They definitely shouldn't be after this. This is the waking point, I've read article today that we could ramp up some serious defense within 5 years on old continent, skillset and money are there. This would massively boost parts of our economies, just like US did in WWII. Use russian assets, use green deal money that is beyond useless effort at this point and most costs are covered.
At the end this may be good for us, since Germany's stance has been pretty much retarded re defense to keep things polite. 4 superpowers instead of 3, albeit maybe Hungary and Slovakia should be kicked out to not sabotage it from within.
It seems an era is ending. Just like it did with 9/11, even outside US. All due to one orange man being voted by >50% americans to do exactly this. Why I don't get and probably never will but he is a symptom of current times IMHO, not a cause.
Anyway voting is not about recording a talley for every 18+ year old human with a pulse. It’s citizens selecting a leader and policy from their community. Getting your people out to vote is part of the event.
When people choose not to have their vote represented, for whatever reason, when the outcome was so clear in advance, then there is practically, legally, morally and philosophically no distinction between not voting and voting for Trump.
We (Americans) can’t be relied on. Yeah most Americans are still supportive of Europe but our political system produces whipsaw foreign policy. The end result of all this is America is weakened on the global stage as our allies lose faith in us and start working around us. Why should Europeans boycott China, sanction Iran, support Israel, isolate Cuba, intervene in another Iraq? These are American priorities, not European ones.
Because they are a part of NATO and have basically zero military to speak of on their own. There's a reason all of their proposed plans to support Ukraine include an American backstop: because they can't stand on their own and have relied on US military spending for decades to prop themselves up.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO and has no significant mutual defense treaty with America. We intervened nonetheless, to protect Europe. I think we should continue intervening, but I also think it's ludicrous for the EU to threaten to not support America, when they've allowed their military infrastructure to rot away at our expense.
Why do you think the US is going to remain in NATO for the next 4 years? Trump loves to say the quiet part out loud and he’s been repeatedly threatening to pull out.
If the US pulls out of NATO, then it's true that Europe has very little reason to support American interests (unless America "pulls out" of NATO by renegotiating a new mutual defense pact, in which case the countries in that treaty obviously will have plenty of reason to support America — similar to how Trump replaced NAFTA with the USMCA in his first term; which is also what Trump has said he wants to do with NATO).
However, that is an "if" statement that has not come to pass.
Well, threatening to seize an ally's territory kind of put the ally bit in question doesn't it? For all intents and purposes NATO ended existing with Trumps speculation to use military force to seize Greenland. After that statement nobody can consider the US a reliable ally anymore. So.. the US may not have pulled out of NATO^ but there is absolutely no reason to believe in any kind of support being available from the US either.
^which by-the-by is difficult to achieve on a practical level. Notifications of withdrawal have to be handed in to the US government
If you were correct, then European countries wouldn't keep asking that the US sign an agreement to backstop a Ukraine deal — after all, regardless of the paper, the US wouldn't be trusted to do it.
But they are asking for that; I think you should consider why.
The US has successfully created a system that integrates the US economy with Europe, limiting Europe's choices and greatly enriching the US for decades... and then last week JD Vance in Munich yelled at everyone and claimed the EU was somehow stealing money from the US.
The really funny thing is: Vance is ~right that the Europeans "steal money" from the US. What I do not get is why that is a bad thing. A "trade" nowadays basically always involves one side getting something tangible that they want, be that goods or services or commodities. And the other side getting something intangible claims or money.
If I can get something inherently valuable for essentially nothing but an empty promise? That's an extremely comfortable position to be in..
Look we're all grateful for the Americans that do care about The Alliance but we've seen the political trends in America and it looks bad. You can't elect Trump twice and say it doesn't represent America. Trump's politics isn't going away. The Democrats allowed 'radical' social change to dictate the party platform and didn't implement enough reforms to please the average citizen. Until they do or Trump makes massive blunders we don't have a hope that the old America is coming back.
Everything you're saying about the international trust American voters have betrayed and thrown away is pretty reasonable. But this:
> The Democrats allowed 'radical' social change to dictate the party platform and didn't implement enough reforms to please the average citizen.
is false.
Democratic policy has done plenty to benefit average citizens, in a long tradition (at one point bipartisan) going back to WW2.
And it's never been centered around any idea more "radical" than taking seriously the words of the declaration of independence about equality, inalienable rights, and life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, even for people who are doing something others think is weird.
It's even pretty clear that Democratic policies have strong electoral popularity:
But "swing" voters (assuming they really exist in any form as popularly understood) among others are often not really clear on who supports the policies they prefer. My suspicion is that this comes from Democratic underinvestment and poor investments in media and culture while their opposition has been doing this aggressively, which allows others to define them as radical.
That’s some creative mathematic gymnastics you’re doing there. “Anyone who didn’t vote chose the one who gamed the electoral college best.”
But that still does NOT mean anywhere near half of Americans actively chose the current situation. To say so is wholly, maliciously, egregiously disingenuous.
EDIT - Showing my work:
US Census in 2020 - 331,449,281
2024 Trump votes - 77,284,118
Even skipping any possibility for growth since 2020, 77.3mil/331.5mil is not “>50% of Americans” by any possible mathematical definition.
You're right that my numbers were of the voting eligible population, though, and not the total population. Okay, so let's work that out.
244,666,890 total eligible voters
- 156,336,693 total ballots cast
= 88,330,197 passive votes for Trump
88,330,197 passive votes for Trump
+ 77,284,118 active votes for Trump
= 165,613,316 total votes for Trump
/ 331,449,281 total US population
= 49.9% of the total population figure
That is, indeed, just shy of 50%. So I'll concede that Trump did not have >50% of Americans supporting him. Just >50% of American voters.
No. Passive voters effectively for the winner, not the loser even if they don't know in advance who that will be. They're delegating their decision to their fellow actual voters, whatever that may be. Perhaps it's because they trust others to know better or perhaps because they don't care. I've tried to do this explicitly in a small club election submitting my vote as for "whoever gets the most votes" but the administrators didn't like that :P
Nobody gamed the electoral college this election. Trump won the popular vote too.
Many voters are voting for the lesser of two evils; they don't like either candidate. Non-voters are simply taking that to the next level: they can't decide between two evils strongly enough to value casting a vote.
Bikeshedding over the difference between active vs passive votes in a single-winner first-past-the-post election is fruitless.
If they're truly both evils, there's always the option to do a write-in vote for someone else. Futile? Sure. But hopefully headlines like "X won the election with 30% of the vote" would start to raise eyebrows in ways that "X won the election with 49% of the vote" doesn't.
> ll due to one orange man being voted by >50% americans to do exactly this. Why I don't get and probably never will...
Not agreeing is one thing, but it is a remarkably easy decision to understand - people go to WWII because every single war since then has been a disaster for US interests and outcomes (I think every single, certainly most). The last time the US had an unambiguous win by fighting was 70 years ago when they got involved in a fight very late. Since then all the warmongering has made America poorer, they don't achieve anything good and generally make the US worse off.
They made a call that they don't trust the military industrial propaganda and they want to see some peace happening for once. Pretty solid decision too; if we can all have normalised relations with the US after Iraq then we can stomach Russia misbehaving in Ukraine. Escalating a land war in Europe is stupid and its been a mistake every other time the Europeans tried it; even in WWII where they claim to be justified. The blood-lust left everyone closely involved broken and it'd have been better if they found a more peaceful route to ending the violence. The fact that they failed to negotiate something doesn't mean it was impossible.
The last time the US had an unambiguous win by fighting was 70 years ago when they got involved in a fight very late.
No, it was in 1999. A short aerial bombing campaign that lasted less than 3 months and cost less than 600 lives ended a decade of wars in former Yugoslavia that had killed 140 000 people and made millions refugees. What an incredibly small price to pay for peace.
Ukraine needs the same kind of support, but instead, they got misguided "de-escalation" that only boxed Ukraine in and gave the initiative to Russia. By knowing that the US would force Ukraine to throttle back every time the Russians made a large misstep, Russia was encouraged to keep escalating without the fear of triggering an overwhelming response.
That war was a huge win for the US, much more so than for the reasons you mention there. It was the first time they managed to convince other NATO pact countries to execute a unilateral offensive campaign, until then a defensive alliance. The PR campaign had to be extensive and effective to justify violating the UN charter, and it was - for the first time successfully positioning a US-led NATO-run offensive war as altruistically motivated in the public eye, paving the way for the numerous wars that followed.
The campaign was valuable to everyone involved. The US got to assert itself as a global moral authority, also finally getting to build Camp Bondsteel[0] after decades of trying to build a base in the region (the largest US base on foreign soil since Vietnam, and it was built and managed by KBR meaning Dick Cheney and his shareholders also profited considerably; they've since lost interest so nowadays it's just a mini Gitmo). For the allies that backed them and helped justify the war, they received carte blanche permission to do what they like and settle their own scores. Their Dutch friends, for example, got to brazenly violate international law from the start by dumping their out-of-date depleted uranium cluster bombs on my densely populated home town[1], choosing to target the main building of our university, the main building of our city hospital, and the biggest civilian central steam heating plant that kept half the city warm.
The campaign did have some negative effects though. In the east it was interpreted as a deliberate provocation toward Russia at a time of particular weakness (their president getting hammered and falling out of planes etc), and Putin used this extensively as an example of Russian embarrassment at the hands of the US, helping him rise to power as PM in August '99, acting President in December '99, and President in March '00.
I'm not particularly emotional about any of this btw - I just thought you'd appreciate the geopolitical perspective and the ripple effect that war had on Russian politics & subsequent opinion towards the West.
The Russian-leaning world remembers this event differently, they think of it as the US unilaterally bombing Yugoslavia, taking out a Chinese installation full of Chinese nationals, and facing absolutely no consequences or ill effects.
This was one of the factors that guided Putin's thinking when he took Crimea.
At the very least, protecting Ukraine's skies when Russia started targeting its cities with missiles would have been exactly the right move, an appropriate international response to warfare against the civilian population. A huge missed opportunity.
Shooting down incoming missiles is not considered an act of war under international law. It falls under self defense. Japan has shot down a number of North Korean missiles and nobody has accused them of declaring war on North Korea.
Planes stopped flying over Ukrainian-held territory only a few weeks into the invasion. Since then, they've mainly launched glide bombs from far away, due to the high risk of being shot down if they penetrated Ukrainian airspace.
There's nothing preventing Ukraine's allies from setting up air defenses and fighter patrols to shoot down drones and missiles. A number of countries did just that when Iran launched a missile attack on Israel last year.
> Since then, they've mainly launched glide bombs from far away, due to the high risk of being shot down if they penetrated Ukrainian airspace.
And Russia would go back to planes if other countries were shooting down their missiles, because they know that other countries would hesitate to declare war by shooting down one of their planes. Other countries taking over this responsibility neutralizes the air defense against planes.
Ukraine can shoot down planes on its own, that needs no foreign assistance. Feels like you're just looking for excuses to sit idle and give the initiative to the aggressor.
This is simply not the case.
There US has very successfully used it’s military to enjoy the position of absolute top dog in the world, but a major part of why they could do that was that the US has made very strong allies in the whole rest of the western world who have never, until now, seen any reason to try to compete with the US in this regard.
A well placed network of foreign aid has also generated influence in other parts of the world.
The United States has now irrevocably destroyed this position.
There will be enough time for the Trump Family and Elon to make out like the bandits they are, but the US position long term is diminished.
Can any of those things be traced back to a specific positive outcome for anyone outside the US weapons industry? Like, say the US hadn't invaded Afghanistan back in '01 and the trillion dollars in budget had been put towards handing out how dinners for the poor instead - what would the negative part of that trade off have been?
> Can any of those things be traced back to a specific positive outcome for anyone outside the US weapons industry
Yes, you have a ton of money to buy stuff that is much cheaper for you than for anyone else in the world because of the global reserve currency being in dollars, not to mention smooth trade guaranteed by the existence of the US navy.
Every thing you do is positively benefited by America's ability to project its military might across the globe.
American hegemony happened by chance, and the dollar just won the reserve currency lottery?
Granted, not every war was a net win but that war machine is uniquely expensive and it may be sacrifice the public is willing to pay. But it probably wouldn't hurt to see how contemporary books on history differs from propaganda.
Wouldn't have happened. A series of impressive military victories early in WWII looms large in peoples heads, but there's no getting away from the raw numbers of how outclassed Germany was wrt material and manpower against the USSR. Barbarossa was launched on very limited, low quality intelligence, and even when more accurate numbers came in regarding Soviet division numbers in 1942, the top brass refused to believe it.
Who can tell what would have happened? It sure would not have been easy without US support:
"... Lend-Lease, including 1,911 locomotives and 11,225 railcars. Trucks were also vital; by 1945, nearly a third of the trucks used by the Red Army were US-built. Trucks such as the Dodge 3⁄4-ton and Studebaker 2+1⁄2-ton were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical."
At the end this may be good for us, since Germany's stance has been pretty much retarded re defense to keep things polite. 4 superpowers instead of 3, albeit maybe Hungary and Slovakia should be kicked out to not sabotage it from within.
It seems an era is ending. Just like it did with 9/11, even outside US. All due to one orange man being voted by >50% americans to do exactly this. Why I don't get and probably never will but he is a symptom of current times IMHO, not a cause.