I would take either, but we have neither. Carney is a progressive conservative.

One of the examples is how South Korea suffered tourism losses after stationing American missile defence batteries on their territory. I would agree with China’s decision in that case.

I mean, look on the bright side. At least the unhinged fascists to the south aren’t bombing us right now, unlike Lebanon’s case. It’s not ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’, it’s ‘out of the frying pan, into a different, less hot frying pan’. Could be worse!

That’s silly, you can’t just decouple from both of the world’s largest economies. The EU deindustrialized itself, and Australia and New Zealand aren’t exactly economic superpowers. Also, Japan is a de-facto one party state with a far-right government.

The smart thing to do is to play the superpowers against each other - distance yourself from the US as much as we can (which we of course can only do to an extent), and normalize relations with China. We would be fools to continue to blindly follow US foreign policy while the US threatens to invade us.

Slava

Being able to shoot the invaders is highly conducive to an insurgency. Otherwise, you would have to throw rocks at them, which is suboptimal.

I don’t put much stock into the “Russian puppet” theory. Presidents have been removed for far, far less than destroying NATO on behalf of the foreign enemy. If he really was a foreign agent, the CIA or some other three letter agency would have gotten rid of him one way or another.

It also lets America off the hook. “Is this the culmination of a process that started before Reagan? No, it was the bad country, Russia, that used their puppet to destroy us. Without Russia and their puppet, everything would be fine.” The effect of the claim, and I would argue the point of it, is to exonerate the Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans for all their failures and misdeeds, to chalk Trumpism off as an aberration, and to promote the idea that everything will be fixed once this one guy goes away. It’s a simplistic and self-serving idea that reads like an airport novel, and it shouldn’t be taken very seriously.

The truth is much stupider and much scarier. The smart people in American politics and government have slowly been rotated out, leaving the stupids. Republican culture war politics, originally just red meat for the base, has wormed its way into the actual world view of the people at the top. They believed their own propaganda, and think that maintaining global hegemony through soft power and finance is “woke”, and “giving money away to third-world shitholes.” They don’t actually understand that they were the primary beneficiary of the old world order, and harken back to the good old days when America would simply violently impose its will on the rest of the world, not realizing that America never stopped doing that, and all the diplomatic power and financial power was just the velvet glove over the mailed fist.

This is probably a good thing for the world, at least in the long term, but it’s very bad for us and for Europe. We let the vampire in a long time ago, letting it offer us benefits and protection at the expense of our independence and our complicity. Now it’s turned on its minions, and we’re weak, long since made ourselves dependent on it. Look at how Macron grovelled to Trump about Iran - “Brilliant work, master! We are in complete agreement about the townsfolk and who their blood truly belongs to! But why must you feed on one of us, your friends?” The vampire does not have friends, it has prey and it has servants. Now it’s decided that the servants are prey as well.

It would be so sick to be part of the in-group that the law protects but does not bind, rather than being part of the out-group that the law binds but does not protect. I should incorporate myself.

Most likely the other half of the roughly 30% of Americans who represent the MAGA coalition think that annexation would be doing us a favour - elevating a bunch of ungrateful socialists to the American standard of living or something like that.