[rbanffy]

Sadly the US still has a lot of nukes and aircraft carriers ready to project power over its rebelling subjects and partners. I don’t expect the military to start refusing orders just because the president became a corrupt tyrant through legal means.

[ben_w]

> Sadly the US still has a lot of nukes and aircraft carriers ready to project power over its rebelling subjects and partners.

So does the UK.

Not enough to take back the old colonies and demand interest payments for the tea, but enough to make it a bad idea for anyone to try that.

> I don’t expect the military to start refusing orders just because the president became a corrupt tyrant through legal means.

I expect almost all militaty personel to obey almost all orders, even when they're expressly unlawful… but not all: Vietnam had both the My Lai massacre and the coining of "fragging" due to soldiers throwing fragmentation grenades into the tents of their own officers.

[jauntywundrkind]

In these regards, I think the US's unfortunately very hard to dislodge advantage is less the ships missiles & guns, and far more the "secret history of silicon valley" style signals intelligence gathering & processing. Very very specifically our massive massive government aggregators/analysis systems (not the focus of these amazing talks). https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://hn.algolia.com/?query=secret%20history%20of%20silico...

The NSA built them released Apache Accumulo & Apache Nifi, to offer extremely fine grained control of massive massive data systems. Unknown if this is still the state of the art, but they're still contributing. The platform infrastructure to be Five Eyes feels like it must be absolutely vast, >50% of the job of Five Eyes. Its hard for me to imagine an alliance of nations taking this task seriously enough to build their own, to serve as the hub.