United States is immune from conventional military attack, the only purpose of mass conscription is to create an expeditionary for invading other countries. You have to wonder whether this may be for Canada / Greenland at some point

Conventional being the key word. Yes, I know that usually is in contrast to nuclear warfare.

There’s really no motivation for China to attack the US (they have plenty of economic leverage and that would be far less costly to them than an invasion, and what would they even want with the territory of a conquered US?) but I suspect many of the reasons the US is assumed to be immune to invasion are far weaker in the face of an enemy with far more manpower and a near-bottomless supply of drones that also has the capacity to cut off our access to key parts, materials, and manufactured goods.

Yes, I suppose it makes no sense to have bases all over the world then.

I see the off ramp: Iran can agree to split the toll fee with Trump, ideally in a special administrative vehicle which Trump himself controls, similar to the funding on the Board of Peace.

demands of this type led to the voluntary withdrawal of service by Facebook from the China market

Amazing series, which somehow survived a forced change of lead actor, and got even better. The story was only marred by rushed ending to the story arc for Season 4, and then a nothingburger of a Season 5. Still, up there with BattleStar Galactica and The Expanse as the greatest TV sci-fi series of all time.

a huge problem, a fair few tourists seem to have been abducted to work in these scam factories, as well as Chinese job seekers answering ads. There's been a round up of some of these scam families, I believe PRC actually executed 11 members of one of these mafias recently.

One of the unanticipated - and probably unintended - outcomes of the kind of hyper nationalism exemplified by Trump's America is that it invariably excludes everyone else. The 'free Internet' turns out to be the 'American Internet', which can be turned against you at any time, for any reason. Cultivating alternatives will be challenging though - can't see anyone doing it to be honest, Europe had a chance in 2000's but complacently thought they would always be in the garden, and are now shocked to find themselves in the jungle. You have to say, China got it right with the Great Firewall, though they too were assisted by early US hostility which underlined the need to de-risk

The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs

Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?

We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?

I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.

It is 2026 and you still speak of the 'free world'. I give you credit for at least using doubt quotes.

How otherwise would you refer to 'The West' which used to be called 'the free world' other than by stating this? Why, then, do you claim I 'speak of the free world'?

History does not change by choosing to ignore it. We in 'The West' used to think of ourselves as 'the free world' and to a large extent there was truth to this claim when comparing 'us' with people behind the Iron Curtain and communist China. Once the wall was broken, the borders opened and the Soviet Union dissolved this ceased to be true. By and large we're still better off than e.g. people in Russia but in many ways it seems like the bad ideas from places like the Soviet Union and China are being implemented at large scale in many countries on the west side of the former Iron Curtain.

So yes, I will keep on referring to these countries in this way, 'used to be called the free world' because this is how those countries did refer to themselves. History matters, it is there to be learned from.

de-risking from the United States is the only choice for anybody who cares about national interests. The question is how to do it on the quiet, and not trigger Trump into another rage tweeted escalation.

Just not talking about it and doing it slowly seems to work? E.g. one of the Dutch pension funds has pulled 1/3rd of their investment of US bonds (10/30 billion) since early 2025. They won't talk about, you'll only see it in their public records/reports. They re-invested the money in Dutch and German bonds.

yeah this is probably the way. One of the features of fascism is general incompetence, springing from destruction of state capacity in favour patronage networks.