It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
Being less predictable makes it harder for our adversaries to calculate. We're still good people, but we're in bad times. You don't need to understand. Through most of history only a tiny number of people anywhere in the world truly understood what was going on and what was necessary to respond to the times. This is true in science as well. How many times in history was it only a few scientists that had a clearer picture? Everyone thinks their religion is _the_ religion. The same can apply to news and opinions.
If you think the US is about Trump's ego, you still don't understand.
Moreover, Trump has made public comments regarding treaty obligations and international law that makes it clear he has no respect for those things, and there are no principles he follows at all so no one can predict what he will do next.
Renegotiating the deal around Greenland prevents the risk of Greenland becoming independent and falling out of NATO since it would not remain in NATO by default.
It's not normal to capture heads of state, but Maduro was not the head of state as he was not recognized as elected by the world. It's not normal to kill heads of state, like Saddam Hussein or the leadership of Iran, but Iraq and Iran have something in common. Both Iraq and Iran attempted to assassinate US presidents multiple times, not to mention the mass killing of their own people. When Iraq attempted to kill a past US president, Bill Clinton had Iraq's special services HQ obliterated and no love was lost eventually when Saddam was hanged by his own people.
Learn more about what China has been doing in their region, around the world and inside the US. China thinks they can break all of the rules and then feign cute innocence like everyone else is crazy as if they are the only one following international law, when it is nonsense. We're operating right at the edge of the rules for sure. You won't find me disagreeing about that.
Our current foreign policy is the most sane it has been in a while, yet it looks a bit more extreme as a result of being so far behind on it. This is mostly what catching up looks like, when being polite doesn't get the job done fast enough.
The Greenland deal was always going to be renegotiated as it always has been, once again antagonizing allies was completely unnecessary.
The US is not operating at the edge of the rules, it is constantly breaking them and tearing down any respect that the world still had for the rules.
At this point I don't know why the world should even have a more positive view of the US than of China. China is far more peaceful and helpful.
None of these countries want to be more reliant on China. While China may be benefiting from their propaganda against the general populations, western leadership is a little more clear eyed about the risks of China. It's more for China to lose if they try to take Taiwan.
Whether the rhetoric around Greenland was entirely unnecessary or not, it may have accelerated the timeline on getting a deal done and this is Trump's negotiation style since he's been doing it forever. It's also interesting strategically, because if you'll recall China's brand of communism was only partially class warfare, but was also anti-colonialism. Framing all such foreign interests as colonial acts even though that is not what we're doing, paints any action by China that looks similar to Cube or Venezuela (which are 2 variants of scenarios we have theorized China might use against Taiwan) will inevitably draw comparisons, even though the details around our actions are very different than the overall rhetoric we're using.
The rules aren't gone. If you look at the rules the US has historically tried to enforce in terms of international law, we're largely still doing that. Do people think that Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela have been following and promoting international law? No. They've been actively and aggressively breaking them, because they see it as a strategic advantage to do so. If we make it impossible for us to respond to their rule breaking, by not getting creative with the rules ourselves, then we allow them to legitimize their rule breaking as the new international norm. Putin says hey, don't do that, hey you can't do that! China says hey, that's against international law, we're stable, you can't do that! It's only to serve their own interests. Of course there are red lines, but they can't say we're crossing red lines of behavior that they themselves are engaging in. That is the game.
If you legitimately don't understand why China is bad, then learn. You're running out of time to do so.
After years of mocking the sovereignty of allies like Canada and Denmark, are they more or less likely to support the US in the event of a war with China? Less likely, and the same applies to most other countries, too.
Chinese analysts have a long history of being hilariously wrong. After all, communism, merit based. Pick one.
Maybe you'll notice that Canada has been a bit leftist for a while. Maybe you'll notice that historically if a country's sovereignty is questioned or nationalist sentiments increase, these countries begin to lean back to the right. Maybe you'll notice we've been doing that intentionally around the world to make the world more conservative. Globalism went too far and for strategic reasons it would be beneficial to unwind that some. These are basic things. It has the extra benefit that China has less influence with conservatives, so by increasing the influence of conservatives around the world, we are simultaneously reducing China's influence in those places.
Maybe you'll notice that we haven't actually invaded Greenland or Canada. Maybe you'll notice that the countries we're actually physically acting against are dictatorships, not democracies.
We don't need you to understand. You will feel all your emotions and your emotions will control you and you will behave exactly like we're banking on you to. The reality is that the US remains the only superpower despite China's advancements and we're still using that power for good, whether you realize it or not.
> Exactly, and our allies aren't going away.
Anything US-related is increasingly seen as a liability. Take the HIMARS, for example. An increasing number of countries that recently bought HIMARS are favouring South Korean Chunmoo for their next purchases. Chunmoo comes with technology transfer that allows customers to maintain the launchers and manufacture the ammunition themselves, whereas HIMARS is micromanaged from Washington, and poorly so.
> Maybe you'll notice that we haven't actually invaded Greenland or Canada.
> The reality is that the US remains the only superpower
The US is losing credibility as a security guarantor, because it has failed to impose its will even on countries such as Iran. From failing to adopt modern anti-drone warfare, and using very expensive interceptor missiles instead, and then running out of them, we can all see that the US military and industrial might is a postcard from the past.
Why does China even need to fight or even directly confront the US when it can simply bribe its government into halting military aid to Taiwan, pressuring Taiwan to surrender, and pressuring others to drop their sanctions? Putin offered Lukoil to Trump's buddies, and today's WSJ top story says that Trump is pressuring Europe to resume buying Russian gas so that his friends can use intermediaries like Lukoil to skim their share of the revenue and enrich themselves. China can offer TSMC to Trump's buddies, too. That would send decades of US wargaming down the toilet, just as Trump's actions have done regarding Iran and Russia.
Which is exactly what needs to happen.
> An increasing number of countries that recently bought HIMARS are favouring South Korean Chunmoo for their next purchases.
I don't see a problem with this.
> The threat to Greenland got real enough that Denmark moved special forces to Greenland, rigged airport runways with explosives to disrupt US airborne assaults, and stocked up on blood to treat casualties. Only then did the rhetoric from Washington change. That burned through most of the goodwill Denmark (and many of its supporters) had towards the US.
That sounds like performative politics. It says nothing about how real the threat actually was and is more likely a performative political demonstration to Greenland that being tied to Denmark has value, which would be a net win for the US since a large part of our concern about Greenland was that they were being given the option to become independent. So performative politics for Greenlanders that has strategic benefit to the US more than Denmark, or useful military practice. It doesn't make it any more real or not.
> Doubtful if the US deserves to be called a superpower anymore. Instead of supporting Ukraine to the fullest extent possible and setting an example that America's partners are not to be messed with, the US government has consistently shown weakness by falling for Putin's bluffs and humiliating itself in the process. Witkoff calling Putin a "humanist" is a good recent example. Pathetic beyond words.
We don't need the US industrial base ramping up for the Ukraine war. We need it ramping up for the war with China. Europe needs to be ramping up for the European war.
As far as Steve Witkoff goes, he's literally a special diplomatic envoy. The point of a diplomat is not to go and insult the people you're communicating with, it's to achieve results through diplomatic means. Saying positive things is also a way to get your message into Russia past the censors.
If you let the media tell you what to think and feel, then they will preserve your lack of understanding of what is happening which creates a self reinforcing cycle of you depending on their nonsense.
That's correlation, not causation. Switzerland made enormous amounts of money from its banking secrecy system over many decades until the US pressured it to end it. And the trends are not looking good for Switzerland based on data. We'll see how stable it remains as the cost of living keeps rising, real wages decline, and unemployment goes up.
If you provide wealth and a good lifestyle to your citizens, then almost any system will be stable.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a prescient article about this roughly a decade ago:
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)
Didn't the U.S. also have all those problems, despite having a president?
There was an assertion made in an ancestor comment that a committee without a leader can't function, but that doesn't seem proven by those problems in Roman history under their Senate, since the U.S. with a president had the same kinds of problems.
I assume other factors are at play, oligarchs for example. And I question the downside risk of having a strong presidency, cult of personality for example.
I agree that the term "did just fine" is subjective.
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
They will choose who will that be by a committee, but after that they have to function as usual.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
The same as every company I've ever worked for, large or small.
Some systems obfuscate it more than others, but at the end of the day somebody has to have the executive power to make a decision when the chips are down, or you just have chaos
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
Also, see the Tomato guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUBdX1d3ok