“I cannot escape the sense that those pundits who really believed that Donald Trump was going to embrace restraint in foreign policy have been played for fools.” @dandrezner https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-trump-american-imperialist
@realcaseyrollins because we mutually insure one another and the Federal government has far more capable and flexible financial tools than the states.
@farah look into pneumonia. antibiotics might help. (i’m still recovering from a rough month.)
@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.
Biden: We have to take extraordinary efforts to counter a recrudescence of territorial adventurism by military force.
Trump: What if we just joined in on the adventure? Our military could take some pretty cool territories!
“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 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".