And he doesn’t even dish it out very well. He’s a fool without the bells.
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Part of Trump’s current Ukraine defense is that Ukrainian leaders talking shit about him in 2016 is evidence of campaign interference, and being in the tank for Hillary. Except as Fiona Hill pointed out in her testimony, lots of world leaders were making unfavorable comments about Trump at the time, and only Ukrainians concern him. (And can you blame Ukrainians for not liking Trump when he publicly said Russia had a right to take the Crimea away from Ukraine?)
[ETA: In other words, Trump is continually complaining about bias against him, but is it really “bias” to look down on an idiot, or mistrust a con man? It’s not some kind of irrational prejudice, it’s logical.]
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Frightening reminder that our foreign policy is based on trumps fragile ego.
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I think the empire has been declining since at least the fall of Saigon, it just got a temporary boost when the Soviet Union collapsed first.
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The United States decided to take the peace dividend in the form of hegemony. What we fought for and what we spent for was not the lifting of the threat of nuclear annihilation, but control of this threat.
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Shrug it off and shake hands like gentlemen.
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As usual for the USA (see also World Series), Leader of the Free World is actually a most humble (/s) self designation originating in cold war propaganda.
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That doesn’t mean it’s not accurate, though. Or at least that it shouldn’t be accurate. The leader of the most economically & militarily powerful liberal democracy in the world, by a loooong ways, should probably be considered the “leader of the free world” and act accordingly. Barring a purposeful abdication of that role by a buffoonish authoritarian with no interest in maintaining any sort of norms, of course.
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Wait until americans finally toss him out of office… then we’ll have lots of strong opinions being voiced by politicians around the world.
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Nah he’ll just shout about it long enough to fuck the stock market and push the global ecconomy closer to recession.
Immediately after he’ll brag about how good he is at ecconomy.
When called out on falling stocks he’ll dismissed stocks as fake news and utter the word “jobs”.
He knows. He knows it hard. And a lot of what he does is done to keep you from noticing or mentioning it.
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I really want to know who took that video and why? A reminder to all of us that anything you say could end up on YouTube.
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You wouldn’t track the decline back to our failure to learn any useful lessons from Korea?
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You know there isn’t actually an office of „Leader of the Free World“, right?
„Leader“ implicates control/command. The rest of the Free World are independent sovereign countries with their own elected leaders. Makes the whole concept of self–declaring yourself Leader of the Free World absurd at best.
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Broadly speaking I wouldn’t disagree, but I see the fall of Saigon as the conclusion to that failure. The moment of clarity. The Korean War itself was a draw and America did have a win with the Apollo program after that.
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I am aware that historians may well have a different take on this, but IMHO, Apollo marked the zenith of American power and leadership. It has been a long slow decline ever since.
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That’s a rather limited view of leadership that seems to omit the existence of moral leadership. To be very clear, I think there are precious few examples of the US actually providing that moral leadership to the world, but one cannot deny that we are in a unique position to do so.
In any event, the fact remains that the US has been in a unique position for the better part of the last century being a military and economic superpower. We, and by extension our President, are often placed in a position of primus inter pares because of that reality, and it’s up to us to decide how to use that.
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As impressive as Apollo was, it was happening concurrently with the escalation of Vietnam and was basically the propaganda theater of the cold war with Russia that dragged both countries down. Any tangible benefits were byproducts of our national need to be able to say we got somewhere first, which is arguably a sign of an insecure empire.
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But we did, you know, go to the moon. I mean, I’m as jaded as anybody else in this modern world, but on the scale of human achievement it ranks up there with anything we’ve done as a species in the last 6k years or so. The fact that going to the moon is still aggressively aspirational to developed countries who now have computers and half a century of rocket engineering to draw on 50 years after the US did it is pretty mindblowing.
I hear you that it was conducted in the context of a cold war, but I’m not sure one can point to any great human achievement that wasn’t undertaken at least in part for something other than the noblest of reasons. If one is going to choose a peak, one could probably do worse, couldn’t they?
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