The ones that remained till now are happy cheering for a constantly lying pedophile who has behavior of a spoiled child and mental capacity of even less. I am not holding my breath anything can move them. Other folks who voted for him and now understand, well drown in shame for all I care, it doesnt change anything since this was obvious years ago and you still voted a childish pedophile in.

The bigger loss is in soft power, the power that comes from economics, having the worlds reserve currency, and even the trust and respect of our allies.

Neither does the US anymore.

US influence has gone up in the smoke of broken economic agreements, psychotic bloviation, and tariff wars.

If all you can do is threaten other people/countries to stand beside you, you have no friends.

Bridges are burned that will never be rebuilt.

What makes you think of this? Also, why wouldn't China pick up this role, when they heavily rely on this, or why wouldn't bilateral agreements be enough?

The Strait of Hormuz has entered the chat.

So much of American "power" in the past few decades has been based on perception, not reality. And other major powers, including China, have largely played along because it has suited their interests too.

But it's a mistake to assume that just because other major powers haven't sought conflict with the US, it means they're not capable of challenging America's power credibly in certain regions and domains.

Of note: the US doesn't even have an aircraft carrier in the Pacific right now. The only thing keeping China from, say, moving on Taiwan, is Pete Hegseth's testosterone.

Pretty wild that the US has a law that literally says it must invade another country if they judge Americans for war crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...

For example take a core grassroots issue - immigration reform. Slowly building support for decades against the corpo imperative for cheap labor. But after it finally gets critical mass, what does this actually result in? A personal enrichment shakedown dynamic for employers of imported labor, concentration camps, and homicidal gangs of jackboots roaming the streets itching to summarily execute people for exercising their Constitutional/natural rights. All that hard earned political capital squandered on nothing more than a performative con man "for the cause". And in a few years we'll be right back to hearing their pissing and moaning about Democrats being responsible, even though they did it to themselves.

(signed, a libertarian)

(I am from the country that voted to leave the EU...)

Arguably the richest in terms of the GDP per capita, but I don't think Americans have ever been the most educated or healthiest in the world.

The US founders—wealthy white male land and slave owners—were explicitly skeptical of democracy and enshrined many anti-democratic measures into the US Constitution, with the purpose of thwarting the will of the majority, which they accomplished successfully. The US has always been a plutocracy, not a democracy. I'd say the worst part of the Constitution is the extreme difficulty of amending it. Design errors can be corrected… except the error of making errors difficult to correct.

Only a minority of Americans consider themselves "MAGA", around 20% of adults IIRC from polls. In contrast, the majority of Americans dislike both of the two major political parties. However, those two parties have a monopoly on fundraising, which is how they maintain their political monopoly in a system where election campaigns are privately financed. The news media is also increasingly monopolistic.

Democracy is fine and well, it's an indictment of americans. Considering the 2 times this century the popular vote winner didn't get into power. And that the current president was given power twice.

> It is difficult to imagine a people - on paper the richest, most educated and healthiest in the history of the world -

The fact that you think these are true is part of the problem.

So all we have to do to come back from it is have Nuremberg style trials for GOP leadership and to ban their ideology and symbology from being displayed in the country?

Saying that they don't have authority to make a decision implies that there's some universal set of rules that internationally lays down what anyone's authority is - precisely the kind of thing you appear to be opposed to, because such a set of rules would likely need a court!

That is authority if you like it or not.

The U.S., along with China, India, Russia, and many other nations, are not members and do not grant any weight to ICC rulings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#C...

Why should we believe in the fantasy of the nation state, but not in the fantasy of international law? It's all just social constructs to create an ordered society that stops the worst excesses.

EU (which is what you presumably mean by "europe") has its own problems, but it do so much in such a short time. UK got close with Brexit, but that's like a single event compared to probably dozens by now by the US in last 2 years.

But you won't see any of that if best you could do was some weak whataboutism.

Which is all the ICC can do to nations that aren't signatories to the Rome statute.

It is indeed fragile since, as you point out, it only takes one party (or in Rs case, one person) to eliminate the consensus. Consensus comes and goes.

And yet, it's notable when through the chaos, both parties have consistently maintained lockstep agreement for 30 years.