when putting US foreign policy into perspective over the past 30 (or more depending where you are) years, then aligning with China suddenly looks a lot less awful all of a sudden.
An example; look at what they’ve been doing in the South China Sea, Hong Kong or Xinjiang.
Some instability in the U.S. is definitely uncomfortable but the alternative is not better.
I'm not well informed on the subject and now you've got me really curious.
- Hong Kong was ceded to the UK after the opium wars in 1842
- The British returned it in 1997, under an agreement that its economic and political systems wouldn't change for 50 years
- starting in the 2010s (less than 20 years later), the PRC has been pressuring the Hong Kong government to drop colonial-era democratic reforms, extradite critics of China, and in general curtail civil liberties.
Presumably OP is referring to the PRCs actions to integrate Hong Kong before 50 years have elapsed. I'm not an expert here, this is just my layman understanding from reading American news
(Not that trump’s accountability is particularly high… but there’s some hope he’ll be gone in 4 years, whereas the situation is different in china)
And everyone in the US should try to remember, every day, that this is NOT normal, and it should not become the new normal.
I was being provocative a bit, to help remember it CAN get worse and we shouldn’t just ride it out.
I live in Europe, I am European: we've outsourced our own defense for far too long. It is absurd that a country presenting an existential threat to us has been met with more supplied resistance from a country across the earth than Europe.
It's long past time for Europe to wake up.
1. You have to allocate that budget towards buying from the US defence industry. You are not going to be allowed to spend that internally. Which arguments aside of if that actually makes sense is at least a conflict of interest.
2. We are also threatening to annex territory and rip up the only meaningful alliance that keeps you safe in practice at the same time.
This is all to say nothing about trade wars also happening in the background or that literally the only time Article 5 of the same NATO treaty was invoked it was done by the US and paid for with European lives.
I’m generally pro US alliance but it’s also entirely incompatible with a fascist takeover of their government and they absolutely cannot be trusted again until there is serious reform that honestly doesn’t look particularly realistic any time soon.
I'm hopeful that it will create a more robust governance systems on the local level in the long run, but not without more short term pain (after all, there were a lot of non-stateside mouths being fed who will have to figure out realistic alternatives and face once unpalatable choices that will need to be made out of necessity).
I don’t think a lot of Americans have any concept of exactly how much the rest of the world hates them right now but I promise you that you’re living in a very different world moving forward as is everyone else.
You can’t spend generations telling everyone to depend on you precisely because you are selling stability and predictability and then change your mind overnight. That is going to have large multi generational consequences.
My advice is to get on top of your oligarchy problem sooner rather than later and you had best figure out a way that the fate of the world and your country doesn’t rely on what a bunch of people from Iowa think about “wokeness” every 4 years. That’s not sustainable
It is worse. Many don't care. They believe in American exceptionalism.
I just watched a stadium full of Canadian hockey fans boo a black woman in a wheelchair singing the national anthem. I’d politely suggest that while that might look like a funny story on the surface is actually very dangerous.
Edit: updated language to not imply poster is American, I didn’t mean anything personal by it at all but better to clarify all the same.
Who thought Canadians booing the US anthem was funny? I saw anger from jingoistic Americans. Sorrow from others.
If the rest of the world doesn't send munitions on target stateside, Americans wont care. Just like they didn't care for the past 20+ years when DoD was tasked with bombing millions others in far away lands without explicit declaration by congress.
Perhaps those who build their relationships on negotiated reciprocity rather than blind trust will fair better in the coming era.
"If you can't trust America, who can you trust?"
People are motivated to make sure you feel the pain of this situation moving forward.
Right now, its just a clown show in regards to that.
I genuinely don’t mean to imply this as any kind of threat whatsoever just as a friendly pointer but I don’t think yelling “what are you going to do about it?” In a public forum under an alias attached to your real name is a particularly sensible move at the moment.
Lots of things that might have not been a big deal a week ago I would feel a lot less sure about now personally.
People will have hard choices to be made, doubly so for those who have avoided making them. It's great that you seem to now be questioning things you have thought unquestionable; things unfolding now are no surprise to me, and i expect things to get worse, even beyond the current administration or the next until I see people make hard decisions globally.
When the EU tried to set up a small standing armed force in the 90s to serve as an umbrella org in the event of war, the US put pressure on Germany and France not to support it, and it failed.
Now you're seeing the stick. And NATO partners should absolutely up their spending on domestic defense industries. German tanks, Swedish anti-air, Ukrainian drones... you've got more than enough indigenous industry already to not feed the US with your defense dollars.