I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.
Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.
Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.
I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
European politicians need to wake up NATO was really an exercise in helping the US with its proxy wars their support will not be reciprocated
Not with trump and not with his successor
It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.
So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]
It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.
The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.
0: https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucki...
Every official or aligned pundit in the GOP is obliged by Trump's universally-known vanity to make a show of supporting literally every dumbass thing he does, knowing he'll purge them if they even question things. So I will say we can't actually get a read on what they truly think until Trump is gone, preferably by passing away peacefully of old age rather than hanging around live-tweeting his takes on the next administration's actions. Of course this means I'm speculating as well, and I admit that.
I just think that I've never seen anyone approaching the Trump levels of pettiness, vanity, and most of all, what looks to me like pure foolishness. Including even his inner circle. Most of them are single-issue extremists.
I actually agree that re-orienting foreign policy and military toward China is just plain smart. But it's idiotic to do that by picking fights with allies, and anyone less dumb than Trump can accomplish a pivot to China while at minimum not causing hostility across the Atlantic. Ideally the West should instead be firming up our alliance and working together to counter Chinese influence, plus, it'll be better to have NATO intact leading up to a potential hostilities with China when they invade Taiwan. Of course, China is working hard on amplifying and promoting division inside the US to destroy NATO in the hopes that Europe will run to their arms economically and thus be unable to oppose China. Kind of like how much of Europe has/had dependencies on Russian petroleum which complicated their ability to respond to Crimea and the rest of Ukraine invasion.
> leaders of the Democratic Party ... looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt
I haven't witnessed any adaptation at all from the DNC. It seems that all their beliefs are still summed up as "We ran a perfect candidate and she ran a perfect campaign. It's the voters who are the problem!"
I can't emphasize enough how collossal the DNC's screwup in 2024 was. We have a system that has been running for hundreds of years where the idea is a primary election gets you two candidates who are at least spitting distance from electable, and then we have to pick one of those two in the general election. It's wildly imperfect in that it entrenches exactly two parties at a time. But the DNC in 2024 took this system and operated it with utter incompetence by just installing the biggest loser of the 2020 primaries as the only alternative to Trump. Many people were so disgusted they stayed home. If they've admitted this, it hasn't been publicly.
For sure -- the bottom 41% of economic literacy are so misinformed that they have no clue what they're talking about. But those voters aren't picking the nominee for President from among a circus of general morons, the party elites are, and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age. Without Trump just flailing around like an idiot, they'd be content to do things that preserve the status quo in a lot of areas. They pander to the unsophisticated Trumpists where needed, but it's lip service, since a lot of them, for instance, love open borders because of how it depresses wages and gives them a compliant workforce. They talk a big game about the debt or the deficit, and also work to make sure we increase defense spending and funnel as much healthcare spending as possible through a bunch of private insurers who add a huge margin to our healthcare costs.
- 1 part petty corruption: stupid stuff like deals that enrich Kushner, his Trump company itself, and that of his close personal allies
- 1 part vanity: stupid stuff that serves no purpose but to exact revenge against people who humiliate him. And let's throw in silly stuff he says just to 'troll the libs' to this group too.
- 1 part just pure inexplicable stupidity. Things like pointless tariffs, or the idiocy around Greenland, that hurt nearly everyone and especially the US itself. Honestly some of this may be just the petty corruption part, where someone who stands to make a fortune from the chaos has cut him in on a deal we don't know about.
I simply don't see that same motivation triad coming from anyone else, even among Republicans. Other Republicans are driven more by political ideology, their own goals, their own ideas about the culture, their belief that X policy makes the economy stronger, etc. So, while you should judge us by what we do in the future, and bearing in mind that more idiots of his caliber may be discovered, I think and hope that you'll find out that Trump was simply the perfect storm of moron, and can never be repeated.
What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.
And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
>What emotion best describes how you feel about Donald Trump’s presidency so far?
Of Republicans:
40% Satisfaction
24% Enthusiasm/pride
6% Hope
5% Relief
They are loving this.
It was an open secret that the USA was a transactional unreliable ally, now it's just common knowledge.
Even the most ardent "look West" politicians have stopped talking about avoiding China.
Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.
e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
Worth noting who gives this advice and to whom.
This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
They said that about Trump I. The Republican Party elites have power, but they don't have all power on the conservative side of American politics. They contend with the Religious elites and various conservative cultural elites and the libertarians and so on. Trump didn't get elected by accident, there are a lot of people who love what he is doing, what he represents. They will happily vote for "the next Trump" when the time comes, and their elites will bend the Republican or the Democrat elites with tax cuts just as easily as they did for Trump.
There are democratic presidents who have done worse things to Canada than Carter. I singled out Carter because, today, he seems to be viewed as left-leaning (for a POTUS) and un-Trump-like.
America perhaps pioneered the mutual-defense agreement as an expansion of de-facto borders. America can attack you if you attack any of its mutual-defense treaty partners - e.g. Japan or NATO. This places an encirclement on other unaligned world powers: Russia and China. Smart, but they picked up on it, which is why mutual-defense agreements with nations near world powers are now fraught with danger.
But Europe is not an innocent led to her subjugation. Europe has always attempted to extract their side of the deal: they will buy American weaponry and host American bases but they will expect America to pick up the defense bill, including for things like access to the Suez Canal which is primarily (though not exclusively) a European risk and concern in that alliance.
Other powers have always used the push and pull of changing demographics and waxing and waning power to jockey for more control or more trade concessions, or lower spending on defense for higher spending on welfare and so on. The reason that Western Europe vacillated on Ukraine isn't that they were unsure who the good guys were. It's that it wasn't clear where the balance of power was and ensuring they were well aligned was their priority. Likewise, the participants who benefited from NS2 going up in bubbles were Ukraine and the US and one or both of them likely did what they needed to.
It is true. Germany did elect Hitler. It is also true that that Germany committed vastly greater crimes than Trump's America has. And it is true that Germany the country is not a civitas non grata (if you will) though one could argue that this was offered at the end of a gun (the persistent US bases). I think this point (delivered tersely and risking Godwin) is actually very strong.
I think Western bloc leaders are well aware of the strength of the Western coalition of Europe and the US. They are also well aware of their waning will to wage war as their population ages. I don't think Trump has a sound head on his shoulders - Americans will probably carry the memory of the danger of aged leaders at least one generation - but it is clear from the texts he has leaked of the other world leaders that they are pragmatic and intend to preserve the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen, and the resulting prosperity it has endowed its constituents with.
Any pressure will immediately be relieved if no actual irreversible damage (e.g. withdrawal from NATO or Anpo) is done and everyone knows it. But to make sure we get there, everyone has to apply just enough pressure to not break the machine. We can only hope they have the skill at diplomacy.
All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan. People were talking about how they pretend to be Canadian and so on. America was supposedly a pariah then, which makes any threat of "you are now a pariah" not particularly meaningful.
So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
Besides that, living in a neighboring country, the generation of my parents and grandparents had a deeply-rooted aversion towards Germans. They would communicate with Germans politely, but when no German was around, they would often use not-so-nice names or jokes. Luckily that aversion is gone with later generations.
When I was young (early 90ies), we would often go on holiday to Czechoslovakia (before the split) and the Czech Republic. The staff at restaurants and shops would be cold and distant until they discovered that we were not German, then they would be very warm and kind. At some point, we would always start the conversation in English. At the time most staff would only speak German, but we would use it as a signal that we were not from Germany.
This kind of distrust can stretch many decades. I think we have mostly healed as Europeans, but it took a damn long time.
Germany is now allowed to remilitarise again, and that’s going to be interesting. I believe we should never underestimate a remilitarised Germany.
Even with greedy short-term thinking: The economic connections between the US and Europe are a big part of US wealth, and failing to protect your market and your investors is bad for business.
Ukraine… Europe supports Ukraine to keep Europe safe. Ukraine is not in NATO, nor is it covered by the EU treaty's mutual defence article.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
Except that, none of this is true. Democrats did not run on such policy at all. They heavily tried to appeal to center.
Republicans run on culture war. And won, because it literally did not mattered what democratic party run on - republican lies won. And they will win again with the same tactic.
And now that even the Americans see it themselves, it's too late. They will _never_ gain the same trust again.
“trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback”
seems it’s applicable to this case too. Sad to see decades of work being tore apart in a few months.
Nobody really cared about Iraq or Afghanistan. Sure, it was fashionable to pretend to care, to get on a high horse and tell the USian rabble how immoral they were. But at the same time, people on their high horses also were glad that there was no Saddam Hussein anymore and that the Taliban were beaten (seemingly, back then).
It's different now because the US threatened to invade the Kingdom of Denmark, a supposedly very close ally. Even the threat of doing that is a red line that will be very very hard to uncross after Trump.
I liken it to Germany rebuilding trust after WWII.
Hegemony comes with a certain degree of humiliation. Socially, it means accepting that a foreign language being taught in elementary schools becomes synonym with intelligence and eloquence, or protecting a copyright/taxation regime that go against your interest, or accepting that manslaughters perpetuated by troops stationed in foreign military installation on your soil will go unpunished, and so on. There's always been creeping resentment towards the US in any given European nation.
However, resentment is not a concern when "adults are in the room", even if not explicitly in charge. Economic prosperity is great, no one wants to break a good deal. But now those safeguards are failing on the US side. There's suddenly room to rationalize any hostility.
Sure, the extent to which this is a factor vs rational analysis is arguable... but I don't find it mere coincidence that France is the nation spearheading this.
The US-Europe military-economic bloc is a strong structure, but of the two Europe is weaker and the participants in Europe stand and fall according to weak ties. Without NATO, it isn't even clear if Poland will have allies. Each of the constituent countries have leaders aware of this. And I'm sure they'll attempt to keep the structure intact. If they fail, they fail but all these dramatic declarations won't have been significant either way. The declarations themselves are just emotional outbursts without even the semblance of even self-interest.
I mean, think about it. If the US has no pathway back to normalcy in relations ("never be trusted") then the cost for all future Presidents to militarily intervene is low. After all, trust is at its minimum value and guaranteed not to rise. If Greenland is core to US interests and Denmark has decided there is no pathway back to normalcy, invasion is on the table for all Presidents, Democratic Party or Republican Party.
Essentially, once you decide that you will never normalize relations, then you're just an adversary: not even a potential future ally. And those who pitch themselves as guaranteed adversaries had better find allies quick.
Just think of the relations the US has with the British. Back in the day, after the independence war, I'm quite sure that there were quite a few people in the US who said something like "never will we have cordial relations with the Kingdom of Britain"...
Meaning people have very short term memories when some sort of financial incentive is inserted.
I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it. But it would be difficult in 10 years to say cause and effect.
People have short term memories unless harmed very specifically / directly. Not indirectly affected.
Please don't keep repeating this, this is why Democrats lost. Being out of touch.
> I think every American needs to understand this quote:
> > "We will never fucking trust you again."
The person I responded to likely never listened to or cared about what democratic politicians are saying.
The higher the risk of e.g. a loan, the more interest it has to pay out to be worthwhile. The exact amount* is, as I understand it, governed by the Black–Scholes model.
* probably with some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum assumptions given how the misuse of this model was a factor in the global financial crisis.
1. Suez Canal: UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for control of that. This stopped very quickly once the USA threatened to turn off the money, and by some measures marks the point where the British Empire became obviously a paper tiger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
2. Iraq/Afghanistan and Americans pretending to be Canadian: yes, I remember this too, but this time Europe and Canada are worried about taking the role of "target", so it hits harder.
The USA can only be trusted by its allies* once again *when we are confident the USA won't turn against us, your allies*.
* NATO and EU definitely; and I assume similar feelings in Japan, Philippines, Australia, South Korea etc.
But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.
So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.
The rest of the world started being disaffected by America's actions in 2003, when it launched an illegal war based on utter lies, which murdered 5% of Iraqs' population.
This act and the following acts of war and funding of terrorist groups that the American empire decided was 'necessary' for its survival, have been noticed by the rest of the world, even while Americans' themselves do not have the temerity to confront the issue.
Blaming Trump is just another excuse Americans make for the mess that has been being made by their state for decades before he walked down some elevator somewhere.
The rest of the world saw what Americans did to Iraq, and it has been downhill since then. You don't get to be the #1 funder of terror around the world and keep demanding glory and respect from the lackey nations you push around with those terror networks...
That the Republicans sold out their business branch for cronyism and populism with MAGA may end up being the negative outcome of that movement with the longest negative ramifications (my thinking being administrations can change immigration policy easily and Trump is more the final nail in the rules based international order than the initiator of its demise)
Even your response is oblivious to the point, and you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars" as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
The problem is with the people more than the party, and fighting that so we can actually progress the country out of the dark ages is an uphill battle.
Problem is, right now America is the biggest threat to Europe. And there is no way to cement the commitment you talk about with America as is - regardless of whether Trump goes. Without Trump, you still have one major party actively hostile to Europe.
Trumps policies are not some kind of aberration, they are exactly what conservatives worked for. Republican party clapped threats to annex Greenland. Without trump project 2025 will be updated to project 2029 or whatever, with more lobbying and "lessons learned" strategy. The threat of this happening again, but this time causing even more harm will be there for foreseeable future.
> I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
You can do that, but you would be lying.
> you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars"
Yes, republicans lie more. That includes situation around the two murders in Minnesota. That includes claims that European NATO members never helped USA.
> as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
There is one reality and one "side" is lying about it a lot. Starting to lie the same way as they do wont solve the problem, it will make it worst.
One can play with bond markets and various ETFs or other derivatives, depending on what you envision. But even if your bet is qualitatively correct (that trust in the US ebbs for decades), it's hard to get the timing right to make an actual bet.
Not 20 years ago, like 90% of Americans would have agreed that it's insane to use racial quotas and different standards of qualification for different groups. Today, the 20% or so who disagree with me on that have dragged the DNC into this unpopular position, abandoning a lot of their previous voters. This has consequences.
DEI may have gone too far in some areas, but that would largely be corporations trying to cash in, not anything planned by the possible Harris administration, and nothing demonstrable by the Biden administration.
But, let's say you're right to an extent, that's just incredibly depressing and shows that the problem ultimately lies with the people.
The only way for the US is to progress is to eliminate the electoral college so views such as yours count for as little as they should.
Preface: Trump's idiocy with Greenland is inexcusable and nonsensical, with NATO already having access to build bases all over that island with barely more paperwork than building them in Alaska. So don't read this as a defense of that BS.
1. Greenland isn't even in Europe and America has no designs on colonizing actual Europe
2. Even Trump in his syphilis-addled head knows that the moment he rolls tanks into a territory with basically no military and a peaceful non-threatening citizenry, his credibility. And this sure isn't Venezuela, where the Nobel Peace Prize winner thanked him for removing the criminal Maduro from his post. He let his dumb mouth get ahead of him when he didn't rule out force, and he was forced to walk that back, a remarkable thing considering his pride. Now, even if he does want to try to use more dumb tariffs, those will hurt the US as much as it does Europe. I wouldn't say these are any major threat to Europe.
On the other hand, Putin would very much like to expand a couple countries over, and geopolitically anyone will tell you that Russia "needs" that in order to have a defensible frontier. America is not a threat to Europe the place. Trump wants to cosplay as a threat to Europe the technical political entity, mainly because our map projections make Greenland look so big that he thinks it will make him a "hero President" in the history books forever, but even most Republicans know this is a stupid and pointless ambition.
The Republicans who make up a lot of the party are not interested in Greenland being US territory, they don't even give a shit about territories we already have like Puerto Rico. They just hate the DNC, whose idea of campaigning is saying that everyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.
You obviously don't hate it that much lol, you clearly want white people to keep the unfair advantages they have had for most of modern history.
They wrote a book about people with you views: 'White Fragility' - you should check it out.
> And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
Giving oppressed people equal opportunities isn't racism. We'll get rid of the EC eventually, and the votes of people like you simply won't matter.
The UK seems a lost cause though, even under Starmer it has been far more appeasing than any (West-)EU country. And as right-wing as Starmer is, your next PM will inevitably be even moreso and more buddy-buddy with the US. Perhaps even a personal friend of MAGA.
Now you can claim that Trump is bad, we'd agree with you. We're saying it's VERY dangerous to state why people voted for him because it enables it to happen again!
DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
I'm not claiming it was all that. For example, some people are single issue voters on abortion, so of course they are going to vote R. But a lot of people bought into the trans panic ads, the xenophobia, etc.
> DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
The voters were misinformed, though. Without a doubt the last election showed the people are much more of a problem than any party.
Better luck next time then?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but you seem to be claiming the rich Republican elites are not happy with Trump's economic policies. But then why did they support him so much during the reelection campaign and continue to support him throughout the Presidency?
For anyone else interested in learning more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_B._Pearson#Role_in_Suez...
And the main reason why you'll never pass that, or any other legislation you promise, is that Democrats lost their ability to convince anyone else. They threw it in the trash and replaced it with screaming "__ist and __phobe" at literally half the country anytime they step out of line of the latest Official Beliefs, which keep getting revised.