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America's Foreign Policy & Other Shit Going On Around the World thread

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2 hours ago, Zeus said:

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Just looked up that tweet. It's from July 31, 2024. 

 

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Just looked up that tweet. It's from July 31, 2024. 
 

But…did you look up the fact that Zeus is a gullible idiot?

CHECKMATE.

I believe our current foreign policy consists of a blindfold, a dart board and a catheter.

This is Israel and US holding Irans feet to the fire on the negotiations. The administration in Iran is going to be under a lot of internal pressure to make a deal. The regular folks there don’t want a war. Who knows if Bibi does wtf he wants to anyway. 

7 hours ago, Zeus said:

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do you ever just stop and say "damn, i am such a fucking useful idiot for parroting easily verified bullshit constantly and i should probably reflect on my decisions in life?"

3 minutes ago, sidis said:

do you ever just stop and say "damn, i am such a fucking useful idiot for parroting easily verified bullshit constantly and i should probably reflect on my decisions in life?"

There's so much misinformation/disinformation online, we've all probably made the mistake of posting something that wasn't true. 

The blaring alarm here is that most Trumpers never acknowledge it or apologize for it. If I got duped and posted something false, I would immediately own up to the mistake if called out. People on the right rarely do.

None of this is actually about the truth to them. I'm more disheartened by the actions of regular people than the traitors running the country. 

 

  • Author

A thorough take-down of Trump's foreign policy failures. The NYTimes analysts writing this sound pissed.

 

Trump Talks Big on Global Diplomacy, but His Goals Are in Tatters
The president said he would bring a quick end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and get China to bend on trade and Iran on its nuclear program. Instead, conflict is escalating.

Quote

 

Donald J. Trump may be known for his combative, vindictive style. But as a candidate for president in 2024, he cast himself as a man of peace. His toughness and the “respect” he enjoys from foreign leaders, he insisted, would enable him to settle conflicts almost with a snap of his fingers.

“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Mr. Trump said in his January inaugural address.

The war in Ukraine could be ended in as little as 24 hours, he said. He would knock heads to reach an agreement between Israel and Hamas to stop the fighting in Gaza.

And he said he would strike a nuclear deal with Iran, “because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal.”

A day after Israel began a massive attack on Iran, however, Mr. Trump’s peace projects are in tatters. The fighting in Ukraine rages on and Mr. Trump appears to have lost patience with efforts to end that war. In Gaza, both Israel and Hamas cling to basic positions they staked out long before Mr. Trump took office.

And instead of announcing a new nuclear deal with Tehran, a president who often denounces America’s history of “stupid” Middle East wars is trying to navigate a dangerous conflict between Iran and Israel, the closest U.S. partner in the region.

“Five months in, Trump is watching prospects of U.S.-mediated negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, the U.S. and Iran, and Israel and Hamas crater. And he’s learning the hard reality that there are severe limits to U.S. influence, power and to his vaunted negotiating skills, especially when you don’t have an effective strategy and aren’t willing to use U.S. leverage to make it succeed,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat who worked under six secretaries of state.

The results undermine Mr. Trump’s argument that he can solve intractable problems with common sense and hard-nosed savvy while ignoring protocol, shunning experts and dispatching inexperienced envoys — including Steve Witkoff, his friend and fellow New York real estate mogul, who has tried to mediate all three projects.

Mr. Trump also appears to be susceptible to conflating flattery and sweet talk from other leaders with a willingness to compromise their interests. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has praised Mr. Trump for years as strong and brave. But when Mr. Trump pressed him earlier this year for a meaningful compromise of his goals in Ukraine, Mr. Putin brushed him off.

Similarly, in his first term, Mr. Trump seemed to develop an admiration for North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, whom he tried to talk into surrendering his nuclear program. But after two high-profile summits in Asia, Mr. Kim proved unwilling to make big sacrifices.

Mr. Trump retains the soul of a New York real estate deal maker. But in each of those cases, he seems to have overestimated how much his counterparts shared his love of deal-making for its own sake.

Mr. Trump is also finding that his efforts to cultivate China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and his pressure on Beijing have not led to Mr. Xi bending on the new trade war that the American president started against China this spring.

Despite the frustrations, Mr. Trump has not given up his hopes for peace, including with Iran.

Even as smoke billowed from bombed targets in Iran, Mr. Trump urged Tehran to continue negotiations over its nuclear program, much of which remains intact.

But it is unclear whether Iran’s leadership will react to Israel’s attack with new concessions, or fresh defiance. The Americans no longer even have an Iranian negotiating partner — an Israeli strike killed Ali Shamkhani, the top nuclear negotiator for Tehran.

Some prominent Trump supporters are urging him to continue diplomacy in the Middle East rather than veer toward greater involvement in Israel’s war with Iran.

Dan Caldwell, a top Pentagon aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth until he was fired this spring, wrote online on Thursday night that “yet another major war in the Middle East where America sends another generation of its sons and daughters to die in support of objectives that are not tied to our safety or economic prosperity is the last thing we need right now.”

On the Gaza front, Mr. Trump spoke excitedly early in his presidency about a post-conflict scenario, saying the United States would “take over” the Palestinian territory and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

But Mr. Trump’s interest has since waned. The Israeli military, armed with American weapons, continues its attacks on Hamas, including lethal airstrikes in areas with displaced Palestinian civilians.

Mr. Witkoff has argued that his lack of diplomatic experience is an asset, giving him fresh eyes on world conflicts, and other Trump allies often deride professionals who they say lack the boldness and smarts of private-sector businessmen.

But many critics see a link between Mr. Trump’s frustrations and his decision to sideline government experts, including career diplomats and military and intelligence officers who can ensure that the president and his envoys have a complete grasp of the complex, historically rooted problems they face.

Mr. Trump and his top officials “are bad at diplomacy because they’re bad strategists,” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “They don’t think beyond their first move, and they don’t respect that counterparties also have domestic politics.”

She added that “the Trump team seems to operate on the basis that others have no choice but to concede to U.S. demands, when allies and adversaries are making decisions to marginalize the U.S. and shield themselves from our influence.”

Mr. Witkoff has been overseeing the talks on Iran, Israel-Gaza and Ukraine-Russia virtually on his own. He has met in Moscow with Mr. Putin, an experienced former intelligence officer, without any American aides present, and then echoes Mr. Putin’s talking points in public and private conversations.

Earlier this year, Mr. Witkoff seemed surprised when Hamas rejected one potential deal with Israel that he thought it had accepted, and later conceded he may have been “duped” by the militant group, which Israeli and Biden administration officials have always said cannot be trusted. He also failed to push Israel into advanced cease-fire talks.

Whatever his end goal, Mr. Trump seems to lack patience with the hard work required to get to real diplomatic outcomes. The Obama administration spent nearly two years negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which Mr. Trump unilaterally withdrew in 2018 — a move that critics say put Iran and Israel on an inevitable path to conflict.

The same impatience helped lead to the implosion of diplomacy with North Korea in Mr. Trump’s first term. After decades of failure by Republican and Democratic administrations to constrain North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Mr. Trump was trying something new and bold in his leader-to-leader diplomacy with Mr. Kim.

But Mr. Trump did not push U.S. officials under him, or allow them enough time, to lay the groundwork for the two leaders to reach an agreement in Hanoi in 2019, and the effort imploded.

On the tariffs on China, Mr. Trump appears to be negotiating against himself. After his worldwide tariffs, including on Chinese imports to the United States, rattled global markets this spring, a shaken Mr. Trump slashed his tariffs on Chinese goods while Beijing made only minor concessions.

Mr. Xi, China’s leader, has refused to call Mr. Trump, and it was Mr. Trump who called Mr. Xi on June 5 to talk about trade, according to the Chinese government.

A columnist recently coined a term for Mr. Trump’s waffling on trade policy that has gained wide circulation as a descriptor of the president’s broader diplomatic efforts: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out.

 

 

Respect on the world stage? Hardly.

Pew: U.S. Image Declines in Many Nations Amid Low Confidence in Trump

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1 hour ago, bolverk said:

A thorough take-down of Trump's foreign policy failures. The NYTimes analysts writing this sound pissed.

 

Trump Talks Big on Global Diplomacy, but His Goals Are in Tatters
The president said he would bring a quick end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and get China to bend on trade and Iran on its nuclear program. Instead, conflict is escalating.

 

Respect on the world stage? Hardly.

Pew: U.S. Image Declines in Many Nations Amid Low Confidence in Trump

image.thumb.png.295f9ea243291add2e6ace6dc4eca0df.pngimage.thumb.png.6d978fa0046b818b38e3ecad6b6d9c5e.png

image.png.33dacc2517916a90eba9cf1cecd49cba.pngimage.png.ebb9efaf9780126d9c0c95b83c83cdb2.png

image.thumb.png.14d5bf94b8f0820fa60f72b3c5f69539.png

 

Duh.  He only has two negotiating techniques (which are usually intertwined): 1) bullying/threats, and 2) being directly transactional (as in, there needs to be a DIRECT quid-pro-quo, like "we'll support your war effort, Ukraine....if you sign over your rare earth minerals").

There is no complexity, no real mutuality, no long-term vision or seed-planting.  It's clumsy, oafish, all short-term, and ultimately, often counter-productive.

  • 1 month later...

Meanwhile…

Shit is blowing up in Syria again and Israel is still killing kids and women in Gaza.

Meanwhile…

Shit is blowing up in Syria again and Israel is still killing kids and women in Gaza.

  • 2 weeks later...
  • Author

Trump's trade policies might push Iceland into joining the EU.

Could Iceland Join The EU? Reykjavik Eyes Accession Talks As Security, Trade Tensions Mount
When predicting which country would be the next to join the European Union, the smart money seems to be on Montenegro given that it has been negotiating for years and has advanced the furthest of all candidates.

Others point to Albania, which is currently making great strides toward Brussels as the next member.

There are also some who think that Moldova -- a reform-oriented and ambitious country in the bloc’s eastern neighborhood -- stands a decent chance of becoming EU member state number 28 in the coming year.

But the right answer may actually be Iceland.

The Trump administration's overtures to annex the Danish territory of Greenland and the prospect of a trade war between its security provider, the United States, and its biggest trading partner, the European Union, have created unease on the North Atlantic island.

The current Icelandic government, which came to power last year, has announced that a referendum will be held before 2027 on resuming accession talks with Brussels. Polls suggest a majority would support restarting talks.

The country has been here before.

It was badly hit by the 2008 global financial crisis, when three of its major banks collapsed. EU membership -- and especially joining the eurozone -- was seen as a way out of the crisis, and negotiations with the bloc began in 2010.

Talks were suspended three years later by a newly elected right-wing government. By then, the eurozone was itself engulfed in the same financial crisis, so joining the club and adopting its ailing common currency was no longer seen as a panacea.

In those three years of accession talks, Reykjavik opened most of the 33 accession chapters and closed 11.

By comparison, the current EU accession frontrunner, Montenegro, has managed to close a mere seven chapters in more than a decade of talks.

'A Sovereign Decision'
It’s not for nothing that EU officials believe that Iceland could wrap up the entire process in a couple of years if it was to resume its application -- which according to the European Commission still remains valid.

It helps, of course, that the country is part of the European Economic Area (EEA), which means that it -- together with other EEA members Norway and Liechtenstein -- is already applying the EU’s internal market rules.

When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited the island last week, she was quick to point out that the issue of future EU membership is “a sovereign decision that the people take here. So, it’s not a topic for me to comment on.”

But, she added, “Iceland is familiar and integrated into the single market, we share values, we know each other very well, we are like-minded -- all this is an asset.”

Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a European diplomat familiar with the topic was even more forthright.

“It would be good if a Western European country would join the EU, especially after Brexit,” they said. “It would show that the club truly is attractive.”

Integration would prove seamless, given that Iceland is richer than the EU average and -- with a population of 300,000 -- would be the smallest member state if it joined.

While Brussels officially is trying to stay out of the Icelandic debate on membership, it is quietly doing everything to edge it closer.

During her visit, von der Leyen promised a trade review to potentially upgrade the EEA agreement. She also struck a deal to protect critical infrastructure that is essential for Iceland, such as subsea cables, and started negotiations on a new security and defense partnership agreement, which would allow closer cooperation on cyber and hybrid threats.

The partnership, expected to be ready by year’s end, is especially important for Iceland, which is acutely aware of the need for security cooperation, particularly as both Russia and China are becoming more active in the Arctic region.

  • 2 months later...
  • Author

Gaza isn't the only genocide that the Trump regime is contributing to.

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https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-usaid-thailand-trump-rubio-aid-7f6919a1863ceea2ddf6708e47bb88f0

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family’s food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.

On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher’s little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: “No children are dying on my watch.”

That, Taher says, “is a lie.”

“I lost my son because of the funding cuts,” he says. “And it is not only me — many more children in other camps have also died helplessly from hunger, malnutrition and no medical treatment.”

Taher’s grief is echoed in families across conflict-ravaged Myanmar, where the United Nations estimates 40% of the population needs humanitarian assistance and which once counted the U.S. as its largest humanitarian donor. Now, in Asia, it has become the epicenter of the suffering unleashed upon the world’s most vulnerable by President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

And like Taher’s son, Mohammed Hashim, it is Myanmar’s children who have borne the brunt of the fallout. A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.

Taher is one of 145,000 people forced to live inside squalid, prison-like camps in the state of Rakhine by the ruling military. Most, like Taher, are members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, which was attacked by the military in 2017 in what the U.S. declared a genocide.

After their food rations evaporated, Taher’s family meals shrank from three a day to one. Taher, his wife and his five children grew so weak, there were days they could not walk.

Little Hashim faded. The clever, caring toddler, who loved playing football and whose cheerful chirps of “Mama” and “Baba” once filled their shelter, could barely move. Anguished by his son’s sobs, Taher tried to find help. But with soldiers banning residents from leaving the camp to find food, and with no money for a doctor, there was nothing Taher could do.

On May 7, Taher and his wife watched their baby take his final breath. Their other children began to scream.

Neighbor Mohammed Foyas, who visited the family after Hashim died and was present for his burial, confirmed the details to The Associated Press.

Asked who is to blame for the loss of his son, Taher is direct: the United States.

“In the camps, we survive only on rations,” he says. “Without rations, we have nothing — no food, no medicine, no chance to live.”

[This is a long read.]

Quote

 

‘The lowest layer of hell’
Throughout Myanmar and in the refugee camps along its borders, the cuts in aid have left children screaming and crying for food. The USAID cuts come at a time when other countries have slashed humanitarian aid, in some cases saying they need the funds to shore up defense. Myanmar’s population has also already been weakened by years of war.

Health care services have been hobbled, and, in some places, vanished. The sick and the starving have wasted away, and people must forage for hours in the jungle each day to find food. Violence and stealing have surged, and young people are huffing glue to numb their hunger pains.

This story is based on interviews with 21 refugees, five people trapped inside Myanmar’s internment camps, and 40 aid workers, medics and researchers.

Safehouses that sheltered dissidents have shuttered, leaving people at the mercy of Myanmar’s merciless military, which has killed more than 7,300 civilians and imprisoned nearly 30,000 in its torture-rife detention centers since its takeover in 2021.

“For Myanmar, we are in the lowest layer of hell already,” says Victor, who headed an emergency program for the aid group Freedom House that helped hundreds who defied Myanmar’s military regime.

Since the U.S. cuts shut down the program, around 100 civilians have sent Victor frantic messages pleading for help he can no longer give.

“I don’t know what to tell them,” says Victor, who goes by one name.

Though the U.S. only spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, Trump declared USAID — once the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance — a waste of money and dissolved it.

Kneecapped by aid cutbacks, the U.N.'s World Food Program in April severed assistance to 1 million people across Myanmar. In central Rakhine, the number of families unable to meet basic food needs has jumped to 57% from 33% in December 2024, according to the WFP.

The military has long been accused of blocking aid to parts of Rakhine. The funding cuts have thus made an already critical situation even more dire, says Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK.

“These U.S. cuts to humanitarian aid are assisting the military in their genocidal policy of starvation against the Rohingya,” says Tun Khin.

The cuts have come during Myanmar’s darkest hour. In the aftermath of a massive earthquake that killed more than 3,800 in March, the U.S. sent three aid workers to Myanmar — all of whom received notices of their impending termination from the Trump administration while in the disaster zone.

A statement from the State Department that did not address most of AP’s questions said the U.S. “continues to stand with the people of Burma,” using another name for Myanmar.

“While we continue to provide life-saving aid globally, the United States expects capable countries to increase their contributions where possible,” read the statement from the department, which has absorbed the few remaining USAID programs.

Michael Dunford, the WFP’s country director for Myanmar, visited Rakhine in April and said some mothers had resorted to making a thin soup out of grass to feed their children.

“The sense of desperation and also the lack of hope for this population was palpable,” Dunford says. “One old gentleman in tears said to me, ‘If WFP doesn’t feed us, and the authorities won’t support us, then please drop a bomb on us — because we can’t continue in this way.’”

For some, the pain caused by the aid cuts has become so intense that death seems like the only escape. So torturous was the sight of his starving family that 40-year-old father of two Mohammed Eliyas took his own life, says his son, Mohammed Amin.

After the food rations disappeared, Amin’s family began subsisting on one meal a day of rice and vegetable leaves.

“My father became restless and hopeless,” Amin says. “The sadness and despair grew so heavy that he began to believe death might be better than continuing to live in such endless hunger and misery.”

One day in June, as the family gathered for a meal, Eliyas began to cry. The family did not realize he’d mixed poison into his rice.

He never said goodbye.

Hungry, hurting and scared
Twelve-year-old Mohama squats in the mud, rain battering his rail-thin frame. He plucks worms from the dirt and places them in a ratty plastic cup.

The worms are bait for the fish he hopes to catch for his family. Recently, he says, there hasn’t been enough to eat in his Thailand refugee camp. So, despite the deluge, he grabs his bamboo fishing pole and wades through rushing water as high as his chest.

Many of Myanmar’s children have survived the horrors of war only to now find themselves hungry and hurting because of a political decision they don’t understand.

Mohama escaped to Thailand with his parents, older brother and two little sisters in 2023 after soldiers attacked their village. He remembers huddling in a bomb shelter, and running alongside hordes of others fleeing for their lives.

Mohama’s parents returned to Myanmar to find work, and his sisters eventually joined them. He lives now with his grandparents and teenage brother in a one-bedroom shelter.

After two hours, Mohama holds up his haul: around 10 tiny fish, each less than 3 centimeters (1 inch) long. It’s enough for a few mouthfuls.

Still, this is lucky. Some days, he says, he catches half as much.

Eleven-year-old Soe fights the river’s current on his own hunt for fish, his skinny frame swallowed by his pink T-shirt. Nearby, children haul logs as big as their bodies back to their shelters for their families to sell.

“Sometimes I get enough food,” says Soe. “But mostly, I’m hungry.”

Some days, he must skip breakfast and lunch and goes to school with a growling belly. At least school is still an option for him; Teacher Saung Hnin Wai says 10 students at her primary school have dropped out since the funding cuts because their parents cannot afford the fees and need their help foraging.

Most of the remaining students are struggling with hunger, she says, and the teaching supplies are dwindling. The funds they once received to repair the leaking roof have evaporated, so they must close the school when it rains.

When the rice runs out at 48-year-old Naung Pate’s shelter, panic sets in among her six children. She walls off her own worry and reassures them that she will find them food, though now there is never enough.

“Seeing my children eating nothing but rice with fish paste and leftover vegetables breaks my heart,” she says, her thin shoulders slumped with fatigue.

She unpacks her basket of foraged bamboo shoots, which will net her 4 baht (12 cents) a kilogram (2.2 pounds). It generally takes her eight hours of scaling mountains to gather enough shoots for one day’s worth of rice.

“If the U.S. doesn’t resume its support, I am worried about my children’s survival,” she says.

From his perch by the river, Ababa frantically points to his mouth, signaling his hunger. Next to him, his 60-year-old mother, Ababa Moe, shakes her head wearily. She has already given him her food for the day.

She has no real way of explaining the danger of their situation to her son, who is 17 years old but cognitively closer to a toddler. And as a single mother too weak to forage, she has no real way of ensuring their survival. She also is too old to benefit from a recent policy change the Thai government made in a bid to prevent mass starvation, granting work rights to some of the 107,000 Myanmar refugees who, like her, live in Thailand’s border camps.

Her son never learned to speak, and needs her help with everything from getting dressed to using the toilet. Since the funding cuts, their survival has hinged on the charity of her Christian church, whose members occasionally give her handfuls of their rice.

She suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, and begins to sweat and grow dizzy when her hunger is at its fiercest. Some days, she eats nothing.

Knowing that everyone in the camp is in the same precarious position is, paradoxically, a grim comfort that staves off the worst of her fears.

“If we are going to starve, everybody will starve,” she says. “It’s not only me.”

‘There is nothing for us here’
The grandfather slides a knife into the sodden jungle floor, pries loose a bamboo shoot and places it into a tattered tote bag slung across his bony back. His stomach is empty, his breath ragged and his energy exhausted. But if he stops now, his family could starve.

Mahmud Karmar has been foraging in the jungle along the Thailand-Myanmar border for two hours and has barely collected enough to feed his wife, six children and 6-year-old grandson two meals. He presses his parched lips into the river, muddied by the monsoon rains, and guzzles.

“I am hungry,” Karmar says, panting. “So I drink the water to get myself full.”

For years, a grant by the U.S. State Department — which saw thousands of its foreign aid awards axed by the Trump administration — provided food and medicine to Karmar and the other Myanmar refugees living in the Thai border camps.

But the ending of that grant on July 31 forced the region’s main aid group, The Border Consortium, to terminate food assistance for 85% of camp residents. The consortium pleaded for donations, but others failed to fill the void left by the U.S.

On Sept. 30, the State Department signed an agreement for a temporary renewal of the grant, allowing rations to resume through the end of the year, says the consortium’s executive director Léon de Riedmatten. But after that, the funds will run out, and the State Department has made clear there will be no further extensions, he says.

Karmar didn’t just lose his food rations because of the aid cuts — he lost his job with the International Rescue Committee, which the State Department had, until July 31, funded to run health clinics in the camps. He has also lost 16 kilograms (35 pounds), his 54-kilogram (119-pound) frame now so slight that he has become unrecognizable even to close friends.

“We are almost dying,” he says. “There is nothing for us here.”

The 55-year-old sits in the dirt and wipes sweat from his brow. A few days earlier, he says, he fainted while attempting to work in a cornfield in a bid to earn 120 baht (US$3.75) — enough to buy one day’s worth of rice for his family.

Like the others languishing in these camps, this was not a life Karmar chose. He was pushed into it, by soldiers who razed his village and beat his brother to death. The bloodshed forced his family to flee in 2006 to the bamboo shelters on the edge of Thailand.

Life here has never been easy, he says. But since the aid cuts, it has become unbearable.

“The sorrow is so deep, I can’t even cry,” he says numbly. “The entire world has forgotten the refugees and the people of Myanmar.”

The lack of food has driven scores of desperate people to steal, he says. At night, he lies awake on the concrete floor of his leaking shelter, listening to the looting. He and several others recently rounded up 27 thieves in one night and sent them to detention.

Among the thieves was one of his friends. Karmar asked him in despair why he was doing this. “We have nothing to eat,” his friend replied.

Karmar refuses to steal, and so, on days when he is too sick to forage, he begs other refugees for help. Most days, though, he pushes his battered body up mountains and through rivers in search of anything his family can eat, trade or sell.

“There’s a heaviness in my heart,” he says, his voice breaking. “The children ask me for pocket money and I cannot give it to them, and that kills me.”

And it is with this thought that the tears trapped inside him finally fall. He wipes his eyes.

All he can do now is hope that the people of the United States show mercy on the people of Myanmar.

“We will all die if it continues like this — I am certain of it,” he says. “We can’t do this forever.”

 

 

All those kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Also, what a solid strategy for making people all over the world hate us for generations to come.  Well-done.

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

All those kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

I would wager at least 20% of the magats actually believe this. 

Add Sudan and South Sudan. We just don't hear about it in our news. 

 

You could read that article word for word out loud to the average magat and the would probably look at you and say something like “So? This is Merica. They ain’t Mericans.”

Those kids died of hunger so magats could think they put a couple of dollars a month into their pockets. What happened was even more money left their wallet, and billionaires pocketed all of it.

On 10/8/2025 at 9:37 AM, Brisketexan said:

All those kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Also, what a solid strategy for making people all over the world hate us for generations to come.  Well-done.

 

had those kids committed to a $6bil trump resort, they'd be well taken care of !

Chose this thread in spite, rather to spite Republican world view and policy. We have earned these shameful days. But, we have also earned the right to feel pride in this message, this poem.

Ideas don’t die.

 

Edited by Willfully Horn

  • 1 month later...

Man, who would have guessed that giving the world's richest people direct and unfettered access to--and influence over--the highest offices in the land would yield negative results for the rest of us?

  • 1 month later...
  • Author

Putting this here because it touches on so many different topics.

For all intents and purposes, the Western Alliance, as we’ve known it, is all but dead. And I'll be honest here about my feelings: I'm mourning the loss. Among the stages of grief, I'm swinging between anger, bargaining, and depression. I suppose those also apply to how I feel about what's going on domestically. Just pissed off at how stupid and destructive this all is, and full of contempt for the dipshits that unleashed this beast on the rest of us. Fucking sad to watch it all go down the shitter. Hoping beyond hope that somehow we'll avoid the worst of it, but with the knowledge that what we once had will never return. It feels like November 2024 all over again.

Anyway, back on topic, I think the cycle of emotions I'm going through must be really similar to what's going on among our NATO partners (hesitate to call them allies anymore), who I'm sure are just hoping/praying that they can hold out long enough so that they can ramp up their defenses. And, oh fuck, how Canada must now be lamenting their geography.

Europe and Rest of World Try to Come to Terms With Trump the Imperialist
Needing U.S. support to fend off Russia in Ukraine, European leaders have been cautious about criticizing President Trump on Greenland, Iran, Venezuela and much else.

It had the makings of one of the most awkward trans-Atlantic meetings in a long time.

European leaders are said to be privately angry and even panicky about President Trump’s new threats to seize Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, after his military intervention in Venezuela. But they need the United States to ensure credible security for postwar Ukraine against any further aggression by Russia — a vital strategic interest for Europe.

With that backdrop, European leaders met in Paris on Tuesday with senior American negotiators to discuss how to secure a peace settlement in Ukraine. They jointly announced progress on security assurances for a postwar Ukraine, but any cease-fire seems distant, given that Russia is not part of the talks.

Earlier in the day, some of the same countries had issued a joint statement of solidarity with Denmark, calling for collective NATO security in the Arctic, including the United States. It had no explicit criticism of Washington, and the Ukraine meeting was all about keeping the Trump administration on board.

Even with those outward displays of European-American unity, underlying everything is Mr. Trump’s sudden return to a more imperialist era. Europeans who consider the American intervention in Venezuela a violation of international law see a U.S. president newly empowered and enthralled by military action, which he compared to watching a television show. He comes across as a largely unpredictable force capable of causing enormous disruption — in NATO, in Ukraine, in Iran, in Gaza — as his eye swings from one imagined prize to another.

After the Ukraine meeting, asked about Greenland and Venezuela alongside American envoys, President Emmanuel Macron of France declined to answer, calling them “not really connected with today’s matters.” He said later to French television, “I cannot imagine a scenario in which the United States of America would be placed in a position to violate Danish sovereignty.”

For the most part, European leaders have said little, making collective statements that shy away from criticism of their most important and now most disruptive ally, the United States.

Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, said, “There is a massive gap between public and private reactions from European leaders.”

“Privately, they are panicking about what happens next, especially in Greenland and what they might do about it,” he added. “But publicly on Venezuela, they are desperate not to say anything critical or invoke international law on Trump at a time of maximum peril for Ukraine. They want to use the influence they have for Ukraine.”

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark has been blunt in telling Washington to lay off. A move on Greenland and Denmark, she has said, will finish NATO. “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end,” Ms. Frederiksen told a Danish broadcaster on Monday. That would include, she added, the termination of “the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.”

There is still a wide belief in Denmark that Mr. Trump is increasing the pressure as a negotiating tactic but would not use force against a NATO ally willing to work with him on both security enhancements and business opportunities.

By comparison, American-Venezuelan relations have been “horrible for decades,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen of the Danish Institute for International Studies, a research organization in Copenhagen. “It’s a completely different ballgame to go and invade a NATO ally,” with considerable unknown costs, he added. Pressure from Washington will continue, he predicted, but, “I just don’t see military invasion as the most likely tool that the U.S. is going to use.”

But no one really knows, especially after Mr. Trump told reporters, apparently in a joking manner, that the issue would be resolved in 20 days.

Europe collectively, through the European Union, has been divided in its response. On Venezuela, it has called for monitoring the situation and a democratic transition. It has reiterated its support for Greenland’s and Denmark’s territorial integrity and has said that any change must be decided by the citizens themselves. But it has so far threatened no action if Mr. Trump acts.

There is global confusion and anxiety about where Mr. Trump, who promised to curtail American involvement in foreign wars, is heading, only a year into his current term. Sowing that confusion may even be characterized as an American strategy, Mr. Leonard said.

“The way they operate is they like to keep people guessing,” he said.

There does seem to be one organizing principle, however, said Nathalie Tocci, director of an Italy-based think tank, the Institute of International Affairs. “U.S. foreign policy now is imperial, and consistently imperial,” she said. “It’s not simply pursuing an American empire in the Western Hemisphere, but Trump accepts the very notion of empire, which is why other empires can exist.”

Such a worldview allows for not only an American empire, but also Russian and Chinese ones, she said. They can manage their own regions as they see fit, “and they can coexist without stepping on each other’s toes” or even choose to cooperate, Ms. Tocci said. “Certainly,” she added, “it’s more comfortable for Putin and Xi Jinping to be their imperial selves where that’s the new norm.”

It is extremely uncomfortable for Europeans, who long ago abandoned empire-building, to be caught between the United States and Russia.

François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, said Mr. Trump’s foreign policy was “highly consistent, but extremely dangerous.” Mr. Trump, he noted, “does what he says,” having already confronted Ms. Frederiksen over Greenland in 2019.

“It’s a world of power, of correlation of forces, and the Europeans still haven’t taken that on board,” Mr. Heisbourg added.

European leaders have typically acquiesced to Mr. Trump’s demands in his latest term, choosing, for example, not to go after American tech firms in the first round of tariff negotiations. Mr. Heisbourg, referring to a Trump administration document issued last month that portrayed the Europeans as weak and in decline, said, “They took our measure, and that measure was described in the National Security Strategy with some accuracy, unfortunately.”

Similarly, Europe missed an important moment in December to show both Moscow and Washington that it was prepared to aid Ukraine aggressively, refusing to use frozen Russian assets and instead compromising on a far smaller collective loan.

Some, like Bruno Maçães, a Portuguese former secretary of state for European affairs, have been outspoken in urging the European Union to come up with a possible counteroffensive should Mr. Trump move on Greenland, including sanctions on American companies, the expulsion of American military personnel and restrictions on American travel to Europe. Raphaël Glucksmann, a French member of the European Parliament, has suggested establishing a European military base on Greenland, as a signal to Washington and a commitment to the island’s security.

Amanda Sloat, a former national security official in the Biden administration, said that world leaders should take note of what undergirds Mr. Trump’s interest in Venezuela as they respond to his Greenland threat. Mr. Trump said that Venezuela was about drugs, but now talks mostly about seizing the oil industry, she noted.

Similarly, she said, Mr. Trump talks of Greenland in terms of security, which the Danes and Greenlanders understand. “They would be open to an enhanced American presence in Greenland,” she said. “But is the real motivation related to profiting from the rare minerals there, or is it just falling into the Monroe doctrine thing of U.S. expanding its regional power?”

Europeans and others keep trying to put Mr. Trump into a known strategic box, but in a second term, “We should have understood that he doesn’t fit into a box,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “He seems ready to do what he says, but what and when? Europeans still try to make sense of it when there isn’t a lot of coherence.”

Ms. Major noted that Europeans did increasingly understand that “Trump is in some areas acting antagonistically” and that the liberal, rules-based order is in tatters. “But,” she added, “given their dependency in security, Europeans feel they can’t speak up or speak their minds. We can’t afford it.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trump-withdraw-un-organizations.html

President Trump withdrew the United States on Wednesday from dozens of international organizations intended to foster multinational cooperation, cutting ties with a wide range of prominent forums addressing international security, law, trade, economics and human rights.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio listed several reasons for the simultaneous withdrawal from so many international organizations, many of which are part of the United Nations. Pointing to waste, mismanagement and redundancy, Mr. Rubio more broadly suggested in his statement that the international influence gained from sending U.S. representatives to these organizations was ultimately not worth the effort.

“It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it,” Mr. Rubio said, asserting that many of the organizations were “dominated by progressive ideology,” including gender equality and climate change. In trumpeting the withdrawal, Mr. Rubio suggested that it was in line with the Trump administration’s decision to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The United Nations did not immediately comment on the United States’ severing relationships with some of its organizations.

An executive order, signed by Mr. Trump on Wednesday, follows a broader vision of American foreign policy that shuns the consensus of nations and building coalitions, focusing almost solely on projecting American power and dominance.

But Mr. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from international bodies stands out even when compared with the actions of other regional and world powers that are skeptical of international agreements on democracy, climate or human rights. Biden administration officials had argued that a withdrawal from those bodies would create a vacuum for U.S. rivals to exploit.

For example, China and Russia are both members of the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the International Energy Forum and the International Renewable Energy Agency, as well as the U.N.’s International Law Commission, Peacebuilding Commission, Alliance of Civilizations and the Register of Conventional Arms. The United States withdrew from all of them on Wednesday.

Many of the organizations listed in Mr. Trump’s executive order also do not appear to require direct membership from nations, but the move seemed to signal more broadly that the Trump administration was likely to refuse to cooperate with them.

Mr. Trump has already pulled the United States out of many significant U.N. organizations, including UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural agency; the World Health Organization; and the U.N. Human Rights Council.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html

President Trump declared on Wednesday evening that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality,” brushing aside international law and other checks on his ability to use military might to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world.

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Mr. Trump said, “I do.” But he made clear he would be the arbiter when such constraints applied to the United States.

“It depends what your definition of international law is,” he said.

Mr. Trump’s assessment of his own freedom to use any instrument of military, economic or political power to cement American supremacy was the most blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview. At its core is the concept that national strength, rather than laws, treaties and conventions, should be the deciding factor as powers collide.

He did acknowledge some constraints at home, even as he has pursued a maximalist strategy of punishing institutions he dislikes, exacting retribution against political opponents and deploying the National Guard to cities over the objections of state and local officials.

He made clear that he uses his reputation for unpredictability and a willingness to resort quickly to military action, often in service of coercing other nations. During his interview with The Times, he took a lengthy call from President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who was clearly concerned after repeated threats that Mr. Trump was thinking of an attack on the country similar to the one on Venezuela.

“Well, we are in danger,” Mr. Petro said in an interview with The Times just before the call. “Because the threat is real. It was made by Trump.”

The call between the two leaders, the contents of which were off the record, was an example of coercive diplomacy in action. And it came just hours after Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had extracted the United States from dozens of international organizations intended to foster multinational cooperation.

In his conversation with The Times, Mr. Trump sounded more emboldened than ever. He cited the success of his strike on Iran’s nuclear program — he keeps a model of the B-2 bombers used in the mission on his desk; the speed with which he decapitated the Venezuelan government last weekend; and his designs on Greenland, which is controlled by Denmark, a NATO ally.

When asked what was his higher priority, obtaining Greenland or preserving NATO, Mr. Trump declined to answer directly, but acknowledged “it may be a choice.” He made clear that the trans-Atlantic alliance was essentially useless without the United States at its core.

Even as he characterized the norms of the post-World War II order as unnecessary burdens on a superpower, Mr. Trump was dismissive of the idea that the leader of China, Xi Jinping, or President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could use similar logic to the detriment of the United States. On topic after topic, he made clear that in his mind, U.S. power is the determining factor — and that previous presidents have been too cautious to make use of it for political supremacy or national profit.

The president’s insistence that Greenland must become part of the United States was a prime example of his worldview. It was not enough to exercise the U.S. right, under a 1951 treaty, to reopen long-closed military bases on the huge landmass, which is a strategically important crossroads for U.S., European, Chinese and Russian naval operations.

“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.

When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.

He argued that only he — and not two predecessors on whom he heaped scorn, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama — had proven capable of persuading NATO nations to spend 5 percent of the gross domestic product on defense. (About 1.5 percent of that is actually for domestic infrastructure — from power grids to cybersecurity — that can support defense. The target does not kick in until 2035, six years after Mr. Trump leaves office.)

“I want them to shape up,” he said. “I think we’ll always get along with Europe, but I want them to shape up. I’m the one that got them to spend more on the, you know, more G.D.P. on NATO. But if you look at NATO, Russia I can tell you is not at all concerned with any other country but us.”

The president added: “I’ve been very loyal to Europe. I’ve done a good job. If it weren’t for me, Russia would have all of Ukraine right now.”

He seemed unconcerned that the last major nuclear arms control agreement with Russia was set to expire in four weeks, leaving the world’s two largest nuclear powers free to expand their arsenals without limit, for the first time in half a century.

“If it expires, it expires,” he said. “We’ll just do a better agreement,” he added, insisting that China, which has the fastest-growing arsenal in the world, should be incorporated in any future agreement.

“You probably want to get a couple of other players involved also,” Mr. Trump said.

The president seemed equally sanguine about whether his decision to send Special Operations forces into Caracas to remove Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela would be exploited by China or Russia. In the days since the action in Venezuela, there have been arguments that the U.S. precedent would help justify a Chinese effort to take Taiwan, or Russia’s attempt to seize Ukraine, which Mr. Putin has described as a historical part of the Russian empire, dating back more than a dozen centuries.

Asked whether he had created a precedent that he may later regret, Mr. Trump argued that his view of the threat posed by Mr. Maduro’s Venezuela was quite different than Mr. Xi’s view of Taiwan.

“This was a real threat,” he said of Venezuela. “You didn’t have people pouring into China,” he argued, repeating his oft-made claim that Mr. Maduro dumped gang members into the United States.

Mr. Trump added: “You didn’t have drugs pouring into China. You didn’t have all of the bad things that we’ve had. You didn’t have the jails of Taiwan opened up and the people pouring into China,” or, he said later, criminals and others “pouring into Russia.”

When a reporter noted that Mr. Xi regarded Taiwan as a separatist threat to China, Mr. Trump said: “That’s up to him, what he’s going to be doing. But, you know, I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t.”

Then, asked whether Mr. Xi might seize on recent events to attack or choke off Taiwan, he suggested that the Chinese leader would not dare to take that step while Mr. Trump was in office. “He may do it after we have a different president, but I don’t think he’s going to do it with me as president,” he said.

On the domestic front, Mr. Trump suggested that judges only have power to restrict his domestic policy agenda — from the deployment of the National Guard to the imposition of tariffs — “under certain circumstances.”

But he was already considering workarounds. He raised the possibility that if his tariffs issued under emergency authorities were struck down by the Supreme Court, he could repackage them as licensing fees. And Mr. Trump, who said he was elected to restore law and order, reiterated that he was willing to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military inside the United States and federalize some National Guard units if he felt it was important to do so.

So far, he said, “I haven’t really felt the need to do it.”

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15 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

JFC. Trump and Morality in the same sentence is incomprehensible.

Helluva headline, huh?

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.

Those two sentences would doom any other political figure in our nation's history. Articles invoking the 25th amendment should be filed before midnight. He's fucking General Jack D. Ripper in the flesh.

according war room GIF

When he says that he does not intend to abide by treaties, he is flatly stating that he does not intend to follow the law.

Article VI of the Constitution - which is not an optional document - makes treaties (along with the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress) the supreme law of the land.

There is no grant of authority in the Constitution, and no colorable argument, that grants the Executive the authority to disregard and violate the supreme law of the land.

Trump has told you that he is above the law. Even the idiotic presidential immunity decision does not go that far - there can be no argument that actions wholly outside of and contrary to the Constitution and Treaties of the United States are legitimate actions of the executive. Not only does he not have such enumerated or implied powers, he is subject to the Constitution. And for the record, the military is ABSOLUTELY subject to the Supreme Law of the Land, and if they follow orders to attack a member nation of NATO (for example), they have followed an illegal order, and have actually (by the express terms of the treaty) committed treason by levying war against the United States, which is punishable by death.

Donald Trump is the most dangerous man this country or world has ever seen. He must be stopped. Resistance in all possible forms is no longer optional.

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