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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

>But remember: Power is rarely taken but mostly given.

I don't care about the US being a powerful country. I'm tired of being the world's police. I'm against so-called "American imperialism". I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone. Switzerland has a much healthier relationship with the rest of Europe, without toxic dependency.

That's my metric regarding whether an approach is "productive" or not. Give it 10 years until the US/Europe relationship resets to the Switzerland/Europe relationship. That's the goal.

I'd say Trump has already succeeded by this metric in terms of Europe taking responsibility for itself. That's the first step. You need to stop depending on us so you'll stop resenting us.

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The comparison with Switzerland is stretching things a bit thin.

Switzerland never threatened Germany to become the 27th canton. They didn't threaten military allies with military intervention. They also do not keep permanent military bases in other countries, in practice autonomous zones where there are intermittent scandals where Swiss law protects rapists. No other counties dutifully joined any Swiss invasions in the Middle East.

Europe did not have to shoulder orders of magnitude (look it up) more refugees from these wars than the instigator of the wars. The Swiss do not regularly use their economic power to force other countries to share passenger data for all transit, they do not force far reaching intellectual property legislation of all sorts on other countries.

The Swiss, however, do a lot of other strange things. They are basically a bank with national sovereignity which economically has kept up a very strong industrial appendix with a very strong, primarily industrially focused, engineering sector. The post-WW2 history contains a lot of stones largely left unturned, and there is zero chance another coutry could occupy this particular nation state evolution niche.

>Switzerland never threatened Germany to become the 27th canton. They didn't threaten military allies with military intervention. They also do not keep permanent military bases in other countries, in practice autonomous zones where there are intermittent scandals where Swiss law protects rapists. No other counties dutifully joined any Swiss invasions in the Middle East.

>Europe did not have to shoulder orders of magnitude (look it up) more refugees from these wars than the instigator of the wars. The Swiss do not regularly use their economic power to force other countries to share passenger data for all transit, they do not force far reaching intellectual property legislation of all sorts on other countries.

Exactly. We are in violent agreement. You're doing an excellent job of explaining why the US should be more Swiss, as I've been saying.

>there is zero chance another coutry could occupy this particular nation state evolution niche.

Of course we won't do exactly what the Swiss have done, e.g. we will continue to have a major software industry. My point is we should have a more Swiss approach to foreign policy.

> I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone.

Imposing tariffs and threatening annexation of former allies is not a great start.

But you will get a lot more of the "anti-americanism" you were crying about some comments ago. Better get used to it, it has merely started.

>Imposing tariffs and threatening annexation of former allies is not a great start.

I'm against annexation of Greenland as I stated elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43460070

The US, as a sovereign country, has just as much right to levy taxes on imports as any other country.

> I'm against annexation of Greenland

You, personally, being against it means little, when your president openly threatens it.

> The US, as a sovereign country, has just as much right to levy taxes on imports

And other countries, in their own sovereignty, have just as much right to retaliate with tarriffs of their own, and do trade deals amongst themselves.

>You, personally, being against it means little, when your president openly threatens it.

You can discount all of my opinions due to me not being president then :-)

>And other countries, in their own sovereignty, have just as much right to retaliate with tarriffs of their own, and do trade deals amongst themselves.

Agreed.

> Agreed

And that, friend, is called a trade war.

Good that we made some progress here.

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