@akkartik i’m sorry. i’m a vector.

@akkartik very few checks. there’s the war powers act, a custom at best honored in the breach. i wonder how resistant the military would be to some bizarre adventure, and whether Trump would have the energy to knock heads in order to insist.

@akkartik i guess i’m not as sanguine. it’s really weird. hopefully it’s just bullshit, but if it isn’t it amounts to an open concession of reversion to great power sphere-of-interest politics, which is exactly what Russia and China have been demanding, and post-Cold-War Pax Americana, for all its flaws, has resisted.

@carolannie right. it would kill NATO more definitively than a mere withdrawal (which a future government might reverse). there would be no effective Article 5 counter to NATO’s biggest power.

a panama thing, let alone some greenland / canada / mexico thing, would instantly justify in retrospect russia’s ukraine thing and in prospect china’s taiwan thing. kind of what a russian-asset american president might attempt.

“We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.” @davidfrenchjag https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/opinion/christmas-jesus-power-humility.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

@dpp this Court is an (unlovely, poisonous) oak tree in this storm, rather than a willow.

@dpp there's a chicken egg problem there, especially with the constitutionalization of campaign finance nonreform via Citizens United and other Roberts Court decisions. something is going to have to give. things already are beginning to give, and it isn't and won't be pretty i think.

it's not that remunerative jobs are boring. it's that they are mostly unethical.

@migurski they say no wars in his term (they overlook the crushing of ISIS and accelerated drone wars), tried to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. they see Biden as risking WWIII, doubling down on an ill-starred US orchestrated coup in Ukraine (Maidan 2014).

to be clear, these are far from my views.

@carolannie even though i have lots of disagreements with him in general, i found this surprising and disappointing.

@Gustodon 🙂

@Gustodon i've done a fair amount of grabbing and shaking, so far to little avail.

i have lefty friends who voted for Trump entirely on the theory that he'd challenge the "blob" and US security state, be a force for international peace. maybe so! maybe he's just speaking loudly and carrying a tiny stick. but the case is looking weaker than it did (and it never looked so strong).

remarkable deference. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1870897966552322506

@louis @carolannie i guess the post WWII period was a bit unique in that there was some credible threat of enforcement of the norm, by the UN and especially the US. Korea, Iraq I. Even wars the US lost, Vietnam, imposed a heavy cost on those who violated the norm. in prior periods there were mutual security alliances, but little threat some unaligned power would be saved just because its invasion was on some level "wrong".

maybe it's just his way of retaliating against Jimmy Carter for voting Kamala.

@carolannie in the sweep of history, no! but the roughly 80 year period that norm has been somewhat enforced seems better than what preceded it!

call me old-fashioned, but i still think the norm against territorial expansion by military force is worth adhering to and enforcing.