'They shot all their weapons; they trashed their ships; they ran out of money'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And yet Switzerland is still going through with the deal but just buying half as many planes.
Oh well, guess we’ve blown up nearly a century of diplomacy to placate some narcissists.
The vandalization of US soft power mechanisms by Musk and others comes into this too. Nobody else is willing to jump into this mess and get dragged down with us.
One could argue soft power would extend a weakening hegemony, but maybe only to a point?
Regardless of whatever the US leaders are saying at any given time, it seems to me (as an outsider) that their actual actions, regardless of Democrat/Republican, continually benefit China's long term prosperity.
But I only see what I'm shown, and I have no idea what I don't know... So all I can really do is shrug.
Look at the example of the failed munitions plant in Texas in the last two years for what happens without either of the above.
Since arguably the 1940s the people running the United States have been consistently trading power over the domains they consider illegible and confusing for power over the domains they consider tractable and familiar, under elite job market conditions where they are incentivised to know as much as possible about abstract court politics and the manipulation of language and as little as possible about the real world.
Even right now, you see the Trump family, the various oligarch families in the cabinet, fiddling the figures, stealing and enabling mass disasters, they are doing what they believe is right and good while having horrific delusions.
Two excellent primers on this, albeit with more of a focus on the parallel problem in the EU establishment than the US, are below:
My question was grounded in ignorance and curiosity. Appreciate the response, gives me a lot to think about. Cheers
I don’t say that lightly, and it’s certainly not just the US that has that problem either. Australia, where I live, is infected with it.
When I said leadership, I didn't mean just the president, but all those with the most power and influence leading the country. Presidents, senators, Congress, supreme Court justices, Federal department heads, etc.
It seems like the things that made america powerful have been chipped away at over decades. Maybe it's just a lifecycle playing out and inevitable?
China's relative advantage is like a club level tennis player: all you need to win is to make fewer dumb errors.
I'm sure that anyone who is e.g. a Democrat is offended by me saying that I've noticed the both sides weakening the US and will want me to list examples, but I'm not going to do that because anytime I have in the past people respond with extreme hostility instead of curiosity. If you don't agree with me that's fine move along.
That's a pretty bold claim, especially insofar as it (perhaps unintentionally) sounds like you're claiming both parties have weakened the US to the same degree.
It wouldn't surprise me if you listed out some ways in which Democrat incompetence has hurt US soft power, since screwing up is kinda their thing. However, given what Trump has done in his two terms so far, it's a tough sell that the two parties are playing the same sport, let alone fall into the same league in terms of damage wrought. It sounds like a strong application of Murc's Law absent your actual list.
My insider's view is that the Republican party will burn my house down, while the Democrats will form a committee that concludes they cannot send a fire truck to put it out and they absolutely cannot hold the responsible Republican members accountable unless they can get bipartisan support. Both need to go, but I have no illusions that one isn't better than the other.
1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=murc%27s+law
From speaking to my US friends who span several states and both parties, and are all intelligent, kind, and thoughtful people, it really seems like the US is being ripped apart - and people who are on one side or the other aren't really seeing the full picture, likely by design.
To what degree the leadership is involved in the ripping is really impossible for me to know. I look at one place and it looks one way, I look at another place and it looks another way, and the ways it looks are mostly incompatible with each other.
The one consistency I see no matter where I look is that we as in all of us living in western democracies are being divided, trust is being attacked and game theory lose-lose is being promoted. There are pockets of resistance, but the consistent theme is of dissolution.
So I may ask some question that comes off as weird, it's because I'm skeptical of whatever media says and asking questions I haven't heard anyone else ask - mostly just to poke at reality and see what happens.
Hit me again, hit me hard.