Interesting report from the world of diplomacy and military alliance.
The headline quotation is a direct quotation of a non-American senior official to the Americans at the meeting.
80 years of effort to build up a world of shared values burned in under a year. 80 years of soft power tossed in the compost pile and recycled into fertilizer. 80 years of blood, sweat, and tears as Americans laboured to make the world safe for America.
All gone in the tantrums of a decrepit toddler.
Indeed, USA: We genuinely will never fucking trust you again.
I can’t say never because that’s quite a long time to make guarantees but I imagine it would take at least a couple generations for the international trust in the US to return to comparable levels.
2017-2020 could have been a blip on the timeline. 2021 we had some progress but the US leadership was practically asleep at the wheel in terms of dealing with the open preparation of fascist takeover in 2025. Now in 2025 the largest military force in the world, its highest internal court, both its governing houses, the various departments that were supposed to serve the public interest are all led by a gaggle of self-serving clowns. And the country’s commander-in-chief can barely remember what they said a minute ago and has trouble staying awake in public meetings.
So I think with a major reversal of fortunes and a program to de-Nazify itself at a scale unseen since WWII, the world could take the US seriously again after 2028 at the earliest. The trust will take a lot longer to come back.
Even if the democrats return to power they would have to clearly demonstrate a commitment to the old values. Not just words, actual actions would be required.
Fair. Let’s just say that nobody alive now, nor the offspring of any of those, will trust the USA. It will be at least the third generation before the USA stands a chance of being trusted by anybody who is not suffering from genuine brain damage.
I mean the de-nazifying would have to come with many expansions and clarifications of the constitution to make sure these things can’t be done so easily again. Not even sure what all would be needed but I think a line stating no ruling of the supreme court can expand executive power might be one and maybe another saying any expansion of the executive power by congress has to be renewed every two years. I would like the executive split into a tribunal as well.
What would be needed is codification of the assumed “norms”. That was the problem in Weimar, and that’s the problem in the USA today: too many things were just “customs” and “norms of behaviour” without any actual legal teeth.
Maybe the US government can spend a decade or ten figuring out how to control themselves instead of controlling, say, what women do with their bodies. Or what people in general put into their bodies, for that matter. A whole lot of energy has been devoted to controlling women’s biology. Maybe that energy could be redirected to controlling lawmakers’ base instincts.
Oh. And cut the crap with “corporations are people”. Or keep that crap, but extend it to jailing corporations and even executing them.
yes this is exactly the type of things we need or we will not completely crawl out of this.