Which nation states might you consider more politically stable than the US, even now?
>under this president and the one who replaces him in three years.
The levels of optimism in this sentence are off the charts. The US's political systems are so weak, fragile and compromised that you don't even know if you're going to hold proper midterms or if you're going to get a civil war, the current president is threatening the FED, but sure, debts are going to be paid when it's ran by the dude that managed to bankrupt casinos.
It's time to stop magical, wishful thinking about how you want the world to be, and deal with the world as it is.
In practice, he has the authority to do anything he wants. Who is going to stop him? You? His pets in Congress? JPow's private hit squad? Clarence Thomas?
The first rule of neo-America is that you're playing the Chairman's Game[1], and there are no more rules. Its counterparties should bargain with it accordingly.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game) [2]
[2] The Chairman's Game is a game invented in a university. Some say it was invented at Stanford, while others say it was invented at MIT. It was inspired by a formerly prominent, but now somewhat disgraced Chinese politician that was famous for coming up with a lot of interesting new rules for his subjects to follow, and enforcing those rules very harshly, without necessarily informing those subjects what those rules were. It's a little bit like Uno, a little bit like Crazy Eights, and the only thing that I can tell you about it is that there are times, when playing this game, when it is not a good idea to speak.
Yes, ultimately Clarence Thomas and his eight friends, or Congress.
If you're waiting for Republicans to save you from his madness, you'll be waiting for a long time.
Add to that the rampant debt increase over many decades and zero political will to rectify the situation, which is why the rate of return is so much higher than in more politically stable countries such as for example Switzerland, Germany or Sweden.
2. The majority of his followers have some level of cult like adoration for him and therefore he isn't worried about losing support for radical actions.
3. Republican voters have been told to not trust the experts, news, or the opposing political party which eliminates all outside sources of information. This allows them to make claims about our debt or why we shouldn't pay it and many of these voters won't get opposing views.
4. Trump wants a massive increase in spending for the military and has cut taxes. While at the same time Republicans ran on the high debt. Not paying it by claiming it's invalid solves that.
Sort of definitionally, nothing in that list is going to be more politically stable than the US.
In the second link, the author gives slightly lower country risk premiums (0% vs 0.2%) to Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland. Setting aside the practicality of these recommendations (how much debt does Liechtenstein issue? or Germany, for that matter?): in a world where the US is unstable, it's hard to imagine Canada being risk-free.
Canada needs to pursue further armament (Carney is pursuing a doubling of its defense budget) and training in asymmetrical warfare.
There's a reason proper countries have had 5+ constitutions and keep changing them.
1. As recently wargamed by the Canadian military.
Then I remembered the building works, and thought "If it happened, how would anyone even notice?"
How does it feel to bury your head in the sand so hard that you can't see what's happening around you?
There are probably two or three different commenting guidelines this runs afoul of: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The US can no longer be trusted based on the actions of this administration. Other countries are pragmatically and reasonably adjusting accordingly, very publicly. There are other options besides the US from an economic, trade, investment, and defense ally perspective. These are facts. Whether you believe them is a choice.
Europe is learning that a ‘deal’ with Trump doesn’t exist - https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/business/trump-davos-greenlan... - January 21st, 2026
That is such a naively simplistic view of how the world works it reads like it's straight from a Daily Mail or Fox News headline, which always say "Europe does X" - like, who is Europe? Are they in the room with us now?
"Europe is learning" should say - (some) European states are learning, and they are learning that you cannot negotiate with convicted criminals and fascists - they will betray you on a whim because they do not answer to anyone, not even themselves.
They (we) are all under attack.
That's a crazily high confidence prediction. What is their track record? What did they predict 5 years ago and how did those predictions bear out?
Edit: whoops, CFR only gives Russia a 9/10 score, not the full 10/10 score of 50% default probability.