cash, blackmail, who knows. But it’s just a matter of whether the price is met, not whether the deal is available.
This view is the only thing that to me makes sense of what’s happening.
EU are reliable vassals, but they're reliable in the sense that their vassalage doesn't add much to strategic balance, especially vs PRC. EU/NATO bluntly net drain in US security commitments and trade balance. Like EU could have been buying 100s of billions more in US arms and LNG, US looking at the 2T+ trade deficit with EU in last 20 years and wondering if that's worth the hegemon privilege. EU + most US partners think they have a tributary system where vassal supports the hegemon, but it's really an expensive client state system where US pays off vassals. Looking at projected US finances - they can't afford to pay off everyone anymore. Also bluntly, US vassals aren't going to reverse payment flow and become tributaries. If it comes to parity burden share as past US admins has pressured, there's less reason to even be "partners" and more reason for EU to try to be their own pole.
There is literally no observation that could not be viewed as confirming this assumption by a sufficiently generous mind.
The storming of the capital in US was under false claims that the elections were stolen.
There is both evidence that the elections were not stolen, and evidence what Yanukovuch said during his election campaign were not his actions. You can't tell the difference between the two?
Plenty of protests ended in the fall of a government and electing a new one. Why would that be the same as the US storming of the Capital?
If you would have said to compare it to the Georgian protests that don't accept the election results, that would be more difficult. But Euromaidan? That's easy.
I'm sure you'll disagree with the above, so here's a thought experiment. What would the Euromaidan protesters be called if they had lost?
Where baker said "not one inch east of the Elbe."
I am not sure how much clearer it can be than declassified documents. "That is a lie putin told, it's propaganda!"
no, it's right there. has been available to look at for 9 years.
I really do not give one WHIT what happened afterward, all i care about is refuting falsehoods.
to wit:
A United States Secretary of State named Baker, gave a "cascade of assurances" that NATO would not expand EAST of the Elbe. Repeatedly, the same message was given to the russians.
That is literally all i said. You're arguing something completely different now and like i said, good for you, i don't care. it wasn't what i was talking about or responding to.
As the Soviet foreign minister stated in a 2014 interview, there was simply no reason to discuss NATO beyond that. They did not expect the Warsaw Pact to dissolve. The idea that the world would change so drastically that the Warsaw Pact would dissolve and its members would seek to join NATO was unimaginable at the time.
You are clinging to an erroneous understanding of a few transcript snippets against the words of the direct participants and their actual written agreements.
I want you to answer the simple question, because you have refused.
Is the statement:
Baker verbally assured gorbachev that there would be no eastward expansion
True or false?
That is literally, and when i say literally i mean literally the only thing i was talking to, above.
Baker verbally assured gorbachev that there would be no eastward expansion
True or false?
And it's obvious if you follow the historical context.
In 1990, Germany was still formally under Allied military occupation (since 1945). In the final 2+4 treaty, East Germany and West Germany - the "two" - negotiated with the four Allied powers (UK, France, USA, and USSR) to determine the terms of reunification. Their discussions centered on whether a unified Germany would be fully neutral, partially neutral, or entirely integrated into NATO. In the end, they agreed that reunified Germany could remain in NATO, provided that no foreign troops were stationed in East Germany until Soviet forces had fully withdrawn by the end of 1994.
That's it. There was never any discussion about the broader future of NATO because there was no reason to have one. Germany bordered the Warsaw Pact, and no-one on the Soviet side expected it to dissolve.
so you just ignore the declassified documents, making this whole thing a waste of my time.
i'd like to thank you for that.
Sounds like a destruction. The administration is abandoning both the US soft power and its abilities to project through allied countries.
The failure in Georgia to push back on the "pro Russian law" (a law similar to one the US has which required all foreign propaganda to be clearly labeled) was probably seen as a watershed moment that it was about time to hit the reset button on that stuff. That one didnt just fail it backfired.
No US military bases have been closed though, have they?
What is expected is to react to the latest headlines, accept them as truth and fight an approved R vs D battle.
Incorrect, Biden treated China as a rival power and pursued an industrial policy based on this view.
If China started doing something similar in North America the US would probably invade that country almost instantly (e.g. like it almost did to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis).
Cuba remained an ally of the USSR after the missile crisis and continued to host Soviet conventional forces, including fighter jets permanently stationed just 10 minutes from Miami, and regular temporary rotations of nuclear bombers like the Tu-95: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/guest-bloggers/tupolev-tu-9...
Even Donald Trump now admits that stalling NATO expansion and not treating Russian security concerns with utter contempt could have prevented this.
Allying with other countries is not illegal, therefore it cannot be a cause of a war.
russia invading a sovereign country is illegal, therefore it was the cause of the war.
Putin sees the fall of the USSR as a historical wrong that must be righted. He uses NATO Expansion as an easy excuse to sell to the rubes, but it's just that, an excuse.
He was going to go after Ukraine and Georgia NATO or not.
Even person who panders to Putin repeat bullshit Russian propaganda? How surprising. The NATO expansion excuse is just ignorant talking point. Russian imperialism is the very reason why every neighbour of Russia (apart from the ones that are it's puppet states) want to be in NATO, not the other way around.
Also it's not clear what "Even Donald Trump now admits..."is intended to mean here. Donald Trump has always repeated Kremlin talking points so I'm not sure why anyone would think of this as novel.
I'm confused why you would phrase it as "even Donald Trump", as if we should somehow expect Trump to not buy in to Putin's propaganda line? The fact that Trump "admits" that he agrees with Putin should not give any weight to what Putin claims.
EVEN Donald Trump? As if minihands is the staunchest critic of Russia? I mean, c’mon. Pretty much _only_ Donald Trump claims this outside the context of actual Russian propaganda.
It’s a terribly flimsy argument. Like, no-one has ever, as far as I know, said that Poland should invade Belarus because it joined the CSTO, say. Because that would be obviously ridiculous; actually joining, never mind wanting to join, a defensive treaty organisation is no sort of excuse for invasion. None of this makes any sense unless you accept to start with that Russia has some sort of rights over Ukraine, and no-one really buys that except for Russia.
That much is clear.
This can kind of be the case with narrow, directed tariffs (protectionism of a vulnerable uncompetitive industry, for instance see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax), or in a developing country that has mostly primary industry (that is extractive industry, mining and that sort of thing). In a developed country, it’s a lot more complicated; a lot of that manufacturing probably depends on imported materials or parts (so tariffs hurt it from that direction) and a lot of the market is probably export (which tariffs also hit, for tariffs more or less inevitably lead to retaliatory tariffs).
And where you have heavy protectionism, the _consumer_ tends to suffer, as the protected industries have little incentive to make their products good or cheap. See British Leyland; for quite a while the British government attempted to keep it alive by heavily restricting the import of actually good cars. Spoiler: it did not work.
Say we put a tariff on socks. And Hanes opens a sock factory in the US. Is a few hundred sock jobs going to help the millions who aren’t making socks? Does working in the sock factory pay enough to buy computers and cars and other higher margin goods?
Generally speaking, for broad tariffs, the answer is “No”.
Might not turn out to be as self-sacrificing as I thought.
How is your mental model literally backwards from reality?
Not sure about musk's wealth but TSLA is down by >30% in the last 3 months.
The hyperbole interferes with construction discussion.
NATO is the reason why saudis are trading in dollars.
NATO is the reason that the US has credible nuclear deterrents
NATO is why america doesn't need to have a physical colonial empire in europe (otherwise it'd need to subjugate cyprus, and somewhere like saaremaa, and that costs a shit tonne of money)
NATO isn't about playing for defence of europe, its about keeping the USSR and russia far enough away to keep trading routes open.
And once that rearmament happens, or is underway to an extent that it’s irreversible, what is the US going to do?
They’ll simply resume the same leadership position they always held, but now over a greatly reinforced alliance. And the Europeans will say, thank goodness the US is back. Aren’t we all safer now.
As a practical matter, if things deteriorate to the point that the office of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe stops being held by the commander of US European Command - it looks like things might be trending in that direction now that NATO countries are holding meetings without the US and intelligence sharing is starting to break down, never mind whatever the US means when it talks about "withdrawing" from Europe - Humpy Dumpty is broken. Whatever organization the US might join again in the future, or even somehow attempt to "lead," will be fundamentally different than what has gone before.
It’s interesting the point you make about political dynamics - elections mainly, and indeed that is a core part of my thesis: American democracy does not cause meaningful changes to the long term strategic direction of the country. Some things are decided by elections, but these things are not.
All highly speculative, yet we will see how it plays out in time.
Trump admin considers giving up NATO command that has been exclusively American since Eisenhower
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-adm...
I don't think the author was interested in fully exploring what this news really means.
I'm asking for a reference and a date when they said that. And obviously, it must be before the Russo-Ukrainian war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
> So his campaign officers have been conveniently running a message of “Tiahnybok is pulling for our side,” but so far managed to get only 1.6 percent of polled voters to declare support for him. A broad-shouldered and towering leader of the right-wing Svoboda Party, he positions himself as a knight on the yellow-and-blue horse – the country’s national colors – on a mission to save Ukraine. His program almost immediately mentions that a section “nationality” should be introduced into Ukrainian passports – a sign of pride to some, yet prejudice to others. Should he be president, Ukrainians will have to obtain visas to travel to Russia and pass a Ukrainian language test to work in civil service. Ukraine would pick up nuclear arms again and take a hard line approach towards Russia. Serving as a lawmaker twice before, Tiahnybok’s ideas have been better received in the more nationalist west. Once allied with President Victor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine faction, he was expelled for anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements.
2010 hope the kyiv post is good enough source https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politic...
58652dd5e1d83157ae78ed96cb2fd53ee98dba25b3b5c0dbda11b83a17035ba5
Taiwan makes some of the most complex devices humans have ever constructed! They can figure out the almost 100 year old technology to make a gun bomb nuke.
I've literally never thought that the US wouldn't help us before Trump came to shit on everything.
Now I imagine we'd have to buy Trump off with "raw earth" or something in exchange for not being abandoned to China, and our head of state would quite possibly be berated publicly for wanting some kind of security guarantee for his people's future.
It's sad, I still feel like the US and UK people are closest to our values, but Trump only works for himself and his billionaire crony parasites.
He will end up with the loyalty he has earned.
Everyone around Trump hates him, and the US is heading in the same direction.
And you, too, have failed to present one. Is funding a never-ending stalemate indefinitely the only option?
Fantastic.
What's your plan for beating Russia? Ideally without starting WW3.
I am sure the Europeans would be willing to shoulder more of the cost but the US has been cutting Ukraine off from intelligence sources and now also support. There is no cost argument for that.
Also do you really think that these decisions will not cost the US in lost sales, reassurances for everything because of lost trust....
What I realized was that, for people who've been "left out of the benefits of the global economy", that picture makes total sense--the pie didn't grow, and in fact probably shrank for them. Thus, zero-sum thinking makes perfect rational sense. It's an accurate worldview, and anyone trumpeting "the pie will grow, you just need to give up a little more (in increased taxes or jobs shipped elsewhere)" in spite of the evidence that IT HASN'T, must be either a fool or outright lying to them.
Anyways, for the first time I felt myself understanding a little bit how these voters may feel.
Who would go for that? If it were merely about the pie shrinking, maybe that's just inevitable, and reasonable people would have to concede that it must shrink. They feel as if there is an element of fraud in the proposals that are made. Rather than miscalculation, rather than misfortune.
But, instead of focusing on spinning up solar panel production factories or cutting edge automation in automobile manufacturing or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs, they’d rather double down on their protectionist agenda while blaming the liberals, despite it being 100% their own fault. Fucking over the liberals might make them feel smug, but the conservative position is worse, because now there isn’t the remote possibility that they can get government funding for all these “socialist agenda items”, never mind that it would actually help them.
I’m not saying you’re defending their position, but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying things don’t suck for them. I’m sorry for them that life is hard, and things change. It would certainly be nice if we could just do the things we’re used to and like forever without needing to adapt. But shit changes, and being mean to trans people or whatever just isn’t going to make their lives better, it’s only going to make every one else’s worse too. We rely on each other. We have no choice not to. So instead of being antisocial, they need to grow up and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
Manufacturing output in the US is at an all-time high:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
Though it's (a) smaller share of GDP compared to the 'good old days' of the 1950-60s, and (b) does not need as many workers because of automation. This is true in a lot of industries: various seaports have never imported/exports more goods, but have fewer dockworkers than decades ago because of containerization and giant cranes.
Though one problem is of 'concentrated loss': if a town/area was dependent on one factory (or industry), then it could be especially heavily hit because of that single point of failure.
And so… they vote for the cheaper goods and killing their towns more?
> the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time.
The Democratic platform has been around providing succour and training to rural areas for several election cycles, Clinton’s campaign included 30 billions in infrastructure, training, and redevelopment, as well as healthcare and pension safeguard for coal counties.
When people do build factories, which they still do, they build them in or around the cities, not in the country, despite having to pay more for land, labor, and regulatory compliance. If they do locate in the country, they choose a town that has a university and a hospital.
There are committed bigots in the Republican voter base. They’re suburban and rural-rich.
The rural poor Republican voters largely are, at least hypothetically (if you can get through their media bubbles) reachable by the right economic message. They’re not in it for the racism or what have you. That’s the suburban republicans.
I can't ever understand why they have so much hate and bile in them? I'm guessing its just fear of losing what they do have? I don't really know.
This was beautifully expressed in the West Virginia teachers strike a few years back: https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=4313
The liberal elites are paying for their inability to keep the societal compact somewhat alive. If too many people don't have jobs and can't find a dentist, they will start a "voter disobedience".
Of course the second order effects will be huge, but it is, in a sense, necessary development. A democratic country has to be able to keep a majority of its people reasonably satisfied and well-off.
FYI I don't believe in "THE REASON" or "THE CAUSE" and I am wary of people who reduce complex issues such as voting patterns to one single root cause, but to deny that economic hardship is a significant factor in anti-system vote seems to be wishful thinking to me.
Show me a relatively rich neighbourhood or voting district (say, over 130 per cent of average national GDP) with above average anti-system vote share, anywhere in Europe. I don't think you will find it. People who have a lot to lose don't rock the boat.
Also your economic story doesn't hold water. The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs. Similarly the destruction of the CHIPS act and its unpopularity in rural areas also shows that the economic opportunity aspect is just an excuse for the cultural hate that has been worked up.
The best way to understand a Trump supporter that I have come to is a person that hates Democrats more than anything, and will do anything possible to bully them, including the economic destruction of the country. I have a lot of family like this, and for years I thought they were just joking or exaggerating about their hate, but the past year has shown me that they were earnest. It's not the 1990s anymore, this is a visceral culture war above all else.
But they haven't, they're just completely uninformed about what they're getting. If you think ANY of the rural farming communities could continue to exist without significant federal subsidies, you're crazy.
Ask a farmer whether globalization has helped him or not the next time China retaliates to a tarriff by refusing to import any US soybeans and you'll quickly discover that it has absolutely helped them.
Globalization is less the cause of their issue, it's deregulation. Consolidation of manufacturing has killed plants in those small towns. Consolidation of groceries[1] has made it impossible for small-town grocery stores to survive on their own. Both can be traced back to Reaganomics.
Are the Democrats at fault for not attempting to reverse any of that? Absolutely, but the answer isn't: we need someone who wants even more consolidation and to kill all international relations.
But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.
As I mentioned in another thread, the Republicans switched from "the immigrants are stealing your jobs" to "the immigrants are stealing your cats."
With what their opponents had? They didn't even need one.
They want the 70s-80s economy back, but they don't want to support unions.
They think they deserve to receive government benefits. But others are moochers, and they don't deserve it.
They think Trump is deporting criminal / drug cartel illegal immigrants.
My state is red (State houses & governor have been conservatives for the last 30 years). Yet they blame all the issues on democrates. When my state signed the carry law, they thought Biden was the one who signed the law.
If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.
You have to distinguish between the rhetoric being spread to hijack the economic woes and the actual root of the problem. All that stuff is designed to give people an outlet for their very real economic frustrations. It's not deep seated (yet), it's a tool to exploit them. The only reason why it's working is because these people have been ignored for too long by the establishment in both parties, and it's not too late to respond and adapt.
The closest is his anti immigrant rhetoric but my guess is that this will largely hurt farmers (although maybe they know better than I do).
How is any of this helping fly over country?
Living in Trump country doesn’t give you any extra credibility. I also live in “Trump Country” and say that the real reason is because they’re all goofs that fell into a personality cult due to the decline of US education and this country’s obsession with celebrity. Who is correct?
Save the downvote victim complex for Reddit.
We’ve been falling over ourselves trying to understand these poor misunderstood Trump voters for nearly 10 years now. We’ve all heard these rationalizations many times before.
But they never ever deliver any real solution. Never. What trump solved in first term? No wall, he was joke of the world for that. No middle east peace - fuck, he made the invasion to Israel by giving Jerusalem official israeli status. Palestinians lost all hope at that point (I know its way more complex than that, I know, but this was the trigger point to go full mental like a cornered animal). Afghanistan withdrawal? Thats his contracts with taliban which made US look so weak they were shooting ducks as you guys and rest of west literally ran away for your life.
To make any successful long term massive changes, you need a steady leadership. trump is the opposite due to his mental & childhood issues, heck he is the epitome of instability. And so he drags whole world into same instability, changing global markets from bullish to bearish within a week, losing literally all friends and allies, globally. No, puttin' ain't your friend and never will be, he is a murderous sociopathic p.o.s. till his last breath.
If simpler folks refuse to see all this and much more and connect those few dots, your idea of babysitting them and hald-holding in ever changing environment is laughable. Even in Europe you guys consider semi-communist we don't do that, we can't do that, its idiotic. This problem is not unique to US in any way and solution ain't what he wants to do. But its so nice to hear all that crap, "I will fix your woes", "the others are to blame for all your issues" and so on. Full on emotions, 0 rationality. Folks, even societies work like that, but get ready China will overtake you sooner than you would like.
I kept thinking he is just a russian agent brainwashed in 80s during his visit to moscow (maybe deep hypnosis or something else), but it seems more and more he is doing massive favors to China actually, since russia is already insignificant globally. I don't mean some pesky tariffs, I mean whole world will realign around China, and he is giving it all to them for free. Bravo.
* Abolish democracy (only works preemptively, abolishing democracy while they're in charge would obviously not work).
* Wait for them to die and hope they don't teach what they know to a successor.
* Learn from them and speak to some fraction of their core even more persuasively than they do.
You don't defeat a populist by simple virtue of being right.
The reason I ask is that here in Romania the issue is completly fabircated by the social media and amplified by the algorithm. What I mean there was not a single law pro LGBTQ passed in Romania, the educational system is not teaching children about LGBTQ, there are no changes in schools or other places to unixes bathrooms, no forced or assisted transitioning programs.
It is just media with conspiracies like the COVID vaccines makes you gay, 5G makes you gay, Bruxelles wants to make your children gay, Soros wants to make the children gay. There are also staged video with transexuals making a circus and shared on TikTok. So now we have a lot of idiots that actually thinks that we need to surrender to Putin so he can kill the traitors and the gays.
You state "the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans. ...globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns."
I 100% agree with that. But I think that many folks are so enthralled with Trump because he was the first politician to really acknowledge this simmering rage, give it legitimacy, and say that it's all those woke, city-dwelling liberals fault. The GP comment says "The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more", but that fits perfectly in with your explanation as well. A lot of Trump supporters are pissed as hell about the hollowing out of their communities, and they're looking to bring retribution for those they blame for their downfall (or the ones Trump has convinced them are responsible for their downfall). Heck, Trump even said it loudly and proudly, "I am your retribution."
It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.
They remember how their towns were when they were young, they had a bustling locally owned and operated main street full of commercial activity, they also often had a factory, or mill which provided good jobs too.
Some of the parallel commenters here only think rural = farming, and thats not true. If you look at the Carolinas for example, there were textile and lumber mills - farming there is still more or less as healthy as its every been - but all of those other sources of employment which brought money in from outside of the community are gone.
This story repeats itself in a bunch of places, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, and across the greater west too.
This rot started well before Reagan though - it's something I've called "the 1971 problem". If you go on a road trip across rural America, you'll rarely see a locally funded building (aka, not a chain store), built after 1971-3 - with the notable exception to this being places with a military base, college, or some other government facility - and I think the causes are multiple here, post vietnam drawdown of forces, détente, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, the Nixon shock, then later the so-called peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.
Globalization thru the 80's-90's just made all of these issues worse, and hollowed out manufacturing too - now all of this this effected cities too, to some extent, but as you mention, cities got benefits of globalization - more information economy jobs, greater wealth flowing in from the financialization of everything, which while didnt replace the jobs lost in manufacturing, did replace the wealth generated by it. (there are even more things I've not really touched on - like the steady decrease in local ownership of businesses, and the corresponding civic rot that kicks in when this happens)
There is another issue I also want to touch on here - "jobs for regular people" - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for is a decent factory job, a job in the trades - or more likely today, a not so great service job. One of the reasons I want to onshore manufacturing is that we need those higher quality jobs to ensure the benefits of our economy are shared more broadly.
I'm a proponent of tariffs as a way to solve this - not what Trump is doing which are penalty tariffs - but what I've called cost adjustment tariffs - tariffs that adjust the price of imported manufactured goods to the same level as if they were made here, where you price in labor differences overall regulatory burden, environmental and climate rules, and other factors - on a fundamental level, I feel it is immoral to export all the externalities from manufacturing to another country (pollution being the primary one I'm thinking of).
While tariffs, even at some low level may result in slower GDP growth. People cannot eat or pay their rent with GDP - a more ideal answer (one I support) is UBI, but UBI doesn't appear to politically possible - and there is also value in being able to do work where you can see the fruits of your labor (both in the physical good you've made - and the pay check you get at the end of the week), for good or for bad, it gives you self worth and a feeling of purpose too.
So I get why rural voters vote for Trump, and its because my side has failed to understand the economic pain that anyplace that isn't a tier 1/2/3 city has experienced over the last 50 years - and what their needs are for the future. In the end, I think Trump will fail them, and probably make everything else worse - but he's the horse that the American people who could be bothered to show up to vote picked (I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).
There isn’t a “progress” switch to turn on. The current state of the Rust Belt isn’t because they are full of knuckle dragging idiots inferior to the coasts. It’s because they were dealt the economic equivalent of a traumatic brain injury, and have spent decades trying to recover. Meanwhile, the areas of the country that inflicted this injury on them are now trying to convince everyone that it was their own fault.
I’m as disgusted by Trump as anyone, and would never vote for him. But I am from the Rust Belt and absolutely sympathize with the anger that would make someone want to burn the system down.
America decided in the 1970s to liquidate its interior and its manufacturing base to make Wall Street rich from the labor arbitrage trade, and did so with the full throated support of both parties.
I live in the outer suburbs of a middle American city. The idea that all Trump supporters are cult members is vastly overblown. There is some of that, but much of his support is exasperation. Rural and working class Americans have nothing to lose and nowhere to go but down. The choice is to vote for Trump or keep watching everyone commit suicide with fentanyl. They know Trump might be full of shit or might not have any real solutions, but they also know Democrats and mainstream Republicans will continue to sell them out.
It's also important to understand that for the most part working class and small town Americans don't want welfare, which is the only thing the Democratic Party (possibly, maybe) offers them. They want jobs. They want to feel useful, to do useful things. Unless you are disabled, accepting welfare is disgraceful. I remember my mom (a lifelong Democrat BTW who hates Trump) feeling humiliated to use food stamps for a brief period when I was a kid. "These are for people who really need them. I don't need them." She worked as hard as she could to get off them. Americans want to do things.
MAGA is as much anti-traditional-Republican as it is anti-Democrat. In fact I know a few Trump voters whose hatred for the likes of Bush II and the Cheneys is greater than for Democrats. It's a third political party that has taken over the corpse of the Republican party that Bush II destroyed.
I didn't vote for Trump because I don't think he actually cares either, and I loathe the man in general. I also have two daughters, and his MAGA movement is full of people who cheer for pro-rape influencers like Andrew Tate or want to LARP the Handmaid's Tale. I can't vote for a movement that is openly allied with such people. Their performative scapegoating of LGBTQ people is gross too, and then there's the crazy autocrat ideologies lurking at the margins. Even if MAGA has some policy points I agree with, the movement is just too intellectually batty and personally disgusting to support.
I see nobody on the US political stage that I actually like. I voted for Harris as a "holding pattern" vote in the hope that something better will appear in the future. It's better to stay with the bad option than to go for obviously worse options. If you look around the world "just shaking things up" with nothing better waiting in the wings usually results in a bad outcome. Successful major political shifts or revolutions require a superior alternative with better ideas.
I understand your perspective, but I don't think that explains most of Trump's actions. The (very valid!) critique of globalist profiteering you shared has been boiled down into something beyond economics and into tribalism.
I blame decades of right-wing media dominance on cable TV and rural radio.
Or maybe Europeans, as "founding members", are able to support the planes on their own? I doubt it though. The engine alone is US made, ans that alone is probably unmaintainable without their support.
The other factor is the NATO nuclear sharing arrangement. The F-35A is the only new aircraft certified to carry the US nuclear weapons under that arrangement, so that impacts Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Netherlands. Germany looked into certifying the Eurofighter Typhoon for the nuclear strike mission but decided that they couldn't afford it, and bought the F-35A instead. Of course, if the US pulls back from NATO and ends nuclear sharing then that concern would become moot and some of those countries would be likely to develop their own nuclear weapons.
I remember the story rather like this:
US: "you want to certify your fighter for nuclear devices"
Germany: "yes"
US: "ooh, that will be expensive and takes a loooong time. Don't you want to just buy our F35 instead?"
And germany basically did. With the implicit understanding, to buy a piece of nuclear protection with that. Well, all gone ... so there are really only some voices left, wanting to keep buying the expensive, potentially useless bricks.
They may lack the scale, but perhaps that can be built up.
(Sadly, sanity of the opposite political party was / is also highly questionable.)
I am not holding my breath that he will just walk away in 4 years, why would anybody be so naive? He thinks US constitution is an old toilet paper, its mememe. Look at what happened last time he was supposed to go out.
We have to assume that the US cannot be trusted as a military ally for at least the next 4 years. In fact, we have to be open to the possibility that they will be willing to be hostile. Including, but not limited to, extortion tactics. That's the hard baseline here.
We also have to be open to the possibility that the US either won't or can't have a proper election in 2028. And even if there is a proper election, that even a "sensible" president will not repair the damage.
What is already permanent is that Europe will never have the same level of trust in the US ever again. Perhaps some of it can grow back over a few decades, but the former level of trust will not return.
No one would ever trust China, not Vietnam, not anyone unwilling to take orders from them. The terms would be heavy.
We'd keep the frame, but Serge Dassault and Charles de Gaulle would probably smite any French mechanic coming within 20 feet of a F-35 to do anything but dismantle one for its secrets.
The only way Europe can match Russia/China is to keep buying american made weapons. Maybe in 20-30 years the situation will be different and Europe will have the same capabilities of the US, but until then... buy, baby, buy!
It seems to me Donald is beheld in some way to Vladimir; what's being done now to my eye is too specifically about setting up UA for second RU invasion.
Donald then I think, step by step, is going to ally with Vladimir.
1. US aid to UA stops (done).
2. USA leaves NATO (on the way).
3. US troops in Europe leave or move to Hungary (floated).
4. Hungary is ejected from EU due to Orban obstructing everything he can.
5. Hungary becomes RU satellite state (maybe with many tens of thousand of US troops).
6. USA lifts its sanctions, placing it directly in conflict with Europe.
7. Donald invokes Insurrection Act, military units can now be used for civil policing (this is why top military brass and specifically top military lawyers removed).
8. Europe puts boots on ground and air cover over UA.
9. To "encourage peace", Donald now disables support for US weapon systems being used by Europe in UA. At this point, F-35 is history whether or not EU has dropped them or not.
10. Protests in USA, military used, people die, Donald suspends Constitution "to restore order and combat subversive elements".
11. No more elections. All court cases underway made irrelevant.
The EU without the US can already produce 5th gen, the selling point of the F35 was 6th gen compatible with 7th gen (NGAD).
Russia is still flying more 4th then 5th gen fighters, because they can't get their bricks off the ground. Why would the EU want to copy the same mistakes of their enemy?
Maybe we (as a Pole living in Norway) can't have state of the art jets, but in practice don't need them?
We (as the whole eastern block - Scands, Balts, Poland, Romania and Ukraine) should cancel our orders of F-35 and focus on developing our drone and strategic missile industry. And focus on investing, developing and buying from our closest allies - the eastern block.
Not on the countries that don't care because they are either too far from Russia (Spain, Italy) or have vested geopolitical interest in alllying with them (Germany). France and UK might want to join to balance out Germany.
At least that's what I understand from hearing smarter than me discuss the current situation.
If your threat model did include a war within former NATO members, the F-35 is the worst possible choice so another way of thinking about this is that they should pick the best option which is actually available. That would mean things like swarm attacks and strikes on the airfields where those stealthy but extremely fragile planes are housed. Even if the public range is significantly low, they’d need a base closer than Greenland to strike European targets.
BAE Systems along with other European arms/aerospace manufacturers are perfectly capable of making competing products.
And there are high quality planes like the Rafale that aren't PaaS (Planes as a Service) where the owner can unilaterally stop you from using it.
America is currently doing everything for Russia! If we actually used the F35 against Russia right now Trump would probably immediately do everything in his power to stop that, just like he’s exerting pressure everywhere else he can in Russias favour
Honestly I’ll personally be buying as little American as possible going forwards
BTW you don't seem to understand military well - F22 is much better plane than F35, but abysmally complex to do and expensive, thats why the low numbers. F35 has way too many compromises ie for us navy.
Also, as Ukraine war shows fighter jets are not that important for waging war if situation is more like peer vs peer, and not US blowing shepherds and weddings into pieces. Sure, they lob a bomb or two, sometimes launch a rocket but all from as much distance as possible. What wins such wars these days is artillery, massive amount of infantry and millions of various drones.
If nobody wants to buy any of that shit because of the knock-on effects of Trump’s self-sabotage and they start investing elsewhere, then those defence companies will sooner distance themselves from the US as well. Unless they’re in on whatever the administration is cooking up the money is still going to speak louder.
I am very curious if EU is smart enough to keep and even tighten their sanctions. After all is European security that is threatened by Russia.
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[https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/RUS/Yea...
It doesn't seems like that. The West was pretty intolerant to business connections with Russia, and if instead of 80% cut there was 100% cut - it doesn't change the overall picture very much.
>by threatening sanctions on India and China
If We look at the trade balance of Western countries and China - the West isn't close to the position to do that.
>use it as a pretext to restart economic ties with Russia is the impending collapse of the Russian economy >yielding to Russian demands.
That's a blatant conspiracy theory. It seems like the main obstacle in the Trump's "peace deal" is that Putin is thinking that he is winning this war and that the Russian economy has way more time than the Ukrainian army will be able to conscript new soldiers.
>employing the same tactics Reagan used to bankrupt the Soviet Union
Soviet Union collapsed because of it's own complete left economy, because oil prices were several times lower than now (even adjusted for inflation) and because Gorbachev thought that it is better for him to advertise pizza, then to be the Supreme Ruler of those piece of sh.t of a country.
There is no political will. Sadly, and on this Trump is correct, the pathetic EU sent as much money to Ukraine as the amount of money they sent to Russia in oil purchases:
https://www.euronews.com/video/2025/03/05/has-europe-spent-m...
Three years of war and no real strategy of economic starvation of Russia....
Sibling in thread says there's already an US alternative, anyway.
Or more likley China wants to sell to people, and thats hard if they are in a trade war, and spending money on a crash re-militarisation drive.
It also serves China well to be on the side of the EU as they can mop up some of the trade thats being destroyed by the USA.
As of February, China’s actions with working with Europe and standing against America cemented its position as world power focused on stability.
Their decision to find a way to work with India, is yet another sign of their decision making.
In sharp contrast, America is dismantling itself in flight.
I guess there would be enough time to switch to French rockets even in the worst case.
The Economist piece spells out that, yes, long term maintenance is problematic, but in the short term nothing will break over night.
With Polaris (the system before Trident) the UK was manufacturing the missiles (effectively under license). It seems unclear whether there's any similar arrangement with Trident.
I guess my main point was that the deterrent is independent (the UK prime minister decides when to fire and can do so without the US sign-off) and there's no cliff-edge where the tech can be disabled by the US. So, with the raw materials ready to go and UK arms manufacturers like BAE Systems perfectly capable of building the tech, the risk to the UK (of being without a nuclear deterrent) is relatively low. Not zero, but low.
The ability to scale advanced or exotic materials science at will was a cornerstone of why US weaponry is difficult to copy. People always underestimate this aspect but it is a major reason why manufacturing of state-of-the-art hardware is not fungible.
Heck, even Italian Agusta sold some of their platforms to a NATO ally with build/iterate/export permissions...
Obviously American left coast DNC die hards and neoliberals hate him with a passion that beggars belief but he's basically still a different face of American imperialism repesenting similar goals with a changed strategy. Patching things up with Russia is part of that.
The conspiracy theory that he's a Russian plant is amusing, but a delusion to which even the most die hard Putin supporter cannot reach. I guess it's easier to admit than the idea that America lost.
Here are CNN's exit polls: https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-result...
The largest split in any income group is 52-46, nearly even. The largest split by gender is only 55-43.
By contrast, Blacks are 13-86. White Protestants are 72-26. White Jews are 20-79. White nones are 28-71.
All more expensive than importing but supports local economies. Again, I'm not an economist, and tariffs are not a panacea, but they are also not useless.
There’s a place for tariffs. Protecting against countries that undercut us by skirting international labor or environmental laws is a decent example. Protecting a specific, narrow industry that has national defense implications could be another.
But against Canada and Mexico? GTFO. That’s nonsense that’s going to hurt the average consumer.
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/how-much-of-the-f-35-is-brit...
But right now the fact that there US citizens (apparently civil contractors, not military personell) stationed at austrian air bases to enable some functionality is a big deal. This is a big deal because the wish-wash Austrian Neutrality is crucial to Austrian Identity.
The problem is systemic: The US doesn't have a functioning democracy. FPTP, gerrymandering, unchecked campaign financing, the electoral college? It just isn't working, and the US is permanently stuck in a dysfunctional two-party system. If that doesn't get fixed (and let's be honest, it won't), the rest of the world won't be trusting the US until it can demonstrate a few decades of continuous trustworthy leadership after Trump is gone.
Because that is where most of the money ends up when the US "supports" other countries. The US unloads weapons from its stockpiles (that need to be replaced at some point anyway) and then replenish the US stockpiles. This is both a huge injection of funds into US defense industry, and it takes care of the expensive problem of dealing with old ordnance.
US defense industry is going to be busy restocking the US stockpiles for a while longer.
If revenue were to soften before that, the Trump administration can distract from this reality by pumping more money into the industry short term. This may actually push the problem forward in time to the next president if they can keep pumping in enough money to hide the problem. It looks as if they are doing exactly this.
Of course, a few years down the line the defense industry will be in trouble as "consumer trust" is gone, Europe have ramped up their production and revenues will start to plummet.
Quite apart from any sovereignty arguments, cash spent at home goes to purchase of hopefully local components, materials, all along paying for local salaries, which drives local economies. And this is taxed along the way too, as income tax, VAT and ultimate corporate tax.
I wonder if that's really true to a significant amount, and if so, how much does that matter. Eg if I can buy something for X abroad, or c*X locally, for what value of c is this overall breakeven?
(Sellier & Bellot and no, it is not French)
And no country wants to wake up to a set of bricks when they really need warplanes all of a sudden.
Shevardnadze, in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, was as clear as one could be:
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SPIEGEL ONLINE: At the end of March 1990, Genscher and the then US Secretary of State James Baker, talked about the fact that there was interest among "central European states" about getting into NATO. You knew nothing of this?
Shevardnadze: This is the first I've heard of it.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Did you have a conversation with your colleagues in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary about a possible eastward expansion of NATO in the spring of 1990?
Shevardnadze: No, that was never discussed in my presence.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The German documents give the impression that Moscow counted on the dissolution of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Did you really think that would happen?
Shevardnadze: That may have been discussed after I resigned from the ministry of foreign affairs in December 1990. However during my time in office it was not.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was the eastward expansion of NATO ever discussed in the inner circles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1990?
Shevardnadze: The question never came up.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Did the subject play a role in the ratification process of the Two-Plus-Four agreement (where the signatories included the two Germanys and the four powers that occupied Germany after World War II) that unified Germany?
Shevardnadze: No, there were no difficulties whatsoever with the ratification process.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Nevertheless, the eastward expansion happened a few years later. Did you feel, at the time, that the German diplomats deceived you?
Shevardnadze: No. When I was the minister of foreign affairs in the Soviet Union, NATO's expansion beyond the German borders never came up for negotiation. To this day I don't see anything terrible in NATO's expansion.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: At the conference in Ottawa on German unity in February 1990, you had five telephone conversations with Gorbachev. Did you discuss a possible NATO enlargement -- beyond the GDR?
Shevardnadze: No. We only had German reunification on the agenda, nothing else.I wouldn't be surprised if it happens on the fact they could share the cost between nations alone for something they've already paid for.
For other countries, the problem remains that if the UK or France government turns far-right, the other countries may quickly be on their own again, just like what they now fear with the US.
An EU-level control over the nukes seems unlikely, as France (and even more the UK) want to retain their sovereignty over that.
The UK lacks an independant warhead delivery system since the cancellation of the Blue Streak in 1960, and currently uses US missiles for the UK submarines.
The UK was the first country to start a nuclear weapons programme and talked the US into starting the Manhatten project.
Once subsumed by the US project, the UK started again post WWII and developed warheads and bombs tested in Australia. They managed to dust a future UK prime minister with fallout as a child in Adelaide.
They were a member of a club, and that club was rich and they deserved to enjoy the results of that. But then other people tricked them into letting a bunch of other people in the club, and selling off the club's assets at the same time, until their share was diluted to nothing. Then the same people who pulled this trick come to them and say "you have nothing of value, you deserve to starve". And some of those people pretend to be the other side "just implement marxism, so you can have your fair share of nearly nothing".
>or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs,
Those universities have nothing to do with that. Go talk to those people, they don't want to "become vocational schools". Not when there's so much grift money to be made bringing in foreigners on student visas.
>but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them.
Nothing gets better from here on out. This is terminal decline, and the two (or more factions) who are at war here couldn't even stop it if they cooperated for some reason.
>I’m sorry for them that life is hard,
Not really. But even if you could shed a genuine tear for them, I think it's going to be short-lived when you discover that you're in much the same boat as they.
>and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
The society you're trying to have is dying. The first rule of societies is that they absolutely must make more generations of people who will then (and soon) become that society. The society you're trying to have thought you could all upload your brains into robot bodies or something and forgot that. And now it's dying, and nothing can save it. These people aren't trying to "be mean to trans people", they were hoping the kindergarten teacher wouldn't groom them into becoming infertile. They were hoping for grandchildren, against all odds.
So, how is inflation and egg price doing now when bad democrats lost?
Democrats have had 4 presidents in office in the last 10 administrations (11 if you count the current one), accounting for 24 of the past 56 years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-biden-tells-coal-miners-15210...
(I am not claiming that their opponents have any better solutions.)
The economic problems are that once a location reliant on extractive industries gets too expensive (and / or gets automated leading to orders of magnitude cuts to the necessary workforce) it's not coming back, the companies either fold or leave. Europe has coal countries which folded a century ago. Once your coal is too far to be cheaply extractible, even if new tech made extracting it viable once again it almost certainly would not need anywhere near the same level of crewing. And reactivating an old mine is probably not worth the cost over upgrading mines which are still active.
So your only "fixes" are to flee the area or move to a new industry. And to do the latter, you need a way to kickstart the change. That's the goal of federal grants.
The recovery of extractive areas is difficult, and may not even be possible if too dependent. And it certainly does not happen by clinging to the extractive industry which left you behind.
It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.
Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.
A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.
The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.
And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.
Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.
For no reason. Trans people aren't doing anything but trying to live their lives but the concept of being trans disrupts their view of the world. People fear what they don't understand and because they don't understand the real reasons for their struggles, everything they don't understand can be conflated by a confident liar saying they are related.
Possibly the most succinct summary has been sitting in pop culture for a quarter century but how it could apply to real life never clicked with most people: "Fear is the path to the dark side"
Nothing has changed here. It's doesn't matter what they've claimed they're doing, there are still no jobs here and working class Americans feel abandoned.
The vast majority of Trump voters around here voted for him because of the economy. The trans stuff was seen as evidence that the Democrats were so wrapped up in first world problems held by a tiny minority that they didn't even notice that the majority of the country was actively struggling to make ends meet. It's not about the trans people, it's about the narrative that Trump shaped about how that related to these people's economic lives.
All of this is made much worse by social media too, which fans the flames hotter than it ever could have been before.
I actually saw a couple people saying that they've received a check from Trump during Covid, and mentioned that as a clear reason to vote for him. I thought it sounded dumb when I saw that he insisted on having his name on the stimulus checks, but apparently it worked. I also saw some people, southern women and big city black men, saying that they definitely didn't want a female president. That was probably part of why Hillary lost, and making the same play this time wasn't very wise from the democrats, although I would probably blame Biden for not dropping out earlier and leaving them very little choice.
People don't realize the economy isn't just a switch with good and bad
I wonder how much of that is due to the media and the polls claiming that Kamala had this in the bag? The same way that they claimed Hillary had it in the bag? This would cause people to stay home no?
Also there have been reports of accelerated efforts to disenfranchise voters by challenging their registration and not telling them until election day when they go to vote. A combination of these two things could have swung the election.
Yes, and they're very aware that Trump is not a Republican in the traditional sense. It doesn't matter to them which banner he hijacked, they know he's different.
Some are just blind partisans, otherwise those places wouldn't have been voting for team red for the last 35 years or so.
There is also the paradox of the low information voter too, which seemed to have broken for Trump 2:1 - that does concern me some.
Trump also has a huge benefit with low information voters, he spews noise all the time which the news media covers with baited breath.
I call it the "Trump says alot of things" problem - it allowed people to paint whatever they wanted him to be onto him by essentially cherry picking the various things he's said to make up their own collage view of whatever they wanted him to be.
They had a different reaction to price increases under Biden because those were not resulting from pro-American-worker trade policies, or at least were not perceived as such. In reality Biden was doing some things to try to repatriate manufacturing, but these policies were badly communicated if they were telegraphed at all, and they were not enough.
Constantly assuming these people are all just stupid isn't winning back any votes. To be fair: Republicans and MAGA spend a lot of time attacking straw man Democrats and liberals too.
BTW -- I see what they're thinking, but I suspect a lot of repatriated manufacturing will be so heavily automated it will not result in the mass employment gains they're hoping for.
Which is it? I mean, I know it's "nothing left to lose" but how can "nowhere to go but down" fit in to that?
Except, that's the exact same outcome you get even if you vote for Trump, unless there's something I'm not seeing?
I think you are correct.
Trump promised change and had "concepts of a plan".
Democrats promised more of the same, and then realized that that was unpopular and then threw together a plan that they said would work.
The reality now is that Trump's promised change may or may not help those voters economically, but the accompanying geopolitical disruptions may be worse.
The way I look at Trump/MAGA is they took over an ineffective, sclerotic Republican party that spent 40 years talking about “family values” while selling off the productive base of the country to globalization and letting rural America rot. The tea-party movement of the late aughts was their last chance to avoid being decapitated. They failed. The Republican party has been hollowed out and is simply not the same entity it was 10 years ago. It has been taken over by a very angry insurgent force.
As I see, the Democrat Party is where the Republicans were in 08/09. They have, perhaps, a few more years of whatever it is they are doing before they similarly get taken over.
Best case scenario: we end up with a new political party (or two) that represent the more sane interests of the old guard and of the population as a whole. Worst case scenario: we end up with two absolutely insane zombie versions of our two legacy political parties fighting for control of the nation.
At least we don’t have more guns than people and a bunch of nukes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EU industrial capabilities may also have issues, but they are (mostly) different ones than Russia faces.
After that the Russian "elite" units were elite in name only.
This was in hour 8 of the war and it's worth bearing in mind that this war could have gone very, very differently.
Whatever shit tier RU MIC/performance has been, it has manage to consistently defeat or mitigate what US+EU has thrown against her. Which includes highend gear like PAC3 MSE. Meanwhile half the reason RU had a hard time was due to facing UKR's abundant legacy USSR systems. At this point it's not unreasonable to dismiss everything in EU arsenal as wunderwaffe tier especially without US support. Including F35... which even if US doesn't restrict usage against EU-RU scenario, could still be borderline paperweight without US tier ISR.
People also forget NATO fought a much shitter/temu RU in Yugoslavia where NATO threw everything at even more legacy soviet systems. All of the awacs, prowlers, F117 barely chiped away at 20% of Yugoslav anti air, something like 700 harms were fired and destroyed less than handful of SA6 batteries. Hard to argue EU part of NATO has better military capability than 20 years ago.
IMO there's a strong chance US would heavily restrict/limit F35 operations against RU. Because one shot down F35 by S400 let alone anything shittier completely evaporates narrative around 5th gen (and what that entails for IndoPac). They'd rather see RU hit F35s in hangers with standoff munitions because at least they can point to JP and SKR and say, see, you need to build harden air shelters.
They have less than 30 airframes, probably 30-40% have some level of operational airworthiness.
The Russians get a lot of glazing on social media about military prowess. The reality is they’re fighting a tiny, poor country, got their asses kicked early on when nobody was really helping Ukraine substantially, mostly by virtue of their own incompetence.
The Russians version of the USAF is their information operations. They’ve helped to nurture right wing shitheads in the US for decades culminating in two freakshow presidential administrations. They’ve done the same in Germany in the former GDR and in the UK with the leave wankers.
They can only do that if US provides them with required components
oh wait...
P.S. Many mocked Russian munitions came with chips made by Texas Instruments among others, but thing is those chips are so damn generic you can get that from random shops in Shenzhen.
Georgia was, obviously, left alone after it dropped its NATO ambitions, disproving the rather quaint theory that Putin is intent on reforming the USSR.
Serbia did not get Kosovo back did it?
They are more battle-tested than any other. America has been involved in a war or another pretty much continuously since the end of WWW2.
Not that they’re going to be allies much longer.
In Syria the US bombs things at their will, same in Somalia. In all Latin America conflicts the US went at it alone.
Maybe pay attention to Greece, Korea, Libya, Kosovo, Serbia, Yemen, Syria (1982), Iran, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, WW1, WW2
The fact that even as we bicker on this forum British and American forces are in Yemen pretty much says everything.
* correction: since 1776
There's no reason this can't be replicated by other rich nations but it won't be cheap or quick.
I don't see EU countries starting to invade other countries around the globe to test out weapons systems and battlefield tactics. The US on the other hand, kind of did this continuously since WWW2 (to mention recent history).
Right now China is pressuring Russia into lots of one sided deals and is taking over large parts of the economy but that holds no candle to taking over the Vladivostok region.
The Chinese leader also calls for closer coordination as he meets security chief Sergei Shoigu amid thawing ties between Russia and the US
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3300618/ch...
Americans shouldn't get high on their MSM narratives supply.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1895449822917951901
The real story here, contrary to the framing, is that Rubio admits that a reverse Kissinger - splitting Russia and China - is NOT achievable. He says that the US will "[never] be successful completely at peeling [the Russians] off of a relationship with the Chinese,” and that the best outcome the US could hope for is "to have a relationship" with Russia so they don't exclusively deal with China. That's actually realistic and indeed probably the best outcome the US can possibly hope for.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1892074921679069555
I see many people commenting that the US is trying to pull a reverse Kissinger, wooing Russia away from China, completely missing the obvious truth right before their eyes: if there's a split happening, it's a Euro-US split.
That's a common flaw in human nature, we're often incapable to conceive that the status quo we've lived with our entire lives has fundamentally changed. We look to patterns from the past, seek to refight the previous war; it's far easier and more comforting to believe you're still in the box even when the box has disappeared.
Russia isn't going to split again from China, there is not a single chance in hell, it learned that lesson the hard way... Putin, as a famously keen student of history, understands how much damage that did.
And why would he? What benefit would Russia possibly derive from this? The world has changed: as we've seen during the Ukraine war the West unleashed its entire economic arsenal against Russia, only to demonstrate its own impotence. Russia last year was Europe's fastest-growing economy even when completely cut off from Western markets. So if the West's maximum pressure amounts to so little, its maximum friendship isn't worth much more.
It's utterly delusional to think that the two torch bearers of the Global South would split just as the emergence of the long sought multipolar order is finally coming true, all in exchange for a return of Western trade which they now know is dispensable, and an end to sanctions which they now know don't hurt much.
Also, kind reminder that Kissinger didn't actually split Russia and China: he took advantage of an already existing split. Geopolitically speaking, it's incredibly hard to split powers - especially great powers, but it's much easier to leverage an existing split. And looking at the landscape, those that are already split - or rather splitting - aren't Russia and China, but very much the U.S. and Europe.
A Euro-US split was bound to happen sooner or later, as the cost of the alliance increasingly outweighed the benefits on both sides. Especially with the rise of the Global South, China in particular, which initiated a profound identity crisis: suddenly you had countries "not like us" being far more successful, taking over an unsurmountable lead in manufacturing, and increasingly science and technology.
At some point there are three choices in front of you: join them, beat them, or isolate yourself from them and slowly decay into irrelevance. The West has been trying the "beat them" approach for the better part of the past 10 years and we've seen the results: an increasingly desperate series of failed strategies that only accelerated Western decline while strengthening the very powers they meant to weaken.
It also tried the "isolate yourself" approach with the various plans of "friend-shoring", "de-risking", "small yard, high fence", etc. That wasn't much more successful and the West undoubtedly sees the writing on the wall: the more you isolate yourself from a more dynamic economy, the further behind you get.
This leaves us with "join them", and here Trump's calculation seems to be that if the U.S. does so first, it undoubtedly can negotiate much better terms for the U.S., much like China did with Kissinger back in the late 1970s when it joined what was at the time still the U.S.-led international order. With Europe, like the Soviet Union back then, left with no choice but to accept whatever crumbs remain.
The situation of course isn't exactly similar. We're outside the box, remember... For one the U.S. isn't remotely in the same conditions as those of China back then and, unlike the Soviet Union, Europe lacks both the military might to resist this new arrangement and the economic autonomy to chart its own course. Which means that in many ways, geopolitically speaking, the U.S. is in better conditions and with more leverage than China had (and therefore able to get itself a better deal), and the EU ends up in worse conditions than the Soviets.
Still, the fundamental reality remains that Trump, for all his faults, seems to have understood earlier than Europeans that the world has changed and he'd better be the first to adapt. This was clear from Rubio's very first major interview in his new role as Secretary of State when he declared that we're now in a multipolar world with "multi-great powers in different parts of the planet" (https://state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-...).
As a European though, I can only despair at the incompetence and naivety of our leaders who didn't see this coming and didn't adapt first, despite all the opportunities and incentives to do so. They foolishly preferred to cling to their role as America's junior partner, even as that partnership was increasingly against their own interests, something which I've personally warned about for years.
Turns out, strangely, that the Europeans were in fact in many ways more hubristic and more trapped in the delusions of Western supremacy than the Americans. The price for this hubris will be very steep, because instead of proactively shaping their role in the emerging multipolar order, they will now have to accept whatever terms are decided for them.
Certainly not resource deals, where China sets cut throat prices.
Talk is cheap and China holds historical grudges, like those lost territories, forever. Having strong dominance over the northern pacific areas would also be far more stable and lucrative than any geopolitical advantages that might be very fleeting.
As for Europe and the US, time will tell. The US is going to pay a high price for the lost credibility. Would you really make yourself dependent by buying US weapons and leave yourself open to such thuggish blackmail tactics we have seen the last weeks? Also the US is a consumer based society that tries to change to a more balanced system. Absolutely understandable but very hard and risky.
We are moving to a multipolar world order and its going to be a time of blood and iron. Russia was just the one making the first move and with the US no longer interested in a rule based world order the mice are coming out to play. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
I don't think that anyone can seriously predict how things will fall out.
The Musk supporters feel that universal automation is coming fast and I bet the Chinese being as industrious as they are will seize upon that to make up for their demographic issues. They are already he world leaders at renewables and nuclear and regardless, their ability to ramp up carbon based fuel sources is second to none.
Meanwhile the US appears to have an okay demographic pyramid(especially compared to their peers) but birth rates are declining and all the ingredients to increasing birthrate are not in the upswing (good incomes, cheap real estate, stable governance). Now you are killing off the US's golden goose (immigration) it seems like you are repeating the mistakes of China.
Hillary famously said "those jobs aren't coming back". I do not know if she was incorrect in that, but I suspect she might have been right. I don't see a viable path to that happening, and I've yet to hear anyone else describe such.
They don't want to be appealed to, nor do they intend to compromise. They want to tear down everything I value, burn it to the ground, piss on the ashes and put me up against the wall. I know this because they've told me precisely that, and have been telling me that for nearly a decade. They've been very vocal and clear about what they want, and it isn't to be understood, or to meet anyone halfway.
I'm tired of being told that I need to capitulate and surrender and understand why I deserve the bullet. Fuck that, and fuck them.
Trumpism Delenda Est.
I'll probably give it a rest here for a few more weeks.
But there remains a question of quantity and determination.
I'm not sure how applicable this would be to a confrontation with European countries. Russian fighters will get getting lots of flight hours on CAP as well, but not much combat based on reporting. Both sides are keeping everything inside their own AD bubbles.
Their own press photos shows uncovered Philips screws on a supposedly stealth aircraft, and their "loyal wingman" drone used the first opportunity near the frontlines to try to defect.
Their previous orders have still not been delivered since they were sent to the frontlines in Ukraine.
I doubt India will want to repeat that.
With rumours of Pakistan getting J-35, 5th Gen fighters are necessity I guess.
Besides they can force Russian to manufacture them in India like Su-30 MKI.
My point was that countries buy those planes for the types of missions it was designed for but beyond that also strongly because they can fire nuclear missiles and are able to lease nuclear missiles from the US and have nuclear deterrence capabilities for lease.
Also agree with Ukraine not having the Rafale, it’s way too advanced for a proxy war. They didn’t get F-35 either but F-16 for the same reason.
Yep, that's the point of all MCAs, but the biggest difference between the F35 and other MCAs is the stealth technology aspect.
The F35 (along with the SU-57 and J-35) incorporated learnings from other MCA projects from the 1990s and 2000s.
You won't be able to fly a Rafale undetected on a bombing raid in Tehran or Isfahan, but that's not the point of the Rafale anyhow.
Most applications I've seen of Rafale and Rafale comparable MCAs is acting as a missle platform with some dogfighting capabilities and basic bombing capabilities if needed.
If the Super Rafale project takes off then you might see an F35 comparable jet from Dassault.
> Also agree with Ukraine not having the Rafale, it’s way too advanced for a proxy war. They didn’t get F-35 either but F-16 for the same reason
Yep! Hence why I think if Ukraine rebuilds it's airforce after this war, they will probably try to procure Saab Gripens because all they need is dogfighting plus missle platform capabilities.
Patriot works in Ukraine, they even got a few Khinzal. But of course any air defense is limited by available ammo and you need enough of the right kind of air defense in the right places for this to work well. The Ukraine is really limited by the number of available systems and ammunition. And for something like the Shahed drones you need other ways to defend yourself to avoid exhausting your precious ammunition for advanced air defense systems.
Russia also was shown to be nearly unable to intercept Storm Shadow/SCALP EG at the beginning. So the somewhat aging European cruise missiles were able to easily penetrate current Russian air defenses.
>patriot works
With US ISR (i.e. AWACs) providing early warning, IIRC correctly UKR was salvoing full patriot battery to intercept single kinzhal/zircon tier hypersonics, i.e. entire supply of EU patriot launcher can be overwhelmed by handful of hypersonics.
>storm shadow
Similarly UKR could sneak cruise missiles through RU IADs is because US info share helped plan missions/routes to circumvent RU defenses. Competent (not even super modern) air defense has like almost 100% interception on subsonic targets like cruise missiles, provided the are detected.
The TLDR is hard to say how EU hardware will perform without US force multiplier tier ISR. Which will effect everything from finding targets to hit, hitting targets, and avoid getting hit even with same/better hardware. Which again, is not to say EU is bad... but EU very unlikely to be US level great.
Most likely because they did not have the specs or complete specs for them and how they looked like on radar. There was an article somewhere that I can't find right now where something like this was said: Once a new weapon system is employed against RU or by RU against UA, it takes about two weeks to create countermeasures for it.
We are seeing Ukrainians regularly hitting russian redars and air defence. Whatever nato wasn't able to do in hte 90s the Ukrainians are fully capable of doing today, because they are doing it. And with lots of european help. So this is just outdated speculation you're doing.
I suppose any afterburning turbofan engine will do if it fits? Again, not particularly opinionated. Just get out from under US control using the path of least resistance.
Not in my understanding. Rather germany always went for the specialized and therefore expensive version (Goldrandlösung) of anything. But sure, parliament says, we are in peace, we don't need so many of those expensive toys. So they rather buyed only limited numbers and created another buerocratic controll gremium.
France could afford a nuclear programm and an aircraft carrier with an equal budget.
So yeah, there are many factors to blame, but I don't think it was because of too little money. Rather too much money with no one sane checking, if it serves really the purpose of defending the country.
Our experts completely misjudged China and its ability to innovate. Now they're ahead everywhere.
Ukraine's $500 billion rare earths scam: they don't exist, and we should know better
Please go through these videos and let me know. I need to know whether I am better informed or you are
@Rare earths. That has been obvious from the start. There are always massive potential resources everywhere. Trillions in Afghanistan, Ukraine....and if you don't have an ambiguous enough surveying report you can always postulate a pipeline is going to be build there, like with Syria. It seemed to me that was always some kind of intentional face saving exercise to please Trumps electorate, but I might be overestimating him. That extortionist act of him is doing so much damage, it is not rational.
EU part of NATO has improved ISR (helios, sarlupe, copernicus etc) but nothing rivalling US tactical and strategic capabilities, i.e. as far as I know, there's no EU system that provides all weather real time targetting.
Likewise the reason why Russia couldn't steamroll Ukraine swiftly is because Ukraine anti air is very formidable (using Soviet hardware no less). That is why it is wrong to simply assume Russia is weak.
russia is weaker than they have been since 1991, possibly 1950.
There is a reason they are now delivering ammo using mules and actually attempting old school cavalry charges on horseback.
And it it's not because donkeys are better than the armoured, tracked towing tractors or because actual horses are better than tanks.
There's pics of UKR javalin calvary too. It's precisely because they're situationally better than tanks in certain combat conditions. For the same reason everyone is zipping around in dirt bikes and golf carts or UKR retiring M1 tanks from frontlines. Look up survivability onion, tanks/armor get detected and destroyed because they're too visible vs modern frontline battlefield recon. If you want to survive, have to move to smaller/more agile platforms to avoid detection in the first place. RU and UKR are both learning and adapting. It's reflection that last 50 years of doctorine is obsolete, aka everything EU military also hedged on. If shit ever hits the fan, NATO maybe donkeying as well.
It seems more likely that mules were used where they make sense: Supplying ammo to a trench deeply in the forest, where mules are the superior "technology". Then that observation was blown out of proportion.
Remember that "the Russians are fighting with shovels" was a slogan in 2022.
Israel's F-35 have being going in and out of Iran's airspace with impunity, so no, I don't think that is going to be an issue.
The Chinese have been trying for years to reverse engineer older Russian turbofan engines and still can't get them quite right. And those are a level below the F414 in complexity.
(Then just make sure not to hook it up to any radio transmitter under the engine's direct control, so it can't call home to the American manufacturer and be disabled remotely.)
Patriot systems were in use to shield Kyiv et al to great success.
I know it sucks to hear this, but if the US goes isolationist, there's not much anyone can do.
As for Ukraine, they have the S-300 ABM, the Buks and Osa-AKM for air defence. (The Russian made Buk was one of the first systems able to intercept cruise missiles and US-made Lance tactical ballistic missiles, Harm anti-radar missiles and other airborne and ground-based precision weapons). Though quite old, they are still formidable and is one of the main reasons Russian Air Force has a low key role in the current ongoing conflict. (That + the NATO AWACS).
The problem Ukraine had was that they ran out of missiles for these platform and that's why the US provided them with the Patriot system. But since America did not have enough spare Patriot missiles, East Europe and the US also modified the Buk platform to fire the radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow and the semi-active radar-guided RIM-7 Sea Sparrow, as well as the heat-seeking AIM-9M Sidewinder air-to-air missile.
Is that a feature or a bug?
Also why get all proud and defensive? Its a dead program now. Europe and other regions will buy homespun.
Meanwhile, a helicopter with an anti-radiation missile can take out CRAM, let alone a stealth F35. F35 (and F16) are the next step after helicopters: you send F35 when enemy antiair is good enough to threaten helis.
https://www.ft.com/content/1503a69e-13e4-4ee8-9d05-b9ce1f7cc...
Israel uses it's own version of ALIS it co-developed with India and France (forgetting the name - will add once I remember).
The fusion aspect was added because of NATO's Air Force fusion/unified command policy in Europe and MENA before the current administration.
Some of the capabilities, sure -- you're never going to be able to use them if you don't have the things it needs to talk to.
The lack of those things don't turn it into a brick. It's still a highly capable fifth gen LO fighter/bomber without them.
The underlying goal of horseshoe theory is not to create a meaningful comparison between two positions, but an underhanded attempt to demoralise those on the left, and to swing undecided centrists by convincing them that the left isn't really offering the progress that it claims. I think it's also used as a shield by people who are right-leaning but don't want to admit it out loud.
...unless you can find a single good example of a notable left-wing proponent suggesting that horseshoe theory is valid, actually.
But somehow – SOMEHOW – the same people that ask for nuance in everything act as if it would be even remotely plausible that the two most polar opposites of political theory would be basically the same for all important intents and purposes if thought to an end.
It is simply mind-blowing. People looking at something, seeing it is complex, stopping their thinking and just somehow feeling their way to the most empty assessment ever: "probably the same consequencesif you think it to the end". Without even having begun to think their way through it!
But I get it: thinking is nice as long as it is a purely intellectual endeavor but not if any personal moral responsibility is concerned. You might be morally obligated to draw consequences in your behavior – Heaven Forbid!
Hate to break it to you, but people in the GOP will support anything Trump tells them to. The right wing political ecosystem is a closed system and it’s driven from the top down, and they’ll believe anything they’re told, so long as the entire ecosystem is reinforcing it. They spent 60 years building this system; it works really well now. And it’s the reason the country is now being dismantled, and the reason there’s nothing anyone can do about it. This system was the cracks in the foundation and Trump was the nitroglycerin.
There is nothing like this on the Democratic side of the fence. There’s no centralization of opinion, and there’s no media ecosystem whatsoever. The so-called “mainstream media” is now all owned by right-wing or at best center-right billionaires, so Democrats can’t actually push a message even if they could get it together, because they don’t have any microphones.
There were attempts at a Democratic media ecosystem, all of them sabotaged by centrists who didn’t want progressives to gain power. Because “better things aren’t possible” wasn’t a winning message and people on both sides of the political fence generally prefer progressive policies (until you associated them with the Democrats, then GOP support plunges.) But it would threaten people like Nancy Pelosi whose power and personal fortune derive from doing massive favors for defense contractors.
Supplementing it may be faster (eg. adding Euro and/or Yuan) than outright replacing it, but it’s not my area of expertise. The timeframe was based on some light research.
the backing of which could be switched very quickly indeed
He's an idiot if he really thinks that his actions will result in this.
European defense stocks are going parabolic right now.
"Trump suggests he’ll use the military on ‘the enemy from within’ the U.S. if he’s reelected" - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-suggests-hell-us...
Democrats will dress in pink...
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/20/1246134779/the-reality-behind...
"In the near future, the U.S. president has given himself a third term. He's disbanded the FBI."
"Trump Muses About a Third Term, Over and Over Again" - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-third-t...
I'm beginning to think that being somewhat reined in by the Republican establishment in his first term, a weakness that the MAGA-crowd sought to correct, ultimately worked in his favor in protecting him from his poor instincts.
It's like he doesn't understand that trust and reliability have a real, tangible value. That's simply a misjudgment. Maybe he actually believes that America is so exceptionally strong that any sort of cooperation ultimately works against it?
It's terribly sad and depressing frankly. A small part of me still has hope that this is going to end badly, in that it turns into a useful lesson, but not badly enough to cause lasting damage. I might be naive.
Note that it might have been possible for the US to convince the rest of NATO to spend more on their defense without losing the faith of their allies. This sure isn't the way to do it.
Maybe instead we should remember the 2014 Wales Summit that was intended to deter Russian invasion?
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Wales_summit
Or maybe instead we should consider that right before Russia's invasion in February 2022, Europe collectively dropped their military spending as % of GDP? Possibly since Trump had left office in 2021? Its unfortunate deterrents don't function when you do this...
-https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_222664.htm
Actually, maybe what we need to remember is that most of Europes money has been going to Russia even after the invasion? What a strange thing for allies to do right?
- https://www.russiafossiltracker.com/
It's weird how the United States justified its support in Ukraine as securing the region for its allies while its allies undermined this at every step of the way, do allies usually do that? When I listen to them on TV they seem to care a lot about Ukraine so it's strange...
First, there are countless other ways to get Europe to rearm if that was actually the goal. Russia's position at the moment is virtually the same as it was a few months into the invasion, which is strong enough that european powers are scared of escalation but not strong enough that anyone thinks an unprovoked Russian attack on NATO territory is either imminent or inevitable. Making Russia weaker to lower fears of retaliation or letting Russia steam-roll Ukraine would both seem like they would better motivate Europe to quickly rearm instead of pressuring for a ceasefire.
Second, it is not at all clear that was the goal. Note that this is extremely against America's interests. As the major supplier of arms to Europe, America wielded tremendous influence over Europe (as evidenced by TFA) while at the same time ensuring Europe was well armed with weapons that would be easily compatible with the US's own military so that they could be readily called as allies. Europe replacing American systems with others does not mean Europe will be militarily stronger, it only means they will not be reliant on the US for what strength they have.
Third, there is no reason to believe that Europe would not feel compelled to build up military capability against China for exactly the same reason the US does. Nor is there any reason to believe China is too smart not to play into America's hands while Russia apparently is. Further, the US doesn't need Europe to rearm for a war with China - even with massive investment, Europe is not going to have the force projection capabilities to support a total war in the Pacific theater, what America really needs is a coalition of economic allies which will side with it in containing China - a need that is not at all served by antagonizing those very allies.
That's not to say any of your assumptions can't be true, just that it's a lot more assumptions than just "the current American leadership is not working to advance the American hegemony."
The protests started when he switched his stance on getting closer to EU. The protesters got him out and had a new election. How can you compare that to not accepting an election result?
Edit: To answer your question: if the Euromaidan protest didn't succeed, it was just a protest like it was now. They would have had another election a bit later, possibly pissing off Russia again (In 2004 Russia poisoned a pro-EU candidate).
In fact, while most nuclear powers have dabbled in the idea of 'how could we conceal a nuclear test', it seems that only Israel is capable of doing it. That is an argument from the absence of evidence unfortunately.
Only because the US decided to officially look the other way. See "The Vela incident" which was never publicly attributed, but was almost certainly a joint Israel-South Africa test.
Exactly what weapons they have seems to be tied to the deals of the US-UK defense agreements. The UK's development of fission weapons is well documented. The development of thermonuclear is unclear and its not exactly obvious when and how they tested proper thermonuclear weapons.
Pakistan probably had nuclear weapons decades before their official tests. The US even made them one heck of an offer to maintain this policy of uncertainty. Ultimately they would debut very small thermonuclear weapons. They probably can manufacture large scale nuclear weapons into the megaton range. Pakistan probably also has plenty of delivery options. But ultimately their arsenal is mainly just there to deter China or India's territorial expansion. Pakistan can't really threaten other nuclear powers and it seems unlikely that a country like France is just going to launch an invasion of Pakistan. So there isn't really too much reason to bother with more tests. Ambiguity is their ally.
Given the sensitivity of global seismometers, I don't think this is physically possible.
Maybe you could test one on the far side of the moon? :)
I don't think that's true. As an example, Finland and French doctrine are very different. It's easier to test all Euopean nations diffrent doctrine and choose what works best (especially if countries from the Balkans add their grain of salt)
Imho that's where European defense industry (as a whole) is interesting. Because you have 5 competing IFV designs (well, over 15, but really, 5 different design that does different things). You also have multiple tanks (and AMX-10s), as well as a bunch of different drone constructors. Even in gun design you have multiple choices, andh while optics and optrionics are Thales', overall equipements are extremely distributed. Europe might find itself on the backfoot in case of an engagement, but i'm pretty sure it would bounce back quickly.
Still sources like Covert Cabal and others do make me think it isn't only a tactical consideration the russians have made but also a reflection of the fact that they very much do see the end of their stockpile.
> There's pics of UKR javalin calvary too. It's precisely because they're situationally better than tanks in certain combat conditions.
It's a war of attrition, both sides are using whatever they can lay their hands on at this point.
I agree that mules / horses are better in certain situations, and not even considering cost. I believe even US 10th Mountain division still uses them
The Russian failure is the exemplar. They were re-waging WW2, and they have little more than a lot of cooked tankers to show for it. Now we’re rolling with throwing prisoners into trenches to stop the maneuver warfare, because they can’t maneuver.
The US is probably in as bad of a condition. Given the poor performance of air power in Ukraine and the Trump/Putin driven destruction of world alignment, US naval power is questionable. Aircraft carriers will become ineffective as modern SAMs are sold on the market. Our submarine platforms are old, manufacturing is barely operational, and we’ll probably fire key individuals if we haven’t already.
In WW3 the role of an aircraft carrier is to launch its airplanes exactly once, before it is sunk.
BNET and IAI+Thales+BEL's Datalink
But, sure, how about Barack Obama? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-creatin... The one who created the hated Obamacare, but they rebelled when their R representatives threatened to cancel the ACA.
No, they're the byproduct of a failed educational system and culture of unearned entitlement. They expect others to save them from drug addiction while doing every possible to prevent help. And they only have this power because of the Senate represents land instead of people.
I cannot find an objective lens that enable one to view the current administration's policy changes as beneficial to the US and it's interests. This forces ones to explore why US leadership would aggressively espouse policy changes that are almost universally assessed to be damaging to us and our interests.
Is Europe finally stumping up and spending more defence? Yes. But they are also much less likely to buy US made systems in the future, and they will ask for more in exchange for intelligence sharing, or maintaining US military infrastructure domestically. The risk of nuclear proliferation is higher than it would have been without the shift.
Trump even refused to call Russia a dictatorship, not that that is material to policy decisions, but it provides fodder to those who are skeptical of Trump's policy goals and objectives.
In the short term, Russia benefits.
Did you read the evidence Grok gave, at least? Lots of citations in there.
Still waiting on the alternative plan.
Given Putin's stated wishes, this will only stop if Russia is unable to make such moves (for whatever reason) or states at risk of invasion are defended such that it's strategically stupid for Russia to even try.
- Shares of Starlink’s European rival Eutelsat have tripled. CEO says it can do the job in Ukraine. [1]
- Boost for German economy: Armaments sector picks up former car industry employees [2]
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/shares-of-starlinks-europe... [2] (German only) https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Ruestungsbranche-sammelt-ehem...
Why do I hear strains of "Spring time for Germany" playing in my head?
It's also the same reason the Swiss defense industry is now in collapse. Because they refused to allow re-export of ammo to Ukraine citing Swiss neutrality.
It immediately made all Swiss made ammo worthless for all european countries in event of war. Lol
Apparently the Swiss are still talking of revising their law while their defense industry is crying because nobody wants to buy their shit as European countries want to be able to help other European countries. Especially circles like the Nordic or Baltic regions where the countries are extremely buddy buddy.
The basic template here is that the people (populism) become so discontented that they see no salvation in any of the existing elites or political movements, so they essentially appoint a dictator or an oligarchy to sweep it all aside in favor of <insert magical thing that will fix all their problems>. The level of naked authoritarianism and brutality varies between these movements -- some are more gloves-on and some more gloves-off -- but they all have an ultimately authoritarian character. The whole thing nearly always backfires into some form of "meet the new boss, worse than the old boss."
Another challenge is that ARMs are designed to fight air defense systems that could potentially include equipment to jam drones. Concepts for future drones include a "drone commander" manned aircraft nearby (as opposed to an easier to jam remote operator) and onboard AI to make autonomous combat decisions.
Overall the drone likely won't be much cheaper than an F-35. But it can be sent on suicidal missions without risking a human crew.
But yes. Large drones (like Predator) can launch missiles. But the news is about smaller drones that are being used to cheaply send small grenades over large distances.
It's very vulnerable position being a prospective member of a gang. The fact that you try to join one for protection doesnt mean you wont end up being sacrificed when the gang leaders demand you "prove yourself" first.
Those are democratic, sovereign countries, in an international order governed by law. Joining voluntarily a _defense_ alliance.
And one bully country that keeps on bullying, and pretends to be the victim of everyone, and unlawfully attacks a neighbouring country.
Despite its own twisted narrative, if someone took the wrong decision, that's Russia.
The horseshoe theory applies here. Putin's supporters take equally orwellian positions to this.
The engine company is Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc and ain't a subsidiary of anyone. It's the second largest manufacturer of aircraft engines after CFM.
BMW owns the modern car company and licenses the name and logo from the engine company.
in the context of this discussion, if all american investors pulled out of Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc because they were tasked with copying an american engine... could Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc make that engine?
This is what american isolationism means and will look like.
If things really got so bad that American investors began intentionally sabotaging the operations of foreign companies, it would probably be forcibly nationalised by the British Government.
Presumably all future contracts would stipulate terms that avoid vetos etc.
The relationship is over. Maybe in 4 years America can start making some initial steps towards patching things up, but even that seems increasingly unlikely at this point.
China plans ahead in decades. US plans ahead less than 12 hours, and depending on the moodswings in the Oval Office are pretty much the definition of unreliable right now.
There was a fascinating quote that some friends around Singapore told me once: "When China comes, they build roads and infrastructure. When US comes, they destroy, enforce and leave emptiness"
And, given what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa and other shitshows I tend to agree.
China learned that cultural influence is playing the long game, and they're very successful with it.
China has been mostly concerned about economic links with other countries and it has few oversea bases comparing to any of the other 4 big dogs.
It doesn't have the mindset to be a region police, let alone a world one.
If you wish to grandstand on this issue you must condemn the war against Serbia also.
If you wish to understand this issue, you must condemn the russian invasions and annexations in Poland, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and many others.
The economic woes come first, and it's still not too late for a left-leaning populist to take charge of the Democrats and give the people what they need while protecting minorities and LGBT folks. The only way we get to the social justice disaster that people are predicting is if we all collectively throw up our hands and write off 50% of the voters as a lost cause.
E.g., the party who actually succeeded in doing something about health insurance just lost to the party who did everything in their power to stop it, and who immediately decided to decimate Medicaid when they took over. So you can give the people what they need and still get punished for it.
And somehow, when left and democrats are doing something bad, left and democrats are to be blamed. And when conservatives or right do something bad ... left and democrats are to be blamed.
> The economic woes come first
No they do not. Trump does not make economy better, you know it, they know it, I know it. It is not about removing fraud or corruption, Trump is fraudster and they know it, you know it and Trump himself knows it.
It was a stream of lies and hate that won and people voted for. It has nothing to do with economic policies that could help these people or not. Pretending to yourself that some rational policy can counteract it is how you loose.
Not one of them could name a single policy position Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had. Part of the reason for that is the dismal and pathetic ability of the Democrats to actually sell themselves, because they assumed just not being Trump would be enough. It should have been, but it wasn't, because Americans are the worst. But the other part is that Trumpists wouldn't have listened, nor would they have cared, regardless of what was offered. They were never going to listen to a "left-leaning populist." These people thought Hillary Clinton was a baby-eating Marxist. They set up a gallows on the Capitol. They saw the price of eggs was too high and the videogames were too woke and decided they wanted to watch the world burn. That's it.
I want social justice. I want UBI. I want socialized healthcare and education. I want a liberal, secular, social democratic society with robust labor laws, a boring and stable government, and a strong social safety net. I want to spend more of my tax dollars on infrastructure and fewer on murdering brown people for God and the almighty petrodollar. I want feminism and black liberation and gay and trans rights. I want land back. I want fully automated luxury space communism. I want science and scholarship. And a lot more Americans align with my views than the popular narrative would have you believe. We even won the popular vote in 2016, not that it matters. All of these things would help Trumpists more than Trump's own policies. Not that it matters. Hillary Clinton said a mean thing about them one time and the screaming in their head has never stopped. She was absolutely correct, though, and the right could have taken the chance to clean their own house instead of trauma-bonding with the worst elements in their ranks. Not that it matters.
But I can't have that. Obviously not from the Republicans, but neither from the Democrats. I can have whatever Snow Crash Handmaid's Tale cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the orange gibbon and his ketamine-tweaking puppetmaster cook up, and 20 years from now I guess can just die in a ditch of hunger and dysentery because JimmyDingleberry or whomever in Musk's cult of groyper fuckbois deleted Social Security and because vaccines were declared fake and gay in the Soyjak purge of 2030.
These are not rational people, and this is not a rational government. I'm not going to give them the dignity of pretending otherwise.
Earth X was a comic (lol) with one interesting idea — if enough people preceive "A" as "B", "A" becomes "B".
In the case of Trump, he despises the left wing camp for kicking him off Twitter and prosecuting him. As such he takes their nightmares that they believed in term one and makes them real as personal revenge. For an old man, it is no doubt the most satisfying possible end of his life possible.
Far fetched but more realistic than "He's being blackmailed". Do you really believe the man has any shame?
If he had no shame, he would have kept the money.
All of these machinations are, to me, an effort to avoid legal prosecution when he thought they could be effective against him. At this point, you could share the supposed piss tape and no one would care.
"\nI bet this isn't going to be good enough, which is why i didn't want to do this. I have more, i just want to prove this point."
to my prior post, the sha256sum will match.
I merely asked what sort of proof you were looking for, buddy. Evidently a Ukrainian politician saying the exact words you said no Ukrainian politician said prior to 2014 isn't good enough.
here, about the party in Ukraine he's led for decades:
> The party gained increasing popularity in the late 2000s and early 2010s, winning 10.45% of the vote in the 2012 parliamentary election. Between 2009 and 2014, it was an observer member of the far-right Alliance of European National Movements. It played a role in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and Euromaidan protests but its support dropped quickly following the 2014 elections. Since then, the party has been polling below the electoral threshold, and it currently has one seat in the Verkhovna Rada.
oh look, they win parliamentary votes, and hold a seat.
also incaseyoumissedit:
> It played a role in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and Euromaidan protests
WHOOPS.
guess i'm "too stupid" :-)
But yes, congratulations on predicting that nobody would be impressed by such a stupid irrelevance. The non-stupid thing would not to have posted it in the first place...
I wonder if we can have this same argument about Freeland in Canada saying canada needs nukes to defend itself against the USA, in 15 years ;-)
ps https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1741301040.34_chrystiafreelan...
Things haven't gotten quite so extreme in the US yet but it feels reductive to suggest that they can just have a flip flop election and that will show they "realised the error of their ways" like Germany did post WW2.
I'm kind of interested if Russia could become normal if the current regime collapses.
https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/scholarsweek/2016/Ger...
Let's all be honest here. At the end of the day, what China wants is for everyone to shut the F up and buy a big screen TV.
Preferably on credit.
Anything that moves the world towards that goal will receive China's tacit support. Trump's moves are seen to move the world away from that goal, so we're seeing some signs of discomfort coming from China.
But believe me, it ain't because they're concerned about Ukraine or freedom or "ideals". Or even because they do or do not want to be world police.
We can't think about their goals in Western terms because the fundamentals of the thinking are just completely different.
I watched a video recently that discussed all the grudges against the West/NATO Russia (Putin) has been holding onto since the mids 90s that makes them feel justified now.
The only thing left would be nuking. He hasn't dared and likely won't.
He has dared. Empty threats? Maybe... but that's quite the gamble to make.
Edit: To downvoters...
Why?
History tells us that appeasement is a worse gamble.
On the contrary: Should Putin risk everything for some sq km of Ukrainian soil?
Is Europe going to ratchet military spending at Putins's bluff?
Putin’s Russia is already at war with Europe - assassinations, destabilisation operations, sabotage.
> destabilisation operations
This might actually start to become more of a self-inflicted wound. The uprise of right-wing parties is already happening in the EU. Mostly voted for by people with less education and less wealth. If we spend more money on defense and less on social security, right-wing parties might get even more traction, which causes further destabilization.
> sabotage
Yes and it sucks. There's actually not much you can do about it, because of how international waters are treated legally. But you think rearming the EU will prevent sabotage in the future? I have my doubts.
The current narrative seems to be "Ukraine is almost an EU member state and if we do not defend Ukraine, the EU will be next". Another view of the situation could be: "Ukraine is a special case and Putin would be very dumb to invade the EU".
Re-arming is unfortunately the only answer to naked aggression from dictators and the US cannot be trusted any more as an ally. Putin has clearly stated his aims - to reconstitute the USSR (and if possible enlarge it) and to defeat the west.
Europe now stands alone against that.
The plan so far has not worked.
Up to now, Ukraine has never received the support it would need to win, just enough not to lose. Weapons deliveries been too little, too late, making the war longer and bloodier than it needs to be. In the meantime domestic production has increased to the point Ukraine covers 30% of its needs.
Russia has lost other wars, it can and should lose this one.
And what does "loss" even look like? Are you genuinely proposing they will simply pack up and head home from all captured territory?
This can be done with very little US funding. And sharing intelligence with Ukraine literally costs us nothing.
wait, what?
You can fly the airframe but there is a significant reduction in capability unless you can also produce equivalent algorithms and data processing technology.
I’m not aware of any computer science breakthroughs required for the f35.
Almost by definition, any classified computer science research would be non-obvious.
Let's not do that here.
...
> Its an accurate generalization
I'm American, and I don't have that view. So it's clearly not literally true.
So perhaps you mean that it's "mostly" true. Then I'd ask, what evidence do you have to support that? Is there some poll of public opinion you can refer to? That's something we could meaningfully discuss.
They still have the jdf but we kinda forced this position, it's a bit of a baffling question.
There were many russian helicopters successfully landing at Hostomel, the area saw heavy fighting for several days until it was under Ukrainian control.
> The Russian Il-76s carrying reinforcements could not land; they were possibly forced to return to Russia.[35]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antonov_Airport
Rumors of an Il-76 downed close to Vasylkiv did not prove to be true:
> Claims have been made that Ukrainian aircraft shot down two Russian Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft transporting assault troops.[33][124][34] However, The Guardian reports "no convincing public evidence has surfaced about the two downed planes, or about a drop of paratroopers in Vasylkiv".[125]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_front_of_the_Russian_...
Within a narrative such as loss of elite troops would definitely have some serious impact. In the context of a war the loss of the aircraft could easily be more significant.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking if only X, but war is complicated. It’s possible Russia would have been worse off because they tried to use those VDV soldiers in a plan that disastrously failed. It’s slightly more likely that they would have been a small net benefit, but chances are things would look more or less identical today with or without them.
The main reason that Ukraine and Russia have had to rely so heavily on drones is that they had no better alternative. The air forces on both sides are shit with zero (or effectively zero) 5th generation aircraft that can survive in a contested environment. The F-35 was designed for that mission and would at least have a chance.
I wouldn't call Russian AF "shit". The УМПК (JDAM) bombs crushed formidable defense of Avdeevka and now hit AFU hard in Sudja. Ka-52 helicopters stopped counteroffensive a year ago. Surely, sky is contested, but it's still important component that hurts Ukraine very hard.
> have had to rely so heavily on drones is that they had no better alternative
What would be an alternative to wing reconnaissance drones? What can hyper-equipped US armed forces offer as a replacement FPV and fiber-optics FPV attack drones? Yeah they have Reapers and other fancy expensive gear for the first 3-4 weeks of active war, then what?
The US has a variety of overlapping reconnaissance capabilities including not just large UAVs but also manned aircraft (including the F-35) and multiple satellite constellations. Over the next few years the priorities in that area should be to accelerate the B-21 Raider program (it will make an excellent recon platform) and develop some sort of prompt satellite launch capability to replace combat losses within hours. There is also a general recognition that we'll have to increase spending or shift budget priorities to build up the industrial capacity necessary to sustain longer conflicts.
We give everyone our junk after the US Marine Corps is done with it, and they get it 20+ years after the army, navy, and airforce consider them "obsolete".
Yes, two hundred and thirty years to even compete with the US. Please note, this is if the US goes full isolationist, and pulls all military forces worldwide back to the US and US territorial waters.
For example, people are talking about Rolls royce "reverse engineering" american engines, or the chinese. Another idea was using Saab planes. If saab planes are so great, why were they using american F-16s?
these aren't my numbers, but my experience with linking the sources of my data isn't great on HN.
It's really quite difficult to not be demeaning because the core of the problem is bigotry across the political spectrum, making significant unequal decisions about individuals based on shallow characteristics (appearance, ethnicity, gender expression). And you can't really have a discussion about it because nobody will accept that making decisions based on a person's race/gender/... is discrimination regardless of which group gets the positive benefit. And you can't really have a discussion about it because "yeah but what the other guys did or are still doing is way worse".
Bottom line: to succeed in the 21st century you have to weigh pros and cons and live in the grey area. This is an optimization problem not a battle between good and evil. Viewing the world exclusively through the "good vs evil" lens is going to lead to a civilization threatening war.
Now what American would ever think that?...
For years we have been listening "fuck your feelings" coming from the right.
Hillary’s “deplorables” thing was maybe the most prominent example. Her point was that democrats who think that all republicans are committed to evil positions we can’t compromise with or entertain isn’t correct! Only about a third of them are, according to the data. The rest could maybe be reached or worked-with!
This is true shit you say in blunt terms in a strategy meeting or nerdy discussion groups, not in public, because poli sci is just full of demeaning stuff about voters, because they are stupid and often evil and if you study democracy soberly that’s what you’ll find, and you have to grapple with it to act effectively, but you don’t say it in public because most voters also don’t know that stuff because they’re not poli sci nerds. She, and/or her speech writers, had been around strategists and wonks too much.
[edit] on the other hand, one wonders how much this really matters when Trump wins while saying worse things about all kinds of folks. The way the media approach and characterize and amplify (or don’t) the messages may matter more than what’s actually said.
They don't. Sovereign cloud in EU has been progressing for a few years now.
Such that some of your mentioned "unbeatable" hyperscalers have already been positioning (e.g. ceasable infrastructure), and some interesting new players on the block. As well as old benefiting from the related market positions: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/
they are not sovereign because they're running software developed by a company liable to coercion by the regime
Doesn't matter if it is a EU subsidiary. The US parent company must abide by US law and give US authorities the data.
EU citizens cannot trust their data in the hands of US companies. No matter if it is on servers in Europe hosted by European subsidiaries.
Unfortunately critical infrastructure providers flock to that, though there are some exceptions.
Just like any other military including the US, no?
I don't have access to perfect information, but I find the reports that Russia is unable to maintain their entire fleet creditable, and believe and/or trust the experts who confirm this analysis.
Obviously Russia has no 5gen at all (or just a few 5gen Su-57, if we going to name them 5gen).
Anyway, my point is that as of now Russia has no need for gen5 and can't afford it anyway, just like about anyone else except for the US and a few countries that have them but at the same time have to rely on the US anyway.
I expect a crash program to reengineer them has already started if only unofficially.
They voted for Trump, twice. They love it when politicians are insulting.
NATO's command in 2003 in Afghanistan came following an unanimous UN Security Council resolution; Russia even provided support. But yeah, let's count 1 here, given the disaster of the whole thing.
Involvement during the Libya campaign in 2011? under a UN mandate again; Russia didn't veto, abstained, and afterwise criticised how it's been interpreted on the ground. Let's count 1.
That makes 2.
NATO did not join the USA in Iraq.
Kosovo Force is a peacekeeping mission.
Ocean Shield was an anti-piracy mission.
Baltic Air Policing, following the Baltic states joining NATO in 2004, is practically a shared border patrol across these states.
Enhanced Forward Presence, since 2016 is a deterrence in response to Russia actions in 2014 in Crimea.
It puzzles me why some people (you, but you're not the only one) think that gaining the UN mandate to conduct a humanitarian mission under false pretensions and THEN saying "we came. we saw. he died" exculpates NATO. It makes it so much fucking worse.
The orwellian/Putinesque thinking is evident here also. If you can excuse this you can excuse the invasion of Ukraine just as easily.
The problem is proving it was a lie and not a change of circumstances/opportunities during the operation (which doesn't make it right either, but at least dismisses the disingenuous intent).
So your attribution to my thinking is pretty unwelcome. I don't think it was ok, I don't think either it makes Putin's perspective more reasonable or acceptable.
Putin's track record is way worse than that: multiple military or mercenary invasions, journalists, activists and politicians murders, multiple meddling with foreign elections.
This does not diminish the defence fundamentals of NATO. Putin's strategy only reinforced NATO making sense for its own members and for candidates. He could have acted differently, and favour democratic changes rather than making himself a defence to autocratic regimes, both at home and abroad.
This isn't the US's first go-round with nazis, obviously.
Back in WWII, just as now, there were capitulation proponents.
Then, just as now, they espoused the supremacy of bettering their own position over helping others.
Then, just as now, they advocated for leaving Europe to fall to invaders.
Then, just as now, they allied themselves with American fascists.
Then, just as now, they campaigned on the slogan, "America First" [0].
There's nothing new here, and personally, I'm glad hitler lost. That dude sucked.
----
0: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/dr...
You have to compare with how much will it cost if the war continues to grow in scale or intensity. Russia is dedicating more and more resources to its war machine. And I have no reason to think it will stop if Ukraine. In 2022 Putin already said he wanted NATO back to 1991, IOW he wants Eastern Europe defenseless.
Russia's economy is just the size of Spain or Italy: not negligible, but not formidable either. Europe should do more, much more, if only for its own sake.
> And what does "loss" even look like? Are you genuinely proposing they will simply pack up and head home from all captured territory?
Territorial issues are somewhat secondary. What matters is that the defeat is clear and Russia's leaders discouraged from attempting to go to war again. It happened to Russia against Japan in 1905, and to the USSR in Afghanistan. It can happen again.
Define "shit".
Today. So many things we have seen in the last couple of years have been pure sci-fi a decade ago. Switchblade 600, for example, has a loitering time of 40 minutes and a range of 24 minutes.
> and they barely move much faster than a carrier.
Fly in the direction bow to stern, low above the water. Or just ... loiter in the path of the carrier.
The Chinese are not stupid. Their A2/AD doctrine is based on large, expensive manned aircraft and fast missiles, not slow and weak little "drones".
So the US legal system can say "give us this data" but they don't have access as they are on another company's servers in another company's data center operated by another company's staff.
US institutions don't hesitate to demand their companies to implement secret backdoors in their hardware or software, as evidenced by Snowden's leaks (for Cisco routers) and the Lavabit shutdown (mail company ordered to implement a tap on their clients' data).
Sure, you can have all you described, but how are updates vetted?
But that is adversarial and is to be expected.
At least for these sort of cooperative partnerships that I am aware of in enterprise, there are typically provisions in contracts for code-access, verifiable builds, ability to reject updates and so on and so on. I don't know if these provisions exist in the sovereign cloud contracts that the cloud companies are building, but I would be really surprised if they went to all this trouble replicating Azure/GCP/etc in entirely air-gapped data centers with duplicated staff and hardware and all that, but don't bother to vet the code they get!
The EU should really fight these illegal circumventions
These sovereignty products I don't think are just a check-box you can tick to get it, they're separate things and probably cost the earth too.
Only officially public one that I know of: e.g. https://www.s3ns.io/en (but I hear whispers of others)
Saying doing X wouldn’t have mattered is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal here. Ukraine not using a missile for attacking that aircraft means they could have used it to attack a different aircraft. Similarly Russia got to use all forces in that plan not destroyed with the aircraft in some other plan.
That’s not backpedaling that’s just the inherent complexities involved.
>Tankers carrying Russian oil stuck idling off Chinese coast after new U.S. sanctions https://meduza.io/en/news/2025/01/13/russian-oil-tankers-stu...
>UK sanctions 30 shadow tankers in largest clampdown on Russian oil trade https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research...
I guess that may all go wrong if Trump drops all sanctions but at the moment it's making things difficult.
In the very first paragraph, filled with Russian propaganda and ahistorical takes easily disproven by Putin's own words and exegesis in Russian.
Accepting the genocidaire's justifications uncritically, in addition to the IC's many other genocidal language about "denazification," is absolutely appalling. As they say, if you wonder what you would have been doing when the Nazis weee invading the world, look at what you are doing now.
These two things are similar!
Here's one for you: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vincent-bevins/the-...
We've been discussing whether or not certain views are held by nearly 100% of current Americans.
IIUC, that book focuses on evils done by the US government in 1965. I'm not seeing the connection.
I’m not sure your second point is true. The vast vast majority of classified information is very boring, or operational like frequencies of radar, etc.
Both sides know the basics, it’s what frequencies the radar comms and aircraft work at that is classified.
There’s very little “OMG this one algorithm changes everything!!”. Unless proven otherwise
The ability of someone to imagine the existence of things they are unaware of has no bearing on their existence. You could say the same of a lot of the classified materials science that underpins a lot of US weaponry hardware for which there is ample circumstantial evidence. No one is going to be talking about it on HN.
(The UK’s a bit of an oddity here in that it’s _kind_ of a multiparty state for historical reasons, but doesn’t really have the right type of electoral system to support a multiparty system.)
Half of the population benefits from the status quo while the other suffers. It is hard to tell whose fault it is, if this question even matters.
I think you underestimate what a capitalist system can accomplish, and how quickly.
It's a cute little badge that does very very little to address the real concerns.
Just last month, I had to change my dedicated server provider and was genuinely concerned about hosting my websites on US-based entities. Would Trump impose a tariff to antagonize my country and president? I don't have the resources to keep changing providers and migrating my services.
I ended up hosting locally.
It's even more absurd to suggest that this can be done in response to the US becoming more hostile than they are today. By the time they are more hostile, we're talking about open hostilities. It's only safe to assume that they will have exfiltrated all the data they are interested in, and then sabotaged or destroy as much of the hardware as possible (as can be done remotely), making the data center next to worthless. And prior to nationalization it was "their data-center", they were entirely within their "rights" to sabotage and destroy it.
The time to migrate away from data-centers to minimize geo political risk is now, not when the current data centers operators are actively trying to deal damage.
But long before that, I believe there will be other noticeable effects. As someone working in a medium sized European company, with substantial investments across private infrastructures, AWS, GCP and some Azure, I can testify to that since last couple of weeks the Public Cloud Exit strategies around having services being prepared is a very hot topic. This concerns both existing services preparations as well as enforcing standards and configurations for new services.
the enemy will never put you into a position where the rational thing to do is to launch your nukes (nationalise their data centres)
but they will push and push up against that line
the way to deal with this is gradual decoupling, ideally backed up by legislation and government subsidy
I see the point. But I would not underestimate the grit of Europeans when backed into a corner, like this
The USA a Europe had very friendly relations for decades, that has changed overnight.
All bets are off
What matters these days is the cost of buying/flying/maintenance, software platform and what missiles they can launch.
Gripen has modular upgradable software, and supports modern Europe-made missiles such as Taurus and Meteor.
For the same reason I consider the F35 a failure.
It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.
Politicians who forget this fact get owned.
Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.
Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.
So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?
I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.
I also don't think it's wise or rational to presume that every aggressive action necessarily means that the aggressor is Hitler or bent on world domination. Or even that opposing them by sending resources to their enemy is the most effective way to stop it.
[1] as a percentage of the US$850,000,000,000 _annual_ Pentagon budget
Chamberlain tried to bargain peace for Britain at the sacrifice of the Czechs and other nations and in the end his country got bombed to shit anyway. You guys make it seem like Russia has no agency here
What is your bill when an ambulance brings you in? When you have a legal problem at your workplace? What will be your pension? How is the mass transit system? What do you pay for child care, how is your school, how safe is your neighborhood, how do the number of murders in your area compare?
NYC has combined local and state top marginal rates of 14.776%, to go up to 48.476%.
I call BS on marginal rates exceeding 50%
Edit: even the new 2024 California payroll tax cap lift and mental health tax on seven figure incomes put it at 49.1%. Marginal rates that high don't exist in the US. Even then that requires paying payroll taxes and NIIT on the same income, which I'm pretty sure is impossible.
AGI: $1000k Federal Income Tax: $322k California State Income Tax: $102k FICA Taxes: $32k Total tax: $456k
Compared to say Germany, where for the same income you would be paying over 50% in taxes. So I think you're doing very well.
We’ve since had two major rounds of tax cuts by republicans, so a balanced budget isn’t feasible even in booms and when we’re not deficit spending on two stupid wars. And now we’ve got all the interest on the debt from those tax cuts and wars to worry about.
If only anyone could have predicted this. Oh wait, everyone who knew anything about taxation policy did.
Neither can France, which redistributes over 50 per cent of its GDP.
The hunger for public monies will eventually outrun any feasible taxation system.
How do I know? Because my parents earning ~1000 USD per month each living in Poland have higher standard of living than most Americans. Despite paying ~30% taxes.
You have to add up what the taxes pay for in the calculation. Free healthcare, free university education, good public transport, low inequality (= low crime). All of that adds up to higher standard of living achievable with pretty shitty earnings.
Oh and before you blame it on military spending - we spend higher% of GDP on military than USA. Russia is a shitty neighbor, we have to.
American problems are exactly the opposite of what Americans think they are. You are in dire need of some social democracy.
Going at it with a chainsaw isn't going to help.
And I think these are all difficult things to do well and make money, as in doing a good job in healthcare, education, etc. is not really profitable. So, they are areas for government involvement.
You can have welfare state with close or open borders and anything in between, and you can have libertarian state with close or open borders.
For the last few years most EU countries have been going towards pretty strict immigration policy but not towards libertarianism.
Also Poland is not a good example (it's been accepting A LOT of immigration since ~2014 - more than average in EU). But that argument gets pretty detailed very quickly so unless you want to go into it - I'll leave that alone).
Actually Europe would stop supplying components for the F-35's so the US would not be able to build any more or keep the ones they have working, let alone sell them to Russia. Russia would never buy them anyway, how could they trust that the next US president wouldn't pull the plug on spare parts? Would they trust that Trump is going to become dictator for life? (And what happens after he dies?) Russia has their own fighters that may not be quite as capable in some ways, but are good enough. Russia sells jet fighters themselves, they do not buy them.
>Europe is completely reliant on the US and US technology for defense right now, these systems took decades and trillions of dollars to build and refine, and an 800 billion EUR investment does not magically create a military industrial complex overnight.
Europe already has a large local military industrial complex. Half of what Ukraine has received has come from Europe. They would only have to expand what they have, not develop new technologies, except perhaps for a replacement for the Patriot missile system. They'd get a boost from converting their existing factories from building US weapons components to building EU weapons components as well.
I'm actually surprised that the US military industrial complex (MIC) is not screaming bloody murder about some of this. They stand to lose sales of replacement weapons for those sent to Ukraine, to lose support contracts for F-16's, and to lose a whole lot more if the US pulls out of NATO. Even if the US does not pull out of NATO, the NATO countries have already started investing in their own defense industries, which is going to severely cut into US MIC profits. They should be terrified.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Note: it is my prediction at 70% (e.g. I think there is 70% that it will happen).
> US imports and exports will decrease over time.
So prices will rise and and government expenditures will fall. Where exactly will that growth come from?
Your labour market has been running at full employment for a while, 4-5% unemployment, there's no leftover hands to help with building up multiple industrial bases. Unless you want massive inflation when all these openings for the rebuilding of USA's industrial base, and need to pay a lot to absorb as much labour as possible to actually happen.
Not even considering in how much risk the investors of this new industrial base will be having to hedge against, who knows when Trump will increase tariffs on their inputs until everything rebuilds internally, financial hedging, oversupplying their warehouses to prepare for shocks, etc. are all quite expensive. Who will pay for it?
Unbelievable amount of damage done in just a month.
The idea that USA's got it right when most of the world does it differently (and with better results adjusting for cost/effect) always amazes me.
God forbid you live in NYC and it can gonna to 42%
If they're married the rates are 29.62% (W-2) and 30.97% (non-W-2), under the same assumption that they do not do anything to qualify for either reduced taxable income or any kind of rebate or credit.
Most people don't make $1 million, and those that do have ways to reduce their tax burden quite a bit without much trouble.
EDIT: Small modifications to the numbers above, they were off by about 0.4% to 0.5%.
And if your income is $1,000,000 you still only pay $10,453 in social security tax.
Around $350,000 gets you to a 24.8% effective federal income tax rate if you're single and only take the standard deductible, $700k if married. That puts you in the top 3% and 1%, respectively, of incomes in the US these days.
But that gets reduced when you include things like tax advantaged retirement accounts, various tax credits, dependents, paying for health insurance, possibly being able to itemize (more likely at those incomes than the US median income). So really you have to be making something like $400k-500 as a single person to hit 25%, and $800k+ for a married person.
In the 1990s and 2000s the funding dried up and they mostly fell apart. They were sold to China for parts.
Why do you think so? Moscow was a good magnet for educated and active people, and Leningrad too, but Kiev was next, and there were other big cities in Ukraine with institutes and factories which were modern at the time as well. In USSR there were a distribution of expertise, and in some areas Ukrainian organizations were best in USSR. Ukraine was also quite big in terms of territory and population. So why they wouldn't have their proportional share in at least the mentioned areas?
> They were sold to China for parts.
Mostly, but not quite. A lot of people went to the West - we still see them appearing in aerospace companies. A lot of expertise in theoretical sciences also went global, as it's easier. Mriya was supported until 2022 - and rocket industry kept making Zenith and then Antares well into 2010-th. So clearly working industry remained - even though it have suffered quite a few years of problems.
> completely ignore who funded this work, when, and why.
Well yes, because it’s tangential.
Also who funded it? Are you implying that the USSR’s colonial possessions didn’t contribute anything economically?
And in the USSR, national republics were financed at the expense of the core of the country, where Russians lived. You can look up (which you certainly won't do) data on the standard of living and level of freedom in different republics of the USSR. For example, in Georgia, small business was allowed, in the RSFSR they put people in jail for it, but in Georgia, for example, you could grow tangerines, transport them on subsidized planes to the north, to all sorts of Norilsk, sell them, and receive in two weeks approximately the annual salary of a Soviet engineer who developed those very missiles, planes, etc. Of course, when the lights went out in the Union in 1991, all this Caucasian prosperity reached a civil war within a year.
By the way, I think that something similar exists in the modern USA, but the locals are blind, just like the Soviet citizens of Russian ethnicity were blind (you may not be aware, but not every successful person of smoked appearance from Russia is Russian), and do not see what is happening. When your Red-Haired Atlas completes his "perestroika and acceleration" in the USA, there will also be changes there, and perhaps people will also begin to see what they did not notice before. Well, that is, if there will be someone to do so.
Would you define Ireland as a colony? It preceded all other British colonies and they used very similar methods to those that the USSR did in its “colonies”, confiscation of land, population replacement, (indirect or direct ) genocide etc. etc.
> which you certainly won't do
If you actually did that would you mind sharing that data?
Of course there is very little accurate data available (due to obvious reasons) and we have to use proxy indicators but still.. can you actually provide any meaningful statistics besides anecdotal claims about a single Soviet state?
> you may not be aware
A lot of projection going on here..
Also I really can’t understand at all what are you trying to say in your last paragraph.
In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.
Look up ASML, make America great again :)
I don't think there are any particular weapon types for which there is no qualified European alternative. Very many systems are however designed around some amount of American components. Even if there are locally produced, reasonably equivalent versions of those components, you can't just swap them out without major redesign work.
For example the license-manifactured jet engines used in the Saab 39 Gripen. If Trump/Musk pulls the plug on support for those, it will be an epic headache to rebuild around some other engine. Not quite designing a new plane from scratch, but very major rework.
Strategic bombers and fifth-generation multi-role aircraft are definitely missing. You could maybe convert A400Ms using a Rapid-Dragon style system into an adequate B-52/Tu-95/H-6N-like bomber, but it wouldn't be a modern penetration bomber like the B-1 and certainly not like the B-2 or B-21. The arguably best European fighter is the French 4.5+ gen Rafale. It's damn good but lacks the stealth of the F-22 and J-10, and the sensor fusion of the F-35.
Maybe also add heavy-lift helicopters, I don't think Europe produces anything in the class of the CH-53/CH-46 and definitely not the Mi-26, but a good-enough big heli is a much easier engineering problem compared to the other two aforementioned equipment categories.
You know the announcement that the US is supplying weapons to Russia and potentially even North Korea isn't that far off don't you?
I guess we’ve been lucky so far?
The protests will escalate in the summer, when the weather is warmer, more time has passed for awareness of what is happening to soak in, and students are on school break.
Honestly I expected it on his last term.
Oh, that's why Trump is trying to speed up TSMC to build chips on US soil! Now everything makes sense! Surely, TSMC will just do it! And the Chinese will wait for the transition period to finish before they attack the island!
This is absolutely intended to be sarcastic and demonstrate the absurdity that someone who cuts ties with allies would ever do anything to help the next one. And if that next one is threatened with war, it would ever feel comfortable to effectively destroy their only bargaining chip for assured US military help afterwards.
Man, all I know is this year isn't going to end well. For anyone.
Not seeing much restraint there.
I'd say the other way round - rebuilding everything that was outsourced will take a long time, so hard times are ahead. In the long term, I hope the USA will be less dependent on China.
But at the same time the way it was done completely destroyed the credibility of the USA as a reliable partner, both in trade as well as military relations. Countries will organize new treaties, and the USA will be a powerful player but with far less influence than before.
For the coal mines, maybe you could fund them through some museum budget?
However, any power able to incinerate large parts of the planet is a bit more than a regional power, in my eyes.
(Typing "sub" reminded me of the Kursk nuclear submarine that sank itself…)
Russia and China are regional powers and can't project military power very far, excluding nukes. To do that you need a credible blue water navy. China is close though, and definitely projecting its economic strength.
Europe (lets just say EU + UK) could be a superpower. However they lack political unity. And still want big daddy US to do the heavy lifting.
Putin has nukes, apart from that Russia is a pretty irrelevant country.
More like this: Two super powers, and a terror nukes nation.
However, any power able to incinerate large parts of the planet is a bit more than a regional power, in my eyes.
But yes, agree with you about China.
Putin wants people to think Russia is a super power, when it's instead a corrupted inefficient mafia state. Look at research or startups coming from there (not much) or it's economy - the country is not interesting any longer (Putin has damaged it that much). Except for Putin attacking Ukraine, and his nukes and troll farms.
If Pakistan starts threatening other countries with nuclear war, and tries to invade a neighbor but mostly fails, is it then suddenly a super power?
Maybe "terror power" could be a new word
Clearly, it's not irrelevant if it's been able to drive a wedge between the US and Europe like this.
The Ukraine war was "successful" in destroying the possibility of railways between the EU and China.
The EU, ever the good vassal, now ramps up the rhetoric against Russia which is exactly what Hegseth wanted in the open.
The EU is still playing the U.S. deep state script and it is very likely that all the Trump pressure and insults are carefully planned political theater.
If the above conjectures are wrong and Trump is serious about peace with Russia, then the EU needs to pivot quickly to China and at least maintain reasonable diplomatic relations with Russia.
I find that becoming exceedingly unlikely. Trust has been destroyed, there is no easy recovery from that.
First, ex-neocon Rubio admitted on the Megyn Kelly show that the world is now multi-polar. Even if he believes that, why would he say so unless it's for show.
Then there is Lindsey Graham. In 2016 he gave warlike speeches to the Azov Batallion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ4e1A-LZEA
In 2025 he throws Zelensky under the bus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18oqMGLWcRA
Graham and probably Rubio are still neocons. Trump must be really powerful to keep all this under control.
Then there is the U.S. arms lobby, which is uncannily quiet even though they'll lose a ton of business when NATO becomes irrelevant. Then there are no reactions to Polish nuclear ambitions, which is weird unless the whole thing is scripted.
So there are two theories. Either Trump is carving up the world or he is acting.
https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/24.htm...
In fact, we discussed how the whole idea of an USA ex-president calling up a personal militia, trying a coup that could reboot a civil war, giving up half way, and not ending up in jail or even politically castrated was garbage fiction until 5 jan 2021.
By the 2008 attack on Georgia it was clear that there is no democratisation of Russia, but some people didn't want to believe it for a long time, not even after 2014 attack on Ukraine.
I don't know which is more wrong, the broad claim here or the claim that you are a liberal.
I mean, what you describe was generally the case...but between the fall of the USSR and the start of the new US-Russia Cold War around 1998-1999, with the belief that Russia was on a path that, while rocky, led to Western-friendly democracy with the right support.
From 1999-2014 (but generally declining through that period) engagement was viewed as useful, in part because Russia’s hostile turn was seen by some as curable with reassurance, but more because Russia was seen as a generally hostile generally but having useful alignments of interest in some parts of the world.
But by a decade ago, 2015? “Normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world militarily” was certainly not a common, much less the dominant, American liberal position on foreign policy.
All Europe has to do is stop all local support for US bases and force all resupply to be done via the US military and the bases existing infra, not via ANY civilian infrastructure (no civilian airports, no civilian trucking, no civilian shipping). That's just one pain point in the USAs soft underbelly that we didn't have to worry about before because we had allies.
For example, 15% of every F35 is made in UK.
The original article suggests that Ukraine may end up having to replace the electronic countermeasures hardware to get around this in the future, so I'd expect any attempts to "un-brick"/work around the lack of support will eventually be along those lines, even if it results in some performance degradation.
No matter how they approach this, it's going to be a horrifically difficult and expensive task.
0. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-to-withho...
the UK made access to the source code a condition of purchase, and the technology transfer agreement was signed
in a hypothetical scenario where the US federal government falls under the direct control of a russian asset, I imagine this would end up in our allies hands reasonably quickly
Move a few flags around in a few registers and for all practical purposes it’s stuck.
We're talking about Europe being able to protect itself from a potential Russian invasion despite the US bricking their F35s, and your argument is that they'd have to bend or break an agreement?
I don't think that's a big hurdle, in that eventuality.
(Reminds me a touch of this, though: :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo )
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43307996#43309468 Replacing the jammers shouldn't be "horrifically difficult", might still be expensive though.
If the American people want to shift track they have the opportunity to actually elect a Congress which will do something.
If not it’s November 2028 for the next presidential election. Trump (if he’s still alive - he’s not exactly young or healthy) won’t be able to stand for a third term unless a constitutional ammendment is past
It is not just about Trump.
Any suggestions on where in the world will remain relatively stable?
I will be going to UA, to fight with them.
Only, ask your military to return against your just previous allies (at your own initiative) among which the one that helped your very nation to fight for its independence, with which you did cross-training and exercises, for the past 80 years... everyone is in for quite a bumpy road.
France over-run by Germany. Gestapo at work, with all its horrors.
UK+US land in French North Africa, part of taking Africa from Germany, part in the long run of liberating France from horrors of occupation.
French soldiers fighting, killing and being killed by UK+US troops.
And, I was more thinking of the situation on American ground, within the USA and between the USA and Canada. I don't mean it wouldn't happen. I mean that I don't think that would happen with 100% engagement from all US army. The disconnect and reversal of strategy of the US, against its own allies, is too sudden.
Of course, all of them were wrong. Short of WW3 between Europe and the US, many awful things that were predicted have come true. DT has severely weakened the USA, weakened the stock market, damaged US reputation and trust in the US army, dismantled many departments, put useless shills in most important positions, pulled out of Ukraine, stopped aid to Ukraine, sucked up to Putin, and turned it all into a country that most people in Europe consider a hostile enemy (myself included).
So. For the sake of your fellow citizens, quit the excuses.
I think it's foolish to restrict operations to Ukraine though, and feel that the size of Russia is one of its main weaknesses. If there's to be a war, it should involve incursions into the US proper.
Given the size and battle experience of their armies I think that it's more probable that it's Ukraine that will cover Europe and not viceversa. And if they'll have to flee their country add a 12th point the UA army takes sanctuary in the EU that goes the way of Lebanon in the 70s when another army had to flee there.
If UA goes down, then EU goes down, because RU will attack before EU is ready.
This is why I think we see EU direct involvement in UA fighting; needed to keep UA up, and needed to get up to speed with drones.
Do you have any numbers or analysis to back this up, please?
A few counterpoints:
- Russia failed to 'take' a relatively unprepared Ukraine, and arguably has only managed the gains it has made because the support (from Biden US and EU) was drip-fed according to the Biden team's strategy.
- Russia is haemorraging fighters and modern fighting machinery in the current war in Ukraine. It's unknown how much longer the loss of life can be sustained without internal unrest. The absence of modern machinery would obviously make an invasion of Europe less likely to succeed.
- While Russia might now be a "war economy" I've seen reports that they can't economically sustain the war for too much longer.
- While the EU certainty needs to invest in defence, some countries are already strong, and would likely fight to protect the collective.
Overall, this suggests that Russia would fail against a united Europe, were they to extend beyond a defeated Ukraine.
And if it is what the Americans want why not. But as the U.S. take this new direction, let's make sure former allies are treated with respect and given proper notice of the changes so that they can adapt their economies and defense postures.
I guess if the economy is in a recession and people spending less it is not the best place to invest. Unless it is for cheap labor but then you'll have problems with export tariffs.
If the U.S. has one thing going for it, it’s the strength of its market, characterized by high consumer spending and strong potential for growth. Contrast this with the Japanese consumer market, for instance: in real terms, salaries have not increased over the past 10 years, and consumer spending is below what it was a decade ago. (Note: I love Japan, but this is the reality.) European market is between these extremes I believe. The U.S. market may be significantly more attractive to most companies.
I can't imagine whatever Cymer is doing is completely hidden from the parent company and that it's non-replicatable anywhere else in the world?
Maybe there is some way the IP is blocked from ASML on national security grounds or something, I don't know, but what I do know, is their mutual destruction for the sake of some crusade against something ridiculous like "the woke mind virus" is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
There has been zero reason given for this attack on Europe.
I mean this is technology that is not in textbooks and is so specialized that China of all groups have yet to replicate it and have been trying like its life or death(because it is).
>Maybe there is some way the IP is blocked from ASML on national security grounds or something, I don't know, but what I do know, is their mutual destruction for the sake of some crusade against something ridiculous like "the woke mind virus" is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
The technology was originally developed by the US Research labs. The acquisition was only approved by the US government given certain stipulations: namely the US can tell the Dutch to do whatever they want when it comes to chip tech using their research. Thats why when the US phones up the Dutch to block sales to China, they dutifully complied. I would argue that it is pretty reasonable. The US put in the effort to develop these innovations, then gave up the freedom to commercialize it (to the complaints of some US politicians) because the Dutch had other necessary components ready to go.
It remains to be seen how the Dutch will now react given current realities but im sure there is a lot the US government can do to damage ASML if it came to that so surely that much be in the calculations.
[1] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2018/09/russias-vostok-exercise...
I would argue that Trump has inflicted the same thing on NATO. Atlantic relations are at an all time low. Putin will be delighted.
and while we're here, since the US is ostensibly going isolationist, maybe they should stop telling the Ukrainians they need to submit to subjugation.
Ukraine has an amazing job, but they wouldn't have been able to do even that without convincing others that it was in their best interest to fund the war. That's been clear from the beginning.
What's your plan that results in Russia giving up the territory they've claimed and heading home?
1. https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macr...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
Consequently I believe that if the EU is to intervene, which I think is a very reasonable thing to do, it should be by imitiating the Russian approach of using aircraft as flying artillery-- i.e. to release missiles etc., against Russian positions in Ukraine, but I also believe that we should attack Russian natural gas pipelines, ammonia plants, nitric acid plants, ammunition plants with long-range weapons. I also believe that it's reasonable to send in ground troops to seize Russian and Belarusian territory in locations where it can be determined that Russia lacks artillery, tanks etc., and to in that way force troop movements, thus depleting the front in Ukraine and allowing Ukraine to basically roll it over.
I believe that this is possible for several reasons, among them that we Europeans are three times as many as the Russians. I believe that it is unlikely to lead to nuclear war because I believe that the Russians are rational and well aware that any nuclear use by them leads to a proportional nuclear use by 'us', whatever that means, and that the number of nuclear weapons in Russian control is irrelevant for the reason that they're gone after an exchange of a mere hundred or so, so that anything beyond that is superfluous.
Unlike you, I don't think the EU had any business participating in this war.
I wouldn't dismiss a nuclear exchange quite easily.
There are some problems with Ukraine, there might be if there's too much corruption and oligarchy type stuff, so I don't want to absorb them immediately-- they need huge reforms, but I don't find them objectionable per se. I think they need to get smarter, get rid of their mafia etc., but it might be possible.
It's critical for the EU to prevent this kind of expansionist warfare on its borders.
I have yet to see a good analysis of the tradeoffs between big expensive weapons and many cheap drone weapons. It seems possible that very soon the big expensive weapons will be seen as too expensive and less capable. Ukraine is making millions of drones, maybe when the are making tens of millions they'll care less about conventional weapons. Seems like making lots of drones could help the EU scale up quickly without a lot of research and at lower cost.
My thought here was that armies can fight with the most brutal oppressors of their very own country, against those who would liberate it.
The US is a big and important market, and for some things, it would be better to forgo competitiveness in the rest of world market; but for others, rest of world adds up to be more important.
It won't work...
What was expected were rapes and thefts so people preferred to flee. It was really the nightmare scenario.
But as Russia started to regain strength in the early 2000s, they specifically aimed for positive relations with the US, but also were not happy with a Germany style relationship and wanted to be treated as equals. This led to us doubling down on hostilities towards them. But this deterioration of relations inevitably led to where we are today, but fortunately not where we could have ended up - which is in the nuclear wasteland that was briefly called WW3.
This also ties right back in to Georgia. Back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit the US was openly encouraging and supportive of Georgia's efforts to join NATO. France and Germany were strongly opposed to such, arguing that such a move would needlessly provoke Russia, but we aimed to move ahead with it anyhow. The Georgia-Russia war would start a few months later.
[1] - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/us-russia-putin-re...
Russia's economy is teetering and looks very weak now, but much of that is due to sanctions. Sanctions that trump will probably remove soon, for zero concessions. I'm not sure how effective EU sanctions will be on their own. Soon we will be seeing a much stronger Russia, already on a heavy war footing, start swallowing up a much weaker Ukraine. I don't like what might happen after that plays out.
But the western support was very small compared to actual western military capability.
Wouldn't freeing up Russia through removal of sanctions and a refusal to engage militarily resulting in an escalation in Ukraine and potentially beyond into Europe be seen as a big failure of his position?
I have not looked at the US-EU agreement.
You don't need an agreement.
Tthe EU commission has tried to create schemes bypassing the issue, and twice they were dismantled by the EU supreme court.
To obey local laws
The USA is going "unlawful", so the risks are technical and real. Local laws do not apply
For Ukraine to continue existing, the russians have to be driven out. Otherwise the genocide will continue. The genocide caused by russians, caused by russians invading Ukraine, caused by russians stealing Ukraine's children.
In america's right wing trump followers, there is utter, sociopathic, monstrous indifference to Ukraine's suffering.
So I'll ask you, personally: If the neighbouring state or country decided to invade and take over an area of your state, and you were told "you've been resisting too long, give in already and give up your fight", would you lay down and welcome the invaders you've been fighting? If you knew that the invaders were stealing children, and murdering whole towns?
US power in Europe has been our intentional policy since the end of WW2. I can't do justice in educating you on the geopolitics of it all but there is a plethora of information out there for you. Not sure how an American can get to be an adult without understanding the background and reasoning.
We did this to the point of encouraging Germany to include limitations on their own power in their constitution (along with Japan). Anyways it's a long, thought out standing position of our country that has 70 years of thought put into it versus the recent 'but it's not fair to us' MAGA reaction based position.
History has shown that lesson again and again and again. There is no “peaceful world without a hegemon” period of history. There is Pax Brittanica, Pax Romana and Pax Americana which is now coming to an end.
We don’t do anything like that. We don’t extract resources from Europe at below market value. We run a trade deficit, so free trade doesn’t even help us. So what’s the concrete explanation that isn’t just recycling liberal internationalist tropes?
That said, it's not very difficult to fix the deficit if there were any will. And once fixed, the US would benefit from open maritime trade more than anyone else. Holding these bases helps us keep the world in order, and in the current order the US winds up on top. (Though the US does need to deal with China's incursions).
It's funny to see you use the word "evidentiary" when you do not apply any standard to your own comments. If you do reply, please try to back up your points, since I'd like to understand where you're coming from.
Deterrence and overwhelming force are the only ways to ensure longterm peace and stability.
Greek Junta perhaps, but it was anything but stable and it collapsed because of a war in Cyprus with another NATO member..
Or are you claiming that Americans put Putin in power in Russia? Slightly far fetched but you might have a point..
Because I can’t think of anything else.
The reserve status is overblown. The question is if not the USD what asset would reserves go into. Certainly not the yuan with china's currency controls.
Some of the P(weapon failure) is constant: from what I hear, a certain fraction of Soviet and US systems (and presumably everyone else's) just don't work.
If that was all it was, then you would be correct.
But: some failures come with age, and require ongoing maintenance to retain function. For example, I expect all the tritium has decayed, and also that in many cases the money that was supposed to get spent replacing the tritium was instead spent on a fancy yacht or a football team or a seat in the UK's House of Lords etc.
And I don't know how good modern anti-missile weapons are, but I would expect them to have improved; conversely, despite Russia's talk about new hypersonic missiles, what they've shown hasn't been very impressive, and they've even used up some of their old nuclear-capable missiles while attacking Ukraine.
I'm happy to be relaxed about this, but only because I have no power — 90% chance some attempted hot war is actually all duds is great for me personally, 10% chance everything burns is unacceptably high for someone running a country.
Modern Russia resembles the USSR in some respects: oppressive government, not particularly wealthy, over-militarized. But it’s definitely not communist.
If freedom and democracy is your thing then that part doesn’t matter. But if your thing is anti-leftism, conservative morality, militarism, powerful rulers, and white people, modern Russia looks pretty good.
EDIT: more seriously, though, throughout the 20th century America hewed much closer to fascism than communism. It's always been there, if not always out in the open.
Communism had an internationalist phase but that was over by the middle of the cold war. It started as an ideal, then become a way to rationalize the USSR's grip on the East, then it died out as countries started to realize they would be better off with the other bloc.
Edit: of course communism had more ideals than internationalism. For example it did not include the authoritarianism part. However they disappeared after it was implemented as a way to rule a country and were replaced by the means that allowed the ruling group to stay in power.
It's exactly what the Ukrainians are asking for - not troops, just weapons.
And then the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq[1], again, against Russia's protests, and by that point, that's like two countries attacked (one invaded and occupied) by NATO/most of its members, and you'd have to be an idiot to look at that and not notice that it shifted from a purely defensive alliance to an offensive one. [2]
Putin isn't an idiot, he looks at this and starts surrounding himself with buffer states, through both soft and hard power. Unfortunately, soft power isn't working out great in this, for various reasons.
---
[1] It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.
[2] It's been 14 years since NATO attacked a country, though (Libya in 2011 - if you squint hard enough, Syria might not count), so I guess we could once again reframe it as a defensive alliance. [3]
[3] It the US continues on it's insane trajectory and withdraws, it will definitely become a defensive alliance, simply because it will lack the ability to project power.
Wat? I’ve never heard anything like that. I’ve heard people try to justify it on the basis of believing the WMD lie or removing Saddam from power, but Russia is never even mentioned in this context.
The question is will it happen soon enough to mitigate some of the damage.
Bush Jr, who unilaterally withdrew from the START treaty in 2002[1], and pushed to establish ABM sites in eastern Europe in 2007? That's considered "normalizing"?[2][3] And Putin, who protested both of these actions as destabilizing, is somehow considered the not-sane one in this narrative?
>Ukraine has depleted Russias military stockpiles and their National Wealth Fund. Russia was weaker than people thought.
"Russia is never as strong as she appears....and Russia is never as weak as she appears." -- multiple attributions including Bismark and Churchill
Russia was supposed to run out of ballistic missiles...in summer 2022.[4] They've also likely taken more casualties than the entire active duty strength of the UK, French, and German land forces combined (73K + 118K + 63K ~= 250k) while still keeping a cohesive force capable of offensive combat operations in the field, which has GROWN since the war started to somewhere around 550-650K (up from ~200-350K in 2022).[5][6] Russia only appears weak by the standard established by the US 1990-2005....but the US is essentially a super-saiyan and functioned on a different plane of existence from every other military in the world.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unilateral-withdrawal-fro...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna21262371
[3] https://www.insightturkey.com/articles/missile-defense-in-eu...
[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/04/01/vladimir-p...
[5] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4589095-russian-army-grow...
Russia knew that Ukraine had little chance of getting into NATO in early 2022 and wasn't even persuing it after the revolution of dignity before the 2014 invasion
Spain and Portugal.
Then Turkey, Greece, Italy, Belgium. Belgium didn't last long though.
But it’s a weird thing to say when the USSR/Stalin literally bankrolled the Nazi invasions of Norway and France (whatever the financing they got from the US USSR contributed a few magnitudes more).
Germany had no oil after Poland and its not far fetched that France/Britain could have just waited it out had the Soviets not bailed them out.
I don’t have evidence that american empire is bad for the economy. But the cost of maintaining it are indisputably high and result in a lot of immortality. So I would like evidence that maintaining an empire actually results in benefits that offset the cost.
Economic theory certainly doesn’t predict that empires would make you richer than free markets. And if empire makes you richer, why is Europe so content to be under our yoke?
The US doesn't have an empire, but we do have a degree of worldwide hegemony. As a practical matter if the US turns isolationist then China will fill that gap. Will that make US citizens richer?
That sounds like a very neocon view of how the world works. We have to maintain an empire because if we don’t, someone else will?
US economy, trade and budget deficit are subsidized by the rest of the world which buys their bonds.
Sorry to disappoint, but Europe is not particularly content to be under the US yoke.
Actually, the US has been actively pressuring Europe to keep it under their yoke. For decades.
And stop being disingenuous by labelling the current US-led global security system as an "empire". Words mean things and I'm sure you're smart enough to know what a real empire looks like, so I can't imagine what you think you're accomplishing by trying to frame the debate that way.
Also, I use “empire” because people are justifying our having military bases all over the world on that somehow benefitting america economically. I am not sure I understand why—forcing the world to use dollars as the reserve currency seems to be part of the theory. But if that’s the case then empire is an appropriate label.
Every single bit of the right is projection. "The left hates America" = we (the right) will dismantle and destroy this 250 year experiment
But yes, projection. Like free speech, playing with World War III, etc.
Is this really the case in 2025? There's been more than a few self-described leftists/liberals writing about attending Trump rallies over the years and this not being their experience. One example: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2018/09/what-i-learned...
The damage is already irreversible on any near to medium term timescale - how bad it gets on an absolute scale is the only thing left to speculate.
It will easily take a generation just for people to find solidarity and courage again.
Progress takes real sacrifice. People died fighting for basic dignity and rights. The anti-slavery movement in the US fought monied interests for centuries.
It took real sacrifice for the labour movement to gain rights such as voting, education, housing, health care in the face of deadly opposition from the rich and their legislative puppets.
It just takes a moment of complaceny on the part of progressive-minded people for the rich and their legislative puppets to undo the foundations of democracy.
1. Europe propped up Russia despite Obama and Trump’s warnings before the war
2. Europe still buys more from Russia than they give Ukraine in financial aid
3. Europe is more friendly towards America’s rival China
4. Europe expects US to spend more protecting Europe than Europe
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.
The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.
Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.
It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
If you want to copy Denmark, I'm guessing you also want their universal healthcare.
Trump is the result of anti-system vote by people who were ignored for decades by both parties.
Trump obviously won't solve their problems. Inequality won't decrease. Healthcare won't become more accessible. Workers' rights won't be fixed. Homes won't get more affordable. Inflation won't drop.
So - even when Trump disgraces himself completely - these disappointed voters will just vote for another anti-system con-man.
Trump's core voters desperately need Sanders to win. But they will vote Trumps and get fucked over time and time again.
This is how democracy dies. People distrusting the system so hard they destroy it.
Funny. Reminds me of the last time I visited Brazil. In the last day I heard someone justifying voting for Bolsonaro by saying "things are so bad that I just want someone who will destroy everything".
The American Problem is not one of systems or policies. The American Problem is about people, what they do to each other, and that you allow that to happen. The constitutional arguments they have are Red Herrings. What matters is what people do, and what they want to be allowed to do by their arguments.
It's not like in authoritarian countries where their votes just go down to trash. It's not like they cannot voice their opinion or organize demonstrations. I agree there is a sentiment of "I'm ignored", but at any point in time it's up to them to not being ignored in democratic society.
Nah, they were not ignored by both parties. It is votes by people who were listened to by the republican party again and again and again.
The most frustrating part is that Trump is sabotaging the US by enacting the pseudo-anti war policies that the republican party has been vilifying for decades.
Leftist now refers to that. The leftist of like over a decade ago. That leftist is now more centrist.
If the left was strong in the US there would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and an actual left wing contender like Bernie Sanders. Even people like AOC would make a decent centrist candidate in Europe.
That’s the kind of persecution they are talking, and angry, about. If that incident had not happened, Trump may never have been elected.
How about you check out the rest of the western world, where each single democracy had their own pickings with communist tendecies. And most of them handled that in the common sense way of giving workers basic protections and ensuring their share of wealth so they don't feel the need to go to the communists.
Worked pretty well for most European countries.
Although, once communism was gone, the ideology of neolibral economic thinking took over and thus all benefits to workers were seen as unnecessary expenses. Leading to the current rise in nationalism and fascism nearly everywhere.
It is pretty simple: If you want all people to carry a system, all people need to feel like they profit from its existence. Once the mask slips and people realize they aren't profiting, they will be unwilling to hold up their side of the social contract. This is what is happening right now.
Yup, and the response to from the owner class is not to uphold the social contract, but to renegotiate it.
"the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration." - Sam Altman
Has it though? It appears most of Europe is by and large a failed state collapsing under such communist-adjacent policies plus unbounded immigration. I would not want to be Europe today, so yeah, to the extent McCarthyism has been a protection against that, kudos.
the saddest part about a comment you are commenting on is that their mind has been so polluted that they only see the world through the views of two arbitrary political parties (who shift their own views every couple of decades, hard rightist from few decades ago is basically same-ish person as far-leftist today). all empires fall and USA is slowly getting there (now going “little” faster) because of thinking like this in part.
My favorite example is probably getting my wife's uncle to agree that the proletariat has nothing to lose but it's chains mid-rant about how right-wing militia groups are the only folks in the country with a finger on the pulse and how they were absolutely going to overthrow the federal government with a selection of canned goods and small arms...
Zuck is probably the best example.
Such moves towards such systems, are usually desperate jumps of those whose empires are under threat of being broken up anyway.
I mean I am actually impressed by the sizeable part of the population media moguls managed to convince into a cultish devotion to lie to themselves against their own naterial interests. This is bad everywhere, but the current US has a propaganda machine that is truly astonishing, in a scary way.
The problem with that is that authoritarians have no incentive to figure out the real roots of a problem. Like a doctor that always blames it on some devil, demon, or whatnot when you go to them an authoritarian will not solve the problem, because every (real) crisis is a chance to blame the (fictional) enemy.
After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress.
Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America."
Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included.
The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).
Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.
One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious.
The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it.
When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely!
That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.
The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything.
A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.
But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.
Maybe a year or two ago…the political landscape has shifted drastically in recent years and months.
California governor Gavin Newsom has a new podcast, and recently told Charlie Kirk (yes, he invited Kirk to pander to the young white male voters) something along the lines of “trans people shouldn’t play sports”.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-this-is-gavin-newsom-268...
Add “…with others” to the end of my statement.
Pedantry is what the oppressors want.
Also, do you not think American right wing media is not capable of whipping up panics? This feels like special pleading.
2-party system is bad. Regional representation instead of population representation is bad. Allowing gerrymandering is bad. Letting companies/oligarchs to contribute to election campaigns is VERY bad.
All of this ends with a system that cannot reform itself. It's a common failure mode in early democracies. There are known workarounds.
If instead all votes go proportionally according to what people voted, you get less extreme policies and encourage parties to build coalitions. Nobody is happy, but fewer people are extremely unhappy.
E.g. Republican Schwarzenegger has been advocating against gerrymandering for a long time.
Force all states to cast election votes to be proportional to citizens' votes (some states do but others do not).
And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists.
It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural?
If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.
strong bodies are lackin' wisdom.
Or:
Who do not smoke, not drink, has never lived.
At no point was "liberal" mentioned in this comment chain prior to your comment.
>Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics#Social_prog...
It's time to stop thinking in materialist terms when analyzing US politics, that has completely flown the coop. It's all culture war.
The main difference is that they are easier to integrate. For instance, immigrants from the Americas speak a romance language, and if they speak Spanish, that's like a second language for the US. Most are also Christians, and yes, it matters because they don't uphold Sharia over local laws. Yes, the US is also getting drug dealers and such, but I bet that a vast majority are there to work and pay their taxes.
Europe has the problem that it took in many people from Africa and Asia, that are harder to integrate, and with many of them fleeing war. And the difficulty here is that people fleeing war have no intention to integrate or even to work for a living if they can get away with subsidies, many intending to return home as soon as possible. Europe also has the issue that it has never been a melting pot, smaller countries in Europe don't have a tradition of cultural diversity, they are unprepared to integrate that many people over a short period of time.
There was also a story recently about Russia apparently fuelling immigration from war zones into Europe, to destabilize the EU and its governments. They also funded “green” NGOs and politicians who succeeded in shutting down shale gas extraction and nuclear power plants, increasing the energy dependence on Russia. I'm guessing their hybrid war is a wild success.
Not to be misunderstood here, I am pro immigration. For example, Germany has been a powerhouse of Europe due in no small part to their generous immigration policies. The population is growing old, and we need people to support society. The “low skilled” classification is a canard. Countries require “low skilled” work as well, and note that unemployment is at an all-time low, US and EU included.
I'll also note that the UK ran xenophobic ads ranting against Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians, as a justification for Brexit. After Brexit, they wanted them back, especially during the pandemic, since “low skilled” Eastern Europeans started going to Germany and other EU countries instead. And immigration actually got worse for them after Brexit, which was ironic, but not unpredictable.
Without union we get nothing and people before us had to fight to get us these rights and now some people want to throw it away because they didn't get big enough raise.
Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".
Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.
To most europeans there are more important things than money, especially those working in tech who likely earn enough to have a great quality of life. Also lots of them have been to the US and made their own minds up.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Ignore the US; keep believing that Sweden is happier than Spain :)
They should really call it something like "World ESG Index."
Those are arguably closer to "economic" than "social". Energy is plainly economic. Even healthcare and labor at the end of the day, boil down to dollars and cents (ie. how much people are paying for healthcare and how much they earn).
>speech
Having the strongest free speech protections in the world is "far right" now?
>religion
The Republicans might be "far right" on religion, but I don't see how the Democrats are. They can certainly be more secular (think the CCP), but at least they're not obviously religious. Compare this to the UK and Denmark which have state regions, and the christian democratic union in Germany.
>basic human rights
Clarify. "basic human rights" has been muddled by the left to include mean stuff like "healthcare", as well as the right to mean "right of babies not not get aborted" and "kids not being groomed".
That rings true, but how did the US get here? How did identity politics suddenly come to be the most important thing, bringing the world order to its knees?
Europe seems to be following America's lead (as we always do/did), but it hasn't reached the same extremes and probably won't, imho.
With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations.
Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.
https://news.siu.edu/2018/08/081018-research-shows-state-fun...
Shows that on average it is about 3x. There are more detailed per-county numbers available in the actual study.
The real losers are the suburban counties surrounding Chicago. Cook County is only slightly shafted.
https://www.farmweeknow.com/policy/state/state-tax-dollars-b...
I don't believe that at all.
My personal opinion is that our state and nation legislatures have way too few members given our current populations. For example, the US House should have some sort of dynamic membership count: the smallest odd number such that when you run the apportionment algorithm the smallest state has 3 members. That’s probably somewhere around 1100 members (just spitballing).
Decreasing the ratio of constituents to representatives won't really work. It may work at the margins, but you will still have the mismatch in proportions between urban/rural.
The executive branch shouldn't have nearly as much authority as it does and anything we want to be difficult to be undone should be protected by law, with a legislative body needing something akin to a 2/3s vote to change it.
Instead we have a massive, powerful executive branch and legislators that can wield way too much power with a simple majority.
I actually wonder if the problem the USA has is that its system has no override function like the UK does under the Parliament Act 1918. I see a lot of frustration that Congress has been deadlocked for nearly 2 decades (mostly by Republicans) so it’s no surprise the average voter demands change and wants the executive branch to take all the power.
The large executive branch has been growing since steadily since FDR though, that isn't a recent reaction to gridlock. There's a good argument that gridlock is a feature of our system meant to slow it down intentionally. We're seeing now how jarring it can be to have the government completely change source every 4 years, gridlock and bureaucracy help smooth that out.
We could be making it worse by demanding gridlock be avoided through executive actions and similar.
It doesn't matter if rights are protected by law, if the executive branch has no intention to enforce that law.
Right now the executive branch is plainly violating laws established by Congress, and there is no one to stop them.
I would also note that while the current Trump administration has broken federal laws at an accelerated rate, the previous Biden administration did much the same thing on a smaller scale. People here on HN frequently make excuses for Biden's illegal student loan forgiveness program because they liked the results but if we want to preserve the rule of law then it needs to apply to every program. In the long run allowing unchecked growth of executive branch power and the administrative state will be bad for everyone.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
I was living out if the country st the time and didn't keep up, I could be mistaken there.
Democracy would have worked in that scenario, and society would just have bifurcated enough that the slight minority lost most power and very much disagrees with the direction.
Congress does have to act pike adults though and do their job of keeping the executive branch in check. If they don't the system is just fundamentally broken and the only reasonable choice is to throw it out and start fresh.
That's not going to happen with the way tech/algos are exacerbating the divide.
We need to be proliferating alternative, humanistic, empathetic software in the world and putting it into people's hands. It's easier than ever for us to independently build a wealth of defensive infrastructure for the common people.
I’m sure there’s a good argument that wealthy people and a broadening wealth divide are responsible for this, but it’s too late to attack that now. We need a huge shift in public sentiment if this is going to change now.
Even if the outcome had been different in November. We’d still be in deep trouble. A lot less, but still a lot. The fundamental problem we have right now isn’t that Trump is President, it’s that about 50% of those who bother to vote think he’s worthy of it.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to change the minds of the American populace. They’ll have to learn the hard lesson of where this stuff goes. The problem is that we all have to learn that lesson alongside them whether we need it or not.
Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through.
I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all.
Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it.
Sanders has a 0% chance of winning.
Even for the Trump "bull in the china shop" voter, Sanders has become less relevant in 2020 and 2024 because he offers so little and for someone so called principled, he doesn’t hold the same ideas on immigration that he has before.
I know many Trump supporters but not a single one of them respects or like Sanders, and all the polling data I can find points out that this is the general trend.
Any Sanders path to victory involved massive amounts of youth turnout that would have otherwise stayed home, and there's basically zero Republican leaning voters that would switch to Bernie. And the swing vote swings massively to Trump when Sanders goes against Trump.
People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections.
[edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.
Given the GP comment I assumed we weren't talking about that scenario where people are only a candidate or party voter.
> Trump _is_ the policy and the view.
That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.
This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place.
2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign.
Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement.
The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing.
In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida).
The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that.
My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.
1: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-pri...
Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\
The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.
This guy does:
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/2...
I can't find his original post on X (although that's probably for the better because his feed is filled antisemitic garbage, and he's pretty clearly at utter idiot).
But yes, some people really do think that way: They never think about the results of their proposals, and getting back to the topic at hand Bernie is the same way (although unlike that other guy Bernie really does seem to care about people), but he never thinks about the effects of his proposals, how people would react and change behavior.
This would make him a terrible President.
And I would remind you that despite being in congress for 34 years Bernie has never manged to get even a single idea of his passed.
This is a solid summary of what happened during the political shifting of the last (almost) ten years.
Unfortunate that this comment is so deep in the thread here.
I have often felt that the only way to break this cycle is to get more non-voters to join the fray. There are enough people totally checked out but get a bunch of them and you can make up for the centrist dems. Its gotta be a celebrity that has any chance of ramming through the Democratic primary just like Trump did. AOC isn't going to cut it. If we make it to 2028, We need a superstar.
This is the real bisector. If one party gets to use magic and capture the stupid vote, what's the other party supposed to do? Lie more? Lie less? As long as magic appeals to stupid people, we're screwed.
The real underlying problem is the collapse of the consensus of the elites, projected through corporate media. Murdoch saw a financial opportunity to break from this model, and social media companies followed with this as their only business model. Murdoch and Zuckerberg make money spreading magic which appeals to stupid people who vote in deranged morons. There is no effective feedback mechanism because not enough voters have the mental skills to evaluate the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps they just like seeing chaos and destruction. Rinse repeat.
Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.
I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly?
More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.
Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem.
The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.
What you describe are both results of an uneducated voting public in my opinion. At least as I see it, those are two important effects with the root cause being a lack of education and critical thinking.
If people were better educated on how our systems work and issues that impact them directly, and willing to think critically and listen to, or engage in, reasoned debates we wouldn't have to worry about what shit they may hear or see in the media, or from politicians, lobbyists, etc.
Now they're talking about keeping the government running on auto-pilot budgets all the way to September. [1] Doesn't even help that it's Rep. Exec. branch, Rep. Senate, Rep. House, Rep. Supreme Court, and Rep. Governor majority. Still a stopgap CR land where nothing gets advanced.
[1] https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/07/congress/ho...
The budget is a weird topic when we consistently spend trillions in debt. I've found it hard for me to take budget debates too seriously when the idea of running such a deficit seems completely against any fundamental financial plan.
I'd care more about budget deadlines and temporary agreements if they were required to agree to a balanced budget.
Compare to the UK’s Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to override the Lords if it passes the same legislation in two sessions. It means that overriding isn’t free (it takes 1-2 years of focused effort) but critical legislation can’t be blocked. Combined with strict timetables that force rejection of legislation that isn’t passed in its allotted time, you bypass the pocket veto, too. Compromise is preferred but, if the upper house refuses to play ball, the threat of ramming it through anyway always exists to keep it in check.
What additional authority doss the US legislative branch need? They have pretty wide authority to create any laws that don't violate our constitutional rights, I don't know how we could really expand that further (but my view is definitely biased since I grew up here).
I think congress would be well within its rights to change their own rules to add time limits on legislation or required expiration on proposed bills, for example.
Some things do sit within Congress such as the Senate adopting the insane role allowing filibuster. However, this is also encouraged by the fact the Senate can kill legislation like this. Filibusters rarely happen in the UK Parliament because the majority party can force through legislation they feel is important enough.
You say that deadlock is built in as though this is desirable. However the public just became so frustrated by the system that they just elected a madman to smash it to pieces.
Encouraging compromise and working across the aisle is an excellent property in the US system. But that has broken down and I think part of the reason is there’s no mechanism to break the deadlock that can force parties back to the table.
If there is ever a conflict between legislative and executive, then the legislative branch can remove the executive branch.
In other words: the president shouldn't be head of government (only head of state, sort of a figurehead).
But the Donald is doing everything he can to stop that.
Also, it doesn’t help that Labour are shit at comms. They’re actually doing what they were elected to do but don’t want to tell the public about it, much like the Biden administration!
In both cases the executive branch is overstepping legal bounds and attempting to take actions that it isn't legally authorized to do.
The why behind it matters most for how emotional of a response it will invoke, but maybe I'm preaching to the choir here.
Hope you don't mind me continuing to pull on this thread, I'm genuinely interested to better understand where you have drawn the line here.
Biden was circumventing established systems when he tried to cancel student debts. He even tried again when the first attempt was blocked. Our higher education system, legal framework around student debt, and the debt industry as a whole was very well established and legally defined.
What is so different with Trump's executive orders? I get that you disagree with them, I disagree with many of them too, but legally I just don't see much light between the two. They both abuse executive orders in an attempt to Dodge existing legislation on the books and make change that the office has no authority to make.
Biden didn't do anything you suggest. You're consuming the propaganda. George Bush made it so that Federal workers with student loans could get them discharged at X years of service. X just happened to fall into Trump's first term.
Trump broke the promise made to people doing their civic duty, Biden repaired it.
Biden never took on more authority than what was established almost two decades ago.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-loan-forgiveness-applic...
How do you distinguish between propaganda and a lawyer arguing a political policy on behalf of the president of the united states, with the understanding that a lawyer should make the most compelling case they possibly can? Its political, its a one-sided view, its cherry picked, and its meant to persuade the target audience to believe a certain point - that sounds pretty propagandistic to me.
We have to use our intelligence and expertise to make applications which take care of users and their privacy, without them needing to suddenly become overnight computer experts. Most of the tooling I see today has (understandably) massive UX issues and is largely relegated to at least the mildly technical.
We need new and open Facebooks, TikToks, calendars, operating systems, etc. which protect and empower people but don't complicate their lives and stress them out, which leads to security and privacy fatigue. Even my current operating system, macOS, is so intensely user-hostile and obfuscated off the happy path, despite being heralded as a champion of human-oriented design.
We need a modern GNU-like organization but focused on building the social/web tooling that most people today are using.
Most people don't care enough to even ask the questions. Creating competing services were the value differentiation is privacy (likely at the trade off of cost or quality) is bound to fail for that same reason.
I’d definitely be interested in evidence that there are democracies with voters who are significantly better at understanding the function of their government, the breakdown of the budget, how basic functions of it work, et c, than in the US before, say, 1975.
This is anecdotal since I don't have evidence handy, but I've been impressed with Swiss voters that I've met and they have all spoken highly of both their Democratic model and their voters. I don't know all the intricacies of it, but my understanding is that their system pushes any meaningful change to a vote. Its slower and requires more voter engagement, but at least from my experience that has succeeded in building a better informed public.
The US political system is completely broken with regards to lobbying and campaign finance. All the money floating around makes it nearly impossible for representatives to work across the aisle, or to ignore the aisle and vote for what their own state wants regardless of party.
> dismantling the federal government, installing loyalists, betraying allies, allying with dictators, and promising lots of money to billionaires
while lying about everything.
Canada may as well be British, except Quebec who are somehow more french than the french themselves.
If any minority group has the power to overrule a majority vote, regardless of what the vote is for, then you don't really have a democracy.
Which is why under no circumstances you should ever elect anyone who will send yours in that direction. Canadians, take note, the CPC only detached its lips from Trump's backside because they needed to come up for air.
At minimum, don't elect people who staged failed coups. They and their supporters will not ever act like they are bound by law.
Perhaps the reasons can't be mentioned in polite company.
That seems like the kind of setup that works great until it goes very, very wrong.
Fairness in the context of an election only means that it was done in accordance to the existing laws. Maybe equal access to voting needs to be on that list too, but I'd expect that to be covered by voting laws.
There have been many attempts to fix districting laws, but of course those changes have to be approved by representatives elected under the previous laws.
It has been difficult to challenge these in court because it’s hard to argue whether a districting is “fair”. There has been a little progress on challenging some districting based on a statistical argument that shows the one-party advantage resulting from the particular districting is extremely unlikely to be the result of chance.
> Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile
Market forces and the law are two different things, which one are you arguing?
> People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers
I never suggested anyone pay for anything, this is a straw man argument.
I don't understand your aggressive stance against engineers building better, open alternatives to current offerings. The market is getting hungrier for it, and if a product is genuinely better, "market forces" will do their thing, no run-around needed.
But.. it's a chicken-egg problem. Has there been a law for prevention before an incident happened or is the law formulated after something happens?
.. it's naive to think and say
> Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up.
If it were like this, then no house would be destroyed by earth quake like in Turkey somewhen 2-3 years ago - and Turkey did pass a law some 10 years ago to prevent cheap buildings in earth quake areas.
No bridge would've collapse in Germany - the laws in Germany are one of the toughest making construction very expensive.
And there are much more examples in real world that opposes your "Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up."
The problem is no one wants to pay much money for the better quality, if a little less in quality will do similar job. Compare housing and housw building costs in US and western Europe/Germany.
So, your engineers can do the best things and the market decides. .. yes, ma‘am!
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-r...
I would assume the same goes for some Democratic voters as well. There's a lot of hate thrown across the aisle in both directions these days. Maybe it comes more frequently from Trump's supporters, I don't know, but I've been surprised by how much blatant disregard, disrespect, and animosity I've heard from those on the left. The idea of voting for Trump was so foreign to many in the Biden/Harris bubble that anyone willing to vote for Trump must have been crazy or less than.
I didn't vote for Trump (or Harris), but working in the tech industry and mostly around people who would consider themselves progressive or liberal has been pretty eye opening the last few elections. Everyone wants to be inclusive unless its political and they strongly disagree with the other side.
That's an interesting idea. Care to expound on who some Democratic voters were eager for Kamala to "hurt"?
Latin America is all quite similar.
Mainland Europe is quite similar, bar the obvious exception.
