Not defending the US here (not least because as a European I'm deeply pissed at the US government and the people backing it) but every country with a large military has similar plans, they are used as a training exercise/staff exercise rather than as realistic plans (as noted in the article you linked).
I like this analogy - sparring with each other like toddlers do, before realizing that they have a lot in common as they age, like the English language, industrialization, the systemic abuse of natives, Big Oil, the World Wars and racism.
Now that they're older, they're sparring once again, just like siblings do over the parents' estate.
I like your analogy, and want to add a sad addendum: parental illness and death is frequently the cause of sibling estrangement. Let’s hope this isn’t prolonged.
This is terrible analogy. We're more like neighbours, and US is a bully. We made a decision not to have much a fence before we were friendly neighbours. We regret that decision, and are planting a hedge and reaching out to our other "neighbours" for support.
The whole neighbourhood thinks you're assholes and bullies, we're all scared. But that is bring us closer together as result, so there's some upside.
Racism? Oh man, visit any other country that is more homogenous.... lol. Everything is relative.
Canadian and American racism is documented in specific events, unlike in other countries. I'd be hard pressed to find specific racism-driven events in Poland or Czechia, even though they top the racist charts.
I'm not American so your second point is completely moot.
Sir, Nawrocki is only the president because of racist pressures. I don't even hate him but you cannot argue that he would be elected if it weren't for fear of foreigners.
Why trust anyone? Really what stops a Trump from getting elected anywhere else? The citizens seem smarter or less bigoted? Are you sure that will always be the case given the agitprop in every form of media and internet communication in every language on earth?
There have been many elections in many political entities where a politician got elected because one group of citizens really liked that politician; and another group of citizens thought that politician was extremely, historically bad. This is inherent to mass democracy itself in any polity where there are real and deep-seated differences between different groups of the electorate. "A Trump" - in the sense of a politician whose opponents describe in apocalyptic terms and consider that politician's supporters to be stupid and bigoted - gets elected all the time in all sorts of places.
The seventy odd million people who looked at Trump and everything he is and then voted for him.
The entire congress and senate of the US who sit by while he does this and the supreme court who lets him, entire departments of the US government co-opted by sycophants put in place by Trump.
There is little to trust in the United States at the moment, you look a lot like the Weimar republic.
I guess I internally equate “Trump” and “Trumpism” - who’s to say what the chicken and the egg is with that whole situation.
> The entire congress and senate of the US who sit by while he does this and the supreme court who lets him, entire departments of the US government co-opted by sycophants put in place by Trump.
It is amazing how much people bend the knee to further their own ends. People like Stephen Miller who probably see Trump as a useful idiot, and hold great contempt for him, as long as he can enact his white supremacist agenda.
The leftist circles I run in like to joke that this could’ve just been properly avoided if we hadn’t fumbled reconstruction as a nation.
Remember the guy who promised he'd shut down Guantanamo? Or the guy who made up some weapons so he could invade Irak? Or the guy who ordered Northstream to be blown up?
> Genuinely, what makes the US untrustworthy if not Trump?
We invaded Korea, and then Vietnam, and a few hundred other interventions that don't seem to be sanctioned by the international community. All because of a hardon for ideology that doesn't seem to actually reflect the interests of the people who live here.
Not only is this true, there are about 50 million people in the south who are incredibly grateful for US involvement. And about 26 million people in the north who are, on average, several inches shorter than the southerners due to the end of US involvement.
We forcibly inserted our forces onto a peninsula to support a state that exterminated hundreds of thousands of people that nominally opposed it. If you want to call this something other than invasion that's your choice. We can all judge what character your faith takes
Israel seems trustworthy in the sense that their priorities and aims are abundantly clear to everyone. People are pissed about Israel for Iran right now, but, I mean, there is a reason why they are attacking Iran right now and not Egypt or Turkey. You go about and poke the bear like Iran has done for decades with Israel, you get these outcomes. Egypt tried to poke the bear but that was decades ago and they've since learned there is nothing to gain there.
Hey that's up to you. I will never vote for a person who supports Israel. Our parents may have been retarded but we don't have to be. I just see a state devoted to slaughtering as many people as they can. Iran looks like a saint compared to them.
I'm not supportive of them either. I just don't consider them untrustworthy though. Everything they do is exactly what they've always done since that state was formed. Easily the most predictable nation on earth, Israel. Easy way to get Israel off your back though? Stop funding terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah that inevitably do something stupid to provoke the Israelis into armed conflict. It is really that simple.
True. Israel begins, Israel assassinates and complains about being targeted by terrorism. Israel begins the loop again. What is more reliable than Israel?
Iran would be a better ally. China would be a better ally. Fucking Russia would be a better ally. Why did we decide to die on the hills of (loosely translated, I guess) mageddo?
But instead our state leans into exterminating people because our PR team was inspired by Goebbels and was trained to hate muslims
Nobody is buying this narrative of Israel being provoked, because the reaction to the provocation, if there ever was one, is completely disproportional.
Israel had settlements in Palestine way before the conflict outbreak, and nothing explains the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure on Lebanon but for Israel just going supernova, like Germany and Japan back then.
Trump can be voted in everywhere, but american constitution makes curruption effectively legal, president effectively lawless and provides no balance to unchecked presidential power. Money in politics are speech, so just unlimited, so any person even having change to be president have to do what Epstein class like.
And it is constitution itself. America had lawd trying to deal with above and supreme court gutted them.
Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.
The supreme court won't change materially in the near future and likely the polarization will continue, but it's hard to image someone in the future with such an absolute grip on either party. So, hopefully a soft restart of the system in 2028 will be the last of this edge case for a while. That's the hope, anyway!
The two countries have far more in common shared interests than differences, so odds are things will drift back to normal in the future.
Trump did not rise to power in isolation. He has not remained in isolation while in power. Voter support for Trump is still reasonably strong, and Trump and his supporters have ensured that the mechanisms of Government are packed with loyalists.
America chose this. America continues to tolerate this. America enabled this.
This isn't something that Trump can be scapegoated for. This is what many Americans wanted, or at the very least, it is what many Americans are willing to tolerate.
> Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
Trump is already, on his own, a two-time phenomenon. Leaving aside broader cultural issues and patterns, "one-time only" has been clearly incorrect for a while.
> He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.
The US constitution has absolutely nothing at all to say about political parties or the particular state of the media landscape, or for that matter the partisan alignment of justices of the supreme court. It's incoherent to suggest that there are "constitutional safe guards" that should have prevented the election of a president (or the exercise of power by that president), who is supported by about one-half of a very polarized electorate and opposed by a separate one-half. Everything about the Trump presidency is as constitutional as every previous US presidency, including the phenomenon of opponents of the president trying to claim that specific things they do are or should be unconstitutional.
The problem is that it isn't just an "edge case" in the constitution - the whole thing is fundamentally flawed from the very beginning. The US isn't going to be trustworthy until it manages to reshape itself into a proper democracy with functional checks and balances.
Considering the right-wing politicians are trying to turn the country into a theocratic nationalistic dictatorship and the "left-wing" politicians are content with getting votes by nothing more than not being right-wing and collecting corporate bribes: good luck with that.
> Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
unless the US extinguishes all of its billionaires and somehow convinces 1/3 to 1/2 of their population to not vote against their own interests it'll happen again