(no subject)

[conuly]

The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

And that's not the most alarming thing about it.

Comments

[dewline]

No thanks, Donnie.

I know he doesn't want the rest of us in the Americas to have any say about how we govern ourselves. Too bad for him and his cronies and backers.

[siliconshaman]

So, Pax Imperialis Americana, uber Allies.

[conuly]

Yup.

[cellio]

Yup. Appalling.

[siliconshaman]

and concerning. I mean, Trump's an idiot and a dunderhead, but he won't last much longer... and those poised to replace him are smarter than him (a low bar I know) and every bit as evil, if not more so. Trump only cares about himself, but Miller and Vance for example are bloody 'Christian' nationalist zealots. They won't be as easily distracted by shiny things as Trump is.

In other words, as bad as things are now, they're set to get much, much worse.

[cellio]

Yes! Trump is a self-absorbed tantrumy child, but Vance is competent and thus even more scary.

I really hope Congress and SCOTUS grow spines and push back against some of the current abuses, but even if they do it's going to be a long fight.

[austin_dern]

Possibly soothing some anxiety, though, is that the track record of fascist douchenozzles passing things off to a successor is really, really poor. Things almost always fall apart right after The Guy bites it, since the things that select for The One Man Who Can Save Us all work against having a The Next Man. (The longest survival post-The-Guy I can find offhand is Portugal's New State, which made it a whole six years after Salazar's cerebral hemorrhage.)

And competence and authoritarianism are close to opposites. (Competence requires everyone under you to be comfortable reporting, "yeah, this is broken and can't work"; authoritarianism requires everyone under you reporting, "yeah, our only problem is how sad we are that we can't be even more perfect for you".) I'll put my chips on Vance showing himself to be incompetent if given the chance to do a thing.

[conuly]

So you're saying that they need to pivot to a less fascist form of totalitarianism?

[austin_dern]

It'd suggest better odds for the regime, but I'm not sure fascism has that gear-shift in it either.

[darkoshi]

It just gets more and more terrifying.

[ionelv]

I have read many commentaries on his NSS and I will be one of few dissenting voices and find some good in it: America has long been overstretched militarily and it has been draining its resources in maintaining an illusion it has itself created in the first place and that is that it cares about world democracy (which it does not unless it is good cover for furthering its own economic interests). The mask is finally off and America will be even more sanguine about its military deployments. It badly needs to or China will eat it for breakfast within 10 years. Europe has been warned repeatedly since Nixon that it needs to pick up the slack (within a zombie NATO) which it largely ignored until now (with one notable exception: UK). Wake up world!

[conuly]

Yeah, the US should never have been allowed to form a military that massively dwarfs any other two or three you care to mention.

[ionelv]

Except that the "allowed" part is non-enforceable either by Americans or others :(

[silveradept]

So the U.S. government intends to let corporations take over various Latin American countries and rule by puppetry in those spaces, on the assumption that those corporations would never do anything to hurt him. That's very ambitious, and I suspect it will not go over well.

There is at least a bit of honesty in there, as I'm pretty sure the U.S. government has ever actually believed it was subject to any international law or any other doctrine save those where not obeying it resulted in bloody and swift retaliation from those wronged.

I think the people summing it up with the Fourteen Words are on target, and we're just waiting to find out what kind of way they're going to go.

[conuly]

So the U.S. government intends to let corporations take over various Latin American countries and rule by puppetry in those spaces, on the assumption that those corporations would never do anything to hurt him. That's very ambitious, and I suspect it will not go over well.

I mean, it's always worked well enough before, for a given definition of "well enough".

[silveradept]

True enough. Being honest about it might qualify as an improvement in some places. The greater improvement would be to not meddle, or to start busting up megacorps that have the resources to try and take over nations, but I doubt Republicans or Democrats would be willing to go that far.