I've temporarily dialed back on my charitable contributions. I believe that the US is at the front end of an unprecedented economic and political disaster, so I need to use the resources available to me to protect myself and my loved ones as best as I can.
Once I have that arranged, I can think about giving again.
Related, I was thinking earlier today about at what probabilities and timelines of regime collapse it makes sense to start seriously planning a move to another country under. A 10% chance over a 10-year timeline feels about accurate to me - low probability, but not so low it feels safe to gamble with.
I am an EU citizen and I am concerned about the collapse of the US and more shortly about its expansionism claims. US has such a military dominance and violent culture that I am afraid it will produce a global war. I now think that the EU needs to rearm, not to defend against Russia, but to protect us against US collapse and expansionism. China is our better bet in this coming disaster.
It's so weird for an EU citizen to claim that the US has a violent culture. Since 1776, Europeans have killed each other at a much higher rate than Americans. The US is far from perfect but let's have a sense of proportion.
Supposedly Hiram Maxim was prompted to invent the machine gun when an acquaintance told him:
"Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility."
It's autism that is said that it can be weaponized; the population is armed. But arming population does not necessarily increase violence within it: compare with highly armed populations of Switzerland and Israel.
The problem of the US is indeed with high incarceration rates, long sentences, bad prisons where more hardened criminals educate the newcomers to be more efficient criminals; this whole system is screwed, and needs to be replaced.
Lack of access to health care, while increasing mortality and decreasing morale, is not violence; rather, it's a lack of mercy, and lack of resources. That same lack of resources limits access to (quality) health care in EU, but in different ways: long wait times, limited prescription of expensive but efficacious drugs, etc.
> It's autism that is said that it can be weaponized
is this a typo? I'm autistic and can't see how autism has anything to do with weapons or being weaponized. in fact, I usually see the opposite (sheer numbers being weaponized against autism), but I'm probably the most biased possible source for that.
"Weaponized autism" is a meme about passionate internet communities working together (and succeeding) to pursue goals "average" non-internet-overusing people would not think about much.
A good example is Paramount's decision to delay the first Sonic movie in response to internet backlash about Sonic's design.
(Google old sonic movie design vs new).
Many people who participate in these things clearly do not have autism, but are spending a lot of time and attention on something broadly considered frivolous by society.
Please don't take offense. It's merely a meme reference, not some slighting of autistic people.
I'm saying this as a father of a girl diagnosed with autism; she's lovely, brilliant in some aspects, and... difficult in some other aspects. Life is harder for her.
The US? I'm pretty sure it was the British, Spanish, and other European colonizers who killed off most indigenous New World inhabitants long before the USA even existed. And although that genocide involved a significant amount of violence (some perpetrated by the US government in the later stages), most of the deaths were caused by the inadvertent spread of infectious diseases.
I suspect you may have an overly sanitized view of the US impact on indigenous populations, at least in North America. You might want to read about the "Indian Wars" post US revolution and efforts by the US government such as those to eradicate bison as a means to wipe out the Plains Indian tribes, the Trail of Tears, the California Genocide, etc., etc.
Not at all. I am fully aware of the terrible, genocidal crimes that the US government (or private US citizens under government protection) committed against indigenous populations. And I make no excuses for those. But if you look at the numbers, Europeans caused a lot more total deaths in the Americas.
Is there actually a difference? The people you call Americans and the people you call Europeans are the same people (in this time period). It doesn't matter if they changed the design on their flags before they charged into certain battles.
Assign the labels or draw the lines however you like. It doesn't change the main point. I was responding to @holyra above who claimed that the USA has a "violent culture", but there is no historical evidence to support such a claim. Over any lengthy period you look at the USA has on average been no more violent (and generally less so) than most European countries. I just find it funny when Europeans who are ignorant of their own history and traditional proclivities try to claim some sort of cultural superiority.
Even in the US, we cover this very explicitly in our history courses. Europeans did displace and kill a lot of natives, but it was the US that almost genocided them long after colonization was over.
See: the Trail of Tears, the actual, literal death march of natives out of their ancestrial lands because "manifest destiny"
There were wars in most parts of former Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. If the US pulls out of NATO (and I don't think we should), how long do you think it will take until the other European powers fall back on their old habits of killing each other? And don't presume to tell us some nonsense about how Europeans have changed and become more peaceful.
It's pretty much the peak of hysteria to think China is a reliable ally for a western democracy. It's like you're totally disregarding the fundamental issue that China is an absolute autocracy, fundamentally incompatible with western democracy. You don't like the US. Fine, fair enough. But let's not get crazy here.
> China is an absolute autocracy, fundamentally incompatible with western democracy.
Lack of direct threats to sovereignty, reliability (in the sense of honoring commitments) and basic diplomacy are characteristics that trump ideological compatibility in domestic functioning. The EU is not gonna buy the chinese equivalent of the F-35, no one thinks they are "friendly" but a turn to China is inevitable. It doesn't help that your democratic institutions are closer in the spectrum to a Putin "election" than a Swiss one.
This is even more true for weak and small countries, Trump's Panama obsession has caused irreparable damage to an already frayed positive perception. Paraphrasing an interview with then Chilean president Ricardo Lagos when he explained to Bush his decision to not vote in favor of the invasion of Iraq in the security council:
How did you approach that moment of saying no to the United States?
I mean, I think there are two important elements here. The first is to understand that Chile is a small country. The international role we play is not very big. But precisely because we are small we demand rules in the international arena. Because if there are no rules, the big ones will mistreat us. Consequently, I explained this to President Bush on several occasions: We need rules because we are a small country. Bush found it difficult to understand the point about rules.
Democracy can't work without freedom of speech whis is seriously broken in mamy EU countries.
In germany it's completely normal to get raided by police and all your digital devices stolen for posting pretty harmless memes or opinions.
I always thought that when Americans say they’re a democracy they mean that in sort of propagandist way. Like, installing democracy as justification for military aggression.
But it seems that now some people really believe it? The bi-partisan system sponsored by corporations, where candidates are vetted through the systems - it reminds me of the Chinese communism with two parties instead.
Just compare it to Swiss democracy.
When was the last time an candidate from an independent political party became a president in the USA?
Democracy can't work without freedom of speech whis is seriously broken in mamy EU countries.
In germany it's completely normal to get raided by police and all your digital devices stolen for posting pretty harmless memes or opinions.
>I am no longer considering the US as a democracy.
Despite the current administration being in power explicitly because it genuinely won a recent election in which the incumbents would have preferred to win instead. Trump's frequent shittiness and feces throwing aside, he got his second term through the long-established and very stable American democratic process.
That you would then go from this to claim China as somehow better, a country in which authoritarian one-party rule is absolute and in which nobody can throw an incumbent out of office, is just.... really absurd.
not to dispute, but the fact that most of our stuff is 'made in china' might play into the public perception of this dynamic more than the political labels attached.
The parliamentary structure of the invader doesn't matter very much to the invaded. The assessment that the US is more likely to invade another country than china is not ridiculous anymore.
The parliamentary structure does matter actually. There is no way for the president of the US to launch a war of conquest without approval of the US Congress (there are a limited set of military actions the president could authorize under the war powers act or an existing AUMF but they would not merit being described as an invasion). That would require majority support in both houses of Congress, which can barely hold together long enough to pass a spending a bill.
IMO the simplest and most realistic way to reconcile "democracies don't invade each other" and "the US might do invasions now" is that the US is not a democracy within this model.
It certainly still is in a technical sense that is sometimes useful. But by other metrics, like "can the president start an unpopular war with a steadfast former ally" uhhhhh. If the military refuses an elected president's order to invade is it still a democracy?
>If the military refuses an elected president's order to invade is it still a democracy?
Yes, because the military can't follow an illegal order, which is what a declaration of war without the approval of Congress would be. The military also can't spend money Congress hasn't authorized, even if the president tells them to.
>Yes, because the military can't follow an illegal order, which is what a declaration of war without the approval of Congress would be.
Congress hasn't actually declared a war since World War 2. The President sends troops wherever he likes, whenever he likes, for whatever purpose he likes and Congress rubber-stamps their approval after the fact, and they call it something other than a war.
You're correct that the military can't follow illegal orders, but what you're describing as an example of an illegal order is just the way the US military industrial complex works.
In every major conflict since the creation of the war powers act became law, an authorization for the use of military force was passed by Congress prior to major combat operations. This was true in the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq. There were cases where the president invoked the war powers act for short term deployments of forces, which did later result in Congress authorizing additional use of force (e.g. Lebanon), but nothing even close to the scale of invading a stable, sovereign state.
America had nothing close to a violent transfer of democratic power for a long time too. Not sure if you've noticed, but a lot of things are happening that "are unthinkable to happen" recently.
I don't think this argument is landing that strongly.
In the modern post-WWII era that would be Tibet, Korea, India, USSR, and Vietnam. Maybe also Philippines, depending on what you consider to be an "invasion". Depending on your perspective, China might have had valid reasons for some of those conflicts but regardless of the reasons the fact remains that they at least temporarily invaded territories claimed by numerous other countries. Who's next?
Right, an exceptionally short list of relatively minor instances when compared to the US.
Tibet doesn’t count either, it’s been a part of China for centuries and it was the serfs and slaves that sought reunification to escape the monks’ brutal rule.
> China is our better bet in this coming disaster.
The US values democracy and free speech more than any other country. The EU only somewhat shares these values, which we can see from the normalization of censorship in its regulations, frequent calls to ban political parties, and the cancellation of election results in Romania. Europe has a vast history of expansionism, which we saw in brutal colonization across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Greenland itself is a result of expansionism.
China is also a country that is pro censorship and doesn’t value democracy. It annexed Tibet and Xinjiang and will do the same to Taiwan. The CCP has caused tens of millions in deaths, not just in the annexed areas but even among its own people.
I can see Europeans practicing some of those same authoritarian tactics China does. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at this statement of viewing China as a better partner. But it still seems odd to see people here admitting that they prefer an authoritarian dictatorship as their friend. In my opinion it says more about Europe than America.
"The US values democracy and free speech more than any other country"
I hope we will finally make peace
with reality and stop giving sh*t about things valued in this or that country.
It is completely irrelevant for the EU what US values or loves and what kinds of authoritarian practices are present in China. What matters is what they can give us and what do they want in return.
US makes it clear it won't give us anything, and will demand a lot. It is China, then.
> The US values democracy and free speech more than any other country.
Trump is destroying democracy and free speech (notably press freedom).
Regarding freedom, I don't buy the US vision. The US culture values individual freedom at the expense of the many.
From my point of view, freedom is not possible without equality between people.
Otherwise, some people impose their will (their freedom) on others.
In this sense, regulation is an instrument of freedom.
> Trump is destroying democracy and free speech (notably press freedom).
Can you name specifics? What freedom does the press not have that they had a few months ago? How is there any less democracy now than before? Nothing has changed about the rights of people to vote or publish - if anything these things are getting better by removing wasteful spending propping up one side of the press, stopping illegal immigration, etc.
> The US culture values individual freedom at the expense of the many. From my point of view, freedom is not possible without equality between people.
It’s an interesting point that I need to think more about. Personally, I still think individual freedom is the only real freedom. The US law is well thought out in limiting individual “rights” in minor ways (like not being able to harm others) while preserving most of it. Those choices let everyone live freely and more equally than any other system.
> Can you name specifics? What freedom does the press not have that they had a few months ago?
Every week, Trump is threatening the free press that criticizes him.
He suspended the Associated Press from acceding to the Oval Office just because they speak about "Gulf of Mexico".
He said that that negative cover of his actions should be illegal.
> How is there any less democracy now than before?
A free press is an important pillar of democracy.
By repeatedly threatening or even attacking it, you are attacking the very fabric of democracy.
Democracy is not just voting, you have to be informed otherwise you are blind. You must also be educated to make decisions in your own best interest. A true democracy requires that anyone has access to education.
Democracy also needs time to make decisions, and to make decisions collectively (at least in a parliamentary way). Trump decides unilaterally by issuing decrees.
This is closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.
Moreover, he decides so quickly that the DOJ cannot ensure that the Constitution and Human rights are respected.
Some of Trump's allies even claim that the USA will need him in 2029: they are ambiguously threatening the very existence of an election.
Trump is attacking free speech by banning the use of some terms in emails, attacking schools (e.g. Columbia) and threatening companies with DEI programs.
I could go on.
> if anything these things are getting better by removing wasteful spending
Even if it was true, you need time to change something.
Otherwise you break lives and companies.
The AP has no right to participate in a press conference put on by the administration, just like a random person can’t show up. Not only can they be excluded, but there is also no requirement that the administration even do news conferences at all. That doesn’t mean any right of the press has been infringed. As I said, they still can publish whatever they want.
> By repeatedly threatening or even attacking it, you are attacking the very fabric of democracy.
You’re suggesting that the press is above criticism, and I disagree. I think the press does need to be held accountable when they are biased or spread misinformation or do bad work to chase clicks, for example. But this is different from their rights being infringed. Just like the press can say what they want, with only some exceptions, so can the administration. That seems balanced to me.
> Trump decides unilaterally by issuing decrees. This is closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.
Why is it that executive orders are executive orders under one administration but “decrees” under another?
> Moreover, he decides so quickly that the DOJ cannot ensure that the Constitution and Human rights are respected.
This isn’t the DOJ’s job. If someone thinks their legal rights are violated by an executive order, they can file a lawsuit and fight it in the courts. There is also no such thing as “ensuring human rights” in American law - there’s just enforcement of the laws passed by Congress and upholding the constitution (which may include ensuring human rights but it might mean something different from what you intend).
This is a tangent, but I want to point out that the previous administration was the one who repeatedly violated the constitution - for example when Biden and his appointees would yell at tech companies to pressure them into censoring the public (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...). That’s literally a violation of the most important right in the US constitution.
> Democracy also needs time to make decisions, and to make decisions collectively (at least in a parliamentary way).
Democracy did make a decision - to elect Trump. I don’t think democracy requires every single daily decision of the administration to be reviewed - that’s just impractical, and no country does that. The executive branch has the right to do its job.
> Trump is attacking free speech by banning the use of some terms in emails, attacking schools (e.g. Columbia) and threatening companies with DEI programs.
You’re mixing a few different things here. A president banning things like DEI in their own agencies is legal. A president removing funding for schools who break the law or enable criminals, as was the case in Columbia, is legal. There’s no unlimited right for any school to get free taxpayer money. And as for companies with DEI programs - given that many of those companies break the law by discriminating based on race and gender as part of their DEI programs, they deserve punishment under the law. You framed this as “threatening” them, but I view it as simply holding them accountable.
The press is and has always been an important part of the balance of power between the people and the barely concealed sociopaths that we choose to govern us. Full stop . When people start suggesting that the lugenpresse is some kind of enemy class it's time to get the Nazi smashing machine going.
The AP is the nation's premier news source, it's relied upon by nearly every other news source for coverage. Banning the AP from the White House for not hewing to the WH's ideological garbage is an attack on the free press, even if it is not (and I think it likely is) a violation of the First Amendment.
Then we have the attacks on Perkins Coie and other law firms for their legal work, revoking their credentials - another violation of the First Amendment, which protects not just speech but action.
The Secretary of State revoking a green card for protected speech? Again an assault on the First Amendment.
Trump repeatedly sues media organizations, several of which have folded in a way to basically pay a bribe.
Revoking funding to Columbia, a private university, for not being draconian enough against people protesting a genocide in Gaza? Also a free speech violation.
And as for the Biden admin pressuring social media companies on Covid and election misinfo? The administration was simply requesting that the companies review content that was against the guidelines - stuff like Alex Berenson's disinfo on vaccines and illegal tweets about voting by SMS. The former kind of content likely killed 100,000s of people, the latter was illegal.
Spare us your Trumpy gaslighting on DEIA - having a goal of having a more diverse and inclusive workplace and educational institutional isn't illegal.
Maybe try doing your own research instead of sputtering out MAGA talking points.
How about those Palestine protestors having their citizenship revoked for expressing their opinion? Supporting Palestine is illegal in Europe too, of course, but they haven't revoked citizenships over it (yet).
No one has had their US citizenship revoked. Some legal permanent residents (not citizens) who have supported terrorist organizations such as Hamas might be deported depending on the outcomes of their court cases. I don't support those actions but let's be clear about what's actually happening.
Expressing their opinion? The protestors literally assaulted Jewish students. They illegally took over property. They prevented people from accessing the classes they pay for. This was an illegal riot and terroristic to any observer.
Also no one has their citizenship revoked. People who are immigrants but not yet citizens are getting booted for breaking the law in numerous ways, including supporting sanctioned terrorist groups. It goes well beyond legally protected speech, even for America.
Then I must have mixed up details from two different stories. But he's relevant anyway. Are permanent residents exempt from the first amendment, or is he being deported for something other than his speech?
Denaturalization means taking away someone's citizenship. Nobody's citizenship was taken away in this specific case.
I think most would agree that "taking away someone's permanent residency card" is not on the same level of outrageous as "taking away someone's citizenship." I agree that both are drastic measures, but one is way more outrageous.
Whether it was justified in this specific case or not, and to which degree, is an entirely separate story.
If you mixed it up with some other case and manage to locate it, please reply with a link, because I am genuinely curious too (not trying to be snarky, I mean it). So far, I was not able to find a single case of a US citizen getting denaturalized recently, except this one[0]. But this one kind of makes sense, since he lied on documents during the naturalization process about his involvement in extra-judicial killings in El Salvador back in the day (which would have almost definitely prevented him from becoming a US citizen, in the first place, if he was truthful):
> Arnoldo Antonio Vasquez, a native of El Salvador, is alleged to have concealed and misrepresented his involvement in the extra-judicial killing of 10 civilians in San Sebastian, El Salvador, in September 1988, when he was an officer in the Salvadoran military. Vasquez was previously identified by then-Vice President Dan Quayle in a list of Salvadoran soldiers responsible for these killings. Vasquez concealed his involvement in the San Sebastian killings throughout his immigration and naturalization proceedings. Vasquez was naturalized as a U.S. citizen Jan. 13, 2005.
I'm a US citizen but I'd be a lot more concerned about the EU if the US falls but not because of the expansionist talk. I do not want to see expansionism rise at all, but the leader we have right now is also a coward and a bully. He might be willing to go for a small country like Panama (and that would still be an _insane_ move) but NATO is still really strong even without the US and I don't think he'd be willing to risk anything but a sure thing.
More likely in my book is the existing wars in the EU spreading, and civil war breaking out in the US. The EU wars are already expanding, loosing stability, and generally getting more politically divisive even if US policy had a strong impact on them. Those tensions aren't new, and at least from this side of the pond it seems like the US was keeping those expansionist actors in check more than encouraging them. Things are not going well in the US politically, and I'll leave it at that.
From the economic side, if there is a US economic collapse, and its definitely not going up, the economies that are going to hurt the most are going to be those built on top of the US dollar as they have outsourced control over the fundamental tools you can use to stabilize your economy in rough times.
> the leader we have right now is also a coward and a bully
These labels are being misapplied in my opinion. What people saw after the first assassination attempt was the opposite of cowardice, and I think it helped Trump win. As for bullying - there’s certainly some. But you can also look at how Biden bullied private companies to implement the Democrat’s censorship machine and find that bullying appears in many forms. Is the EU any better? Given their love of censorship and slip towards authoritarianism, I don’t think so. What about Canada? We saw their authoritarian handling of protests, where they literally denied protesters access to financial assets, and I view that as extreme bullying.
> He might be willing to go for a small country like Panama (and that would still be an _insane_ move)
Would it be insane? The canal was built by the US. It is a key part of economic and national security. Panama is violating treaties around its handover (https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/1/senators-sound-alarm-...). Why do you think China is so upset about the recent sale to Blackrock? It’s because they have been quietly gaining control over the canal.
> the economies that are going to hurt the most are going to be those built on top of the US dollar as they have outsourced control over the fundamental tools you can use to stabilize your economy in rough times
I would say the opposite is true - they benefit from the world’s most powerful and best managed currency. That stability makes them resilient as well. Countries trade in dollars and accept debt in dollars for basic but well thought out reasons. They aren’t making irrational choices.
Panama is not an ally of the US. Neither officially, or even unofficially if you consider all their recent cooperation with China. Violating a treaty in a way that affects national security would require a change from Panama or action from the US. Hopefully diplomatically, but if there’s no change, then maybe retaking the canal is the only sane outcome. To me the insane part is Panama building relations with a communist dictatorship in secret, undermining the conditions of the canal being handed to them.
Panama has been us aligned and a huge trading partner since the late 80s. We don't have any mutual military aid pact or anything but we give them a substantial amount of aid and they give us favorable trading conditions through their sovereign property.
They are a sovereign state. They get to build relations with whoever they want. That's how sovereignty works. The way you win those countries over is with the use of soft power, something that China understands but seems to be outside the grasp of the current admin, who is banging around like a band of drunken apes.
They must abide by treaties, so no they don’t get to build relations with whoever they want. The canal’s handover came with requirements. If they don’t want to uphold those, and treaties mean nothing, why would their sovereignty be respected? But I do agree soft power is better and that the US government has poor strategy here and in general.
Also I’m not sure what you mean by “huge trade partner”. Panama isn’t even in the top 20 trade partners of the US.
You're somewhat mistaken with this assessment. The modern convention is that any treaty can be annulled simply by one of the parties declaring "what kind of idiot would have made this treaty".
It's worthwhile to stay informed on how modern global norms treat treaties.
I think the closest and most recent example we have is the Soviet Union. The US has a more homogeneous culture and language though. However, I can see states "caring" about themselves more than the union. This might actually turn out good for some states though probably catastrophic for some others.
The USSR was in a far worse position than the US is in. They had to build a wall to keep people from walking out. The US on the other hand is financially irresponsible. It can't afford a global Not-An-Empire any more because its economy is no longer the world's unchallenged largest but it isn't in a bad state in absolute terms. The scale of the challenges just aren't in the same league.
Unless it decides to go down fighting and gets something important blown up it could easily remain a nice place to live for centuries. Nobody threatens the US, it is hard to see how it'll ever be in anyone's interest to threaten them, they can re-learn how to be an industrial powerhouse if they have to. Almost all its real problems are ill-advised domestic policies that can be changed pretty quickly if people decide the situation is hairy enough to be honest in politics.
It might be in everyone's interests for the US to dissolve but it won't be as bad as the USSR dissolution was. It'd probably be a good outcome if they went back to the constitution as intended, depowered the federal government and became a collection of powerful states. A lot of the political tension is because whoever wins the fight over controlling the central government ends up with far too much power.
When I look at the Gerontocracy that rules american politics today, I can't help but remember myself of the Soviet Gerontocracy that ruled the USSR in its last decade or so.
I think the collapse might take place in the shape of something like china: self interested elites, self sabotaging economic policy, a hollowing out economically by outside powers, numerous failed rebellions and devolution of central power due to lack of governability, etc. Aka, a period of somewhat rapid decay.
Education funding per pupil has steadily increased year after year. Maybe we should spend even more, but our problems with bad educational outcomes are mostly due to other factors rather than a lack of money.
Automation has done more to remove manufacturing jobs than offshore by a significant margin. 50-70% of job loss and wage reduction can be attributed to automation.
Even if we bring back all the manufacturing jobs we've lost, they represent fewer positions and automation will continue to be a downward force on wages.
Yes, Gibbon makes for interesting reading. Decline can indeed be prolonged. I suppose it's like how some things get very slowly better over the decades, other things get very slowly worse over the decades.
I originally wrote centuries, but there’s reasonable criticism calling something a collapse when there’s periods of renewal and expansion in that timeframe.
Well, presumably you'll have a much easier time living through the fall of a country in another country.
As to "which countries don't seem like they'll collapse with over 1 in 10 odds within 10 years"... Most of them? I guess if you thought this risk was exceptionally high the EU's visa free travel would be the best hedge you could get right now.
I highly doubt that Russia is capable or willing to get into a fullscale war with EU. It's more than 3 years into war with Ukraine without any meaningful result, but repercussions for Russia, while not fatal, still significant. There was very limited military aid for Ukraine, yet Ukranian UAVs explode in Moscow and regions almost every day. Also there's a gas pipe from Russia to EU amidst the conflict which both sides afraid to even touch. Also EU has nuclear.
Full scale is unlikely. Russia could not, but they might send 250k/year to die in Estonia. EU and Nato (with or without US) would defend. But I doubt they would go all the way through Russia to force them to stop.
Nuclear option is not likely to be used for some "minor" conflict like that, because it would go both ways quickly.
This assertion is sharply undercut by the facts. I have an incredibly hard time believing that you're engaging in good faith here.
There is literally zero evidence whatsoever that Russia cares about 'equality for ordinary people' and a mountain of conclusive proof that it does not.
Ukraine did not owe Russia anything at all, so these 'negotiations' were nothing more than theater. Russia gave Ukraine the choice between either surrendering their sovereignty (for literally zero benefit in exchange) or being invaded. That is not a negotiation, that's state-sponsored terrorism.
For example It is clearly that some Ukraine nationalist did bloody crimes before the war even if Russian media exegarates it. Even the European Court of Justice has acknowledged crimes on the side of Ukraine.
I'm Russian, but it is my real opinion. I don't get paid anything for it. And I understand that not all Russian(goverment) actions are good, some were incorrect or questionable. Russia just don't want NATO expansion to the East even without transparent referendums. It's all very complicated in reality, in war no side perfectly correct and right and clean... :(
Why does Russia have any right to say whether sovereign countries on its borders join NATO or not?
The only reason Russia cares is because it wants to continue controlling them -- not because it's worried about the mythical NATO invasion of Russia its news and leader trumpet.
And in contrast, the only reasons those countries want to join NATO is because they're scared of Russia invading them, which it historically has. (See: Finland and eastern Europe)
Why US and EU worried about Nuclear Weapon in Iran?(I've exaggerated a bit here for an example).
NATO has more troops and equipment than Russia, it does not need to be afraid of Russia and seeks to expand even more.
To be sure even about majority opinion in Finland about joining NATO, in such serios questions you need referendum data but there is no such referendum. Even supporters of the West are not always in favor of joining a purely military and not only defensive NATO Alliance.
Yes USSR invading Finland in Soviet-Finland war it's bad, the USSR offered Finland a territory in return before the war, but unfortunately, it did not seem very profitable, but then, during WW2 for most of the time, Finland fought on the side of the German Axis coalition. And Finland did not fight quite adequately and also committed crimes, created concentration camps to isolate peoples who were not ethnically related to Finns and ("non-indigenous peoples") to move out of the territories where these people lived all their lives and many people died in these camps and there is some evidence of crimes in these camps. If someone want to take away something from you, for example, a part of the territory, then would it be adequate to ask for help from a notorious bandit(Hitler) who burns people? Such question has no good answer.
I'm not oneside propagandist. I just want that more people try to see things from all sides and analyse more information. Maybe I'm wrong.
In countries where there is a very significant part of the Russian-speaking and sympathetic to the Russia population, Russia wants their opinion(russian speaking people) to be taken into account, they are not forbidden to speak and study Russian in schools. Yes, sometimes they exaggerate reasonable demands. But I recognize that such countries have the right to require that all official documents be in the main language and the officials need to know the main language. I think it's not that Russia want fully control of this Countries. Russia wants trade and interact economically with these countries, and not just to have all Russian goods blocked or subject to huge duties without reasons.
Sorry for lots of text. And I may be mistaken in some points.
You need to rethink your information environment, you are repeating many false claims that I recognise from past propaganda.
For instance your view of NATO membership is fundamentally flawed as it assumes a NATO push to take on more members, when in reality even the most shallow research shows that it was actually based on a pull from countries who lobbied to be able to join NATO and had to jump through hoops to qualify.
Why did those countries want to join NATO? Because they recognised that, alone, they were vulnerable to what’s clearly a revanchist Russia looking to annex or otherwise control other countries in the region. By being part of a broad security alliance like NATO those countries made themselves safer from Russian attacks.
As for Russian speakers in Ukraine, I know many Ukrainians, most of whom from the east who learnt Russian as a first language. All but one of them absolutely detest Russia, have nothing good to say about Russians in general, who they see as complicit, and have become even more fiercely pro-Ukrainian and patriotic than they were before the war. Many have chosen to speak Ukrainian primarily, despite it being their second language.
And why wouldn’t they? Russia’s invasion destroyed their homes and their way of life, levelling entire cities, and killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians. The idea that all of this was done in their name or to their benefit is insulting.
Since the cold war, it was always understood that it would be OTAN that would have to resort to nuclear weapons to halt a mythical soviet attack on western europe.
There's no conceivable scenario the United States could sustain the logistic chains to engage in a sustained land war in Europe against the soviets in the cold war, and now even less so.
Given the preponderance of artillery of the Russians, I really doubt the current numbers from the delusional british about their losses in Ukrain, but supposing Russia would incur 250 deaths year to subdue Estonia is beyond the realms of the most fantastic political sciences major military fantasy.
The United States fought for 20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban regime with the Taliban at the cost of more than 2 trillion dollars. Even nominal success like Desert Storm were not the military triumph it seems as besides Saddam's army being a poor excuse of a military force, widespread bribing was used to guarantee several Iraq's military units would not fight.
Hitler employed 111 divisions on the Barbarossa plan, with the known results. The US has currently 5 divisions equivalent in state of readiness plus some other ten that would take take time. Any serious american operation against Russia in Eastern Europe would thus necessitate a draft in far bigger proportions than the Vietnam's era Draft, in a population that is way less jingoistic than the boomers eager to prove they were up to the heroic acts of the silent generation that overcome the Axis in the battlefield. A lot of american industrial production has been downsized and sizable parts of it depend on global supply chains.
While american weaponry are technologically impressive, most of it was designed by the most byzantine and politicized proccess you could imagine with the goal of guaranteeing politicians votes in their turfs and to maximize returns for the Military Industry shareholders. American weaponry is maintainance intensive, have low availability and depend on optimal conditions to be operated and mantained. They also depend on robust ISR. All things that a smart enemy with hypersonic weapons and space capabilities would make sure to deny on the first day.
The idea that the United States could prevail in a direct lan war against Russia or a naval conflict against China is a fantasy.
There is a straightforward way to win a naval conflict against China, which is basically a repeat of the strategy used with great success against Japan in WWII. Use mines and submarines to cut off their fossil fuel, food, and fertilizer imports. Starve them to death. Chinese leaders are aware of this vulnerability, and are working hard to reduce dependence on foreign energy as well as building a blue water navy that can protect their sea lines of communication. But progress has been slow.
As for Russia, their internal economy is very weak and they have far less industrial capacity than the old USSR. The only way they are able to financially sustain the invasion of Ukraine is through huge fossil fuel exports. Those exports pass through a limited set of choke points including pipelines, refineries, tank farms, and ports which are impossible to defend and can be wrecked with stand-off weapons. Some of your criticisms of overly complex US weapons systems are valid, but our cruise missiles are proven to work reliably.
It doesn't make much sense to be measured by classical armies if all these countries unfortunately have nuclear weapons and can use them in case of a critical situation. And that's the scariest part. :( It's better to find a middle ground in negotiations somehow.
Sounds good. Everyone loves negotiations when they get what they want. Do you think those negotiations will result in China and Russia ceasing their attempts to seize territory from our allies? If not then we might have to take other measures. Regardless of which side is right or wrong, we seem to be on a long-term collision course for fundamental geopolitical reasons that will extend beyond the current US presidential administration.
Maybe I'm biased because I'm Russian. But I'm sure that Russia has no intention of seizing territories of Western countries, Russia already has a very large territory. Ukraine is a different story, there really are a lot of people there who used to live in the same country with Russia(USSR) and speak only Russian language and really sympathize Russia. I'm not saying it's good to seize territory even in that case, but all other countries that has little only Russian language speaking population have no significant reason to be afraid. As I wrote earlier NATO currently has more troops and equipment than Russia.
The current Russian leader sees the collapse of the USSR as a "tragedy". And since 1990 they they have invaded Georgia, Moldova, and now Ukraine (after repeatedly promising that they wouldn't). That looks like a pattern. I understand why Russia is doing it to create defensible strategic depth due to lack of natural geographic barriers around their population centers. But that doesn't make it right, and regardless of moral issues Russian expansionism is certainly contrary to the interests of the USA and its allies. Who will be the next victim, perhaps Estonia?
I bear no ill will towards Russian people but while the current malign leadership remains in power we should use all means short of war to contain, undermine, impoverish, and generally humiliate the country. Grind them into the dust until they can no longer present a credible threat. But that's just my opinion.
I think the collapse of the USSR was more bad than good, not because of the loss of territory, but because of the collapse of socialist and communist ideals. I believe that better than people are more equal, and there are no billionaires or multi-billionaires. Individuals do not need wealth of this size.
But Russia is not taking people off the streets to war by force currently. Most of those who fight for Russia really believe that they are right. And almost everyone who wanted to could leave Russia. Currently it's not like in WW2 and Hitler. Russian soldiers do not kill civilians on purpose(maybe with the exception of single crimes that are being investigated), it has no point, (although it is possible that by mistakes, this is a war, unfortunately) and in Russia there is not even the death penalty, although in the US there is.
Russia always proposes some kind of settlement so that there is no war. Sometimes they are not so terrible, for example, simply not to make Russian-speaking citizens second-class citizens, not to forbid them anything. Sometimes the demands are of course not entirely adequate, but this is not always the case. And other side can offer some middle ground.
I believe that an invasion in any Baltic country is possible only in one case, if they completely cut off the food supplies of Kaliningrad, and if the sea route is completely blocked, and the people in Kaliningrad will suffer without food.
I didn't support Putin in the last elections, for example, especially because of the change in the constitution. And I don't really understand why he didn't find an adequate successor, for example.
I'm saying this just so you don't think that I think Russia is always right.
Yes, you may think differently. And I may be wrong.
>and in Russia there is not even the death penalty, although in the US there is.
Aside from all the rest of the nonsense and foolishness you've written about Russia and the supposedly lovely ideals of the USSR's bloody, genocidal history, this particular nugget stood out.
Russia has no formal death penalty, sure. Instead it's government illegally murders opponents domestically and internationally, frequently and in sizable numbers while lying about having done so. Aside from the U.S death penalty laws being completely different in nature to such a mafia practice by the Russian government and its agents, at least the U.S, formally and through due process, executes its criminals without concealing what it does.
> But I'm sure that Russia has no intention of seizing territories of Western countries /---/ I'm not saying it's good to seize territory even in that case, but all other countries that has little only Russian language speaking population have no significant reason to be afraid.
Well, that's exactly the problem. Several countries in Europe have more Russians in their population than the Kherson oblast (<14%), which Russia officially annexed.
Yes, I somehow understand this, people are different. I hope that there will be no such thing. It's hard to describe all here in comments. And I fully understand, for example, the country's desire to encourage people to learn the main language of the country.
There was a real danger of people colliding in Ukraine at that time. If everything had been completely peaceful, no seizures would have happened.
After all, there really were supporters of the old government and opponents of it. Or even if NATO had signed an agreement that would definitely not accept Ukraine, perhaps for at least 50 years or some rather long period.
Unfortunately, many people no longer trust the West and NATO, they have failed to fulfill the role of an impartial leader who sets an example for others. They have committed too much deception for their own benefit.
In short, and very very roughly, I'm probably a proponent of a kind of balance. Which side is weaker (the whole NATO is clearly stronger when compared than Russia) that side is currently "right", and we need to look for something like a middle ground. If Ukraine had not received huge assistance from NATO countries and the government had not sought to join it, it would have been a different story. Yes, there is some deception on the other side, too, of course.
If you think about it well, then everything in life is not so simple.
Yes, actually, that's my point. Escalation is inevitable should a real war start. And it will be the United States that will have to resort to nuclear weapons to avoid a defeat.
It will work, and you could probably even say thereafter that the US won the war.
But, it will be a pyrric victory.
This is delusional. There's no real way the United States military and NATO can effect a long sustained blockade on China. American Industry will slow to a halt before the chinese will feel the pain.
The Chinese may like our dollars. But we rely on their manufacturing.
People sometimes fail to understand the real world meaning of having a trade deficit of more than one trillion dollars.
Not at all. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention but the process of decoupling the USA from China is well underway. A lot of manufacturing is moving to other countries like Vietnam and Mexico. Losing access to cheap Chinese imports would be painful but mainly just for consumers. We don't rely on them for strategically important stuff, especially not for military equipment.
If there is a conflict with China then I doubt that other NATO members will play much of a role since they have no critical national interests in the Indo-Pacific region. It will mainly just be the USA with perhaps some assistance from a loose coalition of Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Philippines, and/or India.
Beijing's main concern is an uprising by the population. They are right to be concerned: there have been dozens of uprising and civil wars in Chinese history each of which has killed millions of people. Beijing has successfully used export industries to give 100s of millions of citizens manufacturing jobs which provide a good-enough living to keep their population from revolting. In other words, Beijing has been dependent on exports just to avoid social chaos. In contrast, the US has not been and is not dependent on exports to anything like the same extent.
Beijing did not want the trillions of US dollars it owns: it does not have some master plan the implementation of which requires $trillions. These trillions are an unwanted side-effect of Beijing's policy over the decades of keeping the dollar strong relative to the yuan to makes Chinese good cheap in dollars to encourage owners of dollars to buy Chinese goods (which, again, it does to try to avoid social chaos).
And also, like other commenters have mentioned, China needs to import food, fertilizer and liquid fossil fuels to prevent its people from starving whereas the US is self-sufficient in liquid fossil fuels and food (though I don't know about fertilizer).
The reason it is prioritizing electric vehicles is because right now, if China stops being able to import enough liquid fossil fuels on tanker ships (e.g., from the Gulf and from Russia's European ports), it loses the ability to deliver food to its people. If they manage to make their electric-vehicle infrastructure robust enough, then in some future year, they'll be able to run their delivery trucks on electricity generated from coal, which it has enough of without having it import it.
Beijing is currently in a weaker position than Washington economically and militarily and the difference is quite significant. If Beijing ever launches an attack on Taiwan, that is a strong sign that the leaders in Beijing think the gulf between China and the US is widening (i.e., China is falling ever further behind) because if they thought that the gulf were narrowing, they would conclude that they can afford to wait and snap up Taiwan in the future.
The USA imports a significant fraction of fertilizer (including from China and Russia). But longer term we're in pretty good shape as long as we can get past these ridiculous trade disputes with Canada and Mexico. In particular a lot of fertilizer uses natural gas as a key input, and we're fortunate to have a lot of that.
The EU is facing severe demographic and economic challenges through the aging of its own population, rise of the radical right, issues integrating its immigrant population and Russian threat. While your savings will probably disappear due to the fall of the dollar.
However, in my opinion the United States is not going to collapse, worst case it will be replaced like the British Empire, leaving an advanced Western country (i.e. UK) behind it, minus the entire managing the world part
Also you should read about The Decline of the West, and its influence on Nazi ideology, not every prophecy is correct, and not every prophecy is beneficial to follow
I would point out that having raising radical right is still waaaay better then having them ruling the country ... and have zero checks and balances applied to them. Which is the case of US.
Dislike the current Trump administration as you might, this is a very far cry than the european brand of radical right from the thirties, which was preoccupied with human sacrifice
It is not thirties. These people Sieg Heil and literally fund radical right in Europe. Also they already attempted violent couples once. And have zero respect for law while having unchecked power.
Is it the radical right or the radical left that doesn’t respect law and uses violence for political reasons? BLM, antisemitic occupations of campuses, and now terrorism against Tesla owners, are all from the left. Even if there were comparable examples from the right, surely in the least you can admit that violence isn’t exclusive to the right.
I did not said it is exclusive to the right. I said right attempted violent coup. Also, in USA, right wing terrorism/violence is the most common one.
Protests itself are legal and fine. As much as you hate pushing for rights of non-whites or palestinians or women, none of it counts as "violent coup". Likewise, calling vandalism against Teslas "terrorism" is a stretch.
It’s sad to see how these discussions always seem to be a fight to win the discussion with arguments. We need to try harder to understand each other, otherwise this will only polarize further, and end with real fighting. It’s sad that everyone sees the world differently, through different media, and we can’t agree on what is happening. Repeating what you’ve seen will never convince someone that has seen different things…
Thanks. I’ll admit I am guilty of this. But I don’t know what the solution is. Features like flagging and voting tend to create hostility in these discussions, and I think that’s part of the problem. But another problem is the atmosphere created by constant attack pieces in news and social media, which leaves everyone in a really emotional state. If you have solutions, though please do share!
I say this from a caring perspective, but from your comments, I would suggest avoiding social media and Fox News for a year… “ BLM, antisemitic occupations of campuses, and now terrorism against Tesla owners”
While you’re certainly right that the US isn’t like Germany in 1941, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe it can’t very quickly get to that point. Just ask the asylum seekers and other immigrants and tourists[1][2] (illegal or otherwise) that have been separated from their children[3], detained in extrajudicial facilities[4], kept in solitary confinement[1], or legal immigrants stripped of their permanent residency and deported for exercising their first amendment rights[5]. This is very equivalent to how it started in Germany as early as 1933[6]. I see no reason the US can’t VERY quickly slide down this path with immigrants (of any sort), trans people, and then after that, much more. Especially when so much has been done to destroy any oversight that the checks and balances of the government would have provided, i.e. two failed impeachments, (and congress now being filled with Trump bootlickers, unlikely to impeach again), entirely too broad presidential immunity rulings[7], and completely unpunished coup attempts[8].
I understand the feeling of alarmism as US politics right now look like a zero sum game with no possibility of compromise from either side
But as a descendent of Nazi slaves whose entire families were murdered, I fail to see the similarities between a movement that had established concentration camps and declared its intention of genocide from day one, and the present day rule of idiots that is the United States
I think the fact that comparisons are thrown too easily to the point of cliche only make up for this sense of historical determinism that often makes things worse
If you remove holocaust from the WWII ... the nazi Germany was still supper awful. Holocaust was not the only thing going on nor the reason why WWII started.
Nazi were idiots too in a lot of ways. Being idiot in some sense does not make you not dangerous.
Even if you remove the holocaust from nazi germany, you are still left with a regime that created concentration camps for its own population and went on a mass killing campaign on its disabled population, converted a failed democracy into a completely totalitarian society and all of that without considering the war and its atrocities such as mass killings, slavery, kidnappings and probably any evil imagined
All of these are, a bit far from any action Trump has accomplished in the 4+ years he has been in office
which makes these comparison in my opinion be, both in extremely bad taste and dangerous as they trivialize history
Republicans were not sieg heiling then, they are doing it now. Having all that in mind, several members of Trump administration and republican party sieg heil openly and publicly. And praise and fund far right parties. That being said, Trump did wanted to shoot already protesters during his first term.
And talk about annexing foreign countries. And openly admire Russia while hating on democratic countries. And started their current rule by targeting opposition, removing protections from Fauci and other hated members, targeting law enforcement and regulators that investigated their crimes.
Time will tell, but the only ideology I see under the current Trump administration is shifting Internet trolling to real life, while the greatest political achievement is triggering the other side
I mean, I certainly hope you’re right, and I am wildly wrong. But I simply can’t imagine a scenario where the US isn’t damaged by this long term, in such a way that far right extremists don’t get further along in their agenda. But as you say, time will tell.
They’re not declaring it out loud, sure. But in private they are. I’m from Mississippi. I was privy to those private conversations. Blacks, Mexicans, LGBT people, atheists, feminists.. they would rather all these groups be dead, than have civil rights. So long as the group allows themselves to be oppressed, fine, but they aren’t, and that’s what has started to cause so much anger from the right wing. The telling thing about the stories below isn’t that individuals are violent, that has always been and always will be the case, but rather the reaction of the state. Gay panic defenses, pardon of Jan 6 rioters, calls for abortion to get the death penalty that are getting traction, etc.
Trump is an idiot, yes. But he’s a useful idiot. Vance isn’t a moron, nor are the Project 2025 think tanks. I think the fact that people are willing to dismiss all this as things not actually getting worse, is what allows it to get this bad in the first place. Again, I’m not saying it’s as bad as 1941 yet. But the optimism that it simply can’t happen in 2025 in America is entirely misguided.
> With regard to general populations, the overall consensus amongst historians appears to be that many were aware of a hatred towards the Jewry, but not insofar that a significant comprehension of the Nazis' genocidal policies was reached. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_i...
> With regard to general populations, the overall consensus amongst historians appears to be that many were aware of a hatred towards the Jewry, but not insofar that a significant comprehension of the Nazis' genocidal policies was reached. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_i...
Wikipedia is often hardly a good source for anything even slightly more controversial than the plot for a Pokémon episode
However the paragraph you are quoting regards the knowledge of the general population in german occupied europe, not in Germany
By 1939 more than half of the Jewish population had fled Germany, so they might have been on to something
I really think you are severely underestimating what life in Nazi Germany looked like, and overestimating the current brand of populist republican politics, which has exact replicas in the democratic party as well
> By 1939 more than half of the Jewish population had fled Germany, so they might have been on to something
That was not because of holocaust, that was because of general restrictions of their legal rights. And also, Germany had policy of trying to make those people leave.
Jews in Germany were largely immigrants living mainly in cities. Frequently refugees from Eastern Europe and their descendants.
> overestimating the current brand of populist republican politics, which has exact replicas in the democratic party as well
You started this thread with claim that Europe has far right problem now. Republican and consequently America politics is massively closer to it that European one ... or democrats.
You are correct about the original thread, I claimed Europe has a far-right problem. Keep in mind, Europe has far-right parties that are commonly actually descendants of the nazi/fascist parties of the thirties, not a descendant of the party that abolished slavery
However, I was giving it as an example of problems in Europe that might cause worries when choosing a country to live in, especially someone who is worried where Trump is taking the US. This worry translated to the US applies in my opinion to both extremities of the political system (Trump admin included)
However, I don't think what we see from Trump right now or in the future is in any shape or form close to the thirties, and I also want to believe that the far-right european parties will also be preoccupied with other (stupid) ideological goals
In the thirties? The Trump admin has already begun targeting trans people and immigrants. No, they're not building death camps and using firing squads but that didn't happen in Nazi Germany in the thirties either. Remember the allies in WWII weren't really aware the Germans were commiting mass genocide until after the war.
I am talking about the 20th century where all countries lost their colonial empires at around the same time late 40s-70s, you are referring to a much earlier period
I'm not happy with the rise of populism and radical parties, but just to put some nuance, I'd argue the "radical" right in Western Europe isn't even comparable to Trumpism. To give an idea, Marine Le Pen in France voted to put the right to abortion in the constitution. On many social issues, they are closer to Bernie Sanders than Trump.
The ones who can afford it have been building bunkers in New Zealand and Argentina, but if you sincerely believe a civil war is on the horizon, almost anywhere would be a better option.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine had a negative impact on international markets, but if you were from either country you would have been better off living abroad when it happened.
Similarly, you would be better off almost anywhere outside of Europe from 1933 to 1947.
The beauty about the future is that it is unknown. New Zealand might be hardly self-sufficient in a world of economic collapse, might be occupied by the chinese in 20 days in another timeline, or might be the only safe haven where one could eat lamb until they die of a heart attack.
When you are pessimistic any country has a dark future, while judging from history, historical events do not look inevitable before they actually happen, and are hardly expected.
For example, recently half of the world, including many in the west, believed in the inevitable prophecy of socialist utopia, where there will be no private property and everyone will be free of the oppression of capitalism. Millions of lives later and oops
> The beauty about the future is that it is unknown
There are factors at play in historical development which make the development predictable.
The Chinese would have to go through half a dozen hostile countries to reach New Zealand. These countries have a combined population of around 300,000,000. Even if the Americans abandon the region, there is no feasible scenario in which the Chinese can afford to invade and occupy New Zealand.
Simple, Switzerland.
All the positive things when you think Europe, without the negative things when you think EU plus all the wealth, quality of life and any other metric you can wish for.
Switzerland has no oil and depend on its banking sector. If USA crashes then likely all modern supply line will be cut and finance will be something of the past.
The current well being of a country does not indicate much how it will survive a global crisis.
A farmer in rural Africa would be less affect by the implosion of USA than a trader at Geneve.
What do you think happens when the US goes down? You don't need oil to move within a small country and we self supply on food more or less, many areas are already power independent. Who cares about the banks then?
You may also overestimate the relevance of banking for the countries finances.
Western country are self suplient of food because we have engine and chemical industry, ones this goes down, shortage of food will be quick to come. In part of the world where labour is still mostly manual, it will be more resilient.
Also without bank, a lot of people will find themself without any properties and will likely get more violent. Again, in part of the world where people own real objects and not number in a computer in a datacenter, this won't happend.
It's never as simple as that. What it costs more to live here I save on taxes, products aren't generally more expensive, just work hours are. What's a good thing in the end as everyone earns more. Also I am an immigrant and went trough several other immigration processes and honestly it's not hard, pretty straight forward actually, if you either have skills or a little backup money.
Realistically probably China as they are probably among the countries that depend the least on the US in terms of defense, banking, manufacturing, digital services, culture and the like.
If you want to live there is different question for a number of reasons, but I do think it is probably your best bet avoid the impact of a US collapse (which I think is very unlikely).
Regardless of what happens in the USA, a violent civil war in China is entirely possible within the next few decades. From a historical perspective those are by no means uncommon. The Communist Party has been able to suppress most internal dissent lately but when Chairman Xi leaves power anything could happen.
I can’t speak for the original commenter, but I predicted 4 years ago that Trump was done in politics because the American people wouldn’t stand for a riot in the halls of Congress. Now that he’s back and the rioters are pardoned, I’m listening more closely to the people who predicted that would happen, and they uniformly say there’s a small but significant chance of a collapse.
Any people in particular you listen to? There is so much noise and everyone has a 'prediction'. Post election both sides have gotten really good at using sophisticated talking to sound like they know what they are talking about(Especially the right). I go on Reddit(main subs) its one universe, go to small less known subs, its a second universe and then Twitter is a third universe, all three are different alternative realities.
I guess I would point to prominent politicians as the best examples, although there's also smaller voices I see on Twitter and such. Schumer, Pelosi, Bernie, AOC, et cetera. I don't necessarily agree with all of their policy proposals but it seems like they understand Trump and what his goals are pretty well.
Ironically, I was actually a volunteer for Bernie, AOC back in 2018 when she was running her campaign and I went and continued this tradition trying to help AOC supported politicians like Tiffany Caban (post AOC, the party woke up and destroyed most progressive challengers)
Looking back, it really felt like a waste of time. I should have taken a hint when I saw mostly old people there, and early 20 something political science majors. Two groups that have a lot of free time on their hands or have a personal reason to be there.
I have lost a lot of faith in these people over the last few years. It was hard work to get AOC into office and a lot of her original hard fighting crew have been pushed out post election. While AOC is making waves on Twitter, I haven't seen any tangible positive changes that have been a result of her being there. We could talk about pieces of the GND being in the IRA but still thats a stretch.
What I dont understand is why you believe these people are talking about a 'collapse'? I haven't heard this too much from the progressive left.
Thats more the right wing e/acc folks that want to push the country to collapse faster because then they can rebuild faster or something like that.
One think that I always keep in mind is that I am not the average person. I live a confortable life with financial security. My incentives and the way I see the world is necessarely informed by my standpoint. For me, the continuity of the current institutions and the status-quo is a value.
But think about someone who has been foreclosed in the last financial crisis, people who have no perspective of ever retiring, who a are a paycheck away from becoming homeless. Do you think those people will see our institutions in the same sacred light as we do?
You probably know very well what I am speaking about, and your attitude is a example of how we are losing the vast masses for non-democratic projects that will end up being worse for them than for us.
We should get rid of our condescending attitudes and really try to see things from other's perspective. And on the other side, unless I am talking to an anonymous Peter Thiel, Musk ou Zuckerberg, it is not like we are truly part of the same elite the downtroden see with some much contempt.
I genuinely don't know what you're speaking about. I agree that trying to see things from another's perspective is important, but when I listen to Trump supporters explain their views they don't say the things you're saying. You describe Musk as part of an elite the downtrodden see with much contempt, but Trump campaigned on an explicit promise to empower Musk, and he's now one of the many billionaires with influential roles in the US government. The most common explanation I hear from Trump supporters is that they wanted an immigration crackdown and he's by far the most anti-immigration candidate available.
If it were a matter of people with nothing to lose not caring about American institutions, wouldn't we expect to see lower income voters heavily leaning one way?
Yeah, no, that was my bet as well, and I was unbelievably wrong. It turns out it's really hard to bet against 50-50 odds in a mature democracy with two dominant parties. Each group has infinite dimensions to slide along if the other group begins crawling upwards.
I've been appropriately humbled by the experience. Worst bet of my career
Can you think of any long-lived ( > 100 years), empire-scale civilisations that have collapsed despite a firm belief they were non-collapsible and/or essential to all surrounding nation states?
Without consulting wikipedia, I can only think of about 17 off the top of my head.
This is a salient point, I don't know how other countries handled it but American schools as an institution were absolutely wrecked by covid, a significant portion of the youths just straight up stopped attending school, and I'm in a bubble but most parents I know are homeschooling at least part time now, when they wouldn't think of doing so just 5 years ago
Does not bode well for the future of informed populi
Its the damn phones and tablets. This abundance of cheap software has really messed up kids attention spans. Computers are a distraction in class and need to be delegated to special times. How do you keep tech out of kids hands out of class?
Anecdote: I grew up on N64 and an era where software was a lot more difficult to come by. As a kid, I'd look forward to buying a floppy disk packaged in a plastic bag held up on a cork board at my local computer shop.
When I got a game on the N64, I would be laser focused on completing it.
I recently purchased a N64 for my niece and nephew who are 8 and 10 respectively. When I was 10 I got Ocarina of time at the beginning of the school year and spent an entire year laser focused on solving every puzzle and completing the game.
Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (and being kids to freakin PHD academics) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
They must try "every new app", see every new thing on Netflix/Hulu/whatever. Maybe i'm just exhibiting old man syndrome but it really shocked me. I clearly remember being that kid yesterday and doing my best to beat the game. I guess the fact that the N64 only ever had about ~380 games in its entire lifespan made a difference. Each title was a special event. Today there is just so much software for the kids to play with.
> Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (...) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
Have you considered that they might just not find games interesting? Even if they like playing some games, they might not enjoy the game the particular game that captivated you for so long.
Even in your own generation, there were many kids who would have got bored of sitting in front of any computer game for 10 minutes. There's absolutely no reason to extrapolate your experience with your nephews out to an entire generation.
Yeah you are probably right about that but they play a lot of mobile games so my assumption was that they like it at least somewhat? Maybe they are just bored. The PHD father is also a musician on the side so he got them into guitars and drums at an early age but they are wishy washy on that as well. I don't have kids so there is probably something obvious im missing and im probably overthinking it too much. Like I said, im probably suffering from old man syndrome.
I wanted to provide some more missing context since you brought this up and maybe this can spur some interesting discussion. I have been finding that they prefer simpler games like Mike Tysons punch out which really surprised me since I consider the mechanics of that game pretty basic. I got them Super smash brothers, Zelda, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, super mario 64 and most recently Starfox 64 which they don't even want to take the time to go through the training properly, they get frustrated when they can't move the ship properly and have to press the C buttons to speed up or slow down. They love the easy wins and spectacle of super smash brothers though which is the game they play the most as in every other day. It kinda worries me because it would be one thing if they were striving to excel at smash, that would be cool but they aren't even doing that, just messing around until someone wins. Maybe you are right?
If it helps, I'm older than you and grew up on 8-bits and then progressed to the Amiga. I played games, but even as a kid, my real interest was always programming - I'd usually rather be coding something than playing a game (for me, that is far more mentally stimulating).
I do have very fond memories of certain 8-bit games, but apart from Elite and the Freescape games like Driller and Total Eclipse, they're mostly platformers. I liked some of the classics on the Amiga, e.g. Dynablasters, Monkey Island, etc, but again I far preferred platformers.
However, that was just for that period of time - when I went to uni, I got interested in "real computers" and especially distributed computing, and I missed out on a whole generation of games. Even now, I've still never played any of the Zelda games even though the top-down 2D games would have interested me when I was younger. Even more surprising to me is back in the late 90s, I thought I'd buy Myst on the PC because it seemed like I'd enjoy it because I liked Monkey Island on the Amiga. I never managed to play it for more than about half an hour, it just wasn't interesting to me at that point of time.
Ironically, professionally I'm actually a games developer even though I still don't play a lot of games any more. I'm in that industry because I love programming and experimenting with rendering techniques, and working in that discipline always keeps me on the cutting edge of the current technology. But modern games? Mostly meh, IMHO.
I still do play some modern games, but mostly if they're story based or appeal to my retro side. Things like the Drake and Last of Us series on PS3 that have a great story, or VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy which tap into the retro feelings even though they're much newer. But it's more about an original mechanic for me now - so things like Portal, and I even remember sinking over 80 hours into PixelJunk Eden (a really obscure PS3 game that barely anyone has heard of) which was maybe 10% of my total playtime on all the PS3 games I owned.
Anyway, I agree there might be a problem with your niece and nephew if they are just mindlessly doomscrolling and doing nothing else with their lives. But as long as they also have some hobbies they enjoy, it doesn't really matter if they intersect with yours. Maybe ask your grandparents what games they spent their childhoods playing and see if that's something you'd have wanted to do as a child... I'd guess it probably isn't, or else you wouldn't have spent all your times playing these games.
I'm autistic and a significant percentage of my schooling was ignored by me because it held none of my interest. I practically made it a point to intentionally ignore certain information because I didn't see myself having any use for it in the future because I just didn't care about those things.
As it turns out, the part of me that cared about those things just had a stunted development and was behind. Certain subjects like language and history have an emotional and cultural significance that cannot be appreciated through only math. I highly doubt anyone could have explained this to me because I had thought that I was the sole decider of everything ever in my brain. I honestly probably still do think that way.
* The US economy nearly requires a degree for economic success
* US demographics cliff results in a heavy short fall of student enrollments
* US Federal government deeply cuts funding for universities
* US higher education offers remote learning to attract students and reduce costs, much of which deeply lowers the standard of education
* LLMs are deeply integrated into social products including snapchat and twitter
* LLMs are capable of completing a significant amount of curriculum
* The US Department of Education is removed, including teams responsible for tracking academic success on a national and state level
Words like collapse are I think not the right word. But the long term institutional harm of this sequence of events may hit the country very hard. Bringing back factory jobs ain't gonna fix it, if tariffs are even capable of doing that.
The majority of the country never needed college to obtain the success that they have had. I do concede that it is a positive economic indicator though.
Right now Gen Z is coming into adulthood, they are one of the smallest generations. After that is Gen Alpha the kids of millenials, University funding might change to reflect that.
Aha, I had briefly considered whether that was your intent when you made your original claim, but had mistakenly assumed earnestness:
> The entire world has too much riding on the US not collapsing.
Because, obviously, there's no such thing as a self-assessed 'too important' as some kind of safety net when a nation state is being actively sabotaged from within and without.
The lazy argument is that China will take over everything, that they think in 100 year increments. However they have terrible demographics, have serious risks like food security, and have mucked up their economy through their real estate collapse.
We all know of the US's issues and there is no other country that is really challenging these two....so how about everyone fails and we are all poor and destitute together?
I think it’s in the 0-2% over the next 100 years range. I think there are situations where the US collapses but the world doesn’t so that’s why it’s lower.
If the world collapse happens, it’ll be a result of pandemic, meteor, solar storm, nuclear war, or something like that and not some country “taking over everything.”
HK and Xinjiang are already part of china. Tibet and Taiwan have historical ties. China has no expansionist ambitions, they just want what they perceive as theirs.
And like, idk if you know this, but the world bank and the IMF are the ones offering the predatory loans. Countries choose to work with China instead exactly because the terms of their loans are better than the western alternatives.
The US government has many military bases and troops stationed in other countries. It can project violence across the planet. Any entity with that power has strong ability to dictate what others do, and induce dependency.
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/us-sending-more-troops-...
Safety of maritime shipping. The US Navy was created because ship captains kept getting ransomed by Moroccan pirates, since America gained independence their ships were no longer protected by the British Navy and became fair game.
I know it's a controversial doctrine, but power projection does have a hand in keeping the peace.
Global security (lots of countries exist because of the US), Tech industry (ie: Operating system), Food/Energy and some manufacturing. I think only the first two are critical for the rest of the world. The rest can be substituted.
5 over 100 feels high to me but not order-of-magnitude off. I'm at maybe a 2 myself. I agree that's an entirely unreasonable amount of risk for everyone to just be waving off though.
On average, governments last 250 years — which means we have a 0.4% chance per year. Using that figure, 100 years has a 33% chance of collapse — as our background.
Or roughly 4% per decade.
People wave off that risk because there’s not a lot that can be done: we don’t know how to make perfect governments and we’ve never discovered a good way to, eg, eliminate the ratcheting tax burdens that destabilize society.
Yeah, part of my argument is that that 250 year number is heavily skewed by past civilizations where life was much worse and so people were much more apt to just tear everything apart. I don't think it holds for countries at current First World standards of living. As we improve living standards further the number of years regimes will last for will stretch out even more.
I'm not too crazy about this as an anarchist, mind you, I think there are better stable equilibria we could get to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I guess.
I think 5 in 100 is totally reasonable to wave off.
I’m not giving it a second thought personally.
If it happens it will be so bad that I’ll almost certainly die as a result (due to chronic illness) so I should just keep on living as-is and not worry about it.
An, to be precise I really meant everyone, like including national banks and giant corporations and stuff. Ordinary folk like you and me can almost certainly ignore it, it's just weird I rarely hear people talk about how to price this kind of thing in for very long term assets.
the "very long term" property of assets has very little present value with any reasonable discount rate, and fewer experienced people to actually care about it.
That is true and a big part of the reason why the world let the US get away with lots of stuff. But I think if the nature of the economical relation changes too much (ie: the US demand more juice to flow back to it), I can see how these countries might seriously consider (and maybe go for it) to break from the system. Will be a very wild ride.
But the US is efficiently disentangling itself from the entire rest of the world as we speak; so that argument may not hold anymore in the near future.
My wife and I are not-so-many years from retirement. Ten years ago, we were already planning to retire someplace with more reasonable healthcare. We were already confident in that decision, but the current situation has made it absolute, and possibly pushed the timeline forward.
Which specific countries have more reasonable healthcare, and also allow retirees to immigrate? Most countries are reluctant to take in people who seem like non-productive burdens. If you're wealthy you can sometimes buy your way in, but wealthy people in the US already have access to excellent healthcare.
Generally you get insurance but it's way less than in the U.S.
As an example, when we were in Portugal 8 years ago we needed to get my wife's prescriptions refilled and the person we were staying with said to go to the ER. We confirmed repeatedly and then did as they suggested.
The doctor at the ER questioned us and said "we could have been busy and you would have had to wait."
But long story short, we spent about half an hour all up to get the prescriptions, and it cost us $27. That was with zero insurance, paying full freight. Filling the prescriptions with no insurance cost less than the co-pay in the U.S.
As far as I've researched:
Portugal will let retirees in and after five years you can get citizenship -- you might still want insurance, but it's affordable.
Spain is similar I think, and we're also looking at Italy, Greece, and Croatia.
In Uruguay you need insurance, but if you start a business it's straightforward.
In Thailand healthcare in general is excellent and mostly affordable.
We're looking at 30-40 countries all up, but those are the main ones we're looking at.
"Wealthy" is relative -- for example the minimum monthly income to get a visa for Portugal is something like $1,000 for one person, $1,700 for two. And we don't plan to live the high life, we just want someplace with nice weather, nice history/scenery, and that won't require us to do GoFundMe's to fund our future.
A dissenting voice that might of interest here is Peter Zeihan. He claims that the US is one of the few places that won’t collapse in the coming decade. I do claim here is right, but his analysis is, if nothing else, interesting. His book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, is an easy enough read.
This depends greatly on the working definition of collapse. If your mere existence becomes illegal it doesn't really matter if the economy is technically still functioning.
I guess if you are are straight white make you will probably be ok. Most of my friends are women and/or LGBTQ, and almost all of them would be considered enemies by the current administration.
Plan how to become the new regime, if you think it's likely.
This period looks wild, in no small part because 90% of even the fringe-y media don't like Trump, but I doubt much of his shenanigans will hold up once court cases happen. People will get bench-slapped (the only lawyering pun I know, but it's a good one).
A 10% chance of collapse every decade is a reasonable baseline for a stable country. At least if a civil war or a major invasion counts as a collapse. That gives you a century of stability in the expected case, which is quite exceptional.
At a broader level, parochial thinking and circling the wagons plays into the catastrophe song political narrative that is a strategy of the Steve Bannons of the world. Id encourage generosity for those who have the means. It’ll at least make you happier.
I wonder how important private charity is anyway. The US leads the world in private charity, yet we're worse off than countries with less charity and more robust public institutions, such as the safety net, health care, and so forth.
There’s not a direct causal link between the metrics you’re describing. The economy is too large for private philanthropy to meaningfully impact things like health care delivery costs but it can still be crucial for the arts, community programs, and science funding and all sorts of other unconnected things.
That doesn’t tell you how important it is, because certainly nobody is currently planning to replace private charity spending with public institutions.
there are two kinds of people, as defined by how they react to things becoming scary: those that withdraw to protect themselves and those that remain and risk themselves to protect others.
i personally believe communities composed of the former cannot survive. coincidentally enough, american people are overwhelmingly of the former type.
> american people are overwhelmingly of the former type
HMOs, later PPOs, etc. in the U.S. seemed like a good idea, but health insurance wasn’t available or affordable for the minority. But there’s Medicaid, Medicare, the ACA, and much more, so the U.S. government has subsidized care and assistance.
Another “workaround” for unaffordable health insurance is going to an emergency room at a hospital, assuming you can get there, but many can. It’s slow as hell, but being seen in hours can be better than being seen in months. The downside is that this results in crippling debt for some. Bankruptcy can be declared, but then your credit is shot, and if you’re poor you may need credit.
Healthcare quality overall is quite good, though, even for the minority. It’s far from perfect, but compared to rest of the world, it’s not the worst place to get sick.
Now- why did an activist president, house representatives, and senators get elected that are cutting funding for global and U.S. healthcare? I can’t imagine it’s not the fault of foreign actors and the ease of manipulating 50% of the country through Fox News and social media. You wouldn’t believe how different the belief sets are here between that group and the rest. It changed radically in the last ten years.
The rest of us are far from indifferent to what’s happening. We just don’t know how to fix it. Protesting probably won’t change it, though we protest. Boycotts probably won’t change it, though we boycott. We don’t have enough in the government to even impeach, and what good would that do? They own all three branches of government. They used Gerrymandering and fired election officials, replaced leaders, subordinates, and did mass layoffs to ensure all future victories. They kicked certain news media out of the W.H. and are considering shutting other media companies down.
It all happened so quickly. Much more quickly than in the past in Germany or Russia.
That is fair. This about governments, though. As an individual, you can be quite vulnerable; and you should always prioritize yourself first (if you are struggling, how are you going to help anybody else).
Also remember that you can significantly contribute in non-financial way (ie: teaching, connecting people to jobs, etc..)
> Once I have that arranged, I can think about giving again.
The cost of gutting healthcare is going to go way up. It’s much more costly to fight 10 pandemics that are affecting 90% than it is to maintain vaccinations and control of 10%. That 10% affected becomes 90% affected quickly without assistance.
as a foreigner to the us i am investing heavily in the us, there is a pathway where the legal and social changes could result in considerable economic benefit over the next two years. you should consider how that could occur before waving it off ideologically. i am coming from an investment point of view and am largely agnostic of the politics.
I'd unironically be interested in hearing what economic benefit you think is coming in the next two years?
The nonsense tariffs being thrown at allies and uncoordinated destruction of government foreign aid/social services seem like net negatives to me. I could see the United States Bitcoin reserve thing bumping up the value of crypto, but that whole space is so volatile I would only put in money I'm willing to lose.
Please share your investment prospectus with us. What is the pathway and what economic benefit do you see down the line? I would love to reallocate my investments in my country, but the road we're on right now, I see it only ending worse off
I warmly recommend setting up a recurring donation of, say, 0.5 % of your income. If most of us did this, in particular if we donate to effective charities -- it would make a difference, but not to our economies.
(Many of you may even find it is so non-scary to donate 0. 5 % that you choose to scale up to a larger percentage. But I have yet to find anyone who is willing to donate but claims 0.5 % is too much for them.)
One of the neat things about donating small amounts is that the tax benefit is negligible, so you can expand your targets to entities not registered as formal nonprofits. There are a lot of small but highly effective organizations that would find it burdensome to have such a formal, professional structure.
If you are looking for reasonably responsible ways to donate money - I highly recommend using Charity Navigator which can help you avoid accidentally giving money away to fiscally irresponsible or downright scam charities (cough World Vision cough).
I’m confused, by your link “World Vision” has a 93%/4 star rating, suggesting they would be a good charity. (I have no opinion one way or the other regarding the specific charity in question, however)
The inherent fraud of not using funds for what donors intend and diverting money from a charitable organization to line private individual pockets can be surprisingly difficult to spot.
> American citizens were asked to guess how much US federal spending goes to foreign aid. ... The average guess was a whopping 31%.
What? I'm very curious how people arrived at such a number. I wouldn't be very surprised if people thought it was, say, 5%. But 31% is a wildly implausible number. 15% of people thought it was over half the budget, which is too far from the Lizardman's Constant to just be trolls, but at the same time it's such a wildly high guess that I can't imagine a normal person sincerely making such a guess.
1% was higher than I’d have guessed for transgender people.
It turns out the figures are rounded in that graphic because the source article [0] (posted by another commenter) has it at 0.6% (which is likely rounded too).
Interesting when you consider how much certain topics seem to dominate current political discourse.
A quote I’ve seen going around but not verified conveys that outsized attention quite well: “There are more people with measles right now than there are transgender college athletes”.
Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?
I mixed diseases. English is not my first language. Just checked from wikipedia that it has 20 million yearly cases and assumed it was the mostly harmless kids disease we all had (which is vaccinated against now also I learnt). Anyway why use 20 million cases against 44 athletes (number which might not be correct, but maybe in the ballpark)?
There is rapidly spreading outbreak of measles which makes news right now - 250 cases. Measles are that rare now
It is super contagious, so yes, prior vaccines everyone got it. Mortality is 1-3 in 1000 of sick. Plus some people get deaf and some get brain damage (dunno how many now).
So, nowadays super rare, used to be normal and harmless is not a word I would use for someone that kills 1-3 in 1000 kids.
Ceaseless, decades-long propaganda that US is being taken advantage of and that America should come first certainly played a part in inflating that number in minds of a lot of people. When it comes to stuff like this I think that most people just go off the vibes and don't really have any reasonable idea how the budget is divided up.
Russia’s foreign aid is also primarily development assistance, though much less than the US, UK, EU, and China.
Moreover, the US’s larger defence budget also reflects its self-assumed role as the global stability guarantor of the post-war order it built for its own benefit. It’s that order that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency, requiring most of the world to invest in American financial instruments, and which gave it and its companies an outsized advantage for decades.
That was not an international order built for benevolence or which harmed the US. Americans are going to deeply regret how their place in the world and personal wealth shrinks after this administration is done.
I can't parse what you mean by "China and Russia whose GDPs are far larger". Larger than what? China's GDP is about 3/4 that of the USA and Russia is about 1/10th.
Americans also estimate that 30% of the population lives in New York City (https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...). I think most people just don't have a numerical intuition for percentages, and don't necessarily intend for a guess of 31% to mean "I think the foreign aid budget is equal to the federal budget times 0.31."
People were surprised that the cost of federal civil service employees was only around 5% in the early DOGE discussions here. They were expecting 20+%. SSA which pays about 70 million people is just over 21% of the spending so far this year, and there are only 2.3 million civil service employees. For civil servants to cost as much in salaries as social security pays out would require them to be paid nearly $800k/year on average.
People are just bad at estimating, and apparently none of the ones making the absurd claims know (or their listeners/readers don't know) that all this data is publicly available.
When we spend $1 trillion a year on our military, just which states was that protecting from invasion? Did the Air Force repel a Dutch beachhead on the Alaskan coast last year that I didn't hear about?
All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.
Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more. You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes or security around the underseas cables your tech companies rely upon.
>Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
That sounds more like it's to China's benefit than the United States' (or Europe's). If that wasn't spent, not only would there be an easier tax burden, but more incentive to manufacture domestically, employing people here.
I've lived my whole life through the China-makes-everything era, and the few pennies people saved getting cheap junk never outweighed the reduction in income they suffered when jobs went away.
>I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more.
How are they US companies, if they're selling products manufactured elsewhere, employing 1/50th (or even less) of the workforce they should? They're more like the overseas offices of Chinese companies with an English-friendly name.
>You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes
I've already seen how it performs with the policing. And it can't get any worse for anyone who is in the bottom 90%. It can't get much worse for the greenies worrying about global warming, but failing to put together that making things 12,000 miles away and shipping it across the ocean embiggens the carbon footprint.
Ocean lane policing is the bad solution to a problem we should've never had in the first place, a problem we can get rid of, and it costs too much besides. Saying "but we should protect Chinese profits!" doesn't much change that.
> When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
Yes it was. The primary threat is the illegal drug trade, you know, the one that results in more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US. The drug trade is a huge part of how groups like ISIS get financed. When you take out the group, you take out the people playing the drug trade to finance them, and you weaken the drug trade.
At the end of the day, there's the rules-based international order, and then there's everybody outside it. The law and the outlaws. Outlaws will collaborate to fuel their self-interest. When you weaken some outlaws, you weaken the rest; when you weaken some areas of the law, you weaken the rest as well.
Of course the only reason ISIS existed as any sort of threat was because the village idiots and war criminals Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq and overthrew their regime.
$750B for defense was 3% of the federal budget in 2024. USA plans to shrink defense budget by 40%, to less than 2%, while asking other NATO members to increase their budgets to 5%.
China plans to spend 7.2% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Russia plans to spend 32.5% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Anyway, it looks like USA is #1 now, but Trump wants to make USA #2 by military spending (with purchasing power parity) by 2030, which is not a smart move in the middle of WWIII.
You better read news from media carefully, especially U.S. news on China:
1. "China's defense budget stays under 1.5% of GDP for years".True.
2. "China will increase its defense budget 7.2% this year".True.
> Yet some analysts have recently argued that China’s defense spending is much larger still, and their new numbers have gained the attention of wider audiences. The Economist has reported that China’s defense spending has already reached two-thirds of U.S. spending and is “catching up quickly.” Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress in 2021 that “the Russian and Chinese budgets exceed our budgets if all the cards are put on the table.” In September 2023, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan claimed that China’s defense spending is “probably close to about $700 billion” — three times higher than Beijing’s official defense budget. Apparently worried that China is poised to match or even surpass U.S. spending, Congress introduced legislation in June 2023 calling for the development of new methods for measuring, comparing, and reporting on China’s defense spending.
So, China and Russia increased their military spending a lot, while Trump disarms USA like Zelenskiy did just before fool scale invasion.
I helped a friend in Brazil for a year by sending him a little money each month; less than $100. It would've made next to no difference in the life of an American, but where the exchange rate is 1 to 5, it made a significant difference in his life.
Unfortunately, it only made that difference for him because of the low exchange rate. If he were to receive free money from the government, for example, businesses with just raise their prices to account for the extra money in the system. Prices would go up and he would be left in the same situation that he was in.
Though it wasn't directly mentioned in the article, the relevant context is that the Trump administration is in the process of cutting foreign aid by the US; see the link below for a few details.
Looks to me like the OWID article is saying that the aid from the US is a good investment.
This is not inherently a good thing, unless you believe that Chinese values are worth spreading over American ones.
This is not to say that is or isn’t the case, just that it’s an effective end-result of letting them have massive influence globally.
Additionally, many of China’s deals are meant to bring nations into serious debt, rather than to truly lift them up. Again, this may also be the case with the US, so the question is who you would rather be your creditor.
I mean, this wasn't particularly popular in Canada at the time.
And yes, we did it for who we thought was our biggest ally, and the fallout definitely wasn't worth it, considering the charges were eventually dropped.
Living in Canada and having European family I can tell you the attitudes towards both the US and China have shifted a lot recently.
The media at the time certainly disagreed: you were a "Chinese spy" if you doubted the wisdom of this arrest. Earlier, Chretien was called a traitor for not joining the war in Iraq (though history would show the wisdom of this decision later).
Basically, Canada's recent history was the US saying "jump!" and Canada asking "how high?"
China has active concen— er, “reeducation camps” for specific religious minorities. Others are required to replace photos of their icon with photos of Xi Jinping.
The man implemented social credit scores and will warn neighbors of your bad behavior, to include encouraging shunning you. Dropping the score low enough is enough to get you banned from trains and planes.
Political dissidents, highly respected lawmakers, and billionaires can disappear from public at the pleasure of the president.
I sincerely hope you were simply speaking out of ignorance.
> China has active concen— er, “reeducation camps” for specific religious minorities.
"Religious minority" is one way of framing it. "Political movement that spreads notions repugnant to all decent people" would be another. Every developed country has cult deprogramming and support efforts, and that's usually seen as a good thing.
> The man implemented social credit scores and will warn neighbors of your bad behavior, to include encouraging shunning you. Dropping the score low enough is enough to get you banned from trains and planes.
Whereas the US keeps their no-fly list secret and requires you to figure out people's credit score from context, so that's better? Any amount of antisocial behaviour should be ok as long as you made enough money from it?
> Political dissidents, highly respected lawmakers, and billionaires can disappear from public at the pleasure of the president.
Whereas in the US only nobodies get black-vanned at protests, and the CIA torture flights are only for foreigners, so that's better?
> Political movement that spreads notions repugnant to all decent people
Exactly, specifically, what is so repugnant to “all decent people” about being Uighur?
> Whereas the US keeps their no-fly list secret and requires you to figure out people's credit score from context, so that's better?
The US’s. Is this a serious question? Of course it’s the US. It’s the US version a hundred times over. And yes, people can act how they want. I don’t particularly give a shit how you or daddy Xi think I should behave.
> Whereas in the US only nobodies get black-vanned at protests, and the CIA torture flights are only for foreigners, so that's better?
Once again, I cannot tell if this is a joke or not. Yes, of course this is better. I don’t want my government actively suppressing real citizens like you do. I really do not care if they said Xi was fat, or hurt your feelings, or practiced a religion that makes you cry incessantly. In the real world, you need to get along with people you don’t like - you can’t just sterilize them in a camp. Xi is a dipshit.
China doesn't spread "Chinese values" any more than America spreads "American values." America is an imperialist capitalist hegemon that exploits and oppresses other nations through debt, subterfuge or violence, and as China (which is very capitalistic, despite it's "communist" veneer) expands into the power vacuum created by America vacating its superpower status, it will inevitably do the same, probably in competition with a newly revived and militarized EU.
So in the end, it doesn't matter whether America fucks you or China fucks you, or Europe fucks you, either way you're fucked.
> oppresses other nations through debt, subterfuge or violence
Could you provide a recent example (since 2000 if possible; if not, since WW2) where the US oppresses other nations through debt? I am genuinely curious.
It's a bit of a stretch to say "refusing to give a country loans" is exploiting someone through debt. Though "refusing to roll over a loan" might count, if you have first made a country dependent.
America fucks itself as much as others. Some countries do resist against all odds, examples: Afghanistan fought both Russia and USA and won; Vietnam had wars with both USA and China (1979) and also won. Some countries prefer a side because of inherent affinities.
I find the idea of "superpowers" (or very specific values) more of a Hollywood invention to make people afraid and docile. Yes, some countries do have resources and influence, but lots of times things don't go the way they plan it (values or otherwise).
I wonder what the situation in Iraq is like now... reading the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone" 1), I got the impression Rumsfeld and Cheney metaphorically drove the car of US power into a concrete wall at full speed in Iraq, by bungling about what happens after they take over the country. They expected a welcome with flowers (like Putin expected in Ukraine) and didn't have a plan for nation building. In the early stages there was even bickering about if the State Departmen or Pentagon was in charge.
Needless to say, Afghanistan was a mess too. This article (2) sort of summarizes the entire US occupation. People now think George W. Bush was an OK president (thanks Donnie), but he really did fuck things up big time. I suppose Bin Laden is grinning in his grave, someone's said that 9/11 cost Al Qaida about 500K to stage, if the goal is the destruction of America, what an ROI that's still returning.
It’s amazing to think about how much hinged on 537 votes in Florida. W could have been merely mediocre, but he was presented with a crisis and proceeded to mismanage it horribly.
If you think I meant to imply that America doesn’t spread their values, despite numerous attempts throughout my comment to show that I didn’t in ANY way mean to imply that, you may want to reread my comment. I don’t mean this to be mean - I believe that you’re saying pretty much the same thing as me in your first comment re: filling the power vacuum.
I also completely disagree. I’d rather be fucked by Europe or USA than China any day of the week. At least at the end of the day, we share vaguely similar values.
I am implying that America doesn't spread its values, because that isn't a thing that any country does. Nations don't have values, they have interests, and any premise to the contrary is just propaganda meant to manufacture consent for military adventurism and imperialism.
People will support the premise of going to war in the Middle East to "spread democracy" far more than to "defend the petrodollar and distract the public from Saudi Arabia's complicity in 9/11," for instance.
Nations are comprised of people who have values and elect representatives based on said values, was my point. Their own personal convictions don’t matter a WHOLE lot.
This idea of moral equivalence is popular and extremely dangerous. It is what Trump expressed as "you think we're so innocent?"
No countries are purely altruistic, but there is a big space between pure altruism and simply being exploitative. This ignores the role of norms in foreign policy. For example, think of how the US attitude to the Taliban was (and still is) conditioned by the differences in their beliefs about women in society.
If you think it doesn't matter whether America or China is in charge, you will be in for a shock. These countries have deeply different values, and their foreign policy will express that. I note also that you didn't mention Russia. I think it is obvious that Ukraine is not indifferent between being "exploited" by Russia and by the US.
"Small increases in foreign aid could go a long way"
Unfortunately, his graph of polio results would indicate the opposite.
It's similar, in my mind, to school spending in Chicago and Baltimore correlates to educational outcomes:
When the problem needs both a systemic change and broad-based endemic change, more money is not necessarily the answer.
(For Afghanistan/Pakistan, it's to counter the anti-vaxx narratives that caused the program to stall out. For those school systems, it may start with food and shelter security for students)
Adding more money to government-run K–12 education can sometimes work against meaningful reform. Increased funding typically grows the existing system: hiring more staff, expanding departments, and creating additional layers of bureaucracy.
More people come to rely on the status quo for their livelihood, which can reduce their willingness to support or even consider transformative changes.
It about doubled over half a century. For comparison inflation over that period was 410% or something like that. So idk, it's bigger than it was, it's hard to say whether it's bigger than it should be. I probably wouldn't describe it as dramatically as you have but that's often the case between us with public services I think.
Educational spending per pupil has gone up in real terms, by about 2.5x over 40 years. This is already inflation adjusted so there isn't any comparison to the inflation rate. I'd say a 2.5x increase is pretty dramatic!
I'm not "seeing" a neo-segregationist about school funding policy lol nice try though.
But anyway hasn't the GDP and accumulated wealth of the nation increased much more over that length of time? How much of that new wealth is it appropriate to spend on education?
It might be appropriate to spend a lot on education, if there were a benefit! But as you can see in the first chart, its not at all obvious that all this increased spending has had any measurable positive effect.
I also find there are benefits to spending (on my) education. But if we can't show benefit for a specific kind of public spending, is it justified to take other's money and spend it on "education" in a way which has no measurable impact? I don't think so.
Google "Inflation adjusted per-student spending in washington state schools over time" produces:
"since 2012, Washington state public school funding has increased 39 percent (adjusted for inflation), rising from $13,775 per student in 2012 to $19,163 per student in 2024, but the level of student learning has not improved."
This recent article[1] from the economist shows how much of the aid spending around the world just replaces government spending and never creates a system where those countries can stand on their own.
Not always the case but definitely for a lot of aid spending. Where I'm located (Mongolia) aid spending just gives the government an excuse to free up the budget for handouts to get them elected. It's pretty useless.
I used to be naive and covid changed that. I sincerely believe the US should have shared and China mainland should have accepted any and all knowledge we had about vaccines. Instead, we all went our own separate ways. It wouldn't have cost us much because it isn't like people in China mainland would have bought US vaccines and it isn't like we would import vaccines made in China mainland.
It was just common sense to share this knowledge the best we could and yet...
Most cases of polio now are caught from the lav deattenuating, so unless you vaccinated everyone in the entire world at the same time or invent a better vaccine it’s literally impossible to eradicate with current technology. you can see in the diminishing returns in their graph.. I’m not sure why this is their example of a good place to spend more money
> UN’s target for developed countries to give 0.7% of their GNI to foreign aid
O/c, the UN (a body with a majority of non-democratic members) will want the taxpayers of democratic countries to finance it, all without any real accountability
Any country that has not yet solved its own domestic problems should not donate money to other countries
It's laudable to donate part of your own money to help those in need. It's much more laudable to be a well-functioning part of the deep capital markets that allow places like AMF to buy anti-malarial bednets for $2 apiece in the first place. It wasn't that long ago that making a single decent shirt was weeks of hard labor.
That's a good argument for voluntary individual contributions, but not for foreign aid.
The purpose of government is advancement of the common good of the citizens that form the polity. The good of people outside of the polity is beyond its scope and responsibility. Any aid to or alliance with a foreign nation can only be justified with tangible benefits at home.
This has been a long argument, eg “ordo amoris” — 700 years (Aquinas) to 1600 years (Augustine) in Christian philosophy.
The split is aligned with politics [1]; and the two sides can’t even agree on which direction demonstrates a lack of empathy. To some people, it’s moral to take from your neighbor and give to a stranger; to others, that’s antisocial behavior.
Solving problems abroad can improve economic outcomes locally - a good example with US Foreign Aid is how it was used to purchase American products, employ American Workers, and then improve the lives of folks internationally who could then (you guessed it!) go on to purchase American products, leading to American business growth and more hiring. Much of our aid contracts have stipulations making sure the money ends up back in America for example military aid contracts to Ukraine stipulating they would buy American weapon systems.
Solving problems abroad can prevent them from landing on your doorstep. I'd rather fight wars overseas, protecting economies that buy American products, then let the problems fester, cripple international trade, and risk reaching the American continent (9/11).
All I ask is you look one layer deeper into these problems rather then buying the news headline. You are having your pocket picked if you believe Elon Musk or other parts of the current administration are acting in the nation's interest.
If you work as a dev in a first world country, it’s hard to imagine you’re truly struggling in any real sense (monetarily speaking I mean) unless you’re in your first couple years I suppose.
Still, if it somehow is the case, then this message isn’t directed at you. It’s just a little hard to imagine most developers can’t handle giving up a thousand bucks a year or whatever, which could literally save lives in some cases.
Things have indeed gotten more expensive. But is it crimping your style? Do you eat enough $7/doz eggs and drink enough $11/gal milk to make a difference?
There are quite a few Americans for whom it is, and I'd also like to see more aid given to Americans who need it. Unfortunately, I don't see any effort towards that. Any savings from canceling foreign aid appears to be directed into tax cuts -- sadly, not something that benefits those who can't afford eggs.
I know it's not a key part of your point, but I'm curious if there's actually a place in the US where milk is $11/gallon. Here in Seattle it's remained around $4/gal.
statistically people reading articles these days are often well off enough that improving their own lives won’t mean much in terms of “sleeping under a bridge vs under a roof” or “eating or not eating”, whereas for others that might be the case.
Also nobody said you can’t improve your own life at the same time.
Also you helping other people doesn’t have to be necessarily monetarily.
I've temporarily dialed back on my charitable contributions. I believe that the US is at the front end of an unprecedented economic and political disaster, so I need to use the resources available to me to protect myself and my loved ones as best as I can.
Once I have that arranged, I can think about giving again.
Related, I was thinking earlier today about at what probabilities and timelines of regime collapse it makes sense to start seriously planning a move to another country under. A 10% chance over a 10-year timeline feels about accurate to me - low probability, but not so low it feels safe to gamble with.
I am an EU citizen and I am concerned about the collapse of the US and more shortly about its expansionism claims. US has such a military dominance and violent culture that I am afraid it will produce a global war. I now think that the EU needs to rearm, not to defend against Russia, but to protect us against US collapse and expansionism. China is our better bet in this coming disaster.
It's so weird for an EU citizen to claim that the US has a violent culture. Since 1776, Europeans have killed each other at a much higher rate than Americans. The US is far from perfect but let's have a sense of proportion.
Supposedly Hiram Maxim was prompted to invent the machine gun when an acquaintance told him:
"Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility."
From my perspective, US culture is more violent in the current era because of several factors:
- A large portion of the population is incarcerated
- The population is weaponized
- Many people are dying because they don't have proper access to health care
- The economy leave a lot of people on the side of the road producing highly anxious people
- School shoot / police violence
- ...
It's autism that is said that it can be weaponized; the population is armed. But arming population does not necessarily increase violence within it: compare with highly armed populations of Switzerland and Israel.
The problem of the US is indeed with high incarceration rates, long sentences, bad prisons where more hardened criminals educate the newcomers to be more efficient criminals; this whole system is screwed, and needs to be replaced.
Lack of access to health care, while increasing mortality and decreasing morale, is not violence; rather, it's a lack of mercy, and lack of resources. That same lack of resources limits access to (quality) health care in EU, but in different ways: long wait times, limited prescription of expensive but efficacious drugs, etc.
> It's autism that is said that it can be weaponized
is this a typo? I'm autistic and can't see how autism has anything to do with weapons or being weaponized. in fact, I usually see the opposite (sheer numbers being weaponized against autism), but I'm probably the most biased possible source for that.
"Weaponized autism" is a meme about passionate internet communities working together (and succeeding) to pursue goals "average" non-internet-overusing people would not think about much.
A good example is Paramount's decision to delay the first Sonic movie in response to internet backlash about Sonic's design. (Google old sonic movie design vs new).
Many people who participate in these things clearly do not have autism, but are spending a lot of time and attention on something broadly considered frivolous by society.
Please don't take offense. It's merely a meme reference, not some slighting of autistic people.
I'm saying this as a father of a girl diagnosed with autism; she's lovely, brilliant in some aspects, and... difficult in some other aspects. Life is harder for her.
that's because the US wiped out the previous inhabitants of North America
if that hadn't happened you'd likely be facing the same situation, i.e. having 30 neighbours instead of 2
The US? I'm pretty sure it was the British, Spanish, and other European colonizers who killed off most indigenous New World inhabitants long before the USA even existed. And although that genocide involved a significant amount of violence (some perpetrated by the US government in the later stages), most of the deaths were caused by the inadvertent spread of infectious diseases.
I suggest you look at a map of the US in 1776 and compare it to today
it's quite significantly larger
now, imagine if today that 80% wasn't part of the US, and was instead controlled by the indigenous population (likely tens of sovereign states)
would there have been large scale wars in the 19th and 20th century? it's quite obvious the answer would have been "yes"
Haha lucky you've decided those guys couldn't yet be called American
I suspect you may have an overly sanitized view of the US impact on indigenous populations, at least in North America. You might want to read about the "Indian Wars" post US revolution and efforts by the US government such as those to eradicate bison as a means to wipe out the Plains Indian tribes, the Trail of Tears, the California Genocide, etc., etc.
Not at all. I am fully aware of the terrible, genocidal crimes that the US government (or private US citizens under government protection) committed against indigenous populations. And I make no excuses for those. But if you look at the numbers, Europeans caused a lot more total deaths in the Americas.
Is there actually a difference? The people you call Americans and the people you call Europeans are the same people (in this time period). It doesn't matter if they changed the design on their flags before they charged into certain battles.
Assign the labels or draw the lines however you like. It doesn't change the main point. I was responding to @holyra above who claimed that the USA has a "violent culture", but there is no historical evidence to support such a claim. Over any lengthy period you look at the USA has on average been no more violent (and generally less so) than most European countries. I just find it funny when Europeans who are ignorant of their own history and traditional proclivities try to claim some sort of cultural superiority.
We live in 2025, so compare the culture in 2025, not in 1776.
Even in the US, we cover this very explicitly in our history courses. Europeans did displace and kill a lot of natives, but it was the US that almost genocided them long after colonization was over.
See: the Trail of Tears, the actual, literal death march of natives out of their ancestrial lands because "manifest destiny"
euros genocided all of south america.
But we are not since 1776. We are in 2025.
Feel free to start the comparison at a more recent year if you prefer. Let's say 1939.
Point taken, but if we nudge that to 1946... what have we got? Kosovo?
There were wars in most parts of former Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. If the US pulls out of NATO (and I don't think we should), how long do you think it will take until the other European powers fall back on their old habits of killing each other? And don't presume to tell us some nonsense about how Europeans have changed and become more peaceful.
We're not in 1939, either. We're in 2025.
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I upvoted you before I read the last sentence, and then removed my upvote again.
The US is a terrible ally, for all the reasons you cite, but unless they somehow become a democracy, China would be worse in every way.
> The US is a terrible ally, for all the reasons you cite, but unless they somehow become a democracy, China would be worse in every way.
I am no longer considering the US as a democracy. From a west perspective, China doesn't want to annex Canada or Greenland.
It's pretty much the peak of hysteria to think China is a reliable ally for a western democracy. It's like you're totally disregarding the fundamental issue that China is an absolute autocracy, fundamentally incompatible with western democracy. You don't like the US. Fine, fair enough. But let's not get crazy here.
> China is an absolute autocracy, fundamentally incompatible with western democracy.
Lack of direct threats to sovereignty, reliability (in the sense of honoring commitments) and basic diplomacy are characteristics that trump ideological compatibility in domestic functioning. The EU is not gonna buy the chinese equivalent of the F-35, no one thinks they are "friendly" but a turn to China is inevitable. It doesn't help that your democratic institutions are closer in the spectrum to a Putin "election" than a Swiss one.
This is even more true for weak and small countries, Trump's Panama obsession has caused irreparable damage to an already frayed positive perception. Paraphrasing an interview with then Chilean president Ricardo Lagos when he explained to Bush his decision to not vote in favor of the invasion of Iraq in the security council:
How did you approach that moment of saying no to the United States?
I mean, I think there are two important elements here. The first is to understand that Chile is a small country. The international role we play is not very big. But precisely because we are small we demand rules in the international arena. Because if there are no rules, the big ones will mistreat us. Consequently, I explained this to President Bush on several occasions: We need rules because we are a small country. Bush found it difficult to understand the point about rules.
The US is arguably more democratic than the EU and many of it's member states. And I am an EU citizen myself
> The US is arguably more democratic than the EU and many of it's member states.
By what metric?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Democracy can't work without freedom of speech whis is seriously broken in mamy EU countries. In germany it's completely normal to get raided by police and all your digital devices stolen for posting pretty harmless memes or opinions.
> Democracy can't work without freedom of speech whis is seriously broken in mamy EU countries.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
> The US is arguably more democratic
Because they have elections?
I always thought that when Americans say they’re a democracy they mean that in sort of propagandist way. Like, installing democracy as justification for military aggression.
But it seems that now some people really believe it? The bi-partisan system sponsored by corporations, where candidates are vetted through the systems - it reminds me of the Chinese communism with two parties instead.
Just compare it to Swiss democracy.
When was the last time an candidate from an independent political party became a president in the USA?
Switzerland is not EU
Explain.
Democracy can't work without freedom of speech whis is seriously broken in mamy EU countries. In germany it's completely normal to get raided by police and all your digital devices stolen for posting pretty harmless memes or opinions.
>I am no longer considering the US as a democracy.
Despite the current administration being in power explicitly because it genuinely won a recent election in which the incumbents would have preferred to win instead. Trump's frequent shittiness and feces throwing aside, he got his second term through the long-established and very stable American democratic process.
That you would then go from this to claim China as somehow better, a country in which authoritarian one-party rule is absolute and in which nobody can throw an incumbent out of office, is just.... really absurd.
not to dispute, but the fact that most of our stuff is 'made in china' might play into the public perception of this dynamic more than the political labels attached.
The parliamentary structure of the invader doesn't matter very much to the invaded. The assessment that the US is more likely to invade another country than china is not ridiculous anymore.
The parliamentary structure does matter actually. There is no way for the president of the US to launch a war of conquest without approval of the US Congress (there are a limited set of military actions the president could authorize under the war powers act or an existing AUMF but they would not merit being described as an invasion). That would require majority support in both houses of Congress, which can barely hold together long enough to pass a spending a bill.
We'll see I guess and I hope you're right.
IMO the simplest and most realistic way to reconcile "democracies don't invade each other" and "the US might do invasions now" is that the US is not a democracy within this model.
It certainly still is in a technical sense that is sometimes useful. But by other metrics, like "can the president start an unpopular war with a steadfast former ally" uhhhhh. If the military refuses an elected president's order to invade is it still a democracy?
>If the military refuses an elected president's order to invade is it still a democracy?
Yes, because the military can't follow an illegal order, which is what a declaration of war without the approval of Congress would be. The military also can't spend money Congress hasn't authorized, even if the president tells them to.
>Yes, because the military can't follow an illegal order, which is what a declaration of war without the approval of Congress would be.
Congress hasn't actually declared a war since World War 2. The President sends troops wherever he likes, whenever he likes, for whatever purpose he likes and Congress rubber-stamps their approval after the fact, and they call it something other than a war.
You're correct that the military can't follow illegal orders, but what you're describing as an example of an illegal order is just the way the US military industrial complex works.
In every major conflict since the creation of the war powers act became law, an authorization for the use of military force was passed by Congress prior to major combat operations. This was true in the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq. There were cases where the president invoked the war powers act for short term deployments of forces, which did later result in Congress authorizing additional use of force (e.g. Lebanon), but nothing even close to the scale of invading a stable, sovereign state.
America had nothing close to a violent transfer of democratic power for a long time too. Not sure if you've noticed, but a lot of things are happening that "are unthinkable to happen" recently.
I don't think this argument is landing that strongly.
Yes, surely this is a norm that cannot possibly be changed.
When the people want a king, what's written in the rule book doesn't matter anymore.
> The assessment that the US is more likely to invade another country than china is not ridiculous anymore
When was it ever?
It very much matters, because it's a reason an invasion happens at all, especially between peer states.
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-3134,0...
Chinese want revenge on the west for colonizing them. You think they just forgot about 'century of humiliation' and just moved on? naive
Which country has China invaded lately exactly?
In the modern post-WWII era that would be Tibet, Korea, India, USSR, and Vietnam. Maybe also Philippines, depending on what you consider to be an "invasion". Depending on your perspective, China might have had valid reasons for some of those conflicts but regardless of the reasons the fact remains that they at least temporarily invaded territories claimed by numerous other countries. Who's next?
https://pca-cpa.org/ar/cases/7/
Right, an exceptionally short list of relatively minor instances when compared to the US.
Tibet doesn’t count either, it’s been a part of China for centuries and it was the serfs and slaves that sought reunification to escape the monks’ brutal rule.
Or if the US somehow becomes a dictatorship.
> China is our better bet in this coming disaster.
The US values democracy and free speech more than any other country. The EU only somewhat shares these values, which we can see from the normalization of censorship in its regulations, frequent calls to ban political parties, and the cancellation of election results in Romania. Europe has a vast history of expansionism, which we saw in brutal colonization across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Greenland itself is a result of expansionism.
China is also a country that is pro censorship and doesn’t value democracy. It annexed Tibet and Xinjiang and will do the same to Taiwan. The CCP has caused tens of millions in deaths, not just in the annexed areas but even among its own people.
I can see Europeans practicing some of those same authoritarian tactics China does. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at this statement of viewing China as a better partner. But it still seems odd to see people here admitting that they prefer an authoritarian dictatorship as their friend. In my opinion it says more about Europe than America.
"The US values democracy and free speech more than any other country"
I hope we will finally make peace with reality and stop giving sh*t about things valued in this or that country.
It is completely irrelevant for the EU what US values or loves and what kinds of authoritarian practices are present in China. What matters is what they can give us and what do they want in return.
US makes it clear it won't give us anything, and will demand a lot. It is China, then.
> The US values democracy and free speech more than any other country.
Trump is destroying democracy and free speech (notably press freedom).
Regarding freedom, I don't buy the US vision. The US culture values individual freedom at the expense of the many. From my point of view, freedom is not possible without equality between people. Otherwise, some people impose their will (their freedom) on others. In this sense, regulation is an instrument of freedom.
> Trump is destroying democracy and free speech (notably press freedom).
Can you name specifics? What freedom does the press not have that they had a few months ago? How is there any less democracy now than before? Nothing has changed about the rights of people to vote or publish - if anything these things are getting better by removing wasteful spending propping up one side of the press, stopping illegal immigration, etc.
> The US culture values individual freedom at the expense of the many. From my point of view, freedom is not possible without equality between people.
It’s an interesting point that I need to think more about. Personally, I still think individual freedom is the only real freedom. The US law is well thought out in limiting individual “rights” in minor ways (like not being able to harm others) while preserving most of it. Those choices let everyone live freely and more equally than any other system.
> Can you name specifics? What freedom does the press not have that they had a few months ago?
Every week, Trump is threatening the free press that criticizes him. He suspended the Associated Press from acceding to the Oval Office just because they speak about "Gulf of Mexico". He said that that negative cover of his actions should be illegal.
> How is there any less democracy now than before?
A free press is an important pillar of democracy. By repeatedly threatening or even attacking it, you are attacking the very fabric of democracy. Democracy is not just voting, you have to be informed otherwise you are blind. You must also be educated to make decisions in your own best interest. A true democracy requires that anyone has access to education.
Democracy also needs time to make decisions, and to make decisions collectively (at least in a parliamentary way). Trump decides unilaterally by issuing decrees. This is closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Moreover, he decides so quickly that the DOJ cannot ensure that the Constitution and Human rights are respected. Some of Trump's allies even claim that the USA will need him in 2029: they are ambiguously threatening the very existence of an election.
Trump is attacking free speech by banning the use of some terms in emails, attacking schools (e.g. Columbia) and threatening companies with DEI programs.
I could go on.
> if anything these things are getting better by removing wasteful spending
Even if it was true, you need time to change something. Otherwise you break lives and companies.
The AP has no right to participate in a press conference put on by the administration, just like a random person can’t show up. Not only can they be excluded, but there is also no requirement that the administration even do news conferences at all. That doesn’t mean any right of the press has been infringed. As I said, they still can publish whatever they want.
> By repeatedly threatening or even attacking it, you are attacking the very fabric of democracy.
You’re suggesting that the press is above criticism, and I disagree. I think the press does need to be held accountable when they are biased or spread misinformation or do bad work to chase clicks, for example. But this is different from their rights being infringed. Just like the press can say what they want, with only some exceptions, so can the administration. That seems balanced to me.
> Trump decides unilaterally by issuing decrees. This is closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.
Why is it that executive orders are executive orders under one administration but “decrees” under another?
> Moreover, he decides so quickly that the DOJ cannot ensure that the Constitution and Human rights are respected.
This isn’t the DOJ’s job. If someone thinks their legal rights are violated by an executive order, they can file a lawsuit and fight it in the courts. There is also no such thing as “ensuring human rights” in American law - there’s just enforcement of the laws passed by Congress and upholding the constitution (which may include ensuring human rights but it might mean something different from what you intend).
This is a tangent, but I want to point out that the previous administration was the one who repeatedly violated the constitution - for example when Biden and his appointees would yell at tech companies to pressure them into censoring the public (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...). That’s literally a violation of the most important right in the US constitution.
> Democracy also needs time to make decisions, and to make decisions collectively (at least in a parliamentary way).
Democracy did make a decision - to elect Trump. I don’t think democracy requires every single daily decision of the administration to be reviewed - that’s just impractical, and no country does that. The executive branch has the right to do its job.
> Trump is attacking free speech by banning the use of some terms in emails, attacking schools (e.g. Columbia) and threatening companies with DEI programs.
You’re mixing a few different things here. A president banning things like DEI in their own agencies is legal. A president removing funding for schools who break the law or enable criminals, as was the case in Columbia, is legal. There’s no unlimited right for any school to get free taxpayer money. And as for companies with DEI programs - given that many of those companies break the law by discriminating based on race and gender as part of their DEI programs, they deserve punishment under the law. You framed this as “threatening” them, but I view it as simply holding them accountable.
The press is and has always been an important part of the balance of power between the people and the barely concealed sociopaths that we choose to govern us. Full stop . When people start suggesting that the lugenpresse is some kind of enemy class it's time to get the Nazi smashing machine going.
This is some high level gaslighting.
The AP is the nation's premier news source, it's relied upon by nearly every other news source for coverage. Banning the AP from the White House for not hewing to the WH's ideological garbage is an attack on the free press, even if it is not (and I think it likely is) a violation of the First Amendment.
Then we have the attacks on Perkins Coie and other law firms for their legal work, revoking their credentials - another violation of the First Amendment, which protects not just speech but action.
The Secretary of State revoking a green card for protected speech? Again an assault on the First Amendment.
Meanwhile over at the FCC, Brendan Carr is launching investigations into social media organizations over their moderation processes (https://reason.com/2025/02/05/how-the-fccs-warrior-for-free-...), gone over 60 Minutes over a baseless claim about how an interview was edited, and threatening to revoke broadcast licenses for not being nice to Trump: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/trumps-fcc-chair....
Trump repeatedly sues media organizations, several of which have folded in a way to basically pay a bribe.
Revoking funding to Columbia, a private university, for not being draconian enough against people protesting a genocide in Gaza? Also a free speech violation.
And as for the Biden admin pressuring social media companies on Covid and election misinfo? The administration was simply requesting that the companies review content that was against the guidelines - stuff like Alex Berenson's disinfo on vaccines and illegal tweets about voting by SMS. The former kind of content likely killed 100,000s of people, the latter was illegal.
Spare us your Trumpy gaslighting on DEIA - having a goal of having a more diverse and inclusive workplace and educational institutional isn't illegal.
Maybe try doing your own research instead of sputtering out MAGA talking points.
How about those Palestine protestors having their citizenship revoked for expressing their opinion? Supporting Palestine is illegal in Europe too, of course, but they haven't revoked citizenships over it (yet).
No one has had their US citizenship revoked. Some legal permanent residents (not citizens) who have supported terrorist organizations such as Hamas might be deported depending on the outcomes of their court cases. I don't support those actions but let's be clear about what's actually happening.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/10/nx-s1-5323166/arrest-green-ca...
Generally citizenship can only be revoked from a naturalized US citizen if the government proves some sort of fraud on their application.
Please note that according to the US government, protesting is "supporting Hamas" and therefore valid grounds for denaturalization and deportation.
Expressing their opinion? The protestors literally assaulted Jewish students. They illegally took over property. They prevented people from accessing the classes they pay for. This was an illegal riot and terroristic to any observer.
Also no one has their citizenship revoked. People who are immigrants but not yet citizens are getting booted for breaking the law in numerous ways, including supporting sanctioned terrorist groups. It goes well beyond legally protected speech, even for America.
Did the ones that are being denaturalized assault Jewish students, or is it guilt by association?
Which citizens are being denaturalized?
Mahmoud Khalil
According to literally every single source, he was a green card holder/permanent resident, not a US citizen.
Then I must have mixed up details from two different stories. But he's relevant anyway. Are permanent residents exempt from the first amendment, or is he being deported for something other than his speech?
No idea, and it is besides my point entirely.
Denaturalization means taking away someone's citizenship. Nobody's citizenship was taken away in this specific case.
I think most would agree that "taking away someone's permanent residency card" is not on the same level of outrageous as "taking away someone's citizenship." I agree that both are drastic measures, but one is way more outrageous.
Whether it was justified in this specific case or not, and to which degree, is an entirely separate story.
If you mixed it up with some other case and manage to locate it, please reply with a link, because I am genuinely curious too (not trying to be snarky, I mean it). So far, I was not able to find a single case of a US citizen getting denaturalized recently, except this one[0]. But this one kind of makes sense, since he lied on documents during the naturalization process about his involvement in extra-judicial killings in El Salvador back in the day (which would have almost definitely prevented him from becoming a US citizen, in the first place, if he was truthful):
> Arnoldo Antonio Vasquez, a native of El Salvador, is alleged to have concealed and misrepresented his involvement in the extra-judicial killing of 10 civilians in San Sebastian, El Salvador, in September 1988, when he was an officer in the Salvadoran military. Vasquez was previously identified by then-Vice President Dan Quayle in a list of Salvadoran soldiers responsible for these killings. Vasquez concealed his involvement in the San Sebastian killings throughout his immigration and naturalization proceedings. Vasquez was naturalized as a U.S. citizen Jan. 13, 2005.
0. https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/denaturalization-lawsuit-f...
Not an American citizen.
Denaturalization means stripping a citizen of their citizenship, not revoking a visa or green card.
I'm a US citizen but I'd be a lot more concerned about the EU if the US falls but not because of the expansionist talk. I do not want to see expansionism rise at all, but the leader we have right now is also a coward and a bully. He might be willing to go for a small country like Panama (and that would still be an _insane_ move) but NATO is still really strong even without the US and I don't think he'd be willing to risk anything but a sure thing.
More likely in my book is the existing wars in the EU spreading, and civil war breaking out in the US. The EU wars are already expanding, loosing stability, and generally getting more politically divisive even if US policy had a strong impact on them. Those tensions aren't new, and at least from this side of the pond it seems like the US was keeping those expansionist actors in check more than encouraging them. Things are not going well in the US politically, and I'll leave it at that.
From the economic side, if there is a US economic collapse, and its definitely not going up, the economies that are going to hurt the most are going to be those built on top of the US dollar as they have outsourced control over the fundamental tools you can use to stabilize your economy in rough times.
> the leader we have right now is also a coward and a bully
These labels are being misapplied in my opinion. What people saw after the first assassination attempt was the opposite of cowardice, and I think it helped Trump win. As for bullying - there’s certainly some. But you can also look at how Biden bullied private companies to implement the Democrat’s censorship machine and find that bullying appears in many forms. Is the EU any better? Given their love of censorship and slip towards authoritarianism, I don’t think so. What about Canada? We saw their authoritarian handling of protests, where they literally denied protesters access to financial assets, and I view that as extreme bullying.
> He might be willing to go for a small country like Panama (and that would still be an _insane_ move)
Would it be insane? The canal was built by the US. It is a key part of economic and national security. Panama is violating treaties around its handover (https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/1/senators-sound-alarm-...). Why do you think China is so upset about the recent sale to Blackrock? It’s because they have been quietly gaining control over the canal.
> the economies that are going to hurt the most are going to be those built on top of the US dollar as they have outsourced control over the fundamental tools you can use to stabilize your economy in rough times
I would say the opposite is true - they benefit from the world’s most powerful and best managed currency. That stability makes them resilient as well. Countries trade in dollars and accept debt in dollars for basic but well thought out reasons. They aren’t making irrational choices.
Whataboutisim is the last thing I expect to see on HN.
Yes. Invading Panama, a peaceful democratic ally, would be insane. Let me clear that up for you.
Panama is not an ally of the US. Neither officially, or even unofficially if you consider all their recent cooperation with China. Violating a treaty in a way that affects national security would require a change from Panama or action from the US. Hopefully diplomatically, but if there’s no change, then maybe retaking the canal is the only sane outcome. To me the insane part is Panama building relations with a communist dictatorship in secret, undermining the conditions of the canal being handed to them.
Panama has been us aligned and a huge trading partner since the late 80s. We don't have any mutual military aid pact or anything but we give them a substantial amount of aid and they give us favorable trading conditions through their sovereign property.
They are a sovereign state. They get to build relations with whoever they want. That's how sovereignty works. The way you win those countries over is with the use of soft power, something that China understands but seems to be outside the grasp of the current admin, who is banging around like a band of drunken apes.
They must abide by treaties, so no they don’t get to build relations with whoever they want. The canal’s handover came with requirements. If they don’t want to uphold those, and treaties mean nothing, why would their sovereignty be respected? But I do agree soft power is better and that the US government has poor strategy here and in general.
Also I’m not sure what you mean by “huge trade partner”. Panama isn’t even in the top 20 trade partners of the US.
> They must abide by treaties
You're somewhat mistaken with this assessment. The modern convention is that any treaty can be annulled simply by one of the parties declaring "what kind of idiot would have made this treaty".
It's worthwhile to stay informed on how modern global norms treat treaties.
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You are completely delusional if you think China is a better bet than the US.
What do you think constitutes a collapse? Can you give a modern times example of a country collapsing in a way you’re imagining the US might?
I think the closest and most recent example we have is the Soviet Union. The US has a more homogeneous culture and language though. However, I can see states "caring" about themselves more than the union. This might actually turn out good for some states though probably catastrophic for some others.
The USSR was in a far worse position than the US is in. They had to build a wall to keep people from walking out. The US on the other hand is financially irresponsible. It can't afford a global Not-An-Empire any more because its economy is no longer the world's unchallenged largest but it isn't in a bad state in absolute terms. The scale of the challenges just aren't in the same league.
Unless it decides to go down fighting and gets something important blown up it could easily remain a nice place to live for centuries. Nobody threatens the US, it is hard to see how it'll ever be in anyone's interest to threaten them, they can re-learn how to be an industrial powerhouse if they have to. Almost all its real problems are ill-advised domestic policies that can be changed pretty quickly if people decide the situation is hairy enough to be honest in politics.
It might be in everyone's interests for the US to dissolve but it won't be as bad as the USSR dissolution was. It'd probably be a good outcome if they went back to the constitution as intended, depowered the federal government and became a collection of powerful states. A lot of the political tension is because whoever wins the fight over controlling the central government ends up with far too much power.
Indeed, federations splitting apart -- that's what happens in tough times.
When I look at the Gerontocracy that rules american politics today, I can't help but remember myself of the Soviet Gerontocracy that ruled the USSR in its last decade or so.
US schools really ram home the 'we are american' message. 'Land of the free' and all that.
Those cultural ties will take tens, perhaps over 100 years, to weaken enough to cause a civil war.
I just don't think that's true at all. This country is ridiculously diverse and most people don't share much culture.
I don't think the US has much of a homogenous culture outside of cities.
I think the collapse might take place in the shape of something like china: self interested elites, self sabotaging economic policy, a hollowing out economically by outside powers, numerous failed rebellions and devolution of central power due to lack of governability, etc. Aka, a period of somewhat rapid decay.
Not an expert on China, but I thought standard of living for Chinese people greatly improved in past 1-2 decades? can we call that a collapse?
The collapse is already happening it’s just happening slowly.
We’ve offshored manufacturing, cut funding for education, have failed to invest in infrastructure.
US manufacturing output is higher than ever. Although it makes up a declining share of GDP since other sectors have grown faster.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
Education funding per pupil has steadily increased year after year. Maybe we should spend even more, but our problems with bad educational outcomes are mostly due to other factors rather than a lack of money.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
We literally just invested $500B in infrastructure less than 4 years ago
Automation has done more to remove manufacturing jobs than offshore by a significant margin. 50-70% of job loss and wage reduction can be attributed to automation.
https://www.axios.com/2021/06/17/automation-ai-income-inequa...
Even if we bring back all the manufacturing jobs we've lost, they represent fewer positions and automation will continue to be a downward force on wages.
Factories in the US are less automated than in many foreign countries (SK, China, Germany) [0]. Same with our ports.
[0] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robot-density...
So only more automation to come, and fewer manufacturing jobs
Not exactly a country, but Hong Kong comes to mind. . .
Hong Kong did not collapse. eh, it is doing okay. Sure you have a reduction in liberties but that's not what collapse means.
The people who lived in Hong Kong are worse off today even outside of political freedoms.
It's more "regression" or something. "Collapse" implies a dramatic event and something completely broken.
The collapse of the Roman Empire took decades and British Empire had a similarly long decline, but I understand your sentiment.
Yes, Gibbon makes for interesting reading. Decline can indeed be prolonged. I suppose it's like how some things get very slowly better over the decades, other things get very slowly worse over the decades.
Centuries, not decades.
I originally wrote centuries, but there’s reasonable criticism calling something a collapse when there’s periods of renewal and expansion in that timeframe.
Where would you move that won't be affected by a United States collapse, or alternatively you can't predict a bleak scenario over a 10-year timeline?
Well, presumably you'll have a much easier time living through the fall of a country in another country.
As to "which countries don't seem like they'll collapse with over 1 in 10 odds within 10 years"... Most of them? I guess if you thought this risk was exceptionally high the EU's visa free travel would be the best hedge you could get right now.
Even if the EU doesn't collapse there's a non-zero risk of war though, after Russia is done with Ukraine.
I highly doubt that Russia is capable or willing to get into a fullscale war with EU. It's more than 3 years into war with Ukraine without any meaningful result, but repercussions for Russia, while not fatal, still significant. There was very limited military aid for Ukraine, yet Ukranian UAVs explode in Moscow and regions almost every day. Also there's a gas pipe from Russia to EU amidst the conflict which both sides afraid to even touch. Also EU has nuclear.
Full scale is unlikely. Russia could not, but they might send 250k/year to die in Estonia. EU and Nato (with or without US) would defend. But I doubt they would go all the way through Russia to force them to stop.
Nuclear option is not likely to be used for some "minor" conflict like that, because it would go both ways quickly.
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This assertion is sharply undercut by the facts. I have an incredibly hard time believing that you're engaging in good faith here.
There is literally zero evidence whatsoever that Russia cares about 'equality for ordinary people' and a mountain of conclusive proof that it does not.
Ukraine did not owe Russia anything at all, so these 'negotiations' were nothing more than theater. Russia gave Ukraine the choice between either surrendering their sovereignty (for literally zero benefit in exchange) or being invaded. That is not a negotiation, that's state-sponsored terrorism.
For example It is clearly that some Ukraine nationalist did bloody crimes before the war even if Russian media exegarates it. Even the European Court of Justice has acknowledged crimes on the side of Ukraine.
https://tass.com/world/1927493 https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-ukraine-2
I'm Russian, but it is my real opinion. I don't get paid anything for it. And I understand that not all Russian(goverment) actions are good, some were incorrect or questionable. Russia just don't want NATO expansion to the East even without transparent referendums. It's all very complicated in reality, in war no side perfectly correct and right and clean... :(
Why does Russia have any right to say whether sovereign countries on its borders join NATO or not?
The only reason Russia cares is because it wants to continue controlling them -- not because it's worried about the mythical NATO invasion of Russia its news and leader trumpet.
And in contrast, the only reasons those countries want to join NATO is because they're scared of Russia invading them, which it historically has. (See: Finland and eastern Europe)
It's all complicated questions too.
Why US and EU worried about Nuclear Weapon in Iran?(I've exaggerated a bit here for an example). NATO has more troops and equipment than Russia, it does not need to be afraid of Russia and seeks to expand even more.
To be sure even about majority opinion in Finland about joining NATO, in such serios questions you need referendum data but there is no such referendum. Even supporters of the West are not always in favor of joining a purely military and not only defensive NATO Alliance.
Yes USSR invading Finland in Soviet-Finland war it's bad, the USSR offered Finland a territory in return before the war, but unfortunately, it did not seem very profitable, but then, during WW2 for most of the time, Finland fought on the side of the German Axis coalition. And Finland did not fight quite adequately and also committed crimes, created concentration camps to isolate peoples who were not ethnically related to Finns and ("non-indigenous peoples") to move out of the territories where these people lived all their lives and many people died in these camps and there is some evidence of crimes in these camps. If someone want to take away something from you, for example, a part of the territory, then would it be adequate to ask for help from a notorious bandit(Hitler) who burns people? Such question has no good answer.
I'm not oneside propagandist. I just want that more people try to see things from all sides and analyse more information. Maybe I'm wrong.
In countries where there is a very significant part of the Russian-speaking and sympathetic to the Russia population, Russia wants their opinion(russian speaking people) to be taken into account, they are not forbidden to speak and study Russian in schools. Yes, sometimes they exaggerate reasonable demands. But I recognize that such countries have the right to require that all official documents be in the main language and the officials need to know the main language. I think it's not that Russia want fully control of this Countries. Russia wants trade and interact economically with these countries, and not just to have all Russian goods blocked or subject to huge duties without reasons.
Sorry for lots of text. And I may be mistaken in some points.
You need to rethink your information environment, you are repeating many false claims that I recognise from past propaganda.
For instance your view of NATO membership is fundamentally flawed as it assumes a NATO push to take on more members, when in reality even the most shallow research shows that it was actually based on a pull from countries who lobbied to be able to join NATO and had to jump through hoops to qualify.
Why did those countries want to join NATO? Because they recognised that, alone, they were vulnerable to what’s clearly a revanchist Russia looking to annex or otherwise control other countries in the region. By being part of a broad security alliance like NATO those countries made themselves safer from Russian attacks.
As for Russian speakers in Ukraine, I know many Ukrainians, most of whom from the east who learnt Russian as a first language. All but one of them absolutely detest Russia, have nothing good to say about Russians in general, who they see as complicit, and have become even more fiercely pro-Ukrainian and patriotic than they were before the war. Many have chosen to speak Ukrainian primarily, despite it being their second language.
And why wouldn’t they? Russia’s invasion destroyed their homes and their way of life, levelling entire cities, and killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians. The idea that all of this was done in their name or to their benefit is insulting.
Since the cold war, it was always understood that it would be OTAN that would have to resort to nuclear weapons to halt a mythical soviet attack on western europe. There's no conceivable scenario the United States could sustain the logistic chains to engage in a sustained land war in Europe against the soviets in the cold war, and now even less so.
Given the preponderance of artillery of the Russians, I really doubt the current numbers from the delusional british about their losses in Ukrain, but supposing Russia would incur 250 deaths year to subdue Estonia is beyond the realms of the most fantastic political sciences major military fantasy.
The United States fought for 20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban regime with the Taliban at the cost of more than 2 trillion dollars. Even nominal success like Desert Storm were not the military triumph it seems as besides Saddam's army being a poor excuse of a military force, widespread bribing was used to guarantee several Iraq's military units would not fight.
Hitler employed 111 divisions on the Barbarossa plan, with the known results. The US has currently 5 divisions equivalent in state of readiness plus some other ten that would take take time. Any serious american operation against Russia in Eastern Europe would thus necessitate a draft in far bigger proportions than the Vietnam's era Draft, in a population that is way less jingoistic than the boomers eager to prove they were up to the heroic acts of the silent generation that overcome the Axis in the battlefield. A lot of american industrial production has been downsized and sizable parts of it depend on global supply chains.
While american weaponry are technologically impressive, most of it was designed by the most byzantine and politicized proccess you could imagine with the goal of guaranteeing politicians votes in their turfs and to maximize returns for the Military Industry shareholders. American weaponry is maintainance intensive, have low availability and depend on optimal conditions to be operated and mantained. They also depend on robust ISR. All things that a smart enemy with hypersonic weapons and space capabilities would make sure to deny on the first day.
The idea that the United States could prevail in a direct lan war against Russia or a naval conflict against China is a fantasy.
There is a straightforward way to win a naval conflict against China, which is basically a repeat of the strategy used with great success against Japan in WWII. Use mines and submarines to cut off their fossil fuel, food, and fertilizer imports. Starve them to death. Chinese leaders are aware of this vulnerability, and are working hard to reduce dependence on foreign energy as well as building a blue water navy that can protect their sea lines of communication. But progress has been slow.
As for Russia, their internal economy is very weak and they have far less industrial capacity than the old USSR. The only way they are able to financially sustain the invasion of Ukraine is through huge fossil fuel exports. Those exports pass through a limited set of choke points including pipelines, refineries, tank farms, and ports which are impossible to defend and can be wrecked with stand-off weapons. Some of your criticisms of overly complex US weapons systems are valid, but our cruise missiles are proven to work reliably.
It doesn't make much sense to be measured by classical armies if all these countries unfortunately have nuclear weapons and can use them in case of a critical situation. And that's the scariest part. :( It's better to find a middle ground in negotiations somehow.
Sounds good. Everyone loves negotiations when they get what they want. Do you think those negotiations will result in China and Russia ceasing their attempts to seize territory from our allies? If not then we might have to take other measures. Regardless of which side is right or wrong, we seem to be on a long-term collision course for fundamental geopolitical reasons that will extend beyond the current US presidential administration.
Maybe I'm biased because I'm Russian. But I'm sure that Russia has no intention of seizing territories of Western countries, Russia already has a very large territory. Ukraine is a different story, there really are a lot of people there who used to live in the same country with Russia(USSR) and speak only Russian language and really sympathize Russia. I'm not saying it's good to seize territory even in that case, but all other countries that has little only Russian language speaking population have no significant reason to be afraid. As I wrote earlier NATO currently has more troops and equipment than Russia.
The current Russian leader sees the collapse of the USSR as a "tragedy". And since 1990 they they have invaded Georgia, Moldova, and now Ukraine (after repeatedly promising that they wouldn't). That looks like a pattern. I understand why Russia is doing it to create defensible strategic depth due to lack of natural geographic barriers around their population centers. But that doesn't make it right, and regardless of moral issues Russian expansionism is certainly contrary to the interests of the USA and its allies. Who will be the next victim, perhaps Estonia?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rues-soviet-colla...
I bear no ill will towards Russian people but while the current malign leadership remains in power we should use all means short of war to contain, undermine, impoverish, and generally humiliate the country. Grind them into the dust until they can no longer present a credible threat. But that's just my opinion.
I think the collapse of the USSR was more bad than good, not because of the loss of territory, but because of the collapse of socialist and communist ideals. I believe that better than people are more equal, and there are no billionaires or multi-billionaires. Individuals do not need wealth of this size.
But Russia is not taking people off the streets to war by force currently. Most of those who fight for Russia really believe that they are right. And almost everyone who wanted to could leave Russia. Currently it's not like in WW2 and Hitler. Russian soldiers do not kill civilians on purpose(maybe with the exception of single crimes that are being investigated), it has no point, (although it is possible that by mistakes, this is a war, unfortunately) and in Russia there is not even the death penalty, although in the US there is.
Russia always proposes some kind of settlement so that there is no war. Sometimes they are not so terrible, for example, simply not to make Russian-speaking citizens second-class citizens, not to forbid them anything. Sometimes the demands are of course not entirely adequate, but this is not always the case. And other side can offer some middle ground.
I believe that an invasion in any Baltic country is possible only in one case, if they completely cut off the food supplies of Kaliningrad, and if the sea route is completely blocked, and the people in Kaliningrad will suffer without food.
I didn't support Putin in the last elections, for example, especially because of the change in the constitution. And I don't really understand why he didn't find an adequate successor, for example. I'm saying this just so you don't think that I think Russia is always right. Yes, you may think differently. And I may be wrong.
>and in Russia there is not even the death penalty, although in the US there is.
Aside from all the rest of the nonsense and foolishness you've written about Russia and the supposedly lovely ideals of the USSR's bloody, genocidal history, this particular nugget stood out.
Russia has no formal death penalty, sure. Instead it's government illegally murders opponents domestically and internationally, frequently and in sizable numbers while lying about having done so. Aside from the U.S death penalty laws being completely different in nature to such a mafia practice by the Russian government and its agents, at least the U.S, formally and through due process, executes its criminals without concealing what it does.
> But I'm sure that Russia has no intention of seizing territories of Western countries /---/ I'm not saying it's good to seize territory even in that case, but all other countries that has little only Russian language speaking population have no significant reason to be afraid.
Well, that's exactly the problem. Several countries in Europe have more Russians in their population than the Kherson oblast (<14%), which Russia officially annexed.
You right. At the beginning, this territory was not included in Russia’s demands; the war led to this situation. :(
Former Soviet person here. I grew up in Kyiv, than we moved to Tallinn after Chernobyl.
Estonia has over a quarter of its population as Russian speakers.[1]
They don’t want to have Russians take back over.
1. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/fe...
Yes, I somehow understand this, people are different. I hope that there will be no such thing. It's hard to describe all here in comments. And I fully understand, for example, the country's desire to encourage people to learn the main language of the country.
There was a real danger of people colliding in Ukraine at that time. If everything had been completely peaceful, no seizures would have happened. After all, there really were supporters of the old government and opponents of it. Or even if NATO had signed an agreement that would definitely not accept Ukraine, perhaps for at least 50 years or some rather long period.
Unfortunately, many people no longer trust the West and NATO, they have failed to fulfill the role of an impartial leader who sets an example for others. They have committed too much deception for their own benefit.
In short, and very very roughly, I'm probably a proponent of a kind of balance. Which side is weaker (the whole NATO is clearly stronger when compared than Russia) that side is currently "right", and we need to look for something like a middle ground. If Ukraine had not received huge assistance from NATO countries and the government had not sought to join it, it would have been a different story. Yes, there is some deception on the other side, too, of course.
If you think about it well, then everything in life is not so simple.
Yes, actually, that's my point. Escalation is inevitable should a real war start. And it will be the United States that will have to resort to nuclear weapons to avoid a defeat. It will work, and you could probably even say thereafter that the US won the war. But, it will be a pyrric victory.
This is delusional. There's no real way the United States military and NATO can effect a long sustained blockade on China. American Industry will slow to a halt before the chinese will feel the pain. The Chinese may like our dollars. But we rely on their manufacturing.
People sometimes fail to understand the real world meaning of having a trade deficit of more than one trillion dollars.
Not at all. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention but the process of decoupling the USA from China is well underway. A lot of manufacturing is moving to other countries like Vietnam and Mexico. Losing access to cheap Chinese imports would be painful but mainly just for consumers. We don't rely on them for strategically important stuff, especially not for military equipment.
If there is a conflict with China then I doubt that other NATO members will play much of a role since they have no critical national interests in the Indo-Pacific region. It will mainly just be the USA with perhaps some assistance from a loose coalition of Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Philippines, and/or India.
Beijing's main concern is an uprising by the population. They are right to be concerned: there have been dozens of uprising and civil wars in Chinese history each of which has killed millions of people. Beijing has successfully used export industries to give 100s of millions of citizens manufacturing jobs which provide a good-enough living to keep their population from revolting. In other words, Beijing has been dependent on exports just to avoid social chaos. In contrast, the US has not been and is not dependent on exports to anything like the same extent.
Beijing did not want the trillions of US dollars it owns: it does not have some master plan the implementation of which requires $trillions. These trillions are an unwanted side-effect of Beijing's policy over the decades of keeping the dollar strong relative to the yuan to makes Chinese good cheap in dollars to encourage owners of dollars to buy Chinese goods (which, again, it does to try to avoid social chaos).
And also, like other commenters have mentioned, China needs to import food, fertilizer and liquid fossil fuels to prevent its people from starving whereas the US is self-sufficient in liquid fossil fuels and food (though I don't know about fertilizer).
The reason it is prioritizing electric vehicles is because right now, if China stops being able to import enough liquid fossil fuels on tanker ships (e.g., from the Gulf and from Russia's European ports), it loses the ability to deliver food to its people. If they manage to make their electric-vehicle infrastructure robust enough, then in some future year, they'll be able to run their delivery trucks on electricity generated from coal, which it has enough of without having it import it.
Beijing is currently in a weaker position than Washington economically and militarily and the difference is quite significant. If Beijing ever launches an attack on Taiwan, that is a strong sign that the leaders in Beijing think the gulf between China and the US is widening (i.e., China is falling ever further behind) because if they thought that the gulf were narrowing, they would conclude that they can afford to wait and snap up Taiwan in the future.
The USA imports a significant fraction of fertilizer (including from China and Russia). But longer term we're in pretty good shape as long as we can get past these ridiculous trade disputes with Canada and Mexico. In particular a lot of fertilizer uses natural gas as a key input, and we're fortunate to have a lot of that.
https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/02/tariff-threats-and...
The EU is facing severe demographic and economic challenges through the aging of its own population, rise of the radical right, issues integrating its immigrant population and Russian threat. While your savings will probably disappear due to the fall of the dollar.
However, in my opinion the United States is not going to collapse, worst case it will be replaced like the British Empire, leaving an advanced Western country (i.e. UK) behind it, minus the entire managing the world part
Also you should read about The Decline of the West, and its influence on Nazi ideology, not every prophecy is correct, and not every prophecy is beneficial to follow
> worst case it will be replaced like the British Empire,
Didn't something similar happen to the Roman Empire? It just kinda ... slowly broke apart?
My impression was that it took time but it was also violent (e.g. sack of rome)
The fall of any empire has bursts of violence. In 100 years, we may see Jan 6th and probably many future events as quite violent.
I would point out that having raising radical right is still waaaay better then having them ruling the country ... and have zero checks and balances applied to them. Which is the case of US.
Dislike the current Trump administration as you might, this is a very far cry than the european brand of radical right from the thirties, which was preoccupied with human sacrifice
It is not thirties. These people Sieg Heil and literally fund radical right in Europe. Also they already attempted violent couples once. And have zero respect for law while having unchecked power.
Is it the radical right or the radical left that doesn’t respect law and uses violence for political reasons? BLM, antisemitic occupations of campuses, and now terrorism against Tesla owners, are all from the left. Even if there were comparable examples from the right, surely in the least you can admit that violence isn’t exclusive to the right.
I did not said it is exclusive to the right. I said right attempted violent coup. Also, in USA, right wing terrorism/violence is the most common one.
Protests itself are legal and fine. As much as you hate pushing for rights of non-whites or palestinians or women, none of it counts as "violent coup". Likewise, calling vandalism against Teslas "terrorism" is a stretch.
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It’s sad to see how these discussions always seem to be a fight to win the discussion with arguments. We need to try harder to understand each other, otherwise this will only polarize further, and end with real fighting. It’s sad that everyone sees the world differently, through different media, and we can’t agree on what is happening. Repeating what you’ve seen will never convince someone that has seen different things…
Thanks. I’ll admit I am guilty of this. But I don’t know what the solution is. Features like flagging and voting tend to create hostility in these discussions, and I think that’s part of the problem. But another problem is the atmosphere created by constant attack pieces in news and social media, which leaves everyone in a really emotional state. If you have solutions, though please do share!
I say this from a caring perspective, but from your comments, I would suggest avoiding social media and Fox News for a year… “ BLM, antisemitic occupations of campuses, and now terrorism against Tesla owners”
While you’re certainly right that the US isn’t like Germany in 1941, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe it can’t very quickly get to that point. Just ask the asylum seekers and other immigrants and tourists[1][2] (illegal or otherwise) that have been separated from their children[3], detained in extrajudicial facilities[4], kept in solitary confinement[1], or legal immigrants stripped of their permanent residency and deported for exercising their first amendment rights[5]. This is very equivalent to how it started in Germany as early as 1933[6]. I see no reason the US can’t VERY quickly slide down this path with immigrants (of any sort), trans people, and then after that, much more. Especially when so much has been done to destroy any oversight that the checks and balances of the government would have provided, i.e. two failed impeachments, (and congress now being filled with Trump bootlickers, unlikely to impeach again), entirely too broad presidential immunity rulings[7], and completely unpunished coup attempts[8].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/world/europe/german-touri... [2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/british-tourist-detained-ice_... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44303556 [4] https://apnews.com/article/us-immigration-detention-guantana... [5] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/11/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbi... [6] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Germany [7] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024... [8] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_S...
I understand the feeling of alarmism as US politics right now look like a zero sum game with no possibility of compromise from either side
But as a descendent of Nazi slaves whose entire families were murdered, I fail to see the similarities between a movement that had established concentration camps and declared its intention of genocide from day one, and the present day rule of idiots that is the United States
I think the fact that comparisons are thrown too easily to the point of cliche only make up for this sense of historical determinism that often makes things worse
If you remove holocaust from the WWII ... the nazi Germany was still supper awful. Holocaust was not the only thing going on nor the reason why WWII started.
Nazi were idiots too in a lot of ways. Being idiot in some sense does not make you not dangerous.
Even if you remove the holocaust from nazi germany, you are still left with a regime that created concentration camps for its own population and went on a mass killing campaign on its disabled population, converted a failed democracy into a completely totalitarian society and all of that without considering the war and its atrocities such as mass killings, slavery, kidnappings and probably any evil imagined
All of these are, a bit far from any action Trump has accomplished in the 4+ years he has been in office
which makes these comparison in my opinion be, both in extremely bad taste and dangerous as they trivialize history
Republicans were not sieg heiling then, they are doing it now. Having all that in mind, several members of Trump administration and republican party sieg heil openly and publicly. And praise and fund far right parties. That being said, Trump did wanted to shoot already protesters during his first term.
And talk about annexing foreign countries. And openly admire Russia while hating on democratic countries. And started their current rule by targeting opposition, removing protections from Fauci and other hated members, targeting law enforcement and regulators that investigated their crimes.
Time will tell, but the only ideology I see under the current Trump administration is shifting Internet trolling to real life, while the greatest political achievement is triggering the other side
I mean, I certainly hope you’re right, and I am wildly wrong. But I simply can’t imagine a scenario where the US isn’t damaged by this long term, in such a way that far right extremists don’t get further along in their agenda. But as you say, time will tell.
Have you read Project 2025?
They’re not declaring it out loud, sure. But in private they are. I’m from Mississippi. I was privy to those private conversations. Blacks, Mexicans, LGBT people, atheists, feminists.. they would rather all these groups be dead, than have civil rights. So long as the group allows themselves to be oppressed, fine, but they aren’t, and that’s what has started to cause so much anger from the right wing. The telling thing about the stories below isn’t that individuals are violent, that has always been and always will be the case, but rather the reaction of the state. Gay panic defenses, pardon of Jan 6 rioters, calls for abortion to get the death penalty that are getting traction, etc.
Trump is an idiot, yes. But he’s a useful idiot. Vance isn’t a moron, nor are the Project 2025 think tanks. I think the fact that people are willing to dismiss all this as things not actually getting worse, is what allows it to get this bad in the first place. Again, I’m not saying it’s as bad as 1941 yet. But the optimism that it simply can’t happen in 2025 in America is entirely misguided.
> With regard to general populations, the overall consensus amongst historians appears to be that many were aware of a hatred towards the Jewry, but not insofar that a significant comprehension of the Nazis' genocidal policies was reached. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_i...
The same is happening in America today.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/17/us/lynchings-racism-new-e... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_... https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/02/anti-abortion-pro-life-cam... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rise-abortion-abolition...
> With regard to general populations, the overall consensus amongst historians appears to be that many were aware of a hatred towards the Jewry, but not insofar that a significant comprehension of the Nazis' genocidal policies was reached. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_i...
Wikipedia is often hardly a good source for anything even slightly more controversial than the plot for a Pokémon episode
However the paragraph you are quoting regards the knowledge of the general population in german occupied europe, not in Germany
By 1939 more than half of the Jewish population had fled Germany, so they might have been on to something
I really think you are severely underestimating what life in Nazi Germany looked like, and overestimating the current brand of populist republican politics, which has exact replicas in the democratic party as well
> By 1939 more than half of the Jewish population had fled Germany, so they might have been on to something
That was not because of holocaust, that was because of general restrictions of their legal rights. And also, Germany had policy of trying to make those people leave.
Jews in Germany were largely immigrants living mainly in cities. Frequently refugees from Eastern Europe and their descendants.
> overestimating the current brand of populist republican politics, which has exact replicas in the democratic party as well
You started this thread with claim that Europe has far right problem now. Republican and consequently America politics is massively closer to it that European one ... or democrats.
You are correct about the original thread, I claimed Europe has a far-right problem. Keep in mind, Europe has far-right parties that are commonly actually descendants of the nazi/fascist parties of the thirties, not a descendant of the party that abolished slavery
However, I was giving it as an example of problems in Europe that might cause worries when choosing a country to live in, especially someone who is worried where Trump is taking the US. This worry translated to the US applies in my opinion to both extremities of the political system (Trump admin included)
However, I don't think what we see from Trump right now or in the future is in any shape or form close to the thirties, and I also want to believe that the far-right european parties will also be preoccupied with other (stupid) ideological goals
In the thirties? The Trump admin has already begun targeting trans people and immigrants. No, they're not building death camps and using firing squads but that didn't happen in Nazi Germany in the thirties either. Remember the allies in WWII weren't really aware the Germans were commiting mass genocide until after the war.
ILLEGAL immigrants. Using them and transgender people in the same talking point seems like an intentional attempt to conflate unrelated issues
Yeah? Just illegal immigrants? They haven't detained anybody on a green card lately?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/why-was-mahm...
The guy who broke several of the conditions to keep his green card? Yeah, sure. Why following the law bothers you so much?
Yeah? Protesting? What conditions?
empires rarely fall without the motherland being directly conquered or imploding
the UK was a rare exception here, it is certainly not the norm
The exception together with Spain, France, Portugal and Holland just off the top of my head
france was defeated in war, spain was turned into a puppet state by napoleon and portugal was a dictatorship
the dutch story is more complicated and closer, with napoleon being involved (again)
I am talking about the 20th century where all countries lost their colonial empires at around the same time late 40s-70s, you are referring to a much earlier period
Britain, Spain and France still have parts of their empires
Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands lost their superpower status before the start of the 20th century
if you're in the year 2300, maybe the state Spain and Portugal ended up several hundred years after the loss of their superpower status is of interest
but today, the question we are interested is in "what happens at the point the US loses dominance over the world?"
will the US will handover the reigns to China in the way Britain did to the US?
> rise of the radical right
I'm not happy with the rise of populism and radical parties, but just to put some nuance, I'd argue the "radical" right in Western Europe isn't even comparable to Trumpism. To give an idea, Marine Le Pen in France voted to put the right to abortion in the constitution. On many social issues, they are closer to Bernie Sanders than Trump.
The ones who can afford it have been building bunkers in New Zealand and Argentina, but if you sincerely believe a civil war is on the horizon, almost anywhere would be a better option.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine had a negative impact on international markets, but if you were from either country you would have been better off living abroad when it happened.
Similarly, you would be better off almost anywhere outside of Europe from 1933 to 1947.
The beauty about the future is that it is unknown. New Zealand might be hardly self-sufficient in a world of economic collapse, might be occupied by the chinese in 20 days in another timeline, or might be the only safe haven where one could eat lamb until they die of a heart attack.
When you are pessimistic any country has a dark future, while judging from history, historical events do not look inevitable before they actually happen, and are hardly expected.
For example, recently half of the world, including many in the west, believed in the inevitable prophecy of socialist utopia, where there will be no private property and everyone will be free of the oppression of capitalism. Millions of lives later and oops
> The beauty about the future is that it is unknown
There are factors at play in historical development which make the development predictable.
The Chinese would have to go through half a dozen hostile countries to reach New Zealand. These countries have a combined population of around 300,000,000. Even if the Americans abandon the region, there is no feasible scenario in which the Chinese can afford to invade and occupy New Zealand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_during_World_War_II#/med...
This is a map of Japan, they are nowhere near New Zealand, and they lost all of this within three years.
I suggest you look at the distances, I am only pointing to the possibility in a scenario of a non-participating usa
Simple, Switzerland. All the positive things when you think Europe, without the negative things when you think EU plus all the wealth, quality of life and any other metric you can wish for.
Switzerland has no oil and depend on its banking sector. If USA crashes then likely all modern supply line will be cut and finance will be something of the past. The current well being of a country does not indicate much how it will survive a global crisis. A farmer in rural Africa would be less affect by the implosion of USA than a trader at Geneve.
What do you think happens when the US goes down? You don't need oil to move within a small country and we self supply on food more or less, many areas are already power independent. Who cares about the banks then?
You may also overestimate the relevance of banking for the countries finances.
Western country are self suplient of food because we have engine and chemical industry, ones this goes down, shortage of food will be quick to come. In part of the world where labour is still mostly manual, it will be more resilient.
Also without bank, a lot of people will find themself without any properties and will likely get more violent. Again, in part of the world where people own real objects and not number in a computer in a datacenter, this won't happend.
I honestly think you have a way to negative outlook and heavily overestimate the US role in the world. But who knows
One of the most expensive European countries to live in and one of the hardest to get a residential permit in.
It's never as simple as that. What it costs more to live here I save on taxes, products aren't generally more expensive, just work hours are. What's a good thing in the end as everyone earns more. Also I am an immigrant and went trough several other immigration processes and honestly it's not hard, pretty straight forward actually, if you either have skills or a little backup money.
Realistically probably China as they are probably among the countries that depend the least on the US in terms of defense, banking, manufacturing, digital services, culture and the like.
If you want to live there is different question for a number of reasons, but I do think it is probably your best bet avoid the impact of a US collapse (which I think is very unlikely).
Regardless of what happens in the USA, a violent civil war in China is entirely possible within the next few decades. From a historical perspective those are by no means uncommon. The Communist Party has been able to suppress most internal dissent lately but when Chairman Xi leaves power anything could happen.
Fair enough, but I would view China's stability independently from the evaluation of the impact of a hypothetical US collapse.
You should write down your predictions and take a look at them 5 years from now.
I'm already on Manifold! I got destroyed when I bet incorrectly on the US election results but my track record is only mildly awful otherwise ;)
Never heard of Manifold. Judging only from your posts on this thread I'm going to guess it's something like astrology but for data scientists.
Am I close?
Just another prediction market. Still requires Google or Apple authentication
https://manifold.markets/ianminds/will-manifold-implement-lo...
I can’t speak for the original commenter, but I predicted 4 years ago that Trump was done in politics because the American people wouldn’t stand for a riot in the halls of Congress. Now that he’s back and the rioters are pardoned, I’m listening more closely to the people who predicted that would happen, and they uniformly say there’s a small but significant chance of a collapse.
Any people in particular you listen to? There is so much noise and everyone has a 'prediction'. Post election both sides have gotten really good at using sophisticated talking to sound like they know what they are talking about(Especially the right). I go on Reddit(main subs) its one universe, go to small less known subs, its a second universe and then Twitter is a third universe, all three are different alternative realities.
I guess I would point to prominent politicians as the best examples, although there's also smaller voices I see on Twitter and such. Schumer, Pelosi, Bernie, AOC, et cetera. I don't necessarily agree with all of their policy proposals but it seems like they understand Trump and what his goals are pretty well.
Ironically, I was actually a volunteer for Bernie, AOC back in 2018 when she was running her campaign and I went and continued this tradition trying to help AOC supported politicians like Tiffany Caban (post AOC, the party woke up and destroyed most progressive challengers)
Looking back, it really felt like a waste of time. I should have taken a hint when I saw mostly old people there, and early 20 something political science majors. Two groups that have a lot of free time on their hands or have a personal reason to be there.
I have lost a lot of faith in these people over the last few years. It was hard work to get AOC into office and a lot of her original hard fighting crew have been pushed out post election. While AOC is making waves on Twitter, I haven't seen any tangible positive changes that have been a result of her being there. We could talk about pieces of the GND being in the IRA but still thats a stretch.
What I dont understand is why you believe these people are talking about a 'collapse'? I haven't heard this too much from the progressive left.
Thats more the right wing e/acc folks that want to push the country to collapse faster because then they can rebuild faster or something like that.
One think that I always keep in mind is that I am not the average person. I live a confortable life with financial security. My incentives and the way I see the world is necessarely informed by my standpoint. For me, the continuity of the current institutions and the status-quo is a value.
But think about someone who has been foreclosed in the last financial crisis, people who have no perspective of ever retiring, who a are a paycheck away from becoming homeless. Do you think those people will see our institutions in the same sacred light as we do?
You mean the institutions like social security?
You probably know very well what I am speaking about, and your attitude is a example of how we are losing the vast masses for non-democratic projects that will end up being worse for them than for us.
We should get rid of our condescending attitudes and really try to see things from other's perspective. And on the other side, unless I am talking to an anonymous Peter Thiel, Musk ou Zuckerberg, it is not like we are truly part of the same elite the downtroden see with some much contempt.
Nobody is offering to transfer funding from NASA to Medicare. I just don't think this hypothesis matches up with the things we're observing.
I genuinely don't know what you're speaking about. I agree that trying to see things from another's perspective is important, but when I listen to Trump supporters explain their views they don't say the things you're saying. You describe Musk as part of an elite the downtrodden see with much contempt, but Trump campaigned on an explicit promise to empower Musk, and he's now one of the many billionaires with influential roles in the US government. The most common explanation I hear from Trump supporters is that they wanted an immigration crackdown and he's by far the most anti-immigration candidate available.
If it were a matter of people with nothing to lose not caring about American institutions, wouldn't we expect to see lower income voters heavily leaning one way?
too bad there's not a prediction market on this on a platform like Kalshi so we could see more clearly the odds
So much of politics these days boils down to ontology.
Yeah, no, that was my bet as well, and I was unbelievably wrong. It turns out it's really hard to bet against 50-50 odds in a mature democracy with two dominant parties. Each group has infinite dimensions to slide along if the other group begins crawling upwards.
I've been appropriately humbled by the experience. Worst bet of my career
The entire world has too much riding on the US not collapsing.
I think it’s a 5% chance over the next 100 years.
Can you think of any long-lived ( > 100 years), empire-scale civilisations that have collapsed despite a firm belief they were non-collapsible and/or essential to all surrounding nation states?
Without consulting wikipedia, I can only think of about 17 off the top of my head.
I am impressed that you are so well versed in history.
What % chance do you think there is that the US collapses in over the next 10, 25, 50, and 100 years?
> I am impressed that you are so well versed in history.
You know, schools used to teach this type of stuff.
This is a salient point, I don't know how other countries handled it but American schools as an institution were absolutely wrecked by covid, a significant portion of the youths just straight up stopped attending school, and I'm in a bubble but most parents I know are homeschooling at least part time now, when they wouldn't think of doing so just 5 years ago
Does not bode well for the future of informed populi
Its the damn phones and tablets. This abundance of cheap software has really messed up kids attention spans. Computers are a distraction in class and need to be delegated to special times. How do you keep tech out of kids hands out of class?
Anecdote: I grew up on N64 and an era where software was a lot more difficult to come by. As a kid, I'd look forward to buying a floppy disk packaged in a plastic bag held up on a cork board at my local computer shop.
When I got a game on the N64, I would be laser focused on completing it.
I recently purchased a N64 for my niece and nephew who are 8 and 10 respectively. When I was 10 I got Ocarina of time at the beginning of the school year and spent an entire year laser focused on solving every puzzle and completing the game.
Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (and being kids to freakin PHD academics) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
They must try "every new app", see every new thing on Netflix/Hulu/whatever. Maybe i'm just exhibiting old man syndrome but it really shocked me. I clearly remember being that kid yesterday and doing my best to beat the game. I guess the fact that the N64 only ever had about ~380 games in its entire lifespan made a difference. Each title was a special event. Today there is just so much software for the kids to play with.
> Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (...) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
Have you considered that they might just not find games interesting? Even if they like playing some games, they might not enjoy the game the particular game that captivated you for so long.
Even in your own generation, there were many kids who would have got bored of sitting in front of any computer game for 10 minutes. There's absolutely no reason to extrapolate your experience with your nephews out to an entire generation.
Yeah you are probably right about that but they play a lot of mobile games so my assumption was that they like it at least somewhat? Maybe they are just bored. The PHD father is also a musician on the side so he got them into guitars and drums at an early age but they are wishy washy on that as well. I don't have kids so there is probably something obvious im missing and im probably overthinking it too much. Like I said, im probably suffering from old man syndrome.
I wanted to provide some more missing context since you brought this up and maybe this can spur some interesting discussion. I have been finding that they prefer simpler games like Mike Tysons punch out which really surprised me since I consider the mechanics of that game pretty basic. I got them Super smash brothers, Zelda, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, super mario 64 and most recently Starfox 64 which they don't even want to take the time to go through the training properly, they get frustrated when they can't move the ship properly and have to press the C buttons to speed up or slow down. They love the easy wins and spectacle of super smash brothers though which is the game they play the most as in every other day. It kinda worries me because it would be one thing if they were striving to excel at smash, that would be cool but they aren't even doing that, just messing around until someone wins. Maybe you are right?
If it helps, I'm older than you and grew up on 8-bits and then progressed to the Amiga. I played games, but even as a kid, my real interest was always programming - I'd usually rather be coding something than playing a game (for me, that is far more mentally stimulating).
I do have very fond memories of certain 8-bit games, but apart from Elite and the Freescape games like Driller and Total Eclipse, they're mostly platformers. I liked some of the classics on the Amiga, e.g. Dynablasters, Monkey Island, etc, but again I far preferred platformers.
However, that was just for that period of time - when I went to uni, I got interested in "real computers" and especially distributed computing, and I missed out on a whole generation of games. Even now, I've still never played any of the Zelda games even though the top-down 2D games would have interested me when I was younger. Even more surprising to me is back in the late 90s, I thought I'd buy Myst on the PC because it seemed like I'd enjoy it because I liked Monkey Island on the Amiga. I never managed to play it for more than about half an hour, it just wasn't interesting to me at that point of time.
Ironically, professionally I'm actually a games developer even though I still don't play a lot of games any more. I'm in that industry because I love programming and experimenting with rendering techniques, and working in that discipline always keeps me on the cutting edge of the current technology. But modern games? Mostly meh, IMHO.
I still do play some modern games, but mostly if they're story based or appeal to my retro side. Things like the Drake and Last of Us series on PS3 that have a great story, or VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy which tap into the retro feelings even though they're much newer. But it's more about an original mechanic for me now - so things like Portal, and I even remember sinking over 80 hours into PixelJunk Eden (a really obscure PS3 game that barely anyone has heard of) which was maybe 10% of my total playtime on all the PS3 games I owned.
Anyway, I agree there might be a problem with your niece and nephew if they are just mindlessly doomscrolling and doing nothing else with their lives. But as long as they also have some hobbies they enjoy, it doesn't really matter if they intersect with yours. Maybe ask your grandparents what games they spent their childhoods playing and see if that's something you'd have wanted to do as a child... I'd guess it probably isn't, or else you wouldn't have spent all your times playing these games.
I'm autistic and a significant percentage of my schooling was ignored by me because it held none of my interest. I practically made it a point to intentionally ignore certain information because I didn't see myself having any use for it in the future because I just didn't care about those things.
As it turns out, the part of me that cared about those things just had a stunted development and was behind. Certain subjects like language and history have an emotional and cultural significance that cannot be appreciated through only math. I highly doubt anyone could have explained this to me because I had thought that I was the sole decider of everything ever in my brain. I honestly probably still do think that way.
Follow this chain of events:
* The US economy nearly requires a degree for economic success
* US demographics cliff results in a heavy short fall of student enrollments
* US Federal government deeply cuts funding for universities
* US higher education offers remote learning to attract students and reduce costs, much of which deeply lowers the standard of education
* LLMs are deeply integrated into social products including snapchat and twitter
* LLMs are capable of completing a significant amount of curriculum
* The US Department of Education is removed, including teams responsible for tracking academic success on a national and state level
Words like collapse are I think not the right word. But the long term institutional harm of this sequence of events may hit the country very hard. Bringing back factory jobs ain't gonna fix it, if tariffs are even capable of doing that.
Just to note:
Percentage of people with a college degree: 37.7%
The majority of the country never needed college to obtain the success that they have had. I do concede that it is a positive economic indicator though.
Millenial generation is the largest generation in US history, big generations typically produce big generations. The US currently has a pretty good population pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
Right now Gen Z is coming into adulthood, they are one of the smallest generations. After that is Gen Alpha the kids of millenials, University funding might change to reflect that.
Schools also used to teach sarcasm detection.
> Schools also used to teach sarcasm detection.
Aha, I had briefly considered whether that was your intent when you made your original claim, but had mistakenly assumed earnestness:
> The entire world has too much riding on the US not collapsing.
Because, obviously, there's no such thing as a self-assessed 'too important' as some kind of safety net when a nation state is being actively sabotaged from within and without.
I don't think yours is working.
What do you think of a worldwide collapse?
The lazy argument is that China will take over everything, that they think in 100 year increments. However they have terrible demographics, have serious risks like food security, and have mucked up their economy through their real estate collapse.
We all know of the US's issues and there is no other country that is really challenging these two....so how about everyone fails and we are all poor and destitute together?
I think it’s in the 0-2% over the next 100 years range. I think there are situations where the US collapses but the world doesn’t so that’s why it’s lower.
If the world collapse happens, it’ll be a result of pandemic, meteor, solar storm, nuclear war, or something like that and not some country “taking over everything.”
China had no intention to take over anywhere. They’re happy where they are.
No intention to take over? So they’ll walk away from Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan?
Also, leading countries in Asia and Africa into debt traps and dependence on them through the BRI is not very different from taking over.
HK and Xinjiang are already part of china. Tibet and Taiwan have historical ties. China has no expansionist ambitions, they just want what they perceive as theirs.
And like, idk if you know this, but the world bank and the IMF are the ones offering the predatory loans. Countries choose to work with China instead exactly because the terms of their loans are better than the western alternatives.
>China has no expansionist ambitions
According to Rudyard Lynch, China has invaded Vietnam 27 times.
According to me they haven’t. I can make a youtube channel too if that adds to my credibility.
When I meant take over everything: I meant industries like cars, solar panels, chips, software etc.
I used to think this, but lately I'm not so sure. Beyond financial services, What does "the entire world" rely on US for anymore?
The US government has many military bases and troops stationed in other countries. It can project violence across the planet. Any entity with that power has strong ability to dictate what others do, and induce dependency. https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/us-sending-more-troops-...
That isn't something that people "rely on" though. If that power is lost, some other power will come in to fill the vacuum.
Safety of maritime shipping. The US Navy was created because ship captains kept getting ransomed by Moroccan pirates, since America gained independence their ships were no longer protected by the British Navy and became fair game.
I know it's a controversial doctrine, but power projection does have a hand in keeping the peace.
they aren't, EU is keeping busy with Russia, while China is growing uncheck on Asia
Those are other powers filling the vacuum.
those troops will be summarily evicted if the US regime continues threatening its allies with annexation
Global security (lots of countries exist because of the US), Tech industry (ie: Operating system), Food/Energy and some manufacturing. I think only the first two are critical for the rest of the world. The rest can be substituted.
China and Russia are working hard to either replace or invalidate the US for the first point.
how would Linux be affected by the disappearance of the US?
people would lose access to Teams and Office
but who cares, there's plenty of substitutes
> Global security (lots of countries exist because of the US)
That's a very US-centric POV. It's not like half the world would suddenly cease existing if the US collapsed.
The fact that we buy so much of everything.
> Beyond financial services
Beyond the hoses and water what do we need the fire trucks for?
> Beyond financial services, What does "the entire world" rely on US for anymore?
Our market.
The aqueduct.
And the sanitation.
petroleum wealth
5 over 100 feels high to me but not order-of-magnitude off. I'm at maybe a 2 myself. I agree that's an entirely unreasonable amount of risk for everyone to just be waving off though.
5% over 100 years is historically incredibly low.
On average, governments last 250 years — which means we have a 0.4% chance per year. Using that figure, 100 years has a 33% chance of collapse — as our background.
Or roughly 4% per decade.
People wave off that risk because there’s not a lot that can be done: we don’t know how to make perfect governments and we’ve never discovered a good way to, eg, eliminate the ratcheting tax burdens that destabilize society.
Yeah, part of my argument is that that 250 year number is heavily skewed by past civilizations where life was much worse and so people were much more apt to just tear everything apart. I don't think it holds for countries at current First World standards of living. As we improve living standards further the number of years regimes will last for will stretch out even more.
I'm not too crazy about this as an anarchist, mind you, I think there are better stable equilibria we could get to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I guess.
I think 5 in 100 is totally reasonable to wave off.
I’m not giving it a second thought personally.
If it happens it will be so bad that I’ll almost certainly die as a result (due to chronic illness) so I should just keep on living as-is and not worry about it.
An, to be precise I really meant everyone, like including national banks and giant corporations and stuff. Ordinary folk like you and me can almost certainly ignore it, it's just weird I rarely hear people talk about how to price this kind of thing in for very long term assets.
the "very long term" property of assets has very little present value with any reasonable discount rate, and fewer experienced people to actually care about it.
I think any government has q 2% chance of collapse at any moment
That is true and a big part of the reason why the world let the US get away with lots of stuff. But I think if the nature of the economical relation changes too much (ie: the US demand more juice to flow back to it), I can see how these countries might seriously consider (and maybe go for it) to break from the system. Will be a very wild ride.
But the US is efficiently disentangling itself from the entire rest of the world as we speak; so that argument may not hold anymore in the near future.
My wife and I are not-so-many years from retirement. Ten years ago, we were already planning to retire someplace with more reasonable healthcare. We were already confident in that decision, but the current situation has made it absolute, and possibly pushed the timeline forward.
Which specific countries have more reasonable healthcare, and also allow retirees to immigrate? Most countries are reluctant to take in people who seem like non-productive burdens. If you're wealthy you can sometimes buy your way in, but wealthy people in the US already have access to excellent healthcare.
Generally you get insurance but it's way less than in the U.S.
As an example, when we were in Portugal 8 years ago we needed to get my wife's prescriptions refilled and the person we were staying with said to go to the ER. We confirmed repeatedly and then did as they suggested.
The doctor at the ER questioned us and said "we could have been busy and you would have had to wait."
But long story short, we spent about half an hour all up to get the prescriptions, and it cost us $27. That was with zero insurance, paying full freight. Filling the prescriptions with no insurance cost less than the co-pay in the U.S.
As far as I've researched:
Portugal will let retirees in and after five years you can get citizenship -- you might still want insurance, but it's affordable.
Spain is similar I think, and we're also looking at Italy, Greece, and Croatia.
In Uruguay you need insurance, but if you start a business it's straightforward.
In Thailand healthcare in general is excellent and mostly affordable.
We're looking at 30-40 countries all up, but those are the main ones we're looking at.
"Wealthy" is relative -- for example the minimum monthly income to get a visa for Portugal is something like $1,000 for one person, $1,700 for two. And we don't plan to live the high life, we just want someplace with nice weather, nice history/scenery, and that won't require us to do GoFundMe's to fund our future.
A dissenting voice that might of interest here is Peter Zeihan. He claims that the US is one of the few places that won’t collapse in the coming decade. I do claim here is right, but his analysis is, if nothing else, interesting. His book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, is an easy enough read.
This depends greatly on the working definition of collapse. If your mere existence becomes illegal it doesn't really matter if the economy is technically still functioning.
I guess if you are are straight white make you will probably be ok. Most of my friends are women and/or LGBTQ, and almost all of them would be considered enemies by the current administration.
Geez. I loathe the administration, but I would really prefer it if people on my side quit it on the hyperbole.
In no sense has the current administration expressed that “women” are enemies.
Feminists, like myself, need to quit it on the arguing “anyone who is anti-feminism is anti woman”.
It’s the exact same rhetorical flourish as “anyone who is anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic”.
In this era of Trump’s statements bearing no relationship to truth, we can’t sink to the same lows. Or the bullshitters have already won.
I wasn't clear. My friends are all vehemently anti trump. That's why he would consider them enemies. Not because they are women.
Plan how to become the new regime, if you think it's likely.
This period looks wild, in no small part because 90% of even the fringe-y media don't like Trump, but I doubt much of his shenanigans will hold up once court cases happen. People will get bench-slapped (the only lawyering pun I know, but it's a good one).
The risk that at least some people are worried about is that they will just start ignoring court cases. I don't have any idea how likely that is.
Possible but... very unlikely.
They've already been ignoring court orders
What formula would you even use to quantify that?
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A 10% chance of collapse every decade is a reasonable baseline for a stable country. At least if a civil war or a major invasion counts as a collapse. That gives you a century of stability in the expected case, which is quite exceptional.
Interesting - I’m planning to dial up contributions since they’re so much more needed and impactful now.
At a broader level, parochial thinking and circling the wagons plays into the catastrophe song political narrative that is a strategy of the Steve Bannons of the world. Id encourage generosity for those who have the means. It’ll at least make you happier.
I wonder how important private charity is anyway. The US leads the world in private charity, yet we're worse off than countries with less charity and more robust public institutions, such as the safety net, health care, and so forth.
There’s not a direct causal link between the metrics you’re describing. The economy is too large for private philanthropy to meaningfully impact things like health care delivery costs but it can still be crucial for the arts, community programs, and science funding and all sorts of other unconnected things.
That doesn’t tell you how important it is, because certainly nobody is currently planning to replace private charity spending with public institutions.
There is always something. Previously it was covid, etc.
COVID and our current political predicament are basically the same event, and COVID was a once in a lifetime pandemic.
Sure something is always the most pressing threat to stability, but that does not imply all eras are similarly unstable.
there are two kinds of people, as defined by how they react to things becoming scary: those that withdraw to protect themselves and those that remain and risk themselves to protect others.
i personally believe communities composed of the former cannot survive. coincidentally enough, american people are overwhelmingly of the former type.
> american people are overwhelmingly of the former type
HMOs, later PPOs, etc. in the U.S. seemed like a good idea, but health insurance wasn’t available or affordable for the minority. But there’s Medicaid, Medicare, the ACA, and much more, so the U.S. government has subsidized care and assistance.
Another “workaround” for unaffordable health insurance is going to an emergency room at a hospital, assuming you can get there, but many can. It’s slow as hell, but being seen in hours can be better than being seen in months. The downside is that this results in crippling debt for some. Bankruptcy can be declared, but then your credit is shot, and if you’re poor you may need credit.
Healthcare quality overall is quite good, though, even for the minority. It’s far from perfect, but compared to rest of the world, it’s not the worst place to get sick.
Now- why did an activist president, house representatives, and senators get elected that are cutting funding for global and U.S. healthcare? I can’t imagine it’s not the fault of foreign actors and the ease of manipulating 50% of the country through Fox News and social media. You wouldn’t believe how different the belief sets are here between that group and the rest. It changed radically in the last ten years.
The rest of us are far from indifferent to what’s happening. We just don’t know how to fix it. Protesting probably won’t change it, though we protest. Boycotts probably won’t change it, though we boycott. We don’t have enough in the government to even impeach, and what good would that do? They own all three branches of government. They used Gerrymandering and fired election officials, replaced leaders, subordinates, and did mass layoffs to ensure all future victories. They kicked certain news media out of the W.H. and are considering shutting other media companies down.
It all happened so quickly. Much more quickly than in the past in Germany or Russia.
That is fair. This about governments, though. As an individual, you can be quite vulnerable; and you should always prioritize yourself first (if you are struggling, how are you going to help anybody else).
Also remember that you can significantly contribute in non-financial way (ie: teaching, connecting people to jobs, etc..)
It is only the 3rd month of a 4 year term. Couple that with Elons move fast and break sht, you got some really risky stuff happening.
> Once I have that arranged, I can think about giving again.
The cost of gutting healthcare is going to go way up. It’s much more costly to fight 10 pandemics that are affecting 90% than it is to maintain vaccinations and control of 10%. That 10% affected becomes 90% affected quickly without assistance.
as a foreigner to the us i am investing heavily in the us, there is a pathway where the legal and social changes could result in considerable economic benefit over the next two years. you should consider how that could occur before waving it off ideologically. i am coming from an investment point of view and am largely agnostic of the politics.
I'd unironically be interested in hearing what economic benefit you think is coming in the next two years?
The nonsense tariffs being thrown at allies and uncoordinated destruction of government foreign aid/social services seem like net negatives to me. I could see the United States Bitcoin reserve thing bumping up the value of crypto, but that whole space is so volatile I would only put in money I'm willing to lose.
Please share your investment prospectus with us. What is the pathway and what economic benefit do you see down the line? I would love to reallocate my investments in my country, but the road we're on right now, I see it only ending worse off
Fear is the enemy.
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What sort of comment is this? What purpose does it have? I also don’t see how you make the conclusions you do from the parent comment alone
The last section is worth a read.
> Your personal donations can also make a difference, especially if you focus on where they can go the furthest
https://ourworldindata.org/foreign-aid-donations-increase#yo...
Good time of year to donate (in the UK at least, as the tax year starts in April). Various ways to donate depending on your jurisdiction.
https://www.givewell.org/about/donate/tax-deductibility
I warmly recommend setting up a recurring donation of, say, 0.5 % of your income. If most of us did this, in particular if we donate to effective charities -- it would make a difference, but not to our economies.
(Many of you may even find it is so non-scary to donate 0. 5 % that you choose to scale up to a larger percentage. But I have yet to find anyone who is willing to donate but claims 0.5 % is too much for them.)
One of the neat things about donating small amounts is that the tax benefit is negligible, so you can expand your targets to entities not registered as formal nonprofits. There are a lot of small but highly effective organizations that would find it burdensome to have such a formal, professional structure.
If you are looking for reasonably responsible ways to donate money - I highly recommend using Charity Navigator which can help you avoid accidentally giving money away to fiscally irresponsible or downright scam charities (cough World Vision cough).
https://www.charitynavigator.org
I’m confused, by your link “World Vision” has a 93%/4 star rating, suggesting they would be a good charity. (I have no opinion one way or the other regarding the specific charity in question, however)
World Vision was secretly diverting aid for civilians back in 2016. They could be clean today, but I wouldn’t depend on Charity Navigator to spot that kind of financial crime. https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/dfat-suspends-worl...
The inherent fraud of not using funds for what donors intend and diverting money from a charitable organization to line private individual pockets can be surprisingly difficult to spot.
For those who might be interested, a similar site for Canadian charities is Charity Intelligence.
https://www.charityintelligence.ca/
> American citizens were asked to guess how much US federal spending goes to foreign aid. ... The average guess was a whopping 31%.
What? I'm very curious how people arrived at such a number. I wouldn't be very surprised if people thought it was, say, 5%. But 31% is a wildly implausible number. 15% of people thought it was over half the budget, which is too far from the Lizardman's Constant to just be trolls, but at the same time it's such a wildly high guess that I can't imagine a normal person sincerely making such a guess.
People are way off in their estimates of all sorts of things. I think many use "20-30%" as a generic "kind of small amount".
See this graphic that made the rounds recently (e.g. 1% are transgender, people thought 21%. 6% are military veterans, people thought 40%, etc).
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tky94p/ame...
1% was higher than I’d have guessed for transgender people.
It turns out the figures are rounded in that graphic because the source article [0] (posted by another commenter) has it at 0.6% (which is likely rounded too).
Interesting when you consider how much certain topics seem to dominate current political discourse.
[0] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...
A quote I’ve seen going around but not verified conveys that outsized attention quite well: “There are more people with measles right now than there are transgender college athletes”.
Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?
Measles are not common nor were common for decades. There are simply not many people who have seen it.
There were also no deaths from measles for 10 years, because, well, not enough people had measles.
I mixed diseases. English is not my first language. Just checked from wikipedia that it has 20 million yearly cases and assumed it was the mostly harmless kids disease we all had (which is vaccinated against now also I learnt). Anyway why use 20 million cases against 44 athletes (number which might not be correct, but maybe in the ballpark)?
There is rapidly spreading outbreak of measles which makes news right now - 250 cases. Measles are that rare now
It is super contagious, so yes, prior vaccines everyone got it. Mortality is 1-3 in 1000 of sick. Plus some people get deaf and some get brain damage (dunno how many now).
So, nowadays super rare, used to be normal and harmless is not a word I would use for someone that kills 1-3 in 1000 kids.
Chickenpox? Also not to be confused with smallpox...
That’s it, sorry for the confusion everyone. I stand corrected.
Ceaseless, decades-long propaganda that US is being taken advantage of and that America should come first certainly played a part in inflating that number in minds of a lot of people. When it comes to stuff like this I think that most people just go off the vibes and don't really have any reasonable idea how the budget is divided up.
well... in fact...
- military is 2.7% GDP for US: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941... vs 1.9% for Europe: https://www.google.com/search?q=europe+spending+on+defense+a...
- US spent $62B on foreign aid, vs 0% from China and Russia, whose GDPs are far larger...
China doesn’t spend ‘0%’ on foreign aid. It’s less than rhe US, but averaged around $7 billion a year.
If you include foreign development assistance, which you are in your ‘$62B’ number, then China has provided hundreds of billions through the BRI and other initiatives. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-china-fill-the-void-i...
Russia’s foreign aid is also primarily development assistance, though much less than the US, UK, EU, and China.
Moreover, the US’s larger defence budget also reflects its self-assumed role as the global stability guarantor of the post-war order it built for its own benefit. It’s that order that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency, requiring most of the world to invest in American financial instruments, and which gave it and its companies an outsized advantage for decades.
That was not an international order built for benevolence or which harmed the US. Americans are going to deeply regret how their place in the world and personal wealth shrinks after this administration is done.
I can't parse what you mean by "China and Russia whose GDPs are far larger". Larger than what? China's GDP is about 3/4 that of the USA and Russia is about 1/10th.
I don’t know about Russia but China spends on stuff that’s similar to foreign aid but they categorize it differently, and explicitly expect a return.
My understanding is that China mainland (CCP) very much prefers loans and not grants for big ticket items.
Americans also estimate that 30% of the population lives in New York City (https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...). I think most people just don't have a numerical intuition for percentages, and don't necessarily intend for a guess of 31% to mean "I think the foreign aid budget is equal to the federal budget times 0.31."
Maybe some people have only a handful of numbers: none, one, two, and "many".
Maybe there are cognitive reciprocals of these numbers: "all", "some", "half", and "none".
So when you ask for a fraction, they say 50%.
I have a friend whose fractions stop at fourths. "I'm at half a quarter of a tank of fuel."
I kind of wonder if some of those folks equate things like the gulf war or the war on terror as "foreign aid".
I believe most people don't truly understand percentages. Or are not good at thinking in percentages and probabilities
five fourths of people have trouble with fractions and percentages
Five fourths out of ten?
Ironically, you are espousing a questionable world view based on vibes.
People were surprised that the cost of federal civil service employees was only around 5% in the early DOGE discussions here. They were expecting 20+%. SSA which pays about 70 million people is just over 21% of the spending so far this year, and there are only 2.3 million civil service employees. For civil servants to cost as much in salaries as social security pays out would require them to be paid nearly $800k/year on average.
People are just bad at estimating, and apparently none of the ones making the absurd claims know (or their listeners/readers don't know) that all this data is publicly available.
When we spend $1 trillion a year on our military, just which states was that protecting from invasion? Did the Air Force repel a Dutch beachhead on the Alaskan coast last year that I didn't hear about?
All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.
> When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases.
Not directly, but it is protecting the financial interests of US companies whose products are on said ships.
What products are those, that we ship overseas? I think you have the direction of shipment confused.
Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more. You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes or security around the underseas cables your tech companies rely upon.
>Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
That sounds more like it's to China's benefit than the United States' (or Europe's). If that wasn't spent, not only would there be an easier tax burden, but more incentive to manufacture domestically, employing people here.
I've lived my whole life through the China-makes-everything era, and the few pennies people saved getting cheap junk never outweighed the reduction in income they suffered when jobs went away.
>I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more.
How are they US companies, if they're selling products manufactured elsewhere, employing 1/50th (or even less) of the workforce they should? They're more like the overseas offices of Chinese companies with an English-friendly name.
>You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes
I've already seen how it performs with the policing. And it can't get any worse for anyone who is in the bottom 90%. It can't get much worse for the greenies worrying about global warming, but failing to put together that making things 12,000 miles away and shipping it across the ocean embiggens the carbon footprint.
Ocean lane policing is the bad solution to a problem we should've never had in the first place, a problem we can get rid of, and it costs too much besides. Saying "but we should protect Chinese profits!" doesn't much change that.
The fight against Somalian pirates for example, isn't to protect the local people, but to protect American interests.
> When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
Yes it was. The primary threat is the illegal drug trade, you know, the one that results in more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US. The drug trade is a huge part of how groups like ISIS get financed. When you take out the group, you take out the people playing the drug trade to finance them, and you weaken the drug trade.
consider e.g. https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2017/07/isis-is-so-desp...
At the end of the day, there's the rules-based international order, and then there's everybody outside it. The law and the outlaws. Outlaws will collaborate to fuel their self-interest. When you weaken some outlaws, you weaken the rest; when you weaken some areas of the law, you weaken the rest as well.
Of course the only reason ISIS existed as any sort of threat was because the village idiots and war criminals Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq and overthrew their regime.
$750B for defense was 3% of the federal budget in 2024. USA plans to shrink defense budget by 40%, to less than 2%, while asking other NATO members to increase their budgets to 5%.
China plans to spend 7.2% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Russia plans to spend 32.5% of their budget on defense in 2025.
> $750B for defense was 3% of the federal budget in 2024.
I think you mean of GDP, not federal budget.
Yep, I mean % of GDP. Too late to edit.
Anyway, it looks like USA is #1 now, but Trump wants to make USA #2 by military spending (with purchasing power parity) by 2030, which is not a smart move in the middle of WWIII.
Why would he edit? What he said looks true, and it looks like it refutes my argument. That's all he needs.
You better read news from media carefully, especially U.S. news on China: 1. "China's defense budget stays under 1.5% of GDP for years".True. 2. "China will increase its defense budget 7.2% this year".True.
Quote:
> Yet some analysts have recently argued that China’s defense spending is much larger still, and their new numbers have gained the attention of wider audiences. The Economist has reported that China’s defense spending has already reached two-thirds of U.S. spending and is “catching up quickly.” Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress in 2021 that “the Russian and Chinese budgets exceed our budgets if all the cards are put on the table.” In September 2023, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan claimed that China’s defense spending is “probably close to about $700 billion” — three times higher than Beijing’s official defense budget. Apparently worried that China is poised to match or even surpass U.S. spending, Congress introduced legislation in June 2023 calling for the development of new methods for measuring, comparing, and reporting on China’s defense spending.
So, China and Russia increased their military spending a lot, while Trump disarms USA like Zelenskiy did just before fool scale invasion.
I helped a friend in Brazil for a year by sending him a little money each month; less than $100. It would've made next to no difference in the life of an American, but where the exchange rate is 1 to 5, it made a significant difference in his life.
Unfortunately, it only made that difference for him because of the low exchange rate. If he were to receive free money from the government, for example, businesses with just raise their prices to account for the extra money in the system. Prices would go up and he would be left in the same situation that he was in.
Though it wasn't directly mentioned in the article, the relevant context is that the Trump administration is in the process of cutting foreign aid by the US; see the link below for a few details.
Looks to me like the OWID article is saying that the aid from the US is a good investment.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/how-trump-s-di...
The foreign aid provided by the US does not live in a void; China has been doing well in providing financial aid and loans across the world recently.
This is not inherently a good thing, unless you believe that Chinese values are worth spreading over American ones.
This is not to say that is or isn’t the case, just that it’s an effective end-result of letting them have massive influence globally.
Additionally, many of China’s deals are meant to bring nations into serious debt, rather than to truly lift them up. Again, this may also be the case with the US, so the question is who you would rather be your creditor.
> Chinese values are worth spreading over American ones.
Well the US seems to be allying itself with a murderous dictator and threatening to annex it's neighbours.
China is less murderous than Russia, less warmongering and for those of us in Canada/EU, probably more reliable than a potentially fully-fascist US.
And that's why you carry out politically motivated arrests of Chinese citizens on orders from the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_case_of_Meng_Wan...
I mean, this wasn't particularly popular in Canada at the time.
And yes, we did it for who we thought was our biggest ally, and the fallout definitely wasn't worth it, considering the charges were eventually dropped.
Living in Canada and having European family I can tell you the attitudes towards both the US and China have shifted a lot recently.
The media at the time certainly disagreed: you were a "Chinese spy" if you doubted the wisdom of this arrest. Earlier, Chretien was called a traitor for not joining the war in Iraq (though history would show the wisdom of this decision later).
Basically, Canada's recent history was the US saying "jump!" and Canada asking "how high?"
China has active concen— er, “reeducation camps” for specific religious minorities. Others are required to replace photos of their icon with photos of Xi Jinping.
The man implemented social credit scores and will warn neighbors of your bad behavior, to include encouraging shunning you. Dropping the score low enough is enough to get you banned from trains and planes.
Political dissidents, highly respected lawmakers, and billionaires can disappear from public at the pleasure of the president.
I sincerely hope you were simply speaking out of ignorance.
Yes, and Russia, Iran and NK are all worse than this, and the US is still cozying up to Russia for no reason at all.
That is also wrong of the US
> China has active concen— er, “reeducation camps” for specific religious minorities.
"Religious minority" is one way of framing it. "Political movement that spreads notions repugnant to all decent people" would be another. Every developed country has cult deprogramming and support efforts, and that's usually seen as a good thing.
> The man implemented social credit scores and will warn neighbors of your bad behavior, to include encouraging shunning you. Dropping the score low enough is enough to get you banned from trains and planes.
Whereas the US keeps their no-fly list secret and requires you to figure out people's credit score from context, so that's better? Any amount of antisocial behaviour should be ok as long as you made enough money from it?
> Political dissidents, highly respected lawmakers, and billionaires can disappear from public at the pleasure of the president.
Whereas in the US only nobodies get black-vanned at protests, and the CIA torture flights are only for foreigners, so that's better?
Is this a China bot?
> Political movement that spreads notions repugnant to all decent people
Exactly, specifically, what is so repugnant to “all decent people” about being Uighur?
> Whereas the US keeps their no-fly list secret and requires you to figure out people's credit score from context, so that's better?
The US’s. Is this a serious question? Of course it’s the US. It’s the US version a hundred times over. And yes, people can act how they want. I don’t particularly give a shit how you or daddy Xi think I should behave.
> Whereas in the US only nobodies get black-vanned at protests, and the CIA torture flights are only for foreigners, so that's better?
Once again, I cannot tell if this is a joke or not. Yes, of course this is better. I don’t want my government actively suppressing real citizens like you do. I really do not care if they said Xi was fat, or hurt your feelings, or practiced a religion that makes you cry incessantly. In the real world, you need to get along with people you don’t like - you can’t just sterilize them in a camp. Xi is a dipshit.
China doesn't spread "Chinese values" any more than America spreads "American values." America is an imperialist capitalist hegemon that exploits and oppresses other nations through debt, subterfuge or violence, and as China (which is very capitalistic, despite it's "communist" veneer) expands into the power vacuum created by America vacating its superpower status, it will inevitably do the same, probably in competition with a newly revived and militarized EU.
So in the end, it doesn't matter whether America fucks you or China fucks you, or Europe fucks you, either way you're fucked.
> oppresses other nations through debt, subterfuge or violence
Could you provide a recent example (since 2000 if possible; if not, since WW2) where the US oppresses other nations through debt? I am genuinely curious.
There's no shortage of examples: Iraq, Egypt, Argentina, Pakistan, Philippines to name a few recent examples.
Argentina is being oppressed by corruption, not the US or any other nation.
The US has veto power over the IMF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...
It's a bit of a stretch to say "refusing to give a country loans" is exploiting someone through debt. Though "refusing to roll over a loan" might count, if you have first made a country dependent.
The conditions imposed on countries in order to receive a loan are usually the problem.
America fucks itself as much as others. Some countries do resist against all odds, examples: Afghanistan fought both Russia and USA and won; Vietnam had wars with both USA and China (1979) and also won. Some countries prefer a side because of inherent affinities.
I find the idea of "superpowers" (or very specific values) more of a Hollywood invention to make people afraid and docile. Yes, some countries do have resources and influence, but lots of times things don't go the way they plan it (values or otherwise).
I wonder what the situation in Iraq is like now... reading the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone" 1), I got the impression Rumsfeld and Cheney metaphorically drove the car of US power into a concrete wall at full speed in Iraq, by bungling about what happens after they take over the country. They expected a welcome with flowers (like Putin expected in Ukraine) and didn't have a plan for nation building. In the early stages there was even bickering about if the State Departmen or Pentagon was in charge.
Needless to say, Afghanistan was a mess too. This article (2) sort of summarizes the entire US occupation. People now think George W. Bush was an OK president (thanks Donnie), but he really did fuck things up big time. I suppose Bin Laden is grinning in his grave, someone's said that 9/11 cost Al Qaida about 500K to stage, if the goal is the destruction of America, what an ROI that's still returning.
1) https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/book_review/imperial-life-eme...
2) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afgh... / https://archive.is/VfRmL
It’s amazing to think about how much hinged on 537 votes in Florida. W could have been merely mediocre, but he was presented with a crisis and proceeded to mismanage it horribly.
If you think I meant to imply that America doesn’t spread their values, despite numerous attempts throughout my comment to show that I didn’t in ANY way mean to imply that, you may want to reread my comment. I don’t mean this to be mean - I believe that you’re saying pretty much the same thing as me in your first comment re: filling the power vacuum.
I also completely disagree. I’d rather be fucked by Europe or USA than China any day of the week. At least at the end of the day, we share vaguely similar values.
I am implying that America doesn't spread its values, because that isn't a thing that any country does. Nations don't have values, they have interests, and any premise to the contrary is just propaganda meant to manufacture consent for military adventurism and imperialism.
People will support the premise of going to war in the Middle East to "spread democracy" far more than to "defend the petrodollar and distract the public from Saudi Arabia's complicity in 9/11," for instance.
Nations are comprised of people who have values and elect representatives based on said values, was my point. Their own personal convictions don’t matter a WHOLE lot.
This idea of moral equivalence is popular and extremely dangerous. It is what Trump expressed as "you think we're so innocent?"
No countries are purely altruistic, but there is a big space between pure altruism and simply being exploitative. This ignores the role of norms in foreign policy. For example, think of how the US attitude to the Taliban was (and still is) conditioned by the differences in their beliefs about women in society.
If you think it doesn't matter whether America or China is in charge, you will be in for a shock. These countries have deeply different values, and their foreign policy will express that. I note also that you didn't mention Russia. I think it is obvious that Ukraine is not indifferent between being "exploited" by Russia and by the US.
What China is doing is basically usury, it’s not the same. Stop glorifying China.
"Small increases in foreign aid could go a long way"
Unfortunately, his graph of polio results would indicate the opposite.
It's similar, in my mind, to school spending in Chicago and Baltimore correlates to educational outcomes:
When the problem needs both a systemic change and broad-based endemic change, more money is not necessarily the answer.
(For Afghanistan/Pakistan, it's to counter the anti-vaxx narratives that caused the program to stall out. For those school systems, it may start with food and shelter security for students)
Adding more money to government-run K–12 education can sometimes work against meaningful reform. Increased funding typically grows the existing system: hiring more staff, expanding departments, and creating additional layers of bureaucracy.
More people come to rely on the status quo for their livelihood, which can reduce their willingness to support or even consider transformative changes.
Funding for education in America has increased by leaps and bounds, but K-12 educational attainment hasn't budged.
It about doubled over half a century. For comparison inflation over that period was 410% or something like that. So idk, it's bigger than it was, it's hard to say whether it's bigger than it should be. I probably wouldn't describe it as dramatically as you have but that's often the case between us with public services I think.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
Educational spending per pupil has gone up in real terms, by about 2.5x over 40 years. This is already inflation adjusted so there isn't any comparison to the inflation rate. I'd say a 2.5x increase is pretty dramatic!
I'm not "seeing" a neo-segregationist about school funding policy lol nice try though.
But anyway hasn't the GDP and accumulated wealth of the nation increased much more over that length of time? How much of that new wealth is it appropriate to spend on education?
Name calling isn't an argument.
It might be appropriate to spend a lot on education, if there were a benefit! But as you can see in the first chart, its not at all obvious that all this increased spending has had any measurable positive effect.
This isn't debate club I'm not trying to win an argument. If I was calling him names I'd have much fouler ones tho.
I find there are benefits to spending on education! What would you prefer to do with that money?
I also find there are benefits to spending (on my) education. But if we can't show benefit for a specific kind of public spending, is it justified to take other's money and spend it on "education" in a way which has no measurable impact? I don't think so.
In WA state, per student spending has way, way outpaced inflation.
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Ok giraffe_lady:
Google "Inflation adjusted per-student spending in washington state schools over time" produces:
"since 2012, Washington state public school funding has increased 39 percent (adjusted for inflation), rising from $13,775 per student in 2012 to $19,163 per student in 2024, but the level of student learning has not improved."
That's such a great response to Walter's comments. Useful in almost every thread, no joke.
That polio graph is depressingly flat for the past quarter century :-(
Conspicuously absent: China (34.4T), Russia (6T) vs US (26T)
This recent article[1] from the economist shows how much of the aid spending around the world just replaces government spending and never creates a system where those countries can stand on their own.
Not always the case but definitely for a lot of aid spending. Where I'm located (Mongolia) aid spending just gives the government an excuse to free up the budget for handouts to get them elected. It's pretty useless.
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/03/06/the-demise-of-f...
Wow this thread deteriorated quickly. I had to double check I wasn't on Reddit.
I used to be naive and covid changed that. I sincerely believe the US should have shared and China mainland should have accepted any and all knowledge we had about vaccines. Instead, we all went our own separate ways. It wouldn't have cost us much because it isn't like people in China mainland would have bought US vaccines and it isn't like we would import vaccines made in China mainland.
It was just common sense to share this knowledge the best we could and yet...
No, no, no, wait ... we need to scale back foreign aid and spend it on missions to Mars.
Most cases of polio now are caught from the lav deattenuating, so unless you vaccinated everyone in the entire world at the same time or invent a better vaccine it’s literally impossible to eradicate with current technology. you can see in the diminishing returns in their graph.. I’m not sure why this is their example of a good place to spend more money
It's a good example because once you eradicate the disease, the problem is gone for good. We spend zero money on smallpox.
We did successfully eradicate all but one strain of Polio, and I believe they've stopped vaccinating except for the remaining one.
Inactivated polio vaccines are widely available and do not cause the cases of polio that the attenuated vaccine does.
You got me man, great troll
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So you are pro-salvery then?
I put salves all over me body.
You expect humans to be rational? Hah, that's a laugh.
> UN’s target for developed countries to give 0.7% of their GNI to foreign aid
O/c, the UN (a body with a majority of non-democratic members) will want the taxpayers of democratic countries to finance it, all without any real accountability
Any country that has not yet solved its own domestic problems should not donate money to other countries
> Any country that has not yet solved its own domestic problems should not donate money to other countries
Instead it should loan money, but only if it's proven that it will be beneficial, and there is an accountability on the receiving side
It's laudable to donate part of your own money to help those in need. It's much more laudable to be a well-functioning part of the deep capital markets that allow places like AMF to buy anti-malarial bednets for $2 apiece in the first place. It wasn't that long ago that making a single decent shirt was weeks of hard labor.
That's a good argument for voluntary individual contributions, but not for foreign aid.
The purpose of government is advancement of the common good of the citizens that form the polity. The good of people outside of the polity is beyond its scope and responsibility. Any aid to or alliance with a foreign nation can only be justified with tangible benefits at home.
The purpose of government is whatever people want it to be.
The purpose of any system is what it does.
A stable productive trade partner is a benefit at home.
This has been a long argument, eg “ordo amoris” — 700 years (Aquinas) to 1600 years (Augustine) in Christian philosophy.
The split is aligned with politics [1]; and the two sides can’t even agree on which direction demonstrates a lack of empathy. To some people, it’s moral to take from your neighbor and give to a stranger; to others, that’s antisocial behavior.
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Heatmaps-indicating-high...
Solving problems abroad can improve economic outcomes locally - a good example with US Foreign Aid is how it was used to purchase American products, employ American Workers, and then improve the lives of folks internationally who could then (you guessed it!) go on to purchase American products, leading to American business growth and more hiring. Much of our aid contracts have stipulations making sure the money ends up back in America for example military aid contracts to Ukraine stipulating they would buy American weapon systems.
Solving problems abroad can prevent them from landing on your doorstep. I'd rather fight wars overseas, protecting economies that buy American products, then let the problems fester, cripple international trade, and risk reaching the American continent (9/11).
All I ask is you look one layer deeper into these problems rather then buying the news headline. You are having your pocket picked if you believe Elon Musk or other parts of the current administration are acting in the nation's interest.
What about improving our own lives. I live in a first world country, work as a dev with decent earning. But finding things are expensive these days
If you work as a dev in a first world country, it’s hard to imagine you’re truly struggling in any real sense (monetarily speaking I mean) unless you’re in your first couple years I suppose.
Still, if it somehow is the case, then this message isn’t directed at you. It’s just a little hard to imagine most developers can’t handle giving up a thousand bucks a year or whatever, which could literally save lives in some cases.
Things have indeed gotten more expensive. But is it crimping your style? Do you eat enough $7/doz eggs and drink enough $11/gal milk to make a difference?
There are quite a few Americans for whom it is, and I'd also like to see more aid given to Americans who need it. Unfortunately, I don't see any effort towards that. Any savings from canceling foreign aid appears to be directed into tax cuts -- sadly, not something that benefits those who can't afford eggs.
I know it's not a key part of your point, but I'm curious if there's actually a place in the US where milk is $11/gallon. Here in Seattle it's remained around $4/gal.
Organic can be expensive. The Aldi near me in Michigan has its half-gallon at around $5-$6 usually. Regular milk is around $2.50-$3.50 a gallon.
statistically people reading articles these days are often well off enough that improving their own lives won’t mean much in terms of “sleeping under a bridge vs under a roof” or “eating or not eating”, whereas for others that might be the case.
Also nobody said you can’t improve your own life at the same time.
Also you helping other people doesn’t have to be necessarily monetarily.