Why does the US get to unilaterally decide who gets sanctioned and who doesn't?
Europe has a lot more to loose on an unstable Iran than the US and can't risk deals being undone because the US has a new regime every 4 years.
Europe has a lot more to loose on an unstable Iran than the US and can't risk deals being undone because the US has a new regime every 4 years.
2 wrestlers fight for some good amount of time. When they're tired enough, a 3rd wrestler gets in and beats both.
That was World War II for the most part. After World War II, most of the world was destroyed except for the US.
After the war, the US never left. Overseas bases still exist in Germany, Japan and many other places.
They had everyone adopt a financial system (Bretton Woods) which was largely abused making the US absurdly rich for a few decades... highways, higher education for a bunch of people, space exploration, absurd wars thousands of miles away, a gigantic navy and air force, you name it.
After other countries realized it was a scam (aka "exorbitant privilege"), this golden era ended and the US started to slowly meet reality, rapidly accumulating debt.
The inevitable fate of the US is to collapse in the same way the Soviet Union did in 1989. This will likely happen before 2050 and you read it first in the comments section of HN.
Once the US collapses, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance will be worthless and South America will be taken apart in a giant pinata party starting by the Argentinean Patagonia.
While the final phase took several years, USSR collapsed in 1991. 1989 was de-facto collapse of Warsaw Pact (Berlin Wall).
I lived in USSR/Russia back then, and for the last almost 2 decades i've been living in the US. While a bunch of things went downhill during that time here, the US and USSR doesn't even come close. Specifically, in major part the USSR collapse was due to lowest (at least among developed countries) productivity of its economy, from agriculture to high-tech. The country basically ran out of food. Compare that to the US where economic productivity, from agriculture to high-tech is among highest in the world. Granted, the current administration seems to be hell-bent on doing as much damage to the US economy as possible, yet i think the US economy will be in pretty good shape even after those 6 more years that Trump is going to spend in the office (the damage he is going to do in the next 2 years wouldn't be enough for his electorate to trim their enthusiasm).
The US is largely living beyond its means at the moment and this situation is not sustainable in the long term.
And this isn't even me being a jingoistic American, I was born in Canada.