…Yet it seems safe to say that the world no longer trusts U.S. promises, and perhaps no longer fears U.S. threats, the way it used to. The problem, however, isn’t Biden; it’s the party that reflexively attacks him for anything that goes wrong.
Right now America is a superpower without a fully functioning government. Specifically, the House of Representatives has no speaker, so it can’t pass legislation, including bills funding the government and providing aid to U.S. allies. The House is paralyzed because Republican extremists, who have refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy and promoted chaos rather than participating in governance, have turned these tactics on their own party. At this point it’s hard to see how anyone can become speaker without Democratic votes — but even less extreme Republicans refuse to reach across the aisle.
And even if Republicans do somehow manage to elect a speaker, it seems all too likely that whoever gets the job will have to promise the hard right that he will betray Ukraine.
Given this political reality, how much can any nation trust U.S. assurances of support? How can we expect foreign enemies of democracy to fear America when they know that there are powerful forces here that share their disdain?
To be fair, a lot of countries started scrutinizing the US after the Bush election in 2000.
The Iraq war, intelligence about Guantanamo, the whole thing with PRISM and Snowden, and the entire Trump administration has made the US look increasingly unstable internationally.
The Iraq war, intelligence about Guantanamo, the whole thing with PRISM and Snowden, and the entire Trump administration has made the US look increasingly unstable internationally.
It looks that way because that’s what we’ve become. The question is how much damage are we going to do to ourselves and the rest of the world as we scrabble to keep the influence that we’re losing.
I don’t care how much you damage yourselves, just stop interfering around and role playing world police.
Hmm, I wonder why the world is feeling worse and worse about an American-controlled world where the powers that be in America have a history of reaching across oceans to assassinate democratically elected politicians, install fascist governments friendly to American business interests, make life worse off for people in developing nations, and allow foreign governments to reign untold destruction onto innocent civilians with American-made weapons without recourse. What a fucking mystery.
I don’t think the problem is noticing. People all over have hated this USA influence for ages. The thing is: who could do something about it? It took decades for China’s economy to get where it is today. People aren’t dumb. The skinny kid will usually not get into a fight with the buffed bully if there is not much chance of winning. With the US tripping itself more and more lately, it’s just opportunity presenting itself.
From a British perspective I know there was always a huge political obsession with maintaining the ‘Special Relationship’ with the US up until Trump came in and Brexit happened basically simultaneously making us more irrelevant.
It’s still there in a half hearted transactional way when it comes to intelligence sharing, day to day stuff etc. But in terms of the PM sucking up to the President photo opportunities to get some media attention - that aspect seems to have died pretty quickly.
It strikes me there are a lot of similarities with our politics right now though - lack of faith from the voters, rampant cronyism, lawbreaking heads of state FFS, culture war obsessions dominating the discourse when the average person is more worried about affording their rent/mortgage at the end of the month. I’d say our government is dysfunctional on the same level but the difference is we stopped being a superpower way back when.
I’m rambling way off topic, sorry. Reading that just reminded me of when our politicians used to be all over the American ones as being the glamorous ones to suck up to (whether the public agreed or not) but things have definitely changed.
Pax Americana is such an absurd concept. We JUST got out of a pair of twenty year wars. What fucking pax? This is just nonsense
The term was around before this war, and doesn’t even refer to peace as much as it refers to protected trade routes, with America doing the protecting. The idea is that America enables global trade by ensuring that trade isn’t plundered or threatened by neighboring countries, unstable regimes, or pirates by patrolling those trade routes with massive aircraft carriers to make sure everyone’s following international rules. It also sometimes refers to trade effectively being brokered globally through American channels (effectively the case regardless of agreement so long as the American dollar is also the exchange currency, as it used to be the near-exclusive reserve currency for the IMF), which massively, disproportionately benefits America, but also benefits global trade. Before the Pax Americana was the Pax Brittanica, largely in the same way and for the same reasons. The original term (what the Pax Brittanica referred to, before the sun started setting on the British Empire) was the Pax Romana.
Pax [Latinized empire name] doesn’t mean there’s no wars. It just means there’s no wars that [Latinized empire name] doesn’t want.
More properly, as the person above you said, it means no wars that disrupt commerce. The Romans were fighting wars throughout the entire history of the Empire, but during the Pax Romana, you could travel throughout much of Europe and know you were likely safe from being harmed.
International prices of sunflower and wheat caused by Ukrainian conflict wants a word with you
There is the chaos that Republicans are causing in Congress, but potentially the revelation that Russia isn’t quite the threat the world thought they were and the emergence of China and others as world powers have probably helped to blunt our influence somewhat too. It’s not really a bipolar world anymore, there’s a range of players on the field now, moreso than during most of the latter 20th century. But given how effective our weapons have been in Ukraine, shows that we at least have our massive military budget going for us. We’re not dependable, but if push comes to shove , we’ve got a big stick we can walk in with… assuming our hyper-short attention span can maintain focus long enough.
