That is something Americans don’t really understand. Trump has pushed the envelope but he isn’t as much of an outlier as many Americans would like to believe. His incompetence and arrogance make it easy to see how awful he is but his agenda is the regular American agenda with some more guardrails removed. They don’t seem to notice that their Senate, Congress and Supreme Court have mainly supported him with exceedingly little pushback.
The biggest difference between Trump and his predecessors is that Trump is not pretending.
Regan, Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, Obama, Biden, they all bomb whoever they want, kill whoever they want, support Israel’s genocidal policy, interfere in another country elections, … all those bad things that Trump are not hiding.
For the rest of the world it’s business as usual but this time not behind closed doors.
I think the difference was that before other countries would see themselves as allies and thus as part of the West. NATO is just one of many alliances that went beyond just pretending.
Now Trump threatened all of this. Take over Canada? Get back the Panama Canal? “Rescue” Greenland? Get out of NATO? Suddenly it becomes clear that it was a mistake to trust the US so much and that the same rules should count for them as anyone else.
i’m no expert in global politics so take this with a grain of salt but i would not say trusting US was a “mistake”. there are tons(*) of trustworthy Americans out there. and every alliance always comes with some amount of risk but it’s just how we humans work.
(* - yes I mean tons, plural, I’m pretty sure it’s at least few tons :D)
That is something Americans don’t really understand. Trump has pushed the envelope but he isn’t as much of an outlier as many Americans would like to believe. His incompetence and arrogance make it easy to see how awful he is but his agenda is the regular American agenda with some more guardrails removed. They don’t seem to notice that their Senate, Congress and Supreme Court have mainly supported him with exceedingly little pushback.
The biggest difference between Trump and his predecessors is that Trump is not pretending.
Regan, Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, Obama, Biden, they all bomb whoever they want, kill whoever they want, support Israel’s genocidal policy, interfere in another country elections, … all those bad things that Trump are not hiding.
For the rest of the world it’s business as usual but this time not behind closed doors.
To trust Americans was and it is impossible.
I think the difference was that before other countries would see themselves as allies and thus as part of the West. NATO is just one of many alliances that went beyond just pretending.
Now Trump threatened all of this. Take over Canada? Get back the Panama Canal? “Rescue” Greenland? Get out of NATO? Suddenly it becomes clear that it was a mistake to trust the US so much and that the same rules should count for them as anyone else.
i’m no expert in global politics so take this with a grain of salt but i would not say trusting US was a “mistake”. there are tons(*) of trustworthy Americans out there. and every alliance always comes with some amount of risk but it’s just how we humans work.
(* - yes I mean tons, plural, I’m pretty sure it’s at least few tons :D)