This is a follow-up to my previous post on the end of US democracy and its implications. I argued that there is no choice but to dispense with the idea of the US as the central actor in a democratic and stable world system [1]Here I will discuss how what’s left of the democratic world can respond.
Surprisingly in many ways, the military part of dispensing with the US is the easiest bit, in each of its major areas of operation: Europe, Taiwan, and the broader Asia-Pacific region including Australian and New Zealand.
As regards Europe, NATO would be massively stronger with the US (100 000 troops in Europe) out and Ukraine (Zelensky claims 800 000) in.
While US military aid was essential in the early years of the war, others are now supplying the bulk of military aid, and Ukraine’s own capacities are increasing. The last tranche of US aid, delivered under Biden, means that any withdrawal of US support will not have much effect for some time to come. Even if Ukraine is forced to make some concessions to achieve a ceasefire, Russia will get nowhere near its war aim of imposing a compliant government on Ukraine.
Looking ahead, Russia has lost the vast majority of its pre-2022 armed forces, and is now scraping the bottom of various barrels (North Korean ammunition dumps and troops, refurbishment of Soviet era tanks, desperate financial expedients and more). Russia will take decades to rebuild what it has lost in Ukraine, even assuming that failure there does not provoked a post-imperial reckoning.
As regards Taiwan, it’s become increasingly evident that the idea of a seaborne invasion (always dubious) is a chimera. The destruction of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by a largely home-made Ukrainian set of anti-ship missiles and drones shows the vulnerability of a surface fleet to even moderately well armed opponents. The failure of the US Navy to prevent the ragtag Houthi militia from closing the Suez canal is an even stronger indication. Taiwan has access to much better anti-ship missiles (US Harpoons and Taiwan’s Hsung Feng) to deploy against a putative invasion force relying mostly on converted civilian ferries. It’s for this reason that recent discussion has focused on ill-defined notions of a blockade, while the idea of an invasion has been quietly abandoned.?Finally, apart from the chance to defend global democracy (a lost cause for now), the main benefit of the US alliance to Australia and New Zealand is the assumption that the US would defend us against an attack by a regional adversary. This assumption was obsolete even before Trump’s election. The only plausible candidate for an attack was Indonesia, and the only plausible reason was the appealing, but spurious idea that Indonesia’s (presumed) surplus population could occupy and exploit the vast empty spaces of Northern Australia.
That seems silly now. Apart from the fact that we have been on friendly terms with a democratic Indonesia for decades, the supposed rationale belongs to a past ear. Indonesia would lose more from the end of the Australian tourist trade in Bali than it would gain from seizing all the agricultural land north of a line from Cairns to Broome. But in the Suharto era, and with memories of World War II still fresh, fears of a conflict seemed reasonable enough.
Whether our fears were realistic or not, we could, before 2025, rely on the assumption that the US would come to our aid if needed. That’s no longer true. There is no reason to think that Trump would help us in a regional conflict, or that any successor regime will be much better.
In these circumstances, the alliance, and particularly the AUKUS agreement is a one way street. We pay the UK and US for submarines to be used in US operations (perhaps including wars against other democracies) and, if we are lucky, get some nice words in return. But that hasn’t stopped eager capitulation from the Australian government, which refused to sign a statement defending the International Criminal Court and was rewarded with a Trump endorsement of AUKUs.
As regards trade in goods, the main focus of Trump’s attacks so far, existing economic relationship will be harder to disentangle. The EU break with Russia after 2022 was painful enough, and the relationship there was shallower. But the lesson was that the countries and companies that got out quickly did better than those that tried to hang on and were eventually forced to sell for a pittance.
The US is big but but it only accounts for around 12 per cent of world goods trade. As the US is heads something approaching autarky, and the only response is to reroute the global economy to bypass it. We are already seeing this with the conclusion of EU trade deals such as Mercosur.
What matters for Europe, Australia and other democracies is US dominance of information technology, epitomized by Meta, Google, Amazon and Musk. This increasingly appears to be a castle built on sand. In the last couple of years we have seen repeated demonstrations that the apparent lock-ins achieved by these firms can be broken. Bluesky (and to a lesser extent Mastodon) has replaced X/Twitter for most of us, leaving it to MAGA bots and what we in Australia call “rustadons”. DeepSeek has shown that LLMs can be built at far lower cost than those of US oligarchs. And Substack has revived something similar to the old blogosphere of which CT is a remnant.
Most of these alternatives are US-based. But they provide the proof of concept. There’s nothing to stop any country from breaking with the US oligarchs and building LLMs and social media platforms of their own, or in co-operation with other democracies
The world would be much better if Americans had chosen democracy over fascism. But a plurality of Americans have chosen fascism, and only a small minority actually voted to defend democracy. So far, there is no sign of turning back. Democracies will represent a minority of the world’s population and of global economic activity for the foreseeable future. But democracy has overcome bigger challenges in the past and prevailed.
fn1. Let’s take as read that there was plenty wrong with the way the US fulfilled this role. Comments reiterating this point will be deleted or disemvowelled.
{ 138 comments }
CDT 02.10.25 at 1:19 am
As an American horrified by our gallop into autocracy, this actually makes me feel better.
wkw 02.10.25 at 3:34 am
Have you laid out the “how” part? There’s a lot of “assume a can opener” in here.
E.g., NATO with Ukraine but without the US isn’t NATO, it’s something very different and many current NATO members (e.g., Japan) will not sign up for it. Similarly, countries have been trying to replicate Silicon Valley for years, but as Draghi’s recent report on the investment structure in Europe noted, it hasn’t been going great.
Nuclear proliferation will be an immediate problem, even within NATO. The construction of alternative global financial infrastructure will be required.
A “how” post needs mechanisms: which countries are invited to the Brisbane Woods Conference to hash all this out? Who sets the agenda and what are the scope of negotiations? What form of democratic approval process will be required? What structural conditions must exist in order for the process to be allowed to proceed without interference by the bigger powers? Etc. Even talking in these terms will provide an electoral boost to the Le Pens of the world, more than likely, which might short-circuit these efforts before they begin.
Obviously everyone must be thinking about these scenarios now, it is inescapable. But if the idea is that it’s relatively easy for the League of Democratic Nations to keep the lid on without the US’s involvement, well, there’s a history here that might be worth at least acknowledging. Might even be worth grappling with.
John Q 02.10.25 at 5:18 am
I was assuming a process where Trump made demands, the other members rejected those demands and the US withdrew, as it has done already from WHO, Paris agreement etc.
In formal terms, if the US left, NATO would still be NATO, just as it was when France left, and when the UK left the EU. No special conference required. The only technicality, according to Wikipedia is that countries pulling out are supposed to register this with the depository country, which is the US.
Japan isn’t a NATO member. It will be up to Japan, and other “partner” countries whether it maintains its existing relationship with a US-free NATO or throws in with Trump.
“The construction of alternative global financial infrastructure will be required.” Yes, I left that one in the too-hard basket for now.
As regards replicating Silicon Valley, there’s no need for Europe and Australia to go into manufacturing – there are plenty of sources in Asia for hardware. The real need, as I said, is to develop an independent AI capacity. That just needs smart people and a willingness to copy.
The politics are complex, but anyone using Trumpish rhetoric can reasonably be accused of dual loyalties. This may play out in Canada for example.
Kartik Agaram 02.10.25 at 6:25 am
Another American who’s feeling better after reading this.
I want to quibble, though, with “a plurality of Americans have chosen fascism, and only a small minority actually voted to defend democracy.” The vote to defend democracy was almost 50%! (Unless you’re including the apathetic 33% who didn’t vote as having chosen fascism, a point of view I’m very sympathetic to. Even so, 33% is not a small minority!)
MFB 02.10.25 at 9:48 am
The alternative to the US already exists, namely BRICS+.
Euro-NATO, with or without Zhelenski’s mouth and fantasies about the imaginary weakness of Russia and China, is not an alternative to the US, but a supplement to it, with a long-standing record of subordination to ur-fascist imperialism which doesn’t take much to subordinate to actual fascism.
nastywoman 02.10.25 at 11:44 am
very well played dear Prof. with one (small) exception.
as you mentioned what matters for Europe, Australia and other democracies is US dominance of information technology, epitomized by Meta, Google, Amazon and Musk –
Musk STILL seems to be the FIRST Influencer when it comes to make people (even in Europe) – believe – that you need to HATE your fellow men in order to get Trumplike Rich and Famous – and as it was mentioned somewhere else that Germany used to be the main (and last?) Brandmauer against Fascism -(after some other European Countries went far too deep into the ‘sink’ of Musk) Let’s see how much winning Elon Trump did in the World’s third biggest economy?
If Musk’s German Party (the AfD) will get more than 22 percent in the election the RESISTANCE seriously HAS to change the strategy to leave X for platforms like Bluesky and/or Mastodon and focus (AGAIN) on changing X from ‘the Worlds most winning hate and propaganda machine) into OUR machine! And as such change could be actually done easily by EVERYBODY of US countering day and night and night and day every single fascistic tweet – UNTIL WE have the ‘Oberhoheit’!
Let’s
BUILT A BETTER NARRATIVE
(even Americans will believe)
J-D 02.10.25 at 12:19 pm
There has been a dramatic shift in opinion polling for the 2025 Canadian federal election in the last few weeks. I don’t pretend to know what this shift indicates, but it must indicate something.
Laban 02.10.25 at 3:24 pm
Rather than ponder how the democratic world can respond, isn’t it worth thinking about how long it is likely to be before the rest of the democratic world undergo similar changes?
After all, the same driving forces are there – stagnating or reducing real male wages, increasing housing costs, increasing health and education costs, reduction in manufacturing jobs, increasing financialisation.
Even The Lucky Country isn’t what it was 50 or 60 years ago. I have a vast number of relatives that I don’t know in Australia – all because the younger sons of a farmer chose to emigrate in the 19th century. Cheap land and dear labour, said Benjamin Franklin, was the recipe for early marriage and large families. All of these democracies, or their political elites at any rate, have moved much closer to the opposite view – and then bemoan their tumbling fertility.
steven t johnson 02.10.25 at 4:07 pm
It is not clear to me that a purely European North Atlantic Treaty Organization can achieve its military goals, not least because they are undefined. If NATO was ever a defensive pact aimed at the USSR, there is no more need for it, because 1) there is no more a USSR than there is a Suharto(/PKI) and 2)the Ukrainian victory claimed proves there isn’t even a threat.
As to production/manufacturing/trade, I’m not sure states have quite the ability to control their respective economies, much less the resultant world economy, as required. It seems to me that the US resorting to autarky is even the goal of our new overlords in the US. It seems more likely it is an assertion of a reserved sphere of influence from which competitors will be excluded (the MERCOSUR for instance, I suspect will be too much a target of the US to be a market for outsiders like Europe or Australia.) From first principle the division of the world market into hemispheres (?) would be the shrinking of world markets, which is not good for business. Or so I should have thought.
Quite aside from US financial world domination arising from victory in war, substituting a new system means somehow creating not just a new clearing house, nor even a new reserve currency, but also a new lender of last resort and even more, a new source of liquidity. The role of US Treasury debt seems to me historically inseparable from the military power of the US. And the reliability of its debt seems entirely inseparable from its state commitment to the wealth of its ownership class….which I see no threat to from the new political order.
Not sure too many facts assumed aren’t, but tht s frbddn sbjct.
Burns 02.10.25 at 4:32 pm
Thank you for this article, but I need to question your bit about replacing Americans with Ukrainians, if only because Ukraine is currently (poorly) supplied by other countries. It is currently running a 20% of gdp deficit, give or take, and obviously cannot support 800 thousand soldiers indefinitely without its society resembling north Korea’s. Only some 300 thousand Ukrainians of both sexes are born every year. Assuming you reject nobody (for health, disability, substance abuse, criminal history, etc.), that’s still 2 1/2 years each if you draft both men and women, or 5 years if you only draft men.
It is obviously not a serious number.
wkw 02.10.25 at 5:59 pm
“In formal terms, if the US left, NATO would still be NATO”
But in functional terms it wouldn’t be, and that’s what matters. Formally, the League of Nations without the US was still the League of Nations; functionally, it wasn’t capable of living up to its obligations. (Similarly, in functional terms Japan is a part of NATO, with a decades-spanning “partnership” that is frequently referred to as “tacit” membership, e.g.: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Japan-s-tacit-NATO-membership-acts-as-bridge-for-global-security.)
Finance is in the too-hard bin, AI is just something that can be easily copied (then why the hundreds of billions in investment???)… a “how” post does not hand wave away the most important items, it places them in the center. So let’s think through a few steps.
First, a new reserve asset will be needed. This will require the ECB to be overhauled with a new mandate (no problem, right?), an EU fiscal administration will need to be created (simple), and the UK will probably need to join the common currency to administer global finance out of London (easy to build consensus?); if not, then an alternative payments system will need to be constructed too.
Then, this financial architecture will need to repress the wages of the Democracies in order to channel immense investment into new production. I.e., austerity. In order to protect infant tech industries, the Democracies will have to engage in tech autarky w/r/t both the US and the BRICS, which means cutting themselves out of basically all existing global networks (Farrell and Newman have written a fair amount about the geopolitics of data centers, that’s just one example). More than likely, the Democracies will want to recruit high-value-added white collar workers from Non-Democracies, in addition to accepting many refugees, which will function as further wage suppression (real if not nominal) for local elites.
Then you face the problem of geographical dispersion. Can Canada reasonably join the Democracies while wedged in between the USA and Russia? Probably not, their best bet to to work with California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and maybe some of the Lakes States to create a macrostate in the Western Hemisphere. This of course means war, but the other Democracies are not going to be able to provide much support. Similar local concerns will be very important for Japan, for Korea, for Turkey, for Israel, for Brazil, etc.
At minimum this will take years, during which the process will be sabotaged at every step by internal and external foes to it. And, of course, if any single election in any one of a half-dozen countries (or more: Germany, France, Italy, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Japan, Turkey) goes wrong then this falls apart pretty quickly.
So the “how” questions are all still in front of us.
Mike on the Internet 02.10.25 at 6:32 pm
Autocracy/plutocracy/oligarchy etc is bad enough, but the regime change being effected in the US is driven by people with a particular disregard for national and global interests, and the regime’s effect on environment and global heath can’t simply be pivoted away from. Both Musk and apocalyptic evangelicals (one of whom runs the military now) are disinvested from the importance of continued terrestrial living. The globe hasn’t just lost a partner in development with the Trump/Musk victory, it has gained the most powerful state-level enemy of human survival in history (yes, worse than Germany in WW2, because the present USA is vastly more powerful). This requires a counter-balancing state-level actor with the power to push an opposing “let’s not destroy the material bases of our survival” agenda, over-riding the sovereignty of spoiler states if necessary. I don’t see any such actor besides China. If someone knows of a Western democracy that has anywhere near the same capacity to push a global “anti-suicide” agenda, I’d love to hear about them.
Laban 02.10.25 at 8:54 pm
“The destruction of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by a largely home-made Ukrainian set of anti-ship missiles and drones shows the vulnerability of a surface fleet to even moderately well armed opponents.”
“there’s no need for Europe and Australia to go into manufacturing – there are plenty of sources in Asia for hardware”
But what if all the ships from Asia are sunk en-route? Or indeed only a few pour encourager les autres? The Houthis have shown that shipping is extremely vulnerable to even fairly basic missiles.
“Russia will take decades to rebuild what it has lost in Ukraine” – perhaps, but what was the interval between 1945 USSR, with 20 million dead, a wrecked nation, and Stalin in charge – and Sputnik?
hix 02.10.25 at 10:35 pm
Not building up preferably government owned EU Internet monopolists was a huge mistake. No one needs a Ukrainian 800k army on the long run. Short term, it is rather cheap to pay Ukraine’s entire dysfunctional government.
And maybe to some extent, Ukrainian dysfunction is also a reflection of their unwillingness to shoulder it all with half-hearted support. West more or less load: Get more conscripts, damn it. Ukraine: Guns first. West: No, you conscripts first…. Ukraine: If you had given us real supplies from the start this would probably be over and definitely a lot less of us would have died. West: No excuse for your corrupt, dysfunctional recruiting system and huge deserter rate. …..
As a unified actor (still the case minus Hungary, or some other oddity) the EU should have much better cards than the US in this stupidity.
The problem I see is that the EU is far from it- maybe less so regarding countries vs countries, more regarding delusional elites – in particular the money kind still not getting what is going on, or maybe hoping it will be good for them if the EU turns into something similar too.
The Profs and students here, not just the business admin ones, also say political science with a career invested in transatlanticism seem to be somewhere between not getting it, not caring, or outright delusion (Trump and Harris have the same foreign policy program and nothing will change for Europe no matter which one wins according to my analysis….)
And the people closer to my own status are damn scared about what happens to them after the election in Germany, with little capacity to think about US related issues. I’m too, because the nominal left parties all moved very far to the right. This will not be a Merkel grand coalition this time round.
Also between the different outright crazy conspiracy parties – FDP (considering demands like cryptocurrencies as currency reserves for the central bank, the FDP definitely now is in that category, BSW, AFD, Freie Wähler, we now also got some 32% just voting for madness.
A scary number of migrants, too, are on the too many foreigners of the wrong kind trip. But you see, they think they are in another category usually. Not Muslim, not dark skinned, not refugees, high earning expats (love how many migrants cannot even call themself that to make a class distinction within)… whatever.
some lurker 02.11.25 at 1:04 am
@9
“If NATO was ever a defensive pact aimed at the USSR, there is no more need for it, ”
and yet NATO membership has expanded since the demise of the old USSR for some reason. If a distant neighbor is building a fence, who am I to tell him he doesn’t need it? He knows what he has to deal with more than I do. I have heard this from people who are members of labor unions, arguing against NATO, while somehow not seeing that they are also members of a network for the common defense of its members.
Waiting to Doug Muir to weigh in on this but I see he is no longer on the masthead…
dk 02.11.25 at 4:39 am
@5 MBF
I’d draw your attention to the fact that the “R” in “BRICS” stands for Russia, a mafia-run petrol station thinly disguised as a nation-state.
Laban 02.11.25 at 10:00 am
“petrol station thinly disguised as a nation-state”
Which, according to the World Bank, is the world #4 economy in PPP terms.
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038129/GDP-ranking–PPP-based
I know GDP metrics can be fiddled (Japan fiddle downwards, UK fiddle upwards*) but that’s an awful lot of petrol sales for an economy under heavy sanctions.
I believe we add 10% to GDP for the illegal drug trade, then there’s “imputed rent” which adds a mythical £2,500 a month for the house I couldn’t afford to buy now. If UK house prices halved, something devoutly to be wished, GDP would take a very palpable hit.
novakant 02.11.25 at 10:12 am
I think NATO can survive without the US because the main reason for its existence is to ward off the threat from Russia. While Putin will continue to wage war against Ukraine and conduct hybrid warfare in the Baltics and elsewhere, he is not going ot invade an actual NATO member country. The military NATO operations of the past were beyond or at least stretching the NATO mandate to breaking point.
MisterMr 02.11.25 at 11:47 am
@Laban 17
“Which, according to the World Bank, is the world #4 economy in PPP terms”
But the #11 in nominal terms, that are the relevant ones when you think of foreign trade.
Basically russian PPP GDP is inflated by the fact that Russia sells oil to foreigners at prices Russians themselves can’t afford.
If you compare in nominal terms, you see that Russia’s GDP is lower that thato of 5 different non USA NATO countries, four of them (Germany, France, UK, Italy) are european countries.
Also those countries have significantly higer GDP per capita than Russia, which is the reason many east european countries (like Ukraine) look towards the EU and not Russia (because they have a better chance of making money by trading with the EU than with Russia).
This in turn is the reason Russia acts militarist, because its military is oversized relative to its economic clout, so Russia has to exert its influence through the military; but long term(*) Russia cannot “win” in terms on influence against the EU (with or without the UK).
Now China is a different matter, so I’m limiting my argument to Russia; but the reasons of Russia’s behaviour are in current Russia’s weakness, not in Russia’s strenght.
( * ) of course short term Russia could flatten the EU with nukes, but I’m not counting this option.
Tim Worstall 02.11.25 at 11:57 am
This is certainly arguable, if not actually in error.
“NATO would be massively stronger with the US (100 000 troops in Europe) out and Ukraine (Zelensky claims 800 000) in.”
Military power isn’t about the number of squaddies. Logistics, logistics, logistics. The only people with significant lifting power (air or sea – and at sea it’s being able to protect merchant shipping that matters) are the Americans.
I’d suggest a little rethink on this point at least.
Tm 02.11.25 at 12:10 pm
Laban 17: The Russian GDP estimates are… interesting. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal). In nominal dollars, Russia is number 11 after Brazil, in PPP dollars, number 4 before Japan. This would mean that Russia’s real per capita GDP is almost as high as Japan’s. That seems implausible.
PPP comparisons are tricky and I would even say there is no valid way of making that comparison for economies that are structurally very different. Statisticians still try to come up with something and it has some value if used carefully but let’s be clear about the limitations.
engels 02.11.25 at 12:25 pm
the main reason for its existence is to ward off the threat from Russia
NATO: “For more than 30 years, NATO tried to build a partnership with Russia…”
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_50090.htm
wp200 02.11.25 at 12:29 pm
“What matters for Europe, Australia and other democracies is US dominance of information technology, epitomized by Meta, Google, Amazon and Musk.”
US tech dominance is based on a mutual agreements for all countries to have long-lasting and stringent patents, trademarks, copyrights and other IP-rights. It’s the price countries pay for tariff free access to the US market.
If the world would retaliate to Trump tariffs by significantly loosening IP-laws, it would probably be a net good.
https://doctorow.medium.com/canada-shouldnt-retaliate-with-us-tariffs-a0e32042fec8
lurker 02.11.25 at 1:23 pm
@9, steven t johnson
No USSR, but there’s a Russia that claims to be the successor of the USSR (veto in the UN Security council, possession of the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal etc.) whenever it’s convenient, even as it flies the Imperial/Vlasovite flag.
As for Russia being still a threat, it has only attacked Ukraine and Georgia and continues to occupy part of Moldova because they are not in the NATO and it did not expect serious resistance or consequences.
In 2014, Ukraine was neutral, pro-Russian in sentiment and essentially demilitarized: that is why Russia attacked it, it was an easy target. Si vis pacem para bellum is absolutely correct policy for anyone next door to Russia. In the absence of NATO, Poland and co would have to create their own alliance and nuclear deterrent.
Laban 02.11.25 at 2:36 pm
We’re drifting off topic, entertaining though it be. I agree with Tim W (up to a point, when you are out of squaddies you’re in trouble, logistics or no) – the rest of the democracies (however defined) can dispense with the US, but will their people want to pay the price?
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/gen-z-survey-police-racism-crime-nhs-hlghh0pxw
“Gen Z think UK is racist and would not fight for their country”
At least they’ve internalised some of their school lessons.
M Caswell 02.11.25 at 5:00 pm
Many Americans, including many Trump voters, would disagree that the ‘US’ is ‘Trump’s,’ though I imagine Trump would be delighted with the idea.
Michael Cain 02.11.25 at 8:03 pm
Non-AI cloud computing is another whole large thing, dominated by US companies: Amazon, Azure (Microsoft), and Google.
John Q 02.11.25 at 9:09 pm
Responding to various people on sea power, the failure of the US Navy to defeat the Houthis nullifies it supposed role in protecting merchant shipping. But it would be far easier for the Europeans to stop most of Russia’s merchant trade than vice versa. Only disputes about legality are holding them off from stopping oil transport through the Baltic right now.
J-D 02.11.25 at 11:22 pm
There is international law about state succession. Like all law, its effect depends on people deciding to apply and enforce it, and like all international law its application and enforcement is less reliable than is usually the case for national law (although there are also many cases where the application and enforcement of national law is unreliable!) but it’s not simply a case of present Russian governments deciding to make up whatever rules are convenient for them, there is a larger context: a lot of the time it also suits other countries for Russia to be regarded and treated as the legal successor of the USSR.
dk 02.12.25 at 2:35 am
@17 Laban
High GDP is perfectly compatible with being a mafia-run petrol station thinly disguised as a nation-state. Extracting protection money counts toward aggregate GDP, after all.
some lurker 02.12.25 at 3:00 am
@28 sea power and lifting power are very different things. I don’t know that the US Navy tried to “defeat” the Houthis. But there is no doubt that if the combined forces the USA commands wanted to put any number of troops, armor, artillery, etc on the ground anywhere, they could do it.
John Q 02.12.25 at 4:24 am
Some Lurker @21
We seem to be going in circles here
JQ: Europe has enough boots on the ground to defy Russia
Commenters: Who cares about boots on the ground, what about merchant shipping ?
JQ: US Navy couldn’t protect shipping from Houthis
SL: But US can put boots on the ground anywhere
KT2 02.12.25 at 6:27 am
I can hardly believe I am seriously writing this dangerous and to me, previously unimaginable scenario. The pendulum dynamics will swing past autarky.
Would someone please, after reading White House newspeak “fact sheet” and articles below, tell me what is the difference “that the most unscrupulous extortionists and cybercriminals run rampant from within his borders” (AUKUS below), between the US & Russia, (and now Australia due to AUKUS) & Trump and Putin.
Because:
“The Order directs the Attorney General to pause Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 actions.”… “AMERICAN SECURITY REQUIRES AMERICAN ECONOMIC STRENGTH” (WH)
My imagination is exhausted. “Truth” is seemingly stranger that fiction.
“UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit’s bulletproof hosting provider Zservers” (fn.AUKUS) recently sanctioned and criminalised by US, UK & Australia has been operating from European & UK registered entities since 2011.
And the US since 2011 has known of bribery and mafia like actions:
“Critics have also argued that by being more aggressive than other countries in prosecuting foreign bribery cases, the United States increases businesses’ compliance costs. The influential New York City Bar Association questioned those costs in a 2011 report.” (NYT) ( Report pdf in nyt article).
In thenNYT, Michael Koehler, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at Texas A&M says “cases were dropped on national security grounds.”
If that is the case “cases were dropped on national security grounds”, would someone please tell me the difference between Russia and the US of A, and by extension the dummies downunder.
Trump’s “pause” of the FCPA puts the US in par with what the AUKUS group said of Russia this week. Bet AUKUS won’t sanction and criminalise Trump et al.
###
WH
“FACT SHEET:
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP RESTORES AMERICAN COMPETITIVENESS AND SECURITY IN FCPA ENFORCEMENT
February 10, 2025
“ELIMINATING UNDUE BARRIERS TO U.S. SUCCESS: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to restore American competitiveness and security by ordering revised, reasonable enforcement guidelines for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977.
“The Order directs the Attorney General to pause FCPA actions until she issues revised FCPA enforcement guidance that promotes American competitiveness and efficient use of federal law enforcement resources.
“Past and existing FCPA actions will be reviewed.
“Future FCPA investigations and enforcement actions will be governed by this new guidance and must be approved by the Attorney General.
“AMERICAN SECURITY REQUIRES AMERICAN ECONOMIC STRENGTH
..
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-restores-american-competitiveness-and-security-in-fcpa-enforcement/
NYT.
“In ordering the pause, Mr. Trump argued that the law put American firms at a disadvantage, echoing a criticism long made by the business community.”
“Many of these substantive issues talked about in that executive order have been talked about by many people for several years,” Mr. Koehler said. The Justice Department in prior administrations had “already been tinkering around with F.C.P.A. enforcement,” he added, noting that cases were dropped on national security grounds.
“Critics have also argued that by being more aggressive than other countries in prosecuting foreign bribery cases, the United States increases businesses’ compliance costs. The influential New York City Bar Association questioned those costs in a 2011 report.”
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/business/trump-fcpa-explained.html
AUKUS
“Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “Putin has built a corrupt mafia state?driven by greed and ruthlessness. It is no surprise that the most unscrupulous extortionists and cybercriminals run rampant from within his borders.”
“UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit’s bulletproof hosting provider Zservers
“Huge if true: Brit Foreign Sec says Putin running a ‘corrupt mafia state'”
Tue 11 Feb 2025
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/aukus_zservers_lockbit_sanctions/
hix 02.12.25 at 4:54 pm
Despite knowing better, another point to the war rabbit hole. The current size of the Ukrainian army is rather very small and absolutely sustainable in such a situation. On the contrary, the army is far too small.
Israel had more people under arms recently as a share of the population, without any serious threat to fight. And a 2,5 year conscription without an ongoing war is not that unusual – rather pretty close to what is happening in South Korea, or what was the case in West Germany during some phases of the Cold War. All far from the situation in North Korea.
Anyway, it seems to me rather more concerning how much money countries like Poland and in general huge parts of Western Europe no waste on unnecessary rearmament. In the case of Poland, there’s also a huge lock-in regarding long term running costs (with us maintenance suppliers in particular) involved. A hysteria the EU will probably end up paying to some extent in the future. Nothing besides gender stereotypes is stopping female conscription, either.
I’d also really like to know with what Russia is supposed to be a threat to anyone in the future, the way it is burning through people and material.
Not having the logistics for treating some Third World country far away with an invasion is a good thing. Why would Europe need those logistics? We can agree Europe is utterly capable of transporting stuff from west to Eastern Europe, yes? And if we talk logistics as the one central point, Russia is even less of a threat yes, because logistics is one thing that can easily be built up based on civilian capacity Western/Central European has extensively, but Russia not at all?
(always caught between not wanting to talk about this stuff again and not wanting to let the army fanboys have the last long word on it. I’m a broken record on this since forever, so far no one has made a case the record is wrong.)
Sebastian H 02.12.25 at 6:58 pm
The ease of sinking ships seems to cut against Taiwan in the sense that it absolutely has to be supplied by ships.
JWP 02.12.25 at 7:19 pm
My problem with this analysis is as follows: The USA is a country where no-one outside of Brooklyn, Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, or Portland, Ore. can spell or pronounce “fascism” much less describe what it consists of. And none of these people voted for Trump. So I don’t think it can be reasonably said that Trump voters have “chosen” fascism. What they have done is reject the liberal status quo. More particularly, they’ve registered their dislike for the liberal status quo that has become hegemonic in many areas of American life and policy.
Can you blame them? A lot of this status quo sucks, especially for Americans who are forced to exist outside of the comfortable environs of … Brooklyn, Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, and Portland, Ore.
I don’t think this is a pedantic distinction, because it overlooks the bright side. Because these voters have no fixed ideas about much of anything, they can be persuaded to vote the other way—that is, if the dems can be persuaded to abandon their official policy of trying to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people. They need a new ideology, but are they up to the task? Last week’s DNC leadership election says “no”.
Tom Perrry 02.12.25 at 8:25 pm
Looks like the Trump admin is set to end the war in Ukraine, possibly before comments close on this post.
As part of the conditions, Hegseth says NATO/EU must dispense with Trump’s US as a security guarantee.
Laban 02.12.25 at 9:37 pm
It’s early days yet, but Trump seems to have given Europe/UK some interesting challenges:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/trump-putin-ukraine-ceasefire
steven t johnson 02.12.25 at 10:30 pm
“—that is, if the dems can be persuaded to abandon their official policy of trying to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people.” JWP@36
But, what about the popular immoralities?
Somewhere, some time, somehow, I got the impression that the popular moralities referred to were not in practice all so popular (hence the decline in church going, bible reading, tithing) and tended to blend into official moralities. Do unpopular moralities include things like communism, atheism, evolution, the importance of fossil fuels for cheap energy, the essential need to use fossil fuels/climate change denialism, unremitting hostility to vaccines and the globalist conspiracy to kill off the plain people? Actually I’m even a little confused as to who the plain people are? Pretty sure they’re not me, but I’m equally sure I’m not the fancy people either.
Perhaps Venn diagrams might help?
I’m so confused that I thought one reason for the clergy to endorse Trumpery as much as they have is that the hope for state power to restore the popular moralities back to their proper role so that humanity might live, despite the liberal/Marxist enemy. I still haven’t caught up to the notion that liberalism, Marxism and the Democratic party are the same, much less that the raison d’etre is foisting unpopular immoralities on those plain people?
nastywoman 02.12.25 at 11:20 pm
@The USA is a country where no-one outside of Brooklyn, Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, or Portland, Ore. can spell or pronounce “fascism” – And none of these people voted for Trump.
How true – as if you accept the standard definition that ‘Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism and forcible suppression of opposition – most Americans who voted for Trump probably have not the slightest idea that he nearly perfectly fit’s that definition – for sure all of the Americans who deeply ‘sink’ that they have erected a New ‘Gröfaz (Grösster Führer aller Zeiten) or even ‘god’ or just ‘not a politician at all’ but as there is this old German Rule – which also worked when the Germans once pretended that they had now idea who or what they had elected:
Unwissenheit schützt nicht vor Strafe – and so the World holds the Americans who voted for Trump responsible – as the World -(and the Americans who fought the Fascistic Germans) did with those Germans…
J-D 02.12.25 at 11:22 pm
If there really are people who can’t spell or pronounce ‘fascism’, much less describe it, then those same people equally can’t spell or pronounce ‘hegemonic liberal status quo’, much less describe it; so if they (if they really exist) can’t reasonably be said to have chosen fascism, they equally can’t reasonably be said to have rejected a hegemonic liberal status quo.
There is this difference, though, that there really is such a thing as fascism, but there really isn’t such a thing as a hegemonic liberal status quo.
It is not the official policy of the Democrats to try to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people. That’s just a lie.
Underlying JWP’s description of a great mass of plain people with few or no fixed ideas and limited capacity for spelling and pronunciation I detect contempt. Perhaps it is possible to drive a mass of people like sheep while holding them in contempt for their lack of ideas and capabilities, their plainness and their indistinguishability as part of a mass, but it’s not a project that any decent person wants to be a part of.
J-D 02.12.25 at 11:25 pm
It fascinates me (but no longer surprises me) how people mistake words for deeds. When all is said and done, there’s a lot more said than done. It is conceivable that the war will end before comments close on this post, but that’s not the way to bet (you can bet, though, that if it does end then Donald Trump will claim credit and many people will endorse his claim).
nastywoman 02.12.25 at 11:32 pm
@’Looks like the Trump admin is set to end the war in Ukraine, possibly before comments close on this post’.
Only if Putin will get… what does Trump likes to say:
A really good deal from the Trump admin – like moving all of the bombed out Ukrainians to… to… Jordan and/or Egypt while Trumps son in law will change the worst bombed cities into amusement parks.
engels 02.12.25 at 11:59 pm
Russian defence spending exceeds all of Europe combined, study finds
https://www.ft.com/content/93d44b5a-a087-4059-9891-f18c77efca4b
John Q 02.13.25 at 12:28 am
Engels @41 This total doesn’t include Ukraine’s own spending, around half that of Russia in $US terms, and with more purchasing power per $, at least if battlefield outcomes are anything to go by
John Q 02.13.25 at 12:33 am
Sebastian @35 The ease of sinking ships seems to cut against Taiwan in the sense that it absolutely has to be supplied by ships.
For practical purposes, the same is true of China. They get a bit overland, but not enough to keep their economy going.
Here’s my analysis of the various notions of a blockade that have largely replaced talk of seaborne invasion
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/implausibility-taiwan-blockade
lurker 02.13.25 at 7:54 am
“Russia is supposed to be a threat to anyone in the future” hix, 34
Depends on your definition of anyone, if the Baltic countries, Finland and Poland are anyone, Russia is quite definitely a threat. Not counting Moldova and Georgia, because they already have Russian forces occupying their territory. If Putin thinks he can do an easy land grab, why should he not do it? If he succeeds, like he did in 2014, it would be an enormous boost to his popularity and ego both. He might be wrong about the easy bit, as he was in 2022, but being delusional is the norm, not the exception when it comes to starting wars of aggression.
Also, invading Third world countries is a bad thing, but if the Islamic State overruns entire West African countries, there will eventually be consequences for Europe, too.
Tm 02.13.25 at 8:38 am
JWP: no-one outside of Brooklyn, Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, or Portland, Ore. can spell or pronounce “fascism”
You can’t be a fascist if you haven’t attended a fascism seminar at Berkeley or Cambridge. Interesting take. Living in a fantasy world requires … a lot of fantasy.
novakant 02.13.25 at 11:55 am
“Ending the war … ” sounds great, but under the proposed terms (as far as I can gather) it would amount to giving up the principle of territorial integrity and the prohibition against wars of aggression. If you’re cool with that, you can look forward to a world that is even more violent, unjust and chaotic than the current one.
Tm 02.13.25 at 1:30 pm
Let’s just be clear that Trump is not in the position to “end the war”, in which the US is not party. This is bullshit and the media are going full Pravda with their neverending repetition of Trumpian lies.
reason 02.13.25 at 3:24 pm
Tom Perry @37
That is actually an odd statement, since the USA is not an actual participant. Until both participants actually stop shooting at each other, the war will not end.
reason 02.13.25 at 3:32 pm
I’ve had considerable problems understanding what “the plain people” mean when they say woke. I think I have it now. I think they mean “modern”. These people are reactionaries. They want to go back to the past. What I don’t think they, amongst themselves, agree upon, is when.
Tom Perry 02.13.25 at 5:02 pm
Nothing more from you, please – JQ
Laban 02.13.25 at 5:52 pm
reason – ” the USA is not an actual participant”
Well, the targets are selected using US satellite and ISR data, I’d imagine the terrain maps that the ground-hugging drones follow are from the US, the missiles are often from the US, there might be a Global Hawk drone or P8 safely offshore to detect and analyse defence radars lighting up, and then post-impact analysis is again satellites/SIGINT/ISR.
There are frequent USAF intelligence flights along the Romanian Black Sea coast or near Belarus or Kaliningrad – sometimes from Mildenhall or even Lossiemouth.
It doesn’t seem impossible that a target could be selected in Ramstein – or indeed the UK or the US, the missile or drone programmed remotely, and the only Ukrainian involvement being to point it at the sky and present the post-op briefing conference.
I do wonder if the laws of war, such as they be, will need amending to take account of the new realities of drone warfare.
anon/portly 02.13.25 at 7:42 pm
It is not the official policy of the Democrats to try to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people. That’s just a lie. [currently 41]
Was J-D thinking when he wrote this? The obvious meaning here was that the Democrats take unpopular positions on moral issues or on issues with moral dimensions. I’d say both parties do this all the time, or depending on how one interprets (or gives latitude to) “official policy” and “try to sell” at least at times. I don’t even see how they can help it.
If I was to write, “both parties spend a lot of money on campaign ads highlighting the other side’s position on various moral issues,” would J-D say that was a lie also?
wkw 02.13.25 at 8:49 pm
JQ, if the US is so unimportant then surely its collapse is no big deal, and this post is unnecessary.
Yet you keep writing versions of it, over and over for well more than a decade now, a period of time in which the US has turned sharply inward (even before Trump). Is it a coincidence that during that same period global violence has been increasing while global democracy has been backsliding, and global institutions have been so severely weakened that they may not be salvageable? (This includes institutions in which the US is not a member.)
Maybe. If it is then risks of the coming period are low, and the challenges easily manageable. If so, then answering the “how” questions I’ve posed should be simple to do. Yet they remain unanswered.
I don’t think the Houthis are untouchable. I don’t think the US brought full force to bear against them and failed. The US has chosen extremely limited engagement against them up to now. But the previous US admin had more restraint than the current one has. Biden took the Houthis off the Foreign Terrorist Organization list in 2021 to make humanitarian aid to the region more logistically feasible. This limited the US’s legal ability and moral willingness to carpet-bomb the country. Obviously the current USG doesn’t care about trivial little things like human lives, so they just re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist group this week and cut all humanitarian aid to the region while inflaming the Levant politically.
Which means the Houthis are soon going to be genocided by Bibi + Drunk Pete + MbS… oooh look, some new beachfront property for Jared to develop on the Gulf of Aden, along with a lovely new Trump-owned golf course on the LIV Tour, designed by Phil Mickelson! Easy access to Mecca! Get in now while prices are low!
Should be easy for a European rump NATO to stop this, since Ukraine has 800,000 troops in the trenches on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Right? Or is your analysis incomplete?
J-D 02.13.25 at 9:22 pm
If you are right about what JWP meant, then why is that not what JWP wrote? If you had a choice between writing A–
‘It is the official policy of the Democrats to try to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people’
–and B–
‘The Democrats take unpopular positions on moral issues or on issues with moral dimensions’
–why would you choose A over B?
Then why would it be worth mentioning?
No, I would not. But why would anybody spend their time writing that?
nastywoman 02.13.25 at 10:43 pm
@’If you want a world that is less violent, unjust, and chaotic, you have to balance all the forces in play’.
With the exception of any invading forces. If invading forces are crossing borders there is nothing to balance anymore and –
@’You have to let the players save face’.
which is as senseless as a reaction to somebody who grabs you between your legs.
@’You have to mitigate grievances on both sides’.
there is no ‘grievance’ on both sides if one side grabs the other –
and so –
@’Moving the border might relieve a lot of stress’.
How true – if you take down your border voluntarily you can’t get ‘invaded’ anymore –
but why would any American do that?!
John Q 02.13.25 at 10:47 pm
wkw @56 As regards the Houthis, I wasn’t suggesting that they were unbeatable, merely that a substantial naval force was unable to beat them, which reaffirms my (oft-repeated as you’ve said) point that the usefulness of US naval power has been massively overestimated for decades. It’s possible, but doubtful that a bombing campaign could beat them, and certain that a large land force, backed up by air power, and willing to commit war crimes, could do so. Most of the commenters here were making the claim that US naval power in particular was crucial.
As regards the decline of global democracy, I’d attribute it to two main factors, the failure of neoliberalism and public hostility to migration, particularly asylum-seekers. Both of these, along with the legacy of slavery, have been major factors in work in the US turn away from democracy.
I can’t think of any instances of democratic backsliding where the withdrawal of US influence has been important. I’d say that the Iraq war, and US policy in the Middle East more generally has been a contributing factor in various ways, such as making refugee crises worse, and diminishing respect for the “rules-based order”. But if you have such instances, I’d be interested to discuss them.
hix 02.13.25 at 10:53 pm
@ Lurker: Literarily speaking, yes, Russia will remain a threat to someone. For example, Belarus is now essentially a vassal state. However, the mentioned ones, now all EU and NATO members are rather safe on that basis. A fictive confrontation on their own would be another story for those and many others based on a mix of population disparity and geographic proximity alone.
Also, nukes. So sure, Russia can destroy the world including Russia anytime. Let us hope that enough sanity and/or self-preservation instinct remains there to avoid that outcome. That one will not become less likely if we just let do Russia whatever it wants.
LFC 02.13.25 at 10:53 pm
Tom Perry @53
I would agree the situation is complex, but I think that’s where our agreement mostly ends.
There is no such thing as a prohibition against wars of aggression.
Yes there is. Wars of aggression are, in effect, what UN Charter Art. 2(4) prohibits.
Putin is a thug
Agreed.
and Zelensky is a tool who makes Vidkun Quisling look like the savior of his people
What? That’s an absurd statement.
J-D 02.13.25 at 11:02 pm
There are no legitimate states. (Incidentally, quotation marks are an ambiguous way of expressing emphasis and therefore a poor one.)
I call that a lie even though I have recent experience of how calling something a lie offends some people’s sensibilities.
That’s normally the case during a war. Most people’s attitude to war, most of the time, is the one described by WH Auden in his poem about The Unknown Citizen: ‘When there was peace, he was for peace, and when there was war, he went.’ However, one of the reasons that wars continue despite a general preference for peace is that people are often, and often rightly, unwilling to accept peace on the terms available from the other side. In the case under discussion, the Ukrainian people could have peace on the condition of accepting whatever terms Vladimir Putin might choose to dictate, but they are, rightly, unwilling to accept that condition.
There is nothing about that border which justified Vladimir Putin in sending the Russian military across it.
If you are ridiculing the idea of prohibiting something which cannot be prevented, have you considered how much of the criminal law (or how much of the rules of sports and games) consists of prohibitions of things that can’t be prevented?
Sometimes moving a border relieves stress. Sometimes moving a border creates stress. Sometimes it does both.
You’re wrong about that. But even if it were rational to think this way (which it isn’t), this war wasn’t launched to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, because before the war started Ukraine was not about to join NATO, and attacking Ukraine was not a sensible way of trying to reduce the chance that it would join NATO.
Asking ‘What is the solution?’ is often too simple-minded a question. There are no panaceas. Generally speaking, people find themselves in situations where they have choices between different courses of action with different likelihoods of different combinations of consequences, some good and some bad; you choose how you’re going to act (or not act), you find out what happens next, and then you’re in a new situation with new choices. In the present situation, ‘change the regime in Russia’ is not a course of action which anybody except Vladimir Putin can choose to take (and there’s no prospect that he will do so). At some point in the future that can’t now be estimated, the regime in Russia will change (because nothing lasts for ever), with consequences we can’t now estimate. If it happens soon, it is possible that one consequence would be a drastic improvement in the situation in Ukraine, with an end to the armed conflict, but this is beaide the point, because in the meantime people have to deal with the situation that exists now, with Vladimir Putin still in power. He can’t just be wished away. It’s a simple solution but it’s not a possible one.
KT2 02.14.25 at 12:00 am
Tom Perry – TP @53, reponding to novakant @49, you’ve tried to negate-and purge novakant’s call for a peaceful world. Issued unipolar certainties – yet you say “the situation is far more complex than I understand”. Me too TP.
Derided and nullified humans opinions.
Used the rape apologists excuse; –
– they wore revealing and imodest nato’s!… which I took to be licence to rape and pillage your now non honour, qhichnsensibke putin has already done this…
“I, DONALD J. TRUMP… “I therefore determine that any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute protected persons, as defined in section 8(d) of this order, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to address that threat. I hereby determine and order:” … “and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.” …
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/imposing-sanctions-on-the-international-criminal-court/
Imagine the ICC Member states, all 125 of them, as they have “donated” to the ICC, “and I hereby prohibit such donations”, puts them in the Cantaloupe Caligula’s and his DOGe’s sites. The DODes have the leash now. Tug tug, toward tyranny.
Oh, and “The Rome Statute established four core international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Those crimes “shall not be subject to any statute of limitations”.[9]” has now been pulled up like a tree stump on the road to
Götterdämmerung, a town near Armageddon.
TP, Hegseth & Trump are dumping any pretense of security. Do you think the EU, NATO, deputy sherrifs – ( Australia ), believe for a nano second the US is providing GUARANTEED SECURITY! Plenty of weapons and rheroric though.
The not a security guarantee NOT fine print ACTUALLY states ONLY a show of support. Good.
Yet ZERO GUARANTEE.
Anthony Blinken said:
“… is a historic show of support for Ukraine’s long-term security …”
From “U.S.-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement” PRESS STATEMENT
ANTONY J. BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATE JUNE 13, 2024
https://2021-2025.state.gov/u-s-ukraine-bilateral-security-agreement/
Probable RT ‘news story’ (lmfao) will quote one Tom Perry – you – as in:
RT News Anchor: At the respected academic left leaning CT, TP likened Zelensky to the “Norwegian military officer, politician and Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling saying “Zelensky is a tool who makes Vidkun Quisling look like the savior of his people”.
Note TP, you’ll be doxxed. Your face and name will be prominent on screen, probably provided by “Sandworm” “the Kremlin’s most aggressive cyberwar unit”. See Wired. ANDY GREENBERG NOV 5, 2019 8:00 AM “The Story of Sandworm, the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers” ]
Scary. At best, maybe they’ll put the wrong you TP on screen. No matter in the putin propaganda potty. And ues, wenall have a propaganda potty mouthpiece. Trump & Musk being the biggest propaganda potty liars with the largest Megaphone in the histroy of the Universe.
See: The study by Graham & Andrejevic 2024 “A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election”
Graham & Andrejevic 2024 Figure 1 shows view counts of Musk’s tweets, (to me an unbelievable) THREE & A HALF BILLION views. The graph has a little wiggle hardly above zero for the rest, and a gaping whitespace (pun intended) with Elon Musk’s tweet views ranging up to 3.5 BILLION views.
Musk is more like a tool who makes Vidkun Quisling look like the little worm at the bottom of Fig1 in Graham & Andrejevic 2024.
I agree with novacant @49 “If you’re cool with that, you can look forward to a world that is even more violent, unjust and chaotic than the current one.”
Enough of me and others chasing a moths under a lamps.
May we get back to JQ’s topic “How to dispense with Trump’s US”.. with my caveat… until world domination subsides.
Say, Australia taking over Pine Gap asap. Great barganing chip. No security guarantee though.
anon 02.14.25 at 1:15 am
As an American it is quite interesting to read how non-Americans perceive us.
Even when those views are negative to say the least.
Kartik Agaram 02.14.25 at 1:22 am
I’m curious how you’re feeling after today’s unsurprising yet shocking news. It looks like the US is not going to leave NATO, it’s going to make Europe do all the heavy lifting to create a whole new alliance that includes Ukraine.
I wonder how realistic it would be for all of Europe to agree to a new alliance called say ETO, simply by performing a search-and-replace on NATO documents. I fear everyone would want to renegotiate.
anon/portly 02.14.25 at 3:45 am
JWP [36]: the Democrats have an “official policy of trying to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people.”
J-D [41]: “It is not the official policy of the Democrats to try to sell unpopular moralities to the great mass of plain people. That’s just a lie.”
If we change “trying to sell” to “trying to convince” and “great mass of plain people” to “voters” we can rewrite JWP – without changing the meaning significantly – as “an official policy of trying to convince voters of unpopular moralities.”
To the limited extent that I can follow comment 57, I don’t think J-D disagrees with “the Democrats take unpopular positions on moral issues or on issues with moral dimensions.” So I guess JWP’s “lie” is that when the Democrats do this, they don’t try to convince voters that they’re right? Or is that it’s somehow not an “official policy?” I have no idea.
J-D also says in 41:
Underlying JWP’s description of a great mass of plain people with few or no fixed ideas and limited capacity for spelling and pronunciation I detect contempt [for those people].
Utilizing my own Contempt Whisperer skills, I see JWP’s actual contempt aimed the other way, at the Brooklyn – Portland – Cambridge people or at those responsible for “the liberal status quo that has become hegemonic in many areas of American life and policy” that he mentions earlier in his comment. I think JWP’s use of “great mass of plain people” is sarcastic.
He seems critical of the Democrats for picking the further-left guy over the more moderate guy:
They need a new ideology, but are they up to the task? Last week’s DNC leadership election says “no”.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ken-martin-dnc-chair-election/
Maxlex 02.14.25 at 7:21 am
People seem to keep forgetting that Canada is part of NATO, so even if the US leaves, it’s still the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also, isn’t NATO the only reason the US gets to have all those bases in Europe? I can imagine Trump not caring and pulling out, but the military leadership would do its nut, surely?
MFB 02.14.25 at 8:52 am
There are several separate issues here which need to be considered together.
The war in Ukraine and NATO’s role in it;
The concept of NATO as a defensive alliance against Russia;
The concept of NATO as an offensive alliance against China;
The role of the US in all of these matters.
Firstly, in my view the US is paramount in all of these matters. Whatever one may think about Russia and Europe, all of the armed conflicts which Russia has engaged in, in recent years, have been with countries whose governments are enthusiastically supported by the US. It’s very unlikely that European countries would have done much more than deplore, and might not even have done that. More importantly, it’s quite likely that the armed conflicts which Russia has engaged in would not actually have become armed conflicts had it not been for the US offering military support for the countries with which Russia was in dispute. In other words, the US has been promoting conflict in eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Europe has been going along with it. No doubt this over simplifies the situation and no doubt there are grounds for criticizing Russian foreign policy in the region but nevertheless Russia is right there, Russia is the one which is threatened by military buildups in eastern Europe and the Caucasus, and the US is not, so the two sides are not equally balanced in terms of agenda and culpability.
NATO is the force behind Ukraine’s war machine. It provides Ukraine with all the sinews of war; the money, the logistics, the training, the equipment, the intelligence, and the diplomatic and propaganda backing. Without these things Ukraine’s war with Russia would never have begun, let alone have been sustained for two years. But behind NATO is the US; it is unlikely that NATO without the US would be able to provide these war sinews. Yes, Canada is a member of NATO, but it is not only not a massive military power, the average Canadian is not a Ukrainian and probably does not care very deeply about what happens in eastern Europe. Above all, if the Ukrainian war is considered as a way of undermining Russia, it has simply failed on every level. Militarily and economically Russia is stronger now than it was in 2022, and the Russian government is viewed more favourably by its populace. Thus support for the war will be hard to sustain in the absence of the US backing Europe against Russia.
NATO has always been seen as a defensive alliance against Russia. The problem with such alliances is that they are liable to become pre-emptive. This is what seems to have happened in this case. “Let’s get Ukraine to shut down Russia’s bases in the Crimea” was essentially a pre-emptive project, which unfortunately led to Russia unilaterally seizing the Crimea, and instead of negotiating to try to abandon the plan of shutting down the bases in exchange for Russia returning the territory, NATO then shifted to “Let’s arm Ukraine to grab the Crimea back” which again is not particularly defensive. It’s this mindset which has put NATO in its current pickle. There is actually very little evidence that Russia wants to grab any more territory given that it cannot exploit the vast territory it already controls. There is ample evidence that Russia is justifiably afraid of foreign aggression and unfortunately NATO has been stoking these fears for a long time, so it is hard to call Russia paranoid. In effect, if NATO stopped being a defensive alliance against Russia and just became a defensive alliance without promoting a particular notional opponent, it would probably be a more effective entity, except that then the question would arise “Why do we need a defensive alliance when we have no obvious enemy?”, which is a political rather than strategic question.
The biggest of all problems is NATO’s notional stance against China. This makes no sense unless one sees NATO as essentially a catspaw of the US, which is hostile to China. No European country has any good reason to be hostile to China, and definitely, definitely has no reason to promote armed hostility. This stance against China naturally feeds Russian fears, because Russia, being friendly with China, is liable to assume that it is under attack from NATO as a first step towards attacking China, as the weaker link. This makes Russia more liable to see itself as under an existential threat. Meanwhile, if European NATO is unable to go to war with Russia in any effective sense, it is still less able to go to war with China, so this stance is mainly expressed through bluster, abuse and incompetent commercial conflict. The US wants European NATO to support its Chinese agenda, however, and it appears that it will continue to do so even as European NATO’s Eastern European agenda, foisted on it by the US, comes apart as the US slowly walks away.
It seems to me that almost nobody in European NATO is thinking clearly about these issues, and I’m not talking about the institution, I’m talking about the countries belonging to it. It does seem that there has been a degree of institutional capture, in which people have accepted US leadership in everything and developed ideological coping mechanisms to justify this, and now they are left with the submissive attitude and the ideological coping mechanisms, but without any actual reason for holding that attitude or maintaining those mechanisms.
Incidentally, and related to this, we have the same problem in South Africa, where our intelligentsia and media have been continually telling us to obey the US in everything because they know what they are doing and will stand by us if only we do as we are told, only now to see that the US leadership are a bunch of liars and crooks who stab their friends in the back when it’s convenient. But the intelligentsia and media in South Africa still tell us to obey the US in everything, either because they’re paid to do so or because they do not have the capacity to develop an independent worldview.
J-D 02.14.25 at 8:52 am
When voters are told in focus group discussions about stated Republican policies, sometimes they refuse to believe that the policies can really be as stated, they find them so ugly. Given that context, what would make the unpopularity of some Democratic policies even worth mentioning? If the contest between Democrats and Republicans hinged on which one side had policies that voters liked, Republicans wouldn’t stand a chance.
Yes, at them as well, but a key difference is that they don’t actually exist, given that no hegemonic liberal status quo exists. There’s nothing surprising about some of JWP’s contempt being directed at imaginary people; it’s not the most common thing for people to direct their emotions at imaginary targets, but it’s common enough.
I’ll believe that when JWP confirms it; but not before.
Probably, but it is symptomatic that this was not plainly expressed in words like ‘I prefer the less left-wing candidate’. I’m sure some people prefer the less left-wing candidate, while some prefer the more left-wing candidate, but once it’s put in those plain words, it becomes harder to justify thinking that the observation is worth making.
Tm 02.14.25 at 12:14 pm
JQ: „As regards the decline of global democracy, I’d attribute it to two main factors, the failure of neoliberalism and public hostility to migration, particularly asylum-seekers“
Hostility to asylum-seekers is not a fact of nature. Migration and asylum were irrelevant issues in Germany (according to surveys) as recently as 2023, and the AFD polled at a bit above 10%. Even now, migration is only the fourth most important issue on voters minds but you wouldn’t know that judging from the media coverage. In a recent TV “duel” between Scholz and Merz, migration was the dominant topic and the climate crisis wasn’t even mentioned. This is the result of a very deliberate and very well funded propaganda war by the fossil fuel oligarchy, in which much of the corporate media participate.
The real reason for liberal democracy now being threatened is that the dominant faction of the capitalist class has revoked the post war compromise, which supported liberal democracy, rule of law, publicly provided infrastructure, education and research, and a limited welfare state. This capitalist faction, led by fossil fuel interests, has decided they don’t need these institutions any more, and have allied themselves with fascist movements, most notably Trumpism, to get rid of them.
Neoliberalism has contributed to this development by increasing inequality and weakening democratic institutions.
Tm 02.14.25 at 12:28 pm
Regarding Russia, you really need to look at the demographics (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia). This is a society desperately in decline. This doesn’t look like an empire that can sustain an aggressive military for long. Young men of military age are the smallest demographic group, and the number of births is historically low. The Hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded represent a significant share of the young generation. Putin’s war, in addition to all the other terrible consequences, is wrecking the future of the country. And needlessly.
Tm 02.14.25 at 12:36 pm
Otoh the clown now in charge of the world’s most powerful military just stated publicly that the US cannot match Russia‘a navy. These are both formerly great powers in decline. It has become unfashionable to blame the fall of the Roman Empire on the decadence of the elite but watching the worlds richest oligarch in the oval office talking absolute nonsense while his little son named X makes grimaces and god-emperor Trump sits half asleep at the desk makes one wonder whether perhaps there’s something to the decadence theory after all.
Tm 02.14.25 at 2:54 pm
Shouldn’t further engage but since this hasn’t been mentioned:
The claim “Democrats take unpopular positions on moral issues” is mostly false and the opposite is true.
https://ballotpedia.org/Abortion_on_the_ballot
lurker 02.14.25 at 2:59 pm
‘this war wasn’t launched to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, because before the war started Ukraine was not about to join NATO’ J-D, 62
There was some document stating that Ukraine could become a NATO member eventually, but a) nothing was ever done to start the process and b) several existing members would have been opposed and it only takes one to veto a new member.
In 2013 Russia threatened Ukraine not because of NATO but trade relations with the EU: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/22/ukraine-european-union-trade-russia
Russia was not opposed to NATO membership, it was opposed to Ukraine existing as an independent country.
lurker 02.14.25 at 3:15 pm
“There is actually very little evidence that Russia wants to grab any more territory given that it cannot exploit the vast territory it already controls.” MFB 68
This is like Joe Rogan saying Musk cannot be corrupt because he is so rich.
JWP 02.14.25 at 4:55 pm
JQ@59 On the issue of Immigration in the last election, there is certainly hostility to immigration among Republicans, and for ugly reasons, but so what? Such attitudes are effectively beyond reach in the short term reach. And probably long term as well.
The problem is rather that the Dems have known for some time that a crucial part of their coalition doesn’t like open immigration either. And not for morally suspect reasons, but simply because they don’t want to see their wages depressed. (Here’s where we can see the failure of the post-1975 liberal order to deliver an adequate supply of social product.) But the Dem brain trust can’t see this. Why? One, because these thinkers all come from the upper middle class and have never had to work for wages. And two, because their credentials are all in the business of professional moralizing identitarianism, and their paychecks now depend on their maintaining this ideology. So the DNC’s response to losing in 2024 has been to double down on what the voters don’t like. (Including and even especially black and Hispanic voters, mind you.)
It’s as if the Dems are TRYING to lose elections! Old-school east coast liberal donors who can still remember the Party as it was prior to Clinton are tearing out their hair but what you gonna do?
In any event, I can’t see how the Dem’s fuckups in 2024 amount to a “turn away from” democracy rather than being yet another instance of the Dems being bad at politics.
In response to a few other comments, I resent the implication that I am the kind of person who only “punches up” … I have more than enough contempt to go around and I believe in punching up, down, and sideways, thankyouverymuch!
steven t johnson 02.14.25 at 6:28 pm
” One, because these thinkers all come from the upper middle class and have never had to work for wages. And two, because their credentials are all in the business of professional moralizing identitarianism, and their paychecks now depend on their maintaining this ideology.” JWP@76
First, I’m pretty sure that if you have enough income from property that you don’t have to work for wages, you’re not upper middle class, you’re upper class.
Second, I’m pretty sure that if they’re being paid to put out moralizing identitarianism, the business belongs to the one cutting the paychecks. Not sure if those people are making a profit.
Third, the people who don’t have to work for a living don’t need a paycheck, so assigning the motive of the paycheck to explain their perfidy is confused, at best.
If this were baseball…
wkw 02.14.25 at 6:32 pm
JQ @ 59 wrote “I can’t think of any instances of democratic backsliding where the withdrawal of US influence has been important.”
That is because you think economistically, in terms of partial equilibrium and monocausality rather than systems of interdependence that evolve through recursive feedback. It’s why you have no answers to the “How” questions, and think that naval infrastructure is unimportant (without considering counterfactuals). It seems you’ve learned nothing from Farrell and Newman over the years.
We see democratic backsliding in all of the regions where the US has had a heavy security and diplomatic footprint that has been reduced or withdrawn in the past-15 years (ROK, Europe, Israel, Taiwan, Turkey), and we see it in the Americas where local leaders have emulated Trump (Bolsonaro, Milei).
Again: if this is a coincidence, if these are isolated and independent events occurring independently from another, then we need many local explanations to explain all of these things happening simultaneously. But as I type these words Vance has just concluded a speech in which he endorsed every far right party in Europe, so I don’t think we need to bother with that: the US remains very important for ordering world politics, unfortunately. These movements are coordinated both formally and informally, observably.
So countering them will require counter-mobilization, the intentional creation of non-US clubs and institutions that replicate the US’s hegemonic activities — management of payments infrastructure, credit recycling, absorption of surplus demand, coordination of global security (inc naval security), etc — rather than states simply going their own way while claiming each other’s territory (as is currently happening in E/SE Asia, Europe, SS Africa, the Arctic, and MENA… so far).
wkw 02.14.25 at 7:04 pm
JWP @76 wrote “So the DNC’s response to losing in 2024 has been to double down on what the voters don’t like. (Including and even especially black and Hispanic voters, mind you.)”
Does “the DNC” include AOC, who is running “how to avoid ICE” lessons on her socials? Does “the DNC” include Bernie Sanders, whose plan in 2024 called for the abolition of ICE, the end of deportations, and permanent legal status for DACA. The Congressional Black Caucus linked the experience of undocumented migrants separated from their families to the forced separations of enslaved Black families, are they prioritizing “the DNC” over the voters they represent? How about the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has been even more vocal against Trump’s migration policies… is this false consciousness? Are they astro-turfed?
More pointedly, does “the DNC” include the German SPD? The French PS? Are all of them enslaved to an upper middle class mentality that shares no consciousness with wage earners, all only the business of professional moralizing identitarianism?
How about all of the European Greens, too? https://europeangreens.eu/positions/human-rights-migration/
“The DNC” is more powerful than ever, it seems.
anon/portly 02.14.25 at 7:47 pm
[73] Shouldn’t further engage but since this hasn’t been mentioned: The claim “Democrats take unpopular positions on moral issues” is mostly false and the opposite is true.
Had I meant Democrats take unpopular positions “always” and not “sometimes,” wouldn’t that be false, not “mostly false?” Not to mention entirely absurd?
Is “shouldn’t further engage” a reference to an inability (or disinclination) to engage in good faith or a reference to something else?
anon/portly 02.14.25 at 7:49 pm
[69] When voters are told in focus group discussions about stated Republican policies, sometimes they refuse to believe that the policies can really be as stated, they find them so ugly. Given that context, what would make the unpopularity of some Democratic policies even worth mentioning? If the contest between Democrats and Republicans hinged on which one side had policies that voters liked, Republicans wouldn’t stand a chance.
As it happens, most 2024 voters didn’t get to find out about Republican policies from being told things in focus group discussions, they had to rely on campaign ads and statements and media coverage, and, perhaps non-trivially, their memories of the first Trump presidency.
Given that context, what would make the unpopularity of some Democratic policies even worth mentioning?
The last three US elections were very close? The Democrats lost two of them? The man they lost to is not himself very popular?
Laban 02.14.25 at 8:02 pm
Tm – “Regarding Russia, you really need to look at the demographics”
Of course that applies in spades to Ukraine, and also to pretty much every other developed nation. I’m not at all certain that the UK solution (of both parties), immigration from less developed nations, is the answer. Russia accepts there’s a problem, I’m not certain we do.
If prosperity and technology were just a matter of enough warm bodies, Africa would be the leading continent.
Marius 02.14.25 at 8:48 pm
Hola!
I like your optimistic take, but according to Kiel institute, the funding levels for Ukraine continue to be equal between US and EU in military equipment and funding.
US has fallen behind in humanitarian and other non-military aid, but there, the difference is 70 billion to 50 for EU. It is not that drastic.
(Another point is that as I understand, much of the EU military aid is in cash, which Ukraine then uses to buy US weapons. So I don’t know how much the US (3,4% defence spending per GDP) contribution is actual contributions or just business as usual.)
nastywoman 02.14.25 at 10:04 pm
@JQ@59 ‘On the issue of Immigration in the last election, there is certainly hostility to immigration among Republicans, and for ugly reasons, but so what?’
Perhaps for the reminder that this ‘issue of Immigration’ somehow everywhere in Europe has become the main reason while ‘Fascism’ made such a truly scary comeback – and o.k. – most Americans might have no remembrance anymore that America once fought a ‘far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism and KILLING of opposition – but in Europe and especially in Germany there are just too many places and reminders about
how truly horrifying a ‘far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism and KILLING of opposition – is!
somebody who remembers clinton shifted the job of the border patrol 02.15.25 at 1:36 am
It’s foolish to say “the democrats” or “the identitarians” (who, exactly?) were out of step with members of their coalition on immigration when the democratic position on immigration since 1994 has been in favor of brutal treatment followed by savage abandonment in a random country. the democrats just want the slight veil of a kangaroo court’s stamp of approval on it, or a “voluntary removal” signature extracted with a beanbag shotgun pointed at the signatory’s child’s head. and this has been the democratic coalition’s official position in each and every platform and their coalition position in every immigration bill they’ve supported for thirty years. who, specifically, is the open borders democrat who made people think democrats supported open borders? they don’t exist, everyone who likes open borders hates the democratic party furiously and will do anything to destroy it.
the difference between the parties on immigration is that republicans want the torture to be on prime-time PBS and to eliminate the immigration court apparatus because it’s too woke and occasionally notices that four or five hundred american citizens a year get shoved onto a plane to a random country and doesn’t think this is a good thing even though those citizens often speak spanish and are less white than benedict cumberbatch.
J-D 02.15.25 at 2:59 am
There was and is no justification for Vladimir Putin’s vicious and monstrous decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine, not in anything Ukraine did, not in anything the US did, not in anything NATO did. It is possible that in Vladimir Putin’s disordered imagination sending troops into Ukraine was an appropriate response to a threat presented to Russia by NATO and/or the US–that may have been one of the things he was or is thinking–but even if that is or was his thought, it’s not true. If there ever was any threat to Russia, the kind of things that have predictably happened as a result of his decision–Sweden and Finland joining NATO, stronger support for Ukraine from NATO members–could only have increased that threat. It didn’t even stop Ukrainian troops being sent into Russia: on the contrary, it is actually the thing that made that happen!
When we consider who actually started the war, it’s more relevant to observe that if it is considered as a way of undermining NATO, it has simply failed on every level.
It is not usually the effect of wars to make the participants militarily or economically stronger, and more evidence than a bare assertion would be required for any sensible person to accept that this is an exception. As for how the Russian government is viewed by its populace, there’s no reliable way of judging this. It seems more as if you’re just making up the story you’d like to be true.
So where is it, then? You left it in your other pants? The dog ate your homework?
NATO was created (even if this wasn’t explicitly avowed) to oppose the USSR. I’m not sure whether this was a good idea. Maybe it was justified, but maybe it would have been better if NATO had never been created in the first place. I’m not sufficiently well informed to judge. When the USSR ceased to exist, it would have been a good thing to consider the question ‘Now that the USSR has ceased to exist, is there any good reason to keep NATO in being?’ I don’t know whether this was even seriously considered at that time. It certainly would have been a good thing if it had been considered, and there’s a good chance that it would have been a good thing, at that juncture in history, to decide to wind up the organisation: maybe, or then again maybe not. If it had been wound up then, maybe the world now would be in a better situation; but that decision was not made then. Now, though, maintaining NATO in existence is more plainly justified than it ever was before, as the aggression it opposes is actual and not just hypothetical.
John Q 02.15.25 at 3:12 am
“irstly, in my view the US is paramount in all of these matters. ”
This, I think, is the crucial point. Whether or not the role of the US was paramount in the past, it will not be so in the future.
John Q 02.15.25 at 3:15 am
wkw
“So countering them will require counter-mobilization, the intentional creation of non-US clubs and institutions that replicate the US’s hegemonic activities — management of payments infrastructure, credit recycling, absorption of surplus demand, coordination of global security (inc naval security), etc — rather than states simply going their own way while claiming each other’s territory (as is currently happening in E/SE Asia, Europe, SS Africa, the Arctic, and MENA… so far).’
This is exactly the point I am trying to make in the OP. Our main disagreement is that I don’t buy your claims about global security in general and naval security in particular. But I don’t want to argue about that any further – we’ve done military issues to death in this thread, as usual without any agreement.
J-D 02.15.25 at 3:55 am
Democrats have done more to raise wages than Republicans have. Cutting immigration won’t make wages go up.
Donald Trump and his supporters are all moralising identitarians, far more so than the Democrats.
In Presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, the Republican candidate received more people’s votes than the Democratic candidate in five out of six; in Presidential elections from 1992 to 2024, the Democratic candidate received more people’s votes than the Republican candidate in seven out of nine.
The expression ‘punching down’ refers to mocking people who are less powerful, the expression ‘punching up’ to mocking people who are more powerful. I didn’t use either of these expressions but I hope that if I had I would not have mixed them up the way you have. What I did detect in your earlier comment was contempt for a ‘great mass of plain people’, which if it falls under either of those descriptions would have to count as ‘punching down’. I notice that you don’t deny the contempt but think it’s justified by your extending your contempt to everybody, to which I can only respond that acknowledging your fault is the first step to ameliorating it. I have had enough experience of feeling contempt for people to know that extending and multiplying that feeling does not constitute an improvement.
J-D 02.15.25 at 4:10 am
What makes you think most voters found out about Republican policies at all? One of the things suggested by the focus group results is that most voters are not aware of Republican policies.
I grant that the possibility that Republican policies are more popular than Democratic policies is one way of explaining the election results, but other evidence suggests it may not be the correct explanation. When people are asked why they voted the way they did, what kind of answers do they give?
KT2 02.15.25 at 9:11 am
J-D @90 “I grant that the possibility that Republican policies are more popular than Democratic policies is one way of explaining the election results”.
The medium is the message.
The policies were tuned out by motivated reasoning. And 3.5Billion views blinded enough to get he who we must cease naming into the the throne of the mightiest empire the world had known.
It bears repeating, as that is how the Hund in Chief of the DOGes was the message.
See: The study by Graham & Andrejevic 2024 “A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election”
Graham & Andrejevic 2024 Figure 1 shows view counts of Musk’s tweets, (to me an unbelievable) THREE & A HALF BILLION views. The graph has a little wiggle hardly above zero for the rest, and a gaping whitespace (pun intended) with Elon Musk’s tweet views ranging up to 3.5 BILLION views.
Sometimes J-D you nanoscopic logic and language tools (which I wish I had) hide the starlink view.
Enough of me and others chasing a moths under a lamps.
May we get back to JQ’s topic “How to dispense with Trump’s US”.. with my caveat… until world domination subsides.
Say, Australia taking over Pine Gap asap. Great barganing chip. No security guarantee though.
Tm 02.15.25 at 9:14 am
Laban 82:
“If prosperity and technology were just a matter of enough warm bodies”
That is not my position at all. Demographic decline is a challenge but not necessarily a big problem. However, waging the war Putin has chosen to start 3 years ago does demand large numbers of warm bodies. Putin has now been forced to use soldiers from North Korea to fight for him. You’ll probably explain this as further evidence of Russian strength.
“Russia accepts there’s a problem, I’m not certain we do.”
Putin turns the precious young generation into cannon fodder, imports foreigners from a starving country as cannon fodder, tries to pressure immigrants to become cannon fodder. And his propaganda tries to pressure women to have more children but it’s falling on deaf ears, as natalist propaganda never works. He’s wrecking the future of his country, and all of this is totally unnecessary.
Laban 02.15.25 at 10:32 am
J-D – surely 20 million dead is ample evidence of fear of foreign aggression? People tend to be affected by that kind of thing.
I was pootling round the Musee D’Orsay a while ago, and hadn’t quite realised the effect on certainly the French artistic psyche of the Franco-Prussian defeat.
https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/lenigme-9152
Bruce Wilder 02.15.25 at 11:36 am
A capital fact of U.S. politics, confirmed in careful academic studies, is that the preferences of voters do not matter at all to national policy. Why would it matter if voters were aware of what policies were being pursued, if voters’ opinions on policy are systematically disregarded by politicians and policymakers?
In the U.S., it is common to refer derisively to the foreign policy establishment as the Blob, because of their resistance to common sense and reason, never mind reality. The foreign policy of the U.S. was hijacked decades ago by institutions and interests that have no dependency on electoral politics. American voters are systematically misinformed by a vast, cynically manipulative propaganda apparatus to ensure that remains so.
It is not at all clear to me that European voters are even asked to vote in any sense meaningful to the control of international economic or security policy. Whether that state of affairs is ideal is not my concern, but it would seem to be relevant to the OP’s conceit that it can answer the question of how Europe can dispense with the U.S. in the organization of its own security policy.
Some kind of disengagement from the U.S. is in the offing. What in the European “constitution” would allow them to form any concept of their own interests or allow them to organize cooperatively together? Less abstractly, let me suggest that Russophobia has run rampant in Eastern Europe because the U.S. security state has had reason to encourage it. I am not saying that Eastern Europeans do not have reasons of their own — deep historical experience feeding genuine visceral feelings — but I am saying that U.S. has been actively encouraging European politics that is reckless in its expression of Russophobia. Taking away the U.S. material military support or U.S. soft support for that recklessness does not automatically reorganize European political thinking on more rational, prudent lines.
Tm 02.15.25 at 1:20 pm
The US and Russia are both formerly great powers in decline, a very dangerous situation.
Just came across this chart book by Adam Tooze about the terrible health indicators coming out of the US, especially maternal mortality, which incredibly has increased in the US over the last 20 times, contrary to most other countries of the world.
As Tooze points out, it’s amazing that this fact, along with comparably low life expectancy and high child mortality, is completely ignored in public discourse. Needless to say that Trump’s, and Republican policies (maternal mortality is far higher in red states than blue states) are making things worse (by criminalizing care for pregnant women, defunding medical research, etc). I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump orders the CDC to stop collecting data about maternal health. That’s how tinpot dictators tend to act.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-335-the-shame-of-us-maternal
LFC 02.15.25 at 4:14 pm
JWP @76 implies that “thinkers” from the “upper middle class” who allegedly have never had to work for wages are somehow incapable of reviewing the economic literature and coming to the conclusion that immigration depresses wages (if that’s what the evidence indicates). IOW, JWP suggests that a “thinker’s” class position determines their outlook and conclusions. The suggestion is that if you’ve never had to work for an hourly wage to survive, you can’t understand or empathize with the situation of those who do work for hourly wages. Seems like a rather crude and dubious analysis.
J-D 02.15.25 at 4:16 pm
No, twenty million dead in Vladimir Putin’s so-called special military operation would be evidence of callous indifference to human suffering.
People start wars for different reasons, often reasons which aren’t sensible. In some instances fear is one of them, in others not; when fear is one of them, it isn’t always justifiable fear. The number of people killed is no evidence of what the motives were for starting it or of whether they were justifiable.
Zamfir 02.15.25 at 4:48 pm
@Bruce wilder, as a European I found your post strangely condescending. We have no ability to form an opinion of our own – except as guided by the CIA -, while you, far away, can look through the deceptions and tell us the prudent course of action.
Tm 02.15.25 at 5:05 pm
I’m sure Laban knows that a disproportionate number of the Soviet Union’s war dead were Ukrainians but that doesn’t mean, in his warped reality, that Ukraine has good reason to fear foreign aggression and good reason to seek military support from allies – he uses the Ukrainian war dead as justification for Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine. This is what the virus of war propaganda does to a brain.
wkw 02.15.25 at 5:09 pm
JQ@88, security questions are not separable from the other questions, they are prior to them! In the absence of a systemic security provision all other issues become “securitized” (and are often “weaponized”, in Farrell & Newman’s jargon). We see this with the rapid “securitization” of trade and investment policy around the world, and of course democratic governance is often abandoned during periods of insecurity.
Take Kindleberger’s hegemonic functions: they all presume a stable security environment, there cannot be coordinated macroeconomic stabilization without a prior security imperative, there cannot be an open market for distress goods if the trade system is securitized.
Here’s a multiplex network model showing interdependencies between trade, security, and governance: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509423112
Which is it’s hard to conceptualize a Brisbane Woods Conference to re-order the global economy on a set of principles that does not include ongoing US centrality. (It most likely true that…) Only a security guarantor could convene such a meeting, set the agenda, and propel a durable and enforceable consensus.
Robert Weston 02.15.25 at 5:28 pm
May we get back to JQ’s topic “How to dispense with Trump’s US”
Until a few days ago, I would have entirely discounted the possibility of the United States ever breaking apart, even as the Republican Party explicitly advocates and pursues violent retribution against half the country’s population. As things stand, I still believe the possibility is less than 50%, probably way less – but I wouldn’t surprised to see pro-independence clamors coming from the West Coast as well, possibly, as parts of the Northeast, over the next few years. It’s one thing to ban Black History Month or cut EV subsidies, but the crowd currently in charge is making noise about vaccines while phasing out health and food safety agencies. If blue states feel their children’s safety is under threat from polio, all bets are off.
It needs to be said partition would likely prove very destabilizing as competing post-U.S. states look for allies across the Western Hemisphere and possibly beyond.
Vance’s speech in Munich illustrates a key point from JQ’s previous post: Atlanticists are going to try to keep the relationship going as long as they can. German leaders are livid, but the likely next Chancellor is an avowed Atlanticist and party platforms talk about pursuing and deepening the Transatlantic Partnership. At least, Vance has now made it clear where Washington stands, but the lesson is going to take years to sink in, possibly until a new generation takes over the country’s foreign policy community.
About the “what to do:” Yes, moving to separate payment platforms, developing independent AI infrastructure and security alliances, equidistance from Washington and Beijing, etc., makes perfect sense. Re: reserve currency, I thought it would be difficult to dislodge USD, unless Washington somehow forfeits its position. But that may be happening soon if Trump and Musk keep making noise about not honoring U.S. debt.
Bruce Wilder 02.15.25 at 6:20 pm
@ Zamfir
Not condescension, but certainly some resentment may have seeped into my tone
Consider Estonia and the person of Kara Kallas, currently High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Vice-President of the European Commission
Kara Kallas comes out of a fiercely Russophobic faction in Estonian politics and has spoken fairly aggressively of the desirability of seeing Russia dismembered. That there should be sentiments hostile to Russia in Estonian politics is understandable given the history. However, given the geography — Estonia is tiny and its third largest city is essentially an ex-urb of Leningrad Oblast — there are also good reasons to cooperate with Russia economically and to cultivate friendly relations with the giant neighbor.
I am not Estonian or omniscient. I do not know what course would be absolutely “best” for Estonia from an Estonian perspective. I only observe from afar given geography that the relation with Russia is a necessary problem to solve again and again. Being tiny and vulnerable, without powerful allies, Estonia would have to be cautious, even timid in treating with Russia if it hoped to survive as an independent state. Kara Kallas can be aggressive and even offensive and threatening to Russia because of NATO and the EU, as long as she is able to persuade the U.S., the EU and most of the rest of NATO that Russia is the enemy and should be treated with non-cooperation and great hostility.
I do not think it is in the interest of the U.S. or peace and security in the world to be The Big Stick for Kara Kallas any more than I think relentless NATO expansion to Russia’s border was in the interest of the U.S. It is unfortunate that U.S. foreign policy has been so much in the hands of people like Anne Applebaum, Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, who share so many of the grievances and so much of the outlook of Kara Kallas.
As NATO has secured its grip on the Baltic, an active threat to Russian Kaliningrad is emerging. The Baltic States have cut themselves off from the Russian electrical grid, doubling the price they pay for electricity, to isolate Kaliningrad. There is talk of permitting piracy of Russian vessels. The Nordstream pipeline was destroyed by someone — ‘tis a mystery. I find these developments alarming. If these countries wanted to provoke Russia, would they need to pursue any other course?
Whether Europeans can form policy of their own from democratic deliberation and electoral competition is an open question, imo. The “democratic deficits” of the EU are well-known. Dissent from Russophobic policy is not well-tolerated in Tallinn or Brussels. The cancelled Romanian election is notorious. Germany excludes from participation one of its largest political parties. Fico was shot. Orban’s Hungary is extorted.
anon/portly 02.15.25 at 7:58 pm
[90] What makes you think most voters found out about Republican policies at all?
I believe that almost all of them were alive and paying some minimum attention to the world around them during the first Trump Administration. (And for at least some of them, during earlier Republican administrations, and during Republican administrations in state or local government).
I believe that it is not especially uncommon that people see political ads or watch TikToks or watch or read various things that discuss or reflect on Republican policy, both pro and con, not necessarily in a perfectly illuminating way but not necessarily in a completely false way.
I believe it is quite apparent that elected Republicans do not behave or proceed as if voters are not going to be aware of the effects of their policies. Statements to this effect are made by elected Republicans all the time.
One of the things suggested by the focus group results is that most voters are not aware of Republican policies.
How did the people running the focus groups become aware of Republican policies? These policies are apparently very difficult to discern, what special skills or talents or training did these people apply that enabled them to become knowledgeable in this area?
LFC 02.15.25 at 8:08 pm
@wkw
I can’t claim to really understand sophisticated network analysis (or, as in that paper you linked, the accompanying quantitative/statistical analysis). I do understand why a smooth system of global trade, for instance, requires a security system for the world’s shipping lanes, which could, in theory, be provided either by one country with a navy of global reach or by a group of countries that agree to combine or co-ordinate their navies’ activities. I don’t see, however, why a de facto guarantee of freedom of navigation/transit by a powerful or ‘hegemonic’ navy (in this case, the U.S. one) has required the U.S. to maintain 700+ military bases scattered all over the world (or, for that matter, to divide basically the whole world up into military “commands,” as the U.S. military has done). However, I don’t claim any particular expertise in military matters.
@JQ
U.S. democracy (or what it has amounted to in recent decades) is under severe threat, but I differ from the belief, from which the OP begins, that U.S. democracy “has ended.” A better analysis, I think, is the statement by Levitsky & Way (in a recent Foreign Affairs article) that the U.S. is on the cusp of “competitive authoritarianism.” A U.S. that descended into competitive authoritarianism under Trump 2.0 would not necessarily remain there once Trump left office. So planning to “dispense” with the U.S. as a main actor in world politics seems, at the least, premature.
That said, some of Trump’s recent actions and rhetoric have been extremely damaging to the U.S.’s reputation with allies (and more generally) and should prompt a rethinking of the degree to which they need to act independently of the U.S. For instance, an actual European army made up of EU forces, beyond the rapid reaction force or whatever they have now, would be a good development, I think.
Trump blathered in his inaugural speech about the U.S. expanding its territory, but territorial expansion is not a particularly rational aim for either the U.S. or China (or for any major power in the 21st century). If China dropped its obsession with Taiwan and the disputed islands in the S. China Sea and elsewhere, I suspect it would not suffer in any severe way, or much at all. Russia under Putin is a case of a foreign policy generally unmoored from rational calculation, afaict. As Tm noted upthread, an entire swath of the Russian population is in the process of being wiped out. How hanging on to Crimea and a few oblasts in eastern Ukraine compensates for that is not readily apparent to an outside observer.
anon/portly 02.15.25 at 8:37 pm
The maternal mortality thing has been debunked, hasn’t it?
https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(24)00005-X/fulltext
anon/portly 02.15.25 at 8:51 pm
[94]Less abstractly, let me suggest that Russophobia has run rampant in Eastern Europe because the U.S. security state has had reason to encourage it.
American voters are systematically misinformed by a vast, cynically manipulative propaganda apparatus to ensure that remains so.
Is the U.S. security state manipulating Russia into doing bad stuff, or have I (an American voter) been misinformed, and they’re not doing bad stuff?
Tm 02.15.25 at 8:55 pm
Wilder: in what way did Kalkas threaten Russia?
I think you‘ve made your position clear that Estonia and the other Baltics (Finland and Poland too?) should quietly accept a status as vassal of the big neighbor and forget any idea of national sovereignty. I see your point but I wonder: would you say the same to Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela?
hix 02.15.25 at 9:09 pm
One thing to consider regarding what is happening in the US is that the number of active crazy people – the ones that voted for Trump does not exceed the crazy share in an average European country by much. Low voter turnout (with various measures favouring a low turnout among saner people), a high number of people without citizenships and all the laws banning people after criminal charges plus the election system’s distortions just turned that share into a majority everywhere.
Michael Cain 02.15.25 at 9:10 pm
Basing opinions about the US Navy on the Houthi experience is a mistake. That’s not the kind of mission the Navy is designed for. The major components — 11 carrier strike groups, 54 nuclear fast attack submarines — are designed to refight WWII. Keep peer powers in Europe and Asia bottled up so a massive logistical flow across the Atlantic and/or Pacific is not seriously impeded. If the purpose were to keep pissant powers from closing civilian shipping choke points in the Eastern Hemisphere, you’d design something quite different.
I’m perfectly willing to entertain the notion that the current US Navy is a bad idea.
JWP 02.16.25 at 1:48 am
Yes please let’s return to the subject under discussion: how to dispense with the US of A …
Sorry, you can’t. Like it or not (the consensus here seems to be “not”), the US more-or-less runs the anglo-sphere, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I know that all of us here are undergrads at heart who love to wallow in doomy Spenglerian predictions of decline and failure and decadence and implosion and so on, but please …
As for the US Navy and its alleged insignificance, please visit San Diego and take a look at the installations belonging to the Seventh Fleet and then reflect on the fact that there are SIX MORE where that come from. And if you think that blowing shit up is so yesterday, those three gigantic warehouses you whizzed by on the way into town on the 5 was SPAWAR, the world’s biggest cyber warfare facility … that we know about, of course.
BTW, the Army has its own cyber outfit, it’s in Hollywood, it’s fully integrated with the culture industry, and it invented deepfaking. (But don’t worry, they’ll only use it to make the world a better place.) Check it out, it has its own USC campus and website, but be prepared, lefties, to shit your pants!
dk 02.16.25 at 1:57 am
@96 LFC
Unfortunately, all my experience points to this statement being accurate, however unpalatable it might be.
J-D 02.16.25 at 10:02 am
How common is ‘not especially uncommon’? How much can people be misled by something which is ‘not necessarily completely false’?
Then I believe you’re mistaken.
By doing the kind of research that most people don’t do. Ignorance of political facts is commonplace (not just in the US).
Laban 02.16.25 at 10:47 am
Basically, what Bruce Wilder said. Any nation geographically situated next to a major power is going to have to accept that some policy options are off the table. If Ireland announced that Cobh Harbour was to become a Russian naval base, or Mexico announced that a Chinese fleet would be based at Lázaro Cárdenas, I don’t think that reactions would be great.
The idea of dismembering Russia – or, in Brzezinski’s words “a decentralized political system and free-market economics… a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic”(1) has been kicked around US policy thinktanks since before Putin became leader.
TM – I don’t think Wilder ever stated that Kallas “threatened” Russia. Perhaps her rhetoric was sharpened by having to compensate for the row over her husband’s continued business dealing with Russia, at a time when his wife was calling on everyone to cut ties. More generally, I think it’s a bad idea to tell people “what they really think” and put policy positions (which they haven’t advocated) into their mouths.
A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Foreign Affairs September 1997
hairy 02.16.25 at 11:31 am
There was no “democratic and stable world system”. Rather, it was a unipolar global economy controlled by the U.S. and using the dollar and the military to “protect” other countries against the “tyranny” of rivals like China and Russia.
Bruce Wilder 02.16.25 at 11:55 am
Tm: “would you say . . . to Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela . . . [you] should quietly accept a status as vassal of the big neighbor and forget any idea of national sovereignty?”
All three of the countries mentioned historically and currently have come under great pressure from their neighbor to the north to act in ways favorable to interests in the U.S. I am not generally sympathetic to the goals of the business and ideological interests that use U.S. power to bully these countries or, in some cases, the specific bullying tactics. I don’t have opinions on how I think those countries should respond.
It is a seductive narrative that says some “rule-based international order” exists that defines the ideal bounds of state policy autonomy and that aligns with justice among nations. It is also pathological political narcissism likely to carry terrible, toxic consequences in the wake of the delusions it uses for a compass.
Tm 02.16.25 at 12:10 pm
Laban 113: “TM – I don’t think Wilder ever stated that Kallas “threatened” Russia.”
How hard can it be to read a comment for chrissake?
Quote: “Kara Kallas can be aggressive and even offensive and threatening to Russia because of NATO and the EU”
Anon 105: Tooze’s blog post is quite worth reading. The theory that the CDC has the number wrong is so far a minority position but even if it were true, US numbers would still be outliers. There’s also the other evidence, life expectancy etc. Of course if these numbers were unreliable, which other numbers should we distrust?
Tm 02.16.25 at 12:51 pm
Laban and Wilder: “Any nation geographically situated next to a major power is going to have to accept that some policy options are off the table.”
Wilder described the Baltics policy of energy independence from Russia as an aggression. That is what it’s really about. Russia isn’t in any way threatened by these countries. Nobody, including Putin, believes that. What Putin can’t accept is that they are independent countries and act like it.
The quote above is typical for a certain flavor of Putinist propaganda: you are essentially saying, imperialists will do imperialism and we should accept that. The crucial part is the mixup of descriptive and normative. We know that imperialist powers tend to behave in that way, putting pressure on smaller countries in disregard of international law. But do we have to approve of this? And do we have to accept imperialism as a fact of life?
Ironically, most of those who argue the above also claim to be anti-imperialist and would never accept the proposition that resistance to US imperialism is misguided. It’s just that resistance to Russian imperialism is wrong. A convoluted argument is typically made that accuses critics of Russian aggression of hypocrisy. And sometimes the charge is true and sometimes it isn’t (e. g. most around here are consistent). In any case, the charge of hypocrisy is only effective if you are not yourself hypocrites.
Wilder has posted here years ago. In don’t remember him as a nihilist propagandist at the time. I don’t remember Wilder saying that US imperialism is just a fact of life and we should live with it. I don’t remember him saying that the unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq was just fine and dandy and Iraq had it coming for resisting regime change (the comparison to Ukraine is only partial, the US never tried to annex Iraq.) I don’t remember him ever before saying that Mexico should simply accept vassal status and forget about pursuing its own national interests. I don’t think he ever justified US imperialism with the kind of rhetoric that he’s now using to justify Russian imperialism.
But what do I know, maybe he’s now in the Trumpian camp and supports US annexation of Canada and Greenland. In that case I would have to admire his intellectual consistency.
novakant 02.16.25 at 5:36 pm
People on the Baltics hated the Soviet Union more than Nazi Germany. Add to that decades of Russian hybrid warfare and general imperialistic malevolence and you can forget about any idea of rapprochement.
Of course the US can always pull the plug and hand them over, which is what they’re doing with Ukraine right now. It’s not a Europe I want to live in.
wkw 02.16.25 at 6:07 pm
LFC @ 104,
Maybe you will see it more clearly in the coming years, during which expanded military budgets in Europe and Asia (and Africa and probably S America) require cuts to welfare expenditure (i.e., austerity), economic policy is subjected to national security imperatives (thus reducing living standards at the median), global growth becomes pro-cyclical (thus generating crashes), and nuclear proliferation exceeds anything previously seen.
You may also see it from the global democratic declines, the slowing global growth rates, and the increased conflict propensity. This, at least, would be the predictions of the Hegemonic Stability Theorists, and the early stages of these processes all already observable.
Some on the left have been eager for this day, anticipating that some new form of democratic socialism will emerge from this wreckage (notably: nobody expects this now). Others have warned that what would follow US hegemony would likely be what pre-dated it: deregulated capitalist nationalisms that smash into each other, generating imperial wars.
Time to dust off the Hobson (but maybe let’s skip the casual anti-semitism, and also drop the Bolshevism, this time).
engels 02.16.25 at 6:20 pm
Is the U.S. security state manipulating Russia into doing bad stuff, or have I (an American voter) been misinformed, and they’re not doing bad stuff?
You’ve been misinformed/manipulated into thinking “good va bad” is useful lens through which to understand global power politics (as opposed to, say, Disney or Lucasfilm movies).
Laban 02.16.25 at 6:23 pm
JQ is certainly ahead of the curve with the idea of an alliance without the US. The Guardian seemed stunned by the Trump/Hegseth announcements, but now a couple of columnists have weighed in, the commentariat seem to have gone 100% “cut all ties with the US, close the bases, double defence spending”.
I don’t see Russia as a major threat, simply because of its relative economic weakness.
China on the other hand is now the workshop of the world, and the economic system of China is close to that of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – indeed it was pretty much copied from them. The Far East is much more of a threat, not only because of its superior production capabilities, but because these mean that there are very few “western” defence industries that don’t rely on components from that region.
This should be a particular concern of those living in Aus and NZ. It’s a long way from San Diego.
JWP 02.16.25 at 7:34 pm
@ 117 W/r/t resisting imperialism. maybe if all of us get together, stand by the tracks, clench our butt cheeks, and blog REAL HARD we can all of us, through sheer psychic energy slow down the Wabash Cannonball.
It’s more than a little frustrating to watch actually acheivable goals get dropped in favor of gigantic abstract “goals” like eliminating the existence of world-hegemonic power.
Remember how “Medicare for All” was supposed to be right around the corner? And then the idea of even talking to mainstream politicians became haram, b/c of Gaza and the sexy postures everyone wanted to take thereto.
Actually accomplishing something requires an accurate assessment of what the situation is on the ground, the resources available to us, and the available collective will to stick with what’s usually a hopeless endeavor: that of changing things for the better.
We lefties trip at the first hurdle because we live in a fantasy world in which we are all powerful … the X-Men of the library stacks … the Hulks of the study carrels … because all our lives we’ve done nothing but read books and prefer that to looking at what actually exists
Let’s grow up and admit that: books are a load of crap; the sword is mightier than the pen; and what’s required is some new strategy beyond mere right thinking.
J-D 02.16.25 at 9:00 pm
I know that China produces a lot, but I don’t understand why I should be concerned about that.
hix 02.16.25 at 9:01 pm
Questionable as further military expenditures are – we are far from a point anywhere in the west where those could not comfortably be funded and expand the welfare state at the same time. Only in a fairytale world, where rich people can never be taxed, does one form a constraint to the other. Looking hat how the West German military is described in some (academic) literature over the decades, one cannot escape the feeling those two things were not even completely exclusive for a non-trivial number of people working there. This is one reason I don’t like a big mass conscription armies in peace times. The military is a bad place to socialize (and genuinely help to some extent) people who were rather troubled before they joined or had to join. Bad influence for the countries culture as a whole. We neither need people who idealize their two years at McKinsey nor the two years in the army (or some more) because they developed Stockholm syndrome.
J-D 02.16.25 at 9:02 pm
Ukraine and Estonia are both situated next to Russia. Estonia has joined NATO; Ukraine has not. Is Estonia worse off as a result of being a NATO member? Is Ukraine better off as a result of not being a NATO member?
LFC 02.16.25 at 9:55 pm
wkw @119
Thank you for the reply; glad to see you in this thread. (I’m checking out of it, however, for various reasons.)
J-D 02.16.25 at 10:29 pm
I agree; and for this purpose resort to the rhetoric of mockery and contempt is a general hindrance.
anon/portly 02.17.25 at 4:47 am
[113] If Ireland announced that Cobh Harbour was to become a Russian naval base, or Mexico announced that a Chinese fleet would be based at Lázaro Cárdenas, I don’t think that reactions would be great.
If the Irish and Mexican governments held referenda on these bases, how would the votes go? Why would the Irish and Mexican people want to make enemies of their neighbors and ally themselves with Russia or China? What’s the overall benefit to them of that?
Meanwhile, what about a referendum in Ukraine on joining NATO?
[115] [Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico] historically and currently have come under great pressure from their neighbor to the north to act in ways favorable to interests in the U.S.
True, but pressure can come in different forms, and while some of it reflects badly on the U.S., some of it reflects well.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/08/6-facts-about-how-mexicans-view-the-us-and-their-own-country/
anon/portly 02.17.25 at 4:48 am
[112] Ignorance of political facts is commonplace (not just in the US).
I can think of some “political facts” involving economics or government procedures that I would guess some large percentage of the public understands poorly, but what’s an example (or 2 or 3 examples) of an important Republican policy that most American voters are ignorant of? (Maybe some should be obvious).
John Q 02.17.25 at 5:18 am
I’m signing off on this thread.
FWIW, I agree with wkw that what replaces US hegemony is likely to be a lot worse. If the US polity had managed to reject Trump after 2021, and force the Republican party to remake itself, we could have seen it play a more positive role than in the past. But that didn’t happen, and even a Democratic election victory in 2028 won’t be enough to restore the US as it existed.
The main advantage of having been a critic of actually existing US hegemony is that I have a short headstart in recognising that it is gone for the foreseeable future.
lurker 02.17.25 at 9:07 am
“I’m not at all certain that the UK solution (of both parties), immigration from less developed nations, is the answer.” Laban, 82
Russia has an effectively open border to the Stans and the Russian far right hates Putin for it, but the economy needs those people, or warm bodies as you call them. The western far right ignores this mass migration from Central Asia because they have a fantasy of White Trad Christian Russia. In reality burning the Quran gets you kidnapped and publicly abused by a Chechen warlord.
“If Ireland announced that Cobh Harbour was to become a Russian naval base, or Mexico announced that a Chinese fleet would be based at Lázaro Cárdenas, I don’t think that reactions would be great.” Laban, 113
I’ve seen this argument used, a lot. For it to work, you have to make Ireland a viciously corrupt dictatorship ruled by some Assad-equivalent and change the US-Mexico relationship so that the US has nothing to offer Mexico except cheap natural gas. Russia has very little to offer to anyone which is one reason they are so violent and tend to find only the worst kind of allies.
lurker 02.17.25 at 9:08 am
“Putin turns the precious young generation into cannon fodder” Tm, 92
Much of the cannon fodder is not so young, and as Putin himself put it, they’d have probably drank themselves to death in any case so no big loss.
As long as Russia has money, the poor of the provinces will sign up:
https://janiskluge.substack.com/p/money-talks-russian-recruitment-takes
lurker 02.17.25 at 9:16 am
“I am not Estonian or omniscient.” Bruce Wilder, 102
You can’t even spell Kaja Kallas. Not Grzegorz Brz?czyszczykiewicz, but Kaja Kallas, a total of ten simple ASCII symbols.
“Being tiny and vulnerable, without powerful allies, Estonia would have to be cautious” Bruce Wilder, 102
The strong do as they wish and the weak suffer what they must. Does anyone remember how the Peloponnesian war ended? Must have been an Athenian victory.
“The cancelled Romanian election is notorious. Germany excludes from participation one of its largest political parties. Fico was shot. Orban’s Hungary is extorted.” Bruce Wilder, 102
Georgescu thinks the Iron Guard were heroes. If your definition of heroism is hanging Jews from meat hooks and skinning them alive, he’s right.
Germany may have historical reasons to not allow Nazis in government, it did not end well the last time.
Fico was shot by a lone nut with a history of far-right extremist views. A brown on brown incident.
Orban was once a perfectly normal politician who took Hungary into the NATO, if he had continued as one, everyone would be fine with him. Hungary is not extorted, they are reminded that they are very much net recipients in the EU and that if they keep sabotaging they might not get the money.
novakant 02.17.25 at 1:57 pm
I’m not at all certain that the UK solution (of both parties), immigration from less developed nations, is the answer.
Hey, don’t hold back, the Tories are in full Trump mode now:
Badenoch: some cultures are better than others
Germany excludes from participation one of its largest political parties.
Funny, it seemed that the AfD was on prime time TV last night, debating with the other 3 big parties:
https://www.dw.com/de/tv-quadrell-debatte-mit-scholz-merz-habeck-und-weidel/a-71633959
The fact that they have 20% ove the vote doesn’t mean that anybody has to form a coalition with them.
wkw 02.17.25 at 6:46 pm
JQ, no disagreement with your last comment, or really any of your comments.
My critiques are to urge you to keep pushing the inquiry forward: how can this be done? As you say you’ve been thinking about this for awhile and have some credibility in many corners.
US hegemony is over forever, not for the foreseeable future. I’m not at all certain that what comes after US hegemony will be worse, but in order for that not to be the case we need to have alternative models on offer.
Standing around looking waiting for someone else to create a global order more-or-less ensures that it won’t be someone we like. To generate a better outcome requires proactivity, not mere critique.
Tm 02.19.25 at 8:14 am
lurker 132: Sure I’m aware of this. So far Putin has been able to enlist enough warm bodies from the periphery (and North Korea) to keep the war going without causing major discontent and disruption closer to home. But this cannot go on forever. The reservoir of available cannon fodder gets depleted. Putin doesn’t dare mobilize more forcefully. Signup bonuses and pay are expensive (and of course widows’ pensions and care for the wounded). Hundreds of thousands of young men, many of them highly qualified, have fled the country. Apart from the need for cannon fodder, the Russian economy suffers from severe labor shortages.
JWP 02.19.25 at 6:55 pm
@ 127, Well that’s true. Mao, Lenin, and Trotsky all felt that social change should be subordinated to cozy feels: “A Revolution is like a dinner party!” as the Chairman had it … or am I translating that wrong? My Mandarin was never that hot TBH.
In any event, now that US hegemony is gone forever (whew!), I suppose we have more time than I had originally thought and so we may linger over the port and cheese as long as we like. My mistake was to have turned a critical eye on actually-existing US Hegemony just last week; I had never thought anything about it before then.
alfredlordbleep 02.21.25 at 10:19 pm
Background on NATO expansion. A simple point is that so doing empowered the wrong element of Russian power.—
In 1996, Richard Holbrooke, then an assistant secretary in the State Department, proposed to expand NATO by bringing in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic nations. [William] Perry thought this was a very unwise move and should be delayed at all costs. A prominent group of fifty leading Americans, both conservative and liberal, signed a letter to President Clinton opposing NATO expansion. Among the signers were Robert McNamara, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, and John Holdren. It was to no avail. Perry was the lone cabinet member to oppose President Clinton’s decision to give Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic immediate membership in NATO.
That year, 1996, turned out to be the high point in Russian–American relations. The NATO expansion began during President Clinton’s second term. After President George W. Bush was elected, NATO was expanded further to include more nations, reaching all the way to the Russian border. Bush also withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, and started deploying an ABM system in Eastern Europe, thereby repudiating the important achievements of Richard Nixon and fostering the illusion that a defense could successfully defeat a determined attack of nuclear missiles.
Jerry Brown’s review:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/07/14/a-stark-nuclear-warning/
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