i think the more successful organized crime rackets let you know it's a dangerous world, you really need protection, it isn't really optional. but if you pay and pay regularly they treat you to some degree like a customer, and refrain from busting your kneecaps unless you give them trouble.
tribute is a price paid for protection. a protection racket perhaps, but there’s no point paying the tribute if they’ll kneecap you anyway. there are some contradictions even in the most cynical readings of US behavior.
India is jealously nonaligned but wants to be part of a US-led Pacific security bloc. I agree with you, I think, that America's core alliances now are Pacific. Note that the allies Trump is threatening are only European and North American. His pivot to Asia tosses the rest on the garbage heap.
i don't think that's right. India does not treat China as an existential threat, despite even recently hot disputes. it's a complex mix of partner and security concern. European countries would be loathe to partner with Russia, but don't treat China as equivalent. Brazil sees threat in none of them.
(when i first started traveling to Romania there was an IT firm IDM whose logo was IBM's exactly unless you looked very carefully.)
(more seriously, yes, US IP interests would not favor compulsive licensing of anything by anyone. the US public, on the other hand...)
(good piece. i think it's more likely a new unipolar system, or two largely decoupled systems would emerge, than anything that would be genuinely multipolar. it's conceivable a new quasimultipolar system could be coordinated around SDRs or something, but we are farther than ever from that.)
i'm not saying it's easy or any alternative is close. i'm saying that although coordination equilibria are hard to break, they are not impossible to break, and the more parties feel trapped and mistreated in the existing equilibrium the more potentially successful work will be done to break them.
I mostly agree. But the now broader group does also have some shared interests. Yes, they begin from a random investor note about which emerging markets happened to be booming. But that's of only historical interest now. 1/
The emerging group represents a coalition of governments with some degree of dissatisfaction towards what they perceive as an unjust status quo world order, or with some desire to hedge the potential end of that order. 2/
Several members have an interest in evading USG financial chokepoints, and are working to develop alternative rails. If the US mistreats even its allies, an interest in those rails could become more widely shared. /fin
that's right. but between them, they are experimenting with alternative payments systems. i agree they are unlikely to become the new NATO. but i think they'd be glad to share a new SWIFT. so far their experiments haven't gone far. but really, it isn't rocket science. it'd be like BlueSky emerging.
At a basic level, USD's special status has been anchored by a security arrangement. Allied governments (except sometimes France) don't try to diversify out of it in part bc it finances the US military umbrella. Change the arrangement, and others might become curious abt say what the BRICs are up to.
it might be a hard sell for Republicans would risk three Canadian states, even if Alberta would in all likelihood be red.
"The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic was (and is) to reconcile workers to precarity." ~Becca Rothfeld reviewing @erikmbaker.bsky.social's "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0... ht @steveroth.bsky.social
Review | The can-do spirit that undermines American workers
Link Preview: Review | The can-do spirit that undermines American workers: In “Make Your Own Job,” Erik Baker argues that we have been tricked into regarding personal resilience as the solution to structural injustice
the genius move would be to use the anti-Denmark animus he is ginning up to justify compulsory licensing of Ozempic / Wegovy at generic prices. he'd become the most popular President in history.
the area should be delineated in the traditional Sharpie.
It's an ugly situation for sure.
from Fiona Hill, just after the start of the Ukraine war www.politico.com/news/magazin...
Text: I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
i'm whimsically suggesting i'd be okay with Canada taking over the United States, which would be the effect of this variation.
i'd be more positively disposed if the plan was to divide Canada into states, each with the population of Wyoming. Republicans like small states, right?
fifty-something, probably two or three more than CA.
fifty-something yeah. and two whole senators!