People in the US have been living with the insanity of Trump for so long that they have become numb to it, and don't realize just how crazy and out of bounds every day is now. We continue on, because we have to, but it's hard to reevaluate everything every single day because it's so crazy.
Europe and the rest of the world are making completely rational decisions in response to the utter self-destructive actions taking place by the entire US political system right now.
The US population has been cowed into complacence and numbness, but the rest of the world has not yet, and will take appropriate action.
The media the public consumes only gives them culture war BS to work with, though. It started with Fox News, and that eventually cowed the rest of the media to give in to Fox News framing on every topic, since Fox News was so successful at winning eyeballs.
The media were supporting and whitewashing republicans for years now. For years now, they were full of bad faith false equivalencies. Hysteria whenever someone says true but negative things about conservatives. Somehow, only rural people count as real Americans, people in cities dont. It was important to "challenge" liberals while it was equally important to scold anyone who says something negative about republicans. Republicans must not be challenged, their actions need to be painted in the best possible light.
> big corporations
Big corporations supported Trump, because they thought he will get rid of pesky rules that prevents them from harming more people. They like when the law allows them to harm the environment, when it facilitates frauds committed by big companies.
> big law firms
Is there anything to suggest they were opposed?
As opposed to what? The majority of people took away their power either by not voting for them or not voting at all.
Multiple universities have refused Trump's demands and Newsom even threatened universities in his state if they went along with it.
Democrats speak out about everything Trump is doing. They also worked with some Republicans recently on bills that Trump is against.
So please tell me how they are at fault?
Because it seems they are at fault when they are in power and they are at fault for Republicans when they are in power.
You're also generalizing the media. It's nearly impossible they are equally manipulative.
Since no political party will be perfect we should vote for the best option
If anything, the opposite is true. Citizens who've never protested in their lives are now in the streets. Off-year elections have had record turnouts.
154–155 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election; that's 63-65% of eligible voters, the second highest percentage in the past 100 years.
Most Americans took democracy for granted; the possibility of losing it has caused Americans to wake up.
And then trump got elected which is the reason of the crisis right now.
Perhaps American people wanted this?
Also, I think that America and Russia's probably the only biggest difference right now is protests and yea, I looked at some protests in America and how people are getting shot and even one veteran got detained who worked in iraq war for 3 days and was stripped naked and wasn't allowed to say anything and this happened a long time ago because of ICE
All because he looked brown. You could fight or die for the country & they would come to haunt you.
Veterans are calling ICE against the protestors even worse than how Veterans acted during the wars towards Iraqi citizens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y91VgKlJfLI
I have consistently called it out but most Americans from what I can gather want to desperately fit in the two boxes and not have independent support and especially when one party's effectively doing something like this. Bi-partisanship had always ended & you can't vote for anyone more than these two parties (one of which is causing an active war in greenland but the other party's better in this context but its also complicated and they still have very much an influence caused by lobbying)
A lot of pundits that were center-left in past years fall into this trap, and normalize extremely right-wing positions these days because of it. They are stuck in an media and information environment of politics and, lacking many core values to guide them, they navigate to the middle of the media that they consume, assuming that the truth will be there in the middle just like it was in the past.
This is a fundamental problem and one reason we're mired in this culture war. Social friction is caused by jostling based on group membership, and there's no common values-based scaffolding we can use to collaborate in building a better way.
I used to scoff when told to say the pledge of allegiance as a young person. Now, the closing words "liberty and justice for all" sound quite aspirational.
No, it's an assumption that the people discussing the subject are sane and rational. It's one thing to argue that the US devaluing its wildly overvalued dollar is an effective default. Nobody would disagree with that, that's why we did it - to give us the continual option for rugpulls. But it's simply delusional and unserious to insinuate that the US won't just print paper to pay off nominal debt. It costs the US absolutely nothing.
If the US doesn't do it and defaults, it props up the value of foreign-held treasuries by giving debtors a claim, it doesn't reduce it. We happily let the presses run since 2008, running up the stock market by nearly an order of magnitude, and didn't see a drop of inflation until the last presidential term.
Also, it's extremely weird that European elites think of NATO as some kind of local government. It's simply a US-invented and controlled institution that it used to pressure Russia (the US's competitor in a bipolar world), has had nothing but a corrosive effect in Europe, and now they do the job for free.
NATO is critical for the European powers (those not named Russia). The US doesn't require it. The US doesn't need to defend Europe any longer. And it's clear the Europeans don't want the US there, so it works out great. Europe can boost its defense spending by ~$300 billion to make up the difference, or not, whatever they choose to do is up to them.
The US had the world's largest economy six decades before NATO existed. China is growing into a superpower entirely without a NATO-like participation. NATO is primarily beneficial to European stability. The US doesn't need NATO to defend itself at all.
Today, US policymakers see China as the main adversary. But European states have no real military power--certainly none that can be projected in the Pacific theater--and wouldn't have the will to deploy it even if they did. Europeans now expect America to fight Russia for them, not with them. So now NATO is basically all risk and cost for the US with no benefit against their main adversary.
I think it's a shortsighted view of American national security imperatives: American security relies as it ever did on security in both Western Europe and Eastern Asia. Abandoning one theater to focus on the other just leaves a giant blind spot.
However, this has led Europe to take its own security more seriously and stop relying on America to fight the Russians for them, something multiple POTUSes have tried more diplomatically to achieve--and failed--for decades.
As an European: nobody has this expectation, unless you're using some strange subreddit comment as a source of information.
That is not evident at all in how any US policymaker acts these days. China is stronger than ever, precisely due to US actions. Every day, the US gives up power and throws it away, and China picks it up off the ground for free.
The supposed "China Hawks" are all chicken hawks without anything to back them up.
I note in the current Europe/Ukraine vs Russia fighting there are no US troops, although they did send weapons for which we are grateful
>China as the main adversary
neither China nor Russia are about to bomb the US but in terms of threats to US interests and hybrid warfare we have the full scale war in Ukraine vs only some threats over Taiwan and on the hybrid front I hear rumors the the Russians cultivated a US property developer code name Krasnov and he went on to cause some havoc back in the US.
Are the French going to be parking the Charles de Gaulle alongside American aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Strait if push comes to shove in the Pacific? I wouldn't entirely discount it. But maybe more importantly, even if they're not, does making an enemy of the EU negatively impact the ability of the US to park American aircraft carriers there? Certainly damage to the Atlantic trade relationship is unlikely to do the US any favors economically, which is important if the US wants to keep funding the Navy. And a potential loss of European controlled military bases has the potential to negative effect the US military's logistics, which is where the real superpower status comes from. Maybe most significantly, how would such a shift in alliances impact the willingness of Pacific allies to support the US, which obviously does have a direct impact on any conflict with China.
That's a very uncharitable take. Europe relies on NATO to fight the Russians. Of course it does. There is no alternative, and the US would never allow other credible alliances to form. Because why would they? It's certainly not in their interest.
It's good that Europe spends more in security, and it's good that Europe seems to be serious about Ukraine. However western Europe is something else. If push really would come to shove, there is zero chance Russia could take and hold continental Europe.
The population is larger, the economy is larger by a ridicolous amount, and there are French and British nukes positioned all over. What Europe is mainly lacking military projection in the Pacific and the Middle East, and that's not likely to change.
This is the usual claptrap Euros and Eurosimps come up with when Americans gripe about subsidizing Europe's defense.
"Soft power" isn't putting money back in Americans' pockets, and the primary beneficiaries of NATO clearly didn't like us very much even before Trump's return, when Biden was still president and the aid flowed freely to Kyiv: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...
> Sweden: 47% had a favorable opinion of the US.; Germany: 49%; France: 46%; The Netherlands: 48%
This is the "soft power" that Americans should rue having lost under Trump? A continent of entitled ingrates, who constantly crow about their generous welfare states ("six months paid vacation!") they enjoy partially through neglect of defense, and condescendingly lecture us ("As a European...") about how everything we do is wrong, who apparently don't like us very much even when we do come to their defense?
We the people are responsible for the government we get.
Don't like the consequences? Make better voting choices next time.
The EU has chosen to try to cooperate rather than to be at war all the time and it looks like that may have been a wrong bet but that is mostly because first one (Russia) and now another (USA) party have reneged on the deals that were in place.
It's hard to detect sarcasm through the screen but in case you're being serious and just repeat what Trump says, he does this because Americans are not stupid and are asking, why Europeans can enjoy free healthcare, education and 4-week holidays and we cant? The answer "because we sponsored them" makes no sense but finds fertile ground in the hearts of some people.
So why does the US spend more per capita on healthcare than the EU?
There was also a benefit to the US maintaining NATO - it could nudge/encourage/guide other countries into doing things it wanted done (such as Afganistan). This soft power is being discarded with NATO.
The US economy is only the largest if you don't adjust for purchasing power, at which point the US and EU are in joint second place way behind China, and separated from each other by a rounding error despite Brexit.
If the US wants to go alone, sure we'd miss you, but it's welcome to go in peace… so long as it doesn't steal Greenland on the way out.
The only "good" thing it did was breaking Sarajevo's siege in the mid 90s, but event then it isn't actually clear if the Serb wouldn't have backed off anyway at the end of the month because they couldn't progress due to the UN presence. Still saved a few hundred civilian lives, in exchange for a thousand of proto-nazi, so i can't say it was bad.
No one will attack any EU country anyway, as long as france doens't change its nuclear doctrine, which, i will state here once again, include a "warning shot".
Ultimately though, the Irak invasion shattered the trust and status quo, and i agree 100% with people saying NATO must die. Alliance that are more than a reactive defensive pact and force member into attacking unrelated countries should disappear. Just get nukes, and pray you won't have to use them.
The EU itself was viewed critically from Washington until it could be proven that it had no intention of becoming a military alliance. So while it could be true that the US does not need NATO in a strict sense, the idea that it has not been net beneficial to the US is absurd. No Danish soldiers would have died in middle eastern wars if it wasn't for NATO.
only 1 country invoked article 5 until today and it's not in Europe)
Only because Europe was intent on destroying each other.
The European allies have put their money and more importantly blood into these conflicts.
Yes, we can all look at a geographical map and state that the USA is blessed geographically by being split by two oceans from anything major in the world and thus conclude that the US does not need Europeans to defend its borders.
In essence you're completely ignoring how US allies in form of NATO allowed US to thrive as the global military power by providing a deep web of support, logistics, bases, ports, intelligence and allowing the US to have a huge influence it has consistently leveraged for decades to its own benefit or needs. And that includes financial reasons (like buying US weaponry).
If US wants to pull out of NATO it is what it is, but this whole nonsense of NATO benefitting only the European allies when it's always Washington asking for other's blood and bases and logistics is just it: nonsense.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Treaty
> Following the September 11 attacks, the Secretary General of NATO, George Robertson telephoned Colin Powell and said that declaring an Article 5 contingency would be a useful political statement for NATO to make. The United States indicated it had no interest in making such a request itself; however, it would not object to the council taking such action on its own.[55][56]
If we need Greenland so bad because Russia is that dangerous then isn't NATO important?
NATO is / was USAs way of controlling Europe to have something against Asia.
It's time for us / Europe to let the USA being whatever and kicking them out
We (Germany) are quite well equipped making guns and tanks.
And btw it was our strategy to try to win over countries by NOT being the big bully but sure Russia and USA made it clear that this no longer works.
I hope USA leaves NATO and we kick them out sooner than later
To be pedantic, Canada is a major non-European NATO member.
And then there are allies, some of them designated by Trump:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non-NATO_ally
Or, they were, as there is no certainty under his rule.
If US pulls back from NATO, and Europe builds up military power to compensate, then the US loses this de facto leadership seat of an empire.
Today, the US appears in parallel to be doing two things:
1. Causing fragmentation in Europe, by promoting right-wing nationalist politics in the EU
2. Threatening to drastically reduce their role in NATO
At the very least we can both agree that these two efforts are completely in contradiction with each other, and it's very unlikely that Europeans will want to go for more fragmentation without the military power of the US on their side, right?
You forgot another one: literally threatening two NATO members (Canada and Denmark, in form of Greenland) of annexation.
If that bet is actually being made by Putin, hmm, I'm worried, but then again the implementation of the anti-NATO project is being run by Trump, so I think the EU just might come out on top. The whole Greenland thing for example, seems like an EU solidifying step, at the same time as it is NATO destroying.
Why would anyone listen?
- If EU gets some more vertebrate leaders (something that tends to happen in times like this even in the most spineless countries), the first thing they will do is probably go get some allies in the Pacific to make up for this - and Pacific is much more sensitive to US.
Of course, all of this is phenomenally stupid and everyone will be far worse off.
