Empires seem to deploy their powers to the maximum, desisting only when they no longer have the wherewithal. We may soon be reminded that it was American decline that put Mr. Trump in a position to set American foreign policy in the first place.
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I'm not in a position to comment on the domestic benefits of Trump's policies, other than that he seems to have succeeded in closing the border and the anecdotal evidence is that millions of illegals have self-deported out of the country. He is waffling back and forth on the H1B thing and that is alarming, but internationally, he is much freer to act without being yanked in a hundred different directions by domestic political interests.
The Liberal ideology of the international rules-based order has, since its inception, been a straitjacket for the United States, designed to constrain America's ability to defend its own interests while everyone else brazenly ignored the rules in order to advance theirs. Whenever a US administration did commit to military action, their perceived obligations were used as a pretext to intentionally bog them down with multiple decades of obligatory forever war, which those administrations were of course fine with because they were on the take. What Trump just did has shown the world that he's not going to be constrained by that artificial framework.
I don't understand how anybody could have believed that America First meant that the United States would give free reign to China and every other global rival to fuck around in America's backyard without lifting a finger to stop them.
I don't totally agree with this. Yes the US has been somewhat restrained by the fiction of international order, but it has a lot of sneaky interventions under its belt via the CIA and proxy conflicts. This is far from the first regime change in South America alone.
You kind of made your own counterargument there. If the forever wars weren't massive money laundering operations, they would have been shut down. The perceived obligations were part convictions of Bush Jr (I grant him that much) and part marketing campaign.
What the hell are you babbling about? The US weaponizes "the rules" against adversaries all the time. That's what all these sanctions are.
Globalist US administrations weaponized the rules against Americans and their interests. I won't apologize for believing that Trump is different, and everything he just did with Venezuela supports that view from my perspective.
The US was sanctioning Venezuela since 2008 and has been seamlessly Zionist and anti-Russia across multiple Congresses and Presidents.
Edit: 2008 not 2014
That seems to be the heart of this. Does MAGA mean isolationism at any cost, or aggressively pursuing policies that benefit their own people.
If 'their own people' is Raytheon, then the latter certainly applies.
It's a tiny trickle but it would trickle down to Americans
Trickle down economics is a failure. Sorry Reagan.
Paul Singer isn't my people. He's not even people.