Hope you’re wrong. I’m hoping that the GOP is gasping out its last breath (at least in its current form), but we’ll see.
MM MD
It probably is for the best though. Our interests in the region have been to maintain a military standoff and offensive threat to China and Russia despite what the security, economic and humanitarian interests are for Japan, North and South Korea. We may have some interest in North Korea being a 100% democracy and ally - though not really. We didn’t make that happen for South Korea, what we did there was prop up a brutal dictatorship for a couple decades before they got their own democratic government.
China has an interest in a North Korea which functions more like China does. Not great, but probably realistic and much better than the status quo.
I’m not likely to live long enough to see it, but China is in for some REAL difficult years in the future, due to their demographic issues. Net migration is essentially zero, and the one-child-policy kneecapped their ability to support all the people moving out of the workforce as they age. As screwed up as we are in terms of immigration, we’re still taking in more than any other country, and that’s not going to change, I don’t think.
MM MD
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I think it’s both in our interest, good for the world and morally right that South Korea and Japan remain free democracies with prosperous economies. I am concerned that ceding influence in the region to China is a very bad thing. Even in recognizing that we’ve done a poor job as the world’s police, etc, etc, I don’t have any reason to think that China would do any better in the region going forward.
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Yeah China is going all in on automation for a reason. Fortunately for them their old people do not have high expectations for standard of living… or they’d be really screwed.
Sounds like she got bad legal advice. Also, Gaetz showed up at her sentencing hearing to ask for jail time lol… Great use of the Congressman’s time.
She pleaded guilty, she should have been like, “Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I wasn’t trying to assault the Congressman, I was trying to help him stay hydrated. He appeared to be parched, so I tossed a red drink to him in order to assist him. It’s not my fault he cannot catch!”
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This is the analogy I find most persuasive. It does nothing for us to next time elect the most perfect president America has ever seen. Trump has shown the world that every four years, America has a high likelihood of defaulting or abandoning whatever policy, diplomacy, and unity previous administrations manifested (or at least maintained).
It’s not that we can’t begin to fix a lot of the immediate domestic issues. It’s that Trump has violated the trust of so many people across the world that no one will trust the American government for a long, long time.
And rightly so. When someone shatters your trust, you can forgive them whenever you like, but there is a time component to rebuilding trust that cannot be bypassed.
Every day Trump is in office, America is increasing the amount of time it will take to rebuild any semblance of trust.
Republicans will likely not have the benefit of the doubt from me again in my lifetime, which will hopefully be for a while yet but you never know.
Democrats are going to struggle, too, though not as comprehensively, because even while many have been fighting Trump to various degrees, I cannot shake the sense of betrayal that they somehow did not do more sooner.
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China has no interest in crippling its customers.
China does have an interest in creating both customers and (further) developing the economy in North Korea.
Trump bashed Nancy Pelosi for an impeachment quote. It actually came from a Fox News reporter.
Twitter didn’t ban people for being mean to Tucker Carlson so Fox left in protest.
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Yep. We’re going to have to elect 3-4 sane presidents in a row before most of the rest of the world trusts us again, I think.
The one thing that helps is that parts of the rest of the world have also put nutjobs in power lately and/or have come close. So we may get a little extra benefit of the doubt.
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And again, not only did we not make South Korea a free democracy, we opposed it. This was quite useful as we used about 300000 South Koreans to fight in Vietnam.
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W was pretty bad too though. This has become a recurring theme with us. And let’s be honest… we had a pretty good run as the worlds cop in terms of duration. As a country we can’t really sustain the financial burden of it long term anyway. We’ve neglected our population to a ridiculous degree to fund it. Look at our infrastructure, our healthcare, and our schools. All pretty trash compared to the rest of the developed world. That’s the stuff we neglected to fund blowing up brown people. It had to end sometime for some reason. Might as well be now for these reasons.
In a lot of ways Trump is nothing more than the living manifestation of the average American’s deep unhappiness with the political and foreign policy status quo. And honestly? I get it. I really do.
The world is going to go back to normal. There will probably be a few more wars than there would have been… maybe.
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Yah and to be clear, we are mostly in agreement. I don’t think we can force individual change, but herd mentality and tribal accord are powerful tools for social change. I just get caught up in conflicted feelings about not just how easily it is to use that for evil, as the GOP has done, but that it requires a kind of arrogance and God complex to start declaring and enforcing broad social change. You have to be outrageously certain about what change you’re manifesting, and when you are THAT certain, as the GOP is, you will easily find yourself making all sorts of exceptions to your behavior in order to create a better world.
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I mean fuck. They gave Obama a Nobel peace prize basically as a way to say, “Thanks for not electing another Republican, please don’t do it again”
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Yeah, I don’t know what the “right” thing to do there was. South Korea was a shitshow after WWII, and I don’t know if any sort of democracy could have stood up to North Korea at the time - and I don’t especially see how the world would have been a better place had Korea been unified under the Kim dynasty. I know less than nothing about the whole Korean situation at the time though, other than my dad was drafted, served as a medic, and was somewhat screwed up by the experience. Come to think of it, any recommendations for books about Korea?
MM MD
Democracies aren’t weak. Like, look at who has ruled the world since 1945.
Right I’m speaking from the present onward. We support it now, at least when we have a sane president.
How much of that is due to the US’s privileged position as being the only large power not completely trashed in terms of infrastructure and economy, and with no plausible opponent able to even vaguely threaten their territory for several years I’ll leave open. I do agree that democracy helped after WWII, but the US had a huge running start. South Korea’s situation was less great.
To be clear, I think South Korea was going to be a client state of the US for years after the end of WWII no matter what sort of government they had, democratic or otherwise.
MM MD