People thought that international trade would prevent war before WW1[1]. The concept doesn't really account for how political leaders often care about things other than money, business, or the material welfare of their plebs.
>What worries me is which side the US (government, not people) would choose to support if EU states send troops to Ukraine's front lines, which would absolutely instigate a Russian response.
Even the Biden administration was going out of its way to not push Russia too far. None of The Powers That Be in the US are interested in stumbling into WW3 with Russia, over Ukraine. Stumbling into WW3 with China, over Taiwan? Maybe. So I'd say Europe should approach such a decision from the assumption that you will receive no support from the US if you go down that road. If Europe wants to send its men to the killing fields of the Ostfront, it's on its own.
Assuming Europe, collectively, can even change the balance of power on the ground is also a stretch. Even some of the larger established militaries in Europe don't have the bodies to move the needle in this fight. The British Army, for example, has woefully understrength infantry battalions and is struggling with enlistment.[1][2] France claims they can put a division into the field [3] but I doubt that, probably more like a reinforced brigade (~5,000). I really don't get the impression European civil society is ready for hundreds or thousands of bodies to start coming back home either, but I could be wrong on that.
Meanwhile Russia inducted ~440,000 men last year, beating recruiting goals courtesy of MASSIVE cash enlistment bonuses, and still expects to grow their end strength this year as well.[4]
Most of the Generals and Colonels I've worked with use government-issued smartphones with access to their government Outlook account, and send encrypted group emails back and forth that way.
These people *WERE* military personnel and there is no way they haven't been repeatedly exposed to proper procedures for information handling. They absolutely should know better and deserve to face consequences for this sort of incompetence.
Mike Walz is a Special Forces officer and only retired as a Colonel from the National Guard to take his position as National Security Advisor.
Tulsi Gabbard is still a Lieutenant Colonel in the National Guard.
Pete Hegseth was a Major in the National Guard, ending his service in 2021.
JD Vance is probably the most junior of the veterans, leaving the Marine Corps as a Corporal in 2007.
> Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.
I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
> Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.
When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
I think this is really important - 2A is about being able to arm a militia and only has value when a vast majority of the people are willing to put their life on the line against the military. It isn't magically an antidote to authoritarianism and it's a deep negative if too many of your neighbors don't like the look of you and don't believe in rights or the rule of law.
The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism. Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
>The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism.
The US is charting new ground here. Almost every other massively-oppressive state apparatus has prioritized restricting private firearms ownership early in their decent into tyranny for a reason.
> Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
The rate of firearms ownership in the US has been on a slow decline for the past 40-50 years (not sure how accurate data is before 1970 or 1980), from roughly 45% to 30%. School shootings have skyrocketed in the past ~30 years, and were pretty rare before Columbine. The two don't appear to be correlated. How do you reconcile this? I suspect that other societal factors are more salient causes.....perhaps the explosion in single-mother parenthood (something like 40% of all families now), combined with the known impacts on poor juvenile behavior in young boys and the explosion in "attention culture" courtesy of social media are the major factors in emotionally unstable teens gunning down their peers?
That said....I live in a country with almost no firearms and also have the peace of mind that nobody is gonna shoot my children. But I'm also in a homogeneous society that has almost no concern or risk level for their government turning tyrannical.
I derive substantial portions of my wealth-building from the military-industrial complex, while living outside of the US insulates me, and my children, from the worst of both America's fractured society AND from the authoritarian overreach that typically disproportionately affects minorities such as myself.
For my family unit, the path through all this chaos of imperial decline involves building up sustainable property ownership and revenue streams in Asia and Africa while winding down our US footprint to a minimum (real estate, social security/military pension/VA benefits).
For me to engage in an insurgency, the government would need to seize our US home, and/or cancel our benefits. Even then I'd need to work out some cost-benefit analysis to determine whether I could maximize my children's wealth by either a) continuing to build wealth outside the US or b) fighting to gain restitution via the new revolutionary government.
I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate, going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process and would justify brutal reprisals. An unarmed civilian crowd is far more persuasive for wavering troops ordered to fire on it.
In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
> I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
I don't disagree with that. People have to be invested in the cause first. Weapons are just tools there to both 1) discourage the powerful from attempting tyranny 2) ensure the people at least have access to the final arbiter of power: violence.
> Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate
It would be interesting to see the data on this. Peaceful protests didn't work in Syria or Myanmar, for example. Eventual armed rebellion succeeded in Syria...but still hasn't succeeded in Myanmar despite decades of conflict. Peaceful protests in China got rolled over by tanks in the 1980s (Tianamen). The Arab Spring was shut down pretty fiercely in Bahrain despite being unarmed, but I'm not that familiar with the details.
> going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process
You go to the seat of power, you kill or overpower the security forces, then you take the people inside who think they can oppress you, drag them out into the street, and shoot them. Show trials are optional but recommended. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae... )
> In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence." (great book series BTW) In all likelihood the US got really lucky with George Washington and that colors our national mythology, and by extension our perspective on armed rebellion. Because of course a military officer who breaks laws and uses violence against his government will be magnanimous, and not turn into a vicious and brutal druglord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Guzm%C3%A1n_Decena ).
> All the US had to do was supply it's old weapons to Ukraine whilst replenishing it's stock (creating jobs in America) and things would have been fine.
Well, no, it's not fine, partly because we can't replenish our stocks fast enough. Ukraine is consuming nearly the entire planet's production capacity of Patriot missiles, eating enough of our ATACMS stockpile that it makes Combatant Commanders nervous, and more. To say nothing of the argument "supply Ukraine for as long as it takes, even if that means indefinitely" never made any sense; actions taken without a clear, achievable end goal in mind are just a waste of resources.
> Why do so many journos keep making these politically motivated articles.
Because a bunch of journalists were being paid by the government to be politically-motivated propagandists, and that gravy train went away because of DOGE.
There's a ton of threads on HN about Doge, but if you search with "site:news.ycombinator.com Internews Network".....only 1 result, in the comments.
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.
The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi. It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN.
Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at http://archive.org. Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors. In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Bourgault launched a $10m IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The IN page showing a picture of Bourgault at the CGI has also been deleted.
> USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.
This kind of work is extremely important for making the US be seen as the "police of the world" rather than a bully, who will turn a blind eye to genocide when convenient, but will shell civilians if people who come from the same city threaten commercial routes.
For instance, the US strongly condemns the Venezuelan government. At the same time, it doesn't condemn the Saudi government, even though it is obvious for anyone to see the massive human rights infringements that happen there. The US government also doesn't condemn the Bukele government and, currently, they even give Bukele money by paying him to torture prisoners deported from the US.
Do you see a pattern here? Of course the US needs all the favorable media coverage it can get.
> if we were neither the world's police nor the world's bully.
I too would prefer a more peaceful US (and you could continue spending in making the world aspire to be more US-like via USAID). I like the idea behind the country, but the more I understand about the implementation, the less faith I have on it being an example to be followed.
>They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable
> totally ignoring the fact that you betrayed your allies
The US is following the example of its mentor, the UK. Perfidious Albion allied with the Germans and Russians to fight the French (Napoleonic Wars), then allied with the French and Russians to fight the Germans (WW1 & WW2), then allied with the French and Germans to counter the Russians (Cold War). Great powers don't have permanent friends, nor do they have permanent enemies, they only have permanent interests. Europeans were simply naive[0], thinking they were the equals of the world's hyperpower for some reason, just because our post-WW2 dealings were executed with substantially more carrot than stick. It's just normalcy bias. Somehow Europe didn't think they would ever end up like the South Vietnamese, the Hmong, the Kurds (against Saddam, in 1991[1]), the Afghans, the Kurds again (against the Turks[2]), and now the Ukrainians. Some argue there is more than a bit of latent racism involved, not expecting the White People Countries to be abused by the Empire the same way Brown People Countries are.[3]
> If the US was a kid it wouldn't invite others over because it wants to eat the birthday cake alone.
This is why I often state that Woodrow Wilson is the worst President in American history. Besides shackling us with both the Federal Reserve Banking System and Federal Income Tax, he dragged us into Europe's internecine bloodshed and normalized that interventionism despite Americans largely being comfortable with sticking to our own hemisphere. In 1913, the US already had the world's largest GDP, with a GDP per capita roughly equal to Imperial Germany and about 75% of the UK's (assuming Copilot isn't lying to me on this data). Imports were only 4% of GDP compared to 15% in 2023. I think the wealthy elite who are siding with Trump are charting a plan to return the US to the same kind of domestically-focused economy, but we don't have the sort of natural resources nor human capital to ensure a decent quality of life on a short timeframe (or perhaps even a longer one) given the "shock treatment" that they are implementing.
Roosevelt was president when the US declared war on Nazi Germany, not Woodrow Wilson. It was a very popular move at the time, with over 90% of people agreeing to it according to polls, and 100% of the House and the Senate agreeing to it, too.
> I think the wealthy elite who are siding with Trump are charting a plan to return the US to the same kind of domestically-focused economy
You're delusional, if you think there is any kind of plan going on here. Nobody knew any plan beyond "tariffs" and ideas about invasions coming out of thin air. The tariff numbers are a complete joke.
No, there is no grand scheme, hidden behind an act of absolute incompetence. It's just a short-term money/power grab for the already rich. An attempt to turn the world's "hyperpower" as you put it, into a second-world oligarchy. This may end up in total disaster, that is, a thirld-world oligarchy, if you look at China. But it's hard to actually look at China from the West.
Half the people complaining about Trump's actions say that it's all according to Project 2025, and half the people say what you're saying, that's it all chaotic incompetence with no plan.
I suppose the worst-case scenario is elements of both are true. They've got a fucked up playbook but can't even execute it correctly?
For the record I also don't think they are likely to succeed, I'm just trying to assess what/how they might be planning, or what direction they think they can take the country in. We can agree that they probably won't get the results they want and that America is in for a very rough ride.
> Half the people complaining about Trump's actions say that it's all according to Project 2025, and half the people say what you're saying, that's it all chaotic incompetence with no plan.
I think this is a misunderstanding (not sure if it's on your part of on the part of some of the complaining people): the Trump admin's agenda and strategy are clearly following Project 2025, for the most part. But Trump's tariff obsession does not originate there. I'm quite certain that even the most pro-tariff of the conservative think tanks are uncomfortable with how far he's pushing it.
I get the impression that the zeal behind Project 2025 is not motivated by their economic ideas but mostly by their perception of being in a culture war that they are now on the cusp of winning (they aren't). They deeply hate and resent the "liberal elites" (academics, journalists, etc) who they feel have too much influence on American culture, and the dream that keeps them going is not merely defeating these liberal elites electorally, but utterly destroying them. To "put them in their place", as it were.
One thing that would derail their plans is if Trump lays waste to the economy early in his term, so that he's likely to lose the midterms and a Democrat becomes the next president, and perhaps even making their political movement unviable for years or decades. So even his pro-tariff supporters are uneasy now: the tariff policy is so extreme that it is likely to interfere with their overarching goal.
[1] https://bigthink.com/the-past/world-war-one-illusion/
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