Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

It is not at all obvious to me that those scenarios are irrelevant today.

* The US is poised to strongly take Israel's side in a conflict with Iran, which could easily evolve into either a misadventure, oil shock, or WW3

* The US is poised to withdraw from NATO, ceding a significant amount of geopolitical clout to Russia in particular. This would undermine a bunch of our military efforts abroad, relegating them to the bin of "misadventure." To say nothing of the proposed acquisition of Greenland.

View on HN

But none of the things have happened yet, nor are there any signs they're immediately about to.

They might happen any year.

And fortunately, Iran isn't doing anything belligerent at the moment -- they got their butts kicked last year and are missing a lot of their previous protection. And no, the US isn't "poised to withdraw from NATO". Nobody's even talking about that. I mean, a lot of bad stuff is going on, but withdrawal from NATO has not been in any news cycles.

> And no, the US isn't "poised to withdraw from NATO". Nobody's even talking about that.

Trump, the current president of the US, is. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-would-happen-us-leaves-...

Congress found the scenario credible enough to pass a law specifically making it more difficult for him to do unilaterally.

> But none of the things have happened yet, nor are there any signs they're immediately about to.

Proving the nonexistence of signs is not a position I would be willing to take as it is far too philosophically difficult to defend.

The reality is that both the Ukrainian and Iranian situations are far from an equilibrium; there don't need to be signs to know that dramatic changes are coming, we just can't tell what those changes will actually look like.

You said "poised".

None of that is anywhere close to "poised". You're linking to an article describing a comment from 7 years ago.

"A 2% chance of happening this year" (or even 10%) is not "poised".

> And no, the US isn't "poised to withdraw from NATO". Nobody's even talking about that.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-2025-na...

* https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/trump-may-withdraw-us-from-n...

* https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/its-time-for-the-us-to...

* https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/analytics/nato-under-trump-possib...

I don't know how close to withdrawing from NATO the US actually is, but people are talking about it. The aggressive stance the US President has towards two NATO members makes it seem like it could happen soon.

* https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-offshore-drilling-gul...

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-nato-allies-1....

The US isn't "poised". Nobody's talking about actually doing it.

Sure you can write what-if's, but the current administration hasn't brought it up. They've brought up a lot of bad and dumb stuff, but not that.

I think Russia lost a lot of clout all by itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com