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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

US President warning Germany about Russia in 2018:

> "Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation. That is why we congratulate European states, such as Poland, for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs. Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course,"

> "Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers."

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Back in 2014:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-eu-summit/obama-tells...

Back in early 2014: "Fuck the EU" - Victoria Nuland. Google it up. As it stands, EU is being consistently and thoroughly fucked

Not coincidentally, this is also when we learned the US was behind the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which directly led to Putin invading & annexing Crimea. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

Let's name names. Trump, the abovementioned president, at the UN in 2018 warns that Germany is endangering itself by increasing dependence on Russia. German envoys laugh <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwgepe>, including foreign minister Heiko Maas, today enjoying a quiet retirement back home in Saarland.

Is this the same Trump who said he trusts Mr. Putin's word over his own intelligence agencies? Let's not kid ourselves that he had nothing but making himself look good in mind when he said those "warnings".

Was he wrong? After all, now we know the role the US played in the coup (sorry, perfectly organic color revolution) in Ukraine in 2014[0], and I don't think our intelligence agencies were vey forthcoming with that information...

And yet by 2016 when he took office it was known we were fucking with their internal politics too[1], using "totally not the CIA" organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy[2] and USAID[3].

This is not a new playbook, we have to realize every foreign government knows exactly what we're doing right? We can only pay people to look the other way for so long until a line is crossed. Whelp, apparently we discovered the line.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golos_(election_monitor)

[2] https://mronline.org/2022/03/08/national-endowment-for-democ...

[3] https://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/4/is_usaid_the_new_cia_a...

Am. Role? You mean US dared to talk to participants in the coup?

And by "fucking with their internal politics" you mean funded a non-profit, that was trying to expose rampant election fraud?

FYI, the account that you are replying to has a long track record of "pushing a certain talking point" on this topic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You are not going to persuade them.

Here is the delayed but inevitable result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32326857

To be fair US was also messing with Poland internal affairs in the 80s.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/world/reagan-and-pope-rep...

>President Ronald Reagan signed a secret order in May 1982 that authorized an array of economic, diplomatic and covert measures to _destabilize the Government of Poland_ and begin to break the Soviet Union's dominance of Eastern Europe, Time magazine reported this week.

>The secret order, National Security Decision Directive 32, set in motion aid to the Solidarity movement, more vigorous promotion of human rights, economic pressure and diplomatic isolation of the Communist Government, the article said.

>The report in Time adds many new details, particularly the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Roman Catholic Church in opening networks across which telephones, fax machines, printing presses, photocopiers, computers and intelligence information moved to Solidarity.

Thanks to this I can buy bread, washing machine or a car without waiting in a queue, signing up on a list or waiting for a government grand. Meanwhile in a shithole russia: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-tv-segment-family-who... https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/07/18/7358790/

This is a different argument though. You're making an argument about which system is better. I'm saying that Putin was telling the truth when he complained about the US interfering in their elections first, and our intelligence agencies were lying when they claimed we don't do the same thing we accused Russia of doing to us.

So when Trump said he believed Putin in that instance, he was correct.

Trump took Putin's word that Russia did not meddle in the US election.

The last few presidents have said the same thing - here's Obama in 2014: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-eu-summit/obama-tells...

Trump also yanked the rug out from under the TPP which effectively locked in our manufacturing relationship with China, so glass houses and all that.

Hillary was also opposed to TPP so it would have been the same result either way.

The TPP was widely opposed before Trump stopped it. Then the "everything Trump does is wrong" crowd reversed their position and started claiming the TPP was a good thing.

https://www.rockagainstthetpp.org/

https://www.artistsagainsttpp.org/

https://act.eff.org/action/speak-out-against-the-trans-pacif...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-im-against-the-tpp_b_6831...

https://progressive.org/latest/tpp-another-trade-scam/

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/07/politics/hillary-clinton-oppo...

> The TPP was widely opposed before Trump stopped it.

Agreed. Progressives are equally culpable. Though I never really heard many outlets reverse their opinions. I think people just largely forgot about the TPP.

> Then the "everything Trump does is wrong" crowd

To the contrary, I do not understand the crowd that shows up to a conversation about the time and insists on bringing their broken clock.

There were very good reasons why people opposed the TPP. The devil was in the details.

Even Biden said (in 2019) that he would not rejoin the TPP as it was initially put forward, and would insist that we renegotiate pieces of that.

> insists on bringing their broken clock.

I assume you're suggesting that the "everything Trump does is wrong" crowd doesn't exist? To the contrary, their influence is so great that even Thomas Friedman, a vocal opponent of Trump, felt it necessary to call them out:

"One of the hardest things to accept for all of us who want Donald Trump to be a one-term president is the fact that some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them!"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/opinion/trump-trade-china...

I understand that the TPP is politically dead. But hand waving over details on the specific tariffs on suits from Singapore is misdirection. It was fundamentally an agreement to form a trade block against China. If we politically cared more about the details, then we really didn't care about China.

> I assume you're suggesting that the "everything Trump does is wrong" crowd doesn't exist?

I'm not. But I also don't understand the driving need to give a specific politician credit for doing something normal. Someone quoted Trump's opinion, several of us pointed out that it's not particularly novel or unique, and now we are being lectured about how absolutes are wrong?

Are his words somehow divine that his opinions deserve to be discussed?

> Someone quoted Trump's opinion, several of us pointed out that it's not particularly novel or unique, and now we are being lectured about how absolutes are wrong?

I'm not talking about Trump's opinion about Germany's dependence on Russia, which, I agree, is "not particularly novel or unique".

Why did you bring up the TPP, even though it's irrelevant to this conversation? It seems to me that it was purely as a criticism of Trump ("glass houses"), as if no positive statement about Trump could ever be allowed to pass without criticism.

Now, they are really quiet today and are still struggling to admit their foolishness, since they have now realised years later that they have become Europe's biggest fools, such that it's even more embarrassing to them that it also came directly from Trump, alongside with other points he specifically made at the time which aged like fine wine.

So Germany will indeed learn the hard way, despite ignoring the repeated warnings.

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