Meanwhile our President also keeps threatening to invade sovereign territory (Greenland) of a NATO ally (Denmark) and using language w/r/t Canada that is almost indistinguishable from how Russia talked about Ukraine a decade ago. And Canadians are fucking pissed about it.
It's very, very different than his first term or even Iraq.
This time it is diplomats that are raising the flags. It actually has not yet arrived in the public sphere as drastically as it has in the policy side.
In the first term Trump was unprepared, now they had 4 years to prepare and it seems they are very methodical in dismantling US global influence, and but also dismantling structures internally.
As far as I'm worried about security of Europe or Far East allies (Japan, SK, Taiwan, Philippines), I'm worried about future of US itself.
Europeans see this as treason, and it is.
We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)
We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?
And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.
Now we have a dim view of Americans.
There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.
And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.