What a sick people.
It really feels strange, odd, yet unsurprising that the US is going from a globalist leadership to selfish nationalism.
Literally the only losing move was to mess with our relations to them.
The Heritage Foundation's agenda is to isolate the USA and bring it back to the Gilded Age, which runs counter to the narrative of 'the greatest country on earth'. So far, the Heritage Foundation is making great progress with putting processes in motion that makes the downfall almost irreversible.
Show us it isn't just lies and bad faith.
It’s worse than that. This doesn’t suit the US. It suits Trump (or at least, that’s what his addled mind thinks).
So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
That is the fundamental problem. The only way out, is to make changes to the constitution to specifically prohibit the executive branch from having any of this power to arbitrarily change things on a whim. That is the only way international peer could in the future trust an agreement made with the USA.
As long as the US feels it is ok to sign an agreement and immediately violate it, nobody in their right mind will bother to negotiate any future agreements. Which is not a good state to be in.
It’s a rather diabolical form of control, democracy. “You have fake choices and you like … nay, you love what you choose”, quite literally. You have to love it, because you have to believe it’s true. And that’s where they latched onto your mind.
It’s quite ingeniou.
European here: Oh hell no. The Brexit breakup drama was years of chaos with each of the braindead Prime Ministers somehow managing to make things worse.
We still aren't doing border checks on EU imports.
Still, Boris Johnson wasn't as bad as Trump.
The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.
The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.
For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.
Each PM in the UK's neverending parade gained power by telling their electorate "I have this genius plan that'll totally let us cherry pick" only to be deflated when the EU held to its clearly stated position.
The problem with Brexit was that the Brits wanted something that was never on the table, they voted for Brexit under false pretenses and then got mad when they couldn't get what they wanted.
Please state the official "consistent" position regarding the main problem caused by your own decision to leave: the Irish border.
"Forced into the Brexit outcome"
Cameron stepped down after he shat the bed, every PM was a Tory.
And yeah, the position was consistent. Before it was 'we could have all the benefits of being in the EU, with none of the down sides'. We could have soft Brexit, or the less popular hard Brexit.
Teresa Mays position was "Brexit means Brexit" and non of the others had a clue either. Because they promised everything to everyone. In the event we got a harder Brexit than the hardest Brexit discussed before the vote.
So if you want to say the UK was consistent, I say fuck you to the civil servants that consistently ignored the conversation prior to the vote.
That's the reality of most mature democracies from UK to Germany to Italy.
If anything, that makes change slower and based on coalition consensus, not a single winner-take-all individual mood.
Which means that there isn't much to "work" as previous arrangements keep holding and they hardly change.
I would never exchange our democracy for a king electing one like in US, Turkey or Russia.
I'd rather have our democracies slower, the governments more unstable, but representative.
They are usually negotiated by a nation's crack team of experts. America just does not take any of this seriously anymore.
There is only one chance the US has - they need to do what us Germans were forced to post-1945, rearchitect everything.
The US and UK are the only major countries that didn't undergo some sort of revolution, war or other reset of their constitution and legal systems and it shows everywhere.
If we Europeans (or anyone else) are supposed to ever trust the US again, we demand they properly fix their shit and prevent another madman's rise for good.
[edit autocorrect changed divisive to decisive]
Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.
As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.
A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-to-secure-the...
> US mines produce roughly 500,000 metric tons of potash per year, only about 8 percent of the 5.9 million metric tons of apparent annual US consumption. The remaining demand is met through imports, producing a net import reliance of about 92 percent. Reflecting the high concentration of global potash production, most of that supply comes from Canada (79 percent), with smaller volumes from Russia (12 percent) and other producers (9 percent) including Israel.
It would be decidedly un-Canadian to leverage electricity, potash, or other commodities necessary for survival in trade negotiations -- despite what Ford may suggest. We're nice, but we won't bow to bullies. Elbows up, eh!
And you don't have to ban them, just make them more expensive. Your US brethren did vote for tarriffs. With that comes higher prices.
All other issues aside, Trump and the Republicans love to boast that they aren’t bound by anything including their own promises. This is the end result of that.
You’d be mad to cut a deal with the US right now. The Trump Admin will just try to take another bite. They are dishonest and unreliable. Making America’s word mean nothing is the greatest long term damage done to the country and the surest indicator of the end of the American Century (80 years but we can round up)
If you want political gestures then impose heavy sanctions on Israel and declare that Latinos can get refugee status in Canada because of ICE. That would be an economic win too.
Sadly, U.S. politics doesn't attract high-quality thought in general (especially in more recent years), so any discussion surrounding our little three-ring circus cult here isn't likely to be much better than the subject matter bein' discussed. It's all just too crazy to base any sane discussion around.