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.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a prescient article about this roughly a decade ago:
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.
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.
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.
> Which is exactly what needs to happen. /---/ I don't see a problem with this.
BRUSSELS — U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau on Wednesday slammed European NATO allies for prioritizing their own defense industry over American arms suppliers, according to three NATO diplomats. /---/ Landau, a longtime NATO skeptic who spoke first at the closed-door meeting, told ministers not to “bully” his country’s defense firms out of participating in Europe’s rearmament.
The expectations seems to have been that elevated military spending would flow to US arms manufacturers. Instead, it is flowing to European manufacturers, making them more competitive and reducing the influence that the US government had through export controls, which essentially gave the US veto power over the foreign and defence policies of other countries. That influence is now rapidly waning.
> That sounds like performative politics.
This was the moment when trust was broken beyond repair. No amount of flowers or apologies will restore the trust that was before. It is perhaps one of the most important events of the past decade in US-EU relations and a fundamental shift in the understanding that had stood since 1949 when NATO was established.
> We don't need the US industrial base ramping up for the Ukraine war. We need it ramping up for the war with China.
> 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.
There's a reason why the US government has not achieved any meaningful concessions from Russia since the 2021 ultimatum. The endless talks with Witkoff serve only as a humiliation ritual. Putin even got to walk down a red carpet on US soil while US officers saluted him, all without giving anything in return. Allegedly, that embarrassing Alaska summit happened because Witkoff misunderstood what Russians meant by "withdrawal from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson". He mistook Russian demand for Ukraine to withdraw from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson for an offer by Russia to withdraw its own forces. This led Trump to immediately annouce the summit in Alaska that produced flashy photos for Russian newspapers, but nothing else. My God, what a bunch of retards. They don't even understand what's being told to them, and you're trying to condescendingly convince me that they're playing clever reverse psychology on Europe. It's time to face the reality.
Purchases from US manufacturers have increased, which contradicts your claim that they have not. Europe industrial capacity is also increasing. So, this all sounds fine to me.
I think you vastly overestimate the importance of the Denmark and Greenland thing in terms of meaningful harm to US interests. This is very basic bread and butter foreign policy. Just because it's not what you're used to and makes you uncomfortable doesn't mean it is actually wrong. Your feelings are worthless and reality gets all of the votes.
Re patriot missiles, there are a few things you need to understand. They are not the only kind of defense system we have. We do not publish actual numbers, they are secret. The way our defense acquisitions work is kind of political, so we have to get Congress to invest into any particular needs.
We don't need to scale up patriot missiles anyway, because they aren't the defense system of the future anymore. They have specific uses, but they've been getting used for purposes outside of their optimal. They're too expensive and complicated for the way the world is going.
So everyone has tried things that don't work with Russia. Somehow Trump failing at it in his own way is meaningful? Everything is emotion emotion emotion with you. It's about how you feel, how you project human emotion onto geopolitics. You're wasting your time trying to do that. Oh we should be so ashamed! The drama, the scandal! How inappropriate! The end is near!
Move beyond tabloid thinking and the world will make a lot more sense. Like I said though, we don't need you to understand and most people never will. It's fine.