It's mind blowing to witness the speed and rapidity with which we have
* Completely alienated key allies via an erratic and unpredictable tariff policy
* Significantly undermined faith in US economic data and fiscal policy via overt politicization of key economic institutions
* Increased the deficit by almost $3 trillion after vowing to reduce the deficit
* Signaled far and wide that pay for play is the new norm, whether for pardons or favourable policy. Preferably paid in crypto, but with in kind payments being acceptable.
Is there any wonder that other countries are unwilling to trust the US? The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration, but who knows!
This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China. Every year, neighboring countries of China like Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam sent envoys to Imperial China, paying gold, women, and exotic products, in return for recognition of their sovereignty (subject to the supreme authority of Chinese emperor), military protection, and access to trade routes within China.
It is interesting to see the resurgence of such imperial practices in modern-day America. I think it worked out quite well for the Tang dynasty, but arguably that was because all East Asian feudal states were authoritarian monarchy back then. A logical next step would be for POTUS to declare himself as the supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent.
> This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China. Every year, neighboring countries of China like Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam sent envoys to Imperial China, paying gold, women, and exotic products, in return for recognition of their sovereignty (subject to the supreme authority of Chinese emperor), military protection, and access to trade routes within China.
The most irritating thing is that I specifically didn't want to see a return to form for this for China, but I never imagined that America in the 21st Century would somehow get there first. It was just out of fucking nowhere.
The prospects for the working class disappeared when you moved manufacturing to China. The population was subsequently dumbed down because there was no money for schools(except for the rich elite).
Probably because you’re talking about a whole different thing than what I was responding to. America shaking down Japan and Korea to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars wasn’t even on my bingo card for 2025, but perhaps your bingo card was more prophetic.
Usually I read these “how could you/they not see this coming?” statements less in reference to a specific occurrence and more like “Given this man’s profound and enduring disinterest in history, culture, economics and the global political process, along with his demonstrated venality, how could you not see that bad things would happen, this being an example…”
> prospects for the working class disappeared when you moved manufacturing to China
I think the prospects of the working class died with the crisis signaling the end of the USSR and by extension communist/socialist circles. After all it was the only counter-balance that instilled a baseline fear of violent uprising from the workers class in the heart of the wealthy class.
And in a way the final nail came with the free reign liberal policies that followed with Thatcher e Reagan, not so much about offshoring in itself.
The true problem is money in politics. No, this has nothing to do with Musk. Musk is just visible, but it's been going on in the US for a long, long time.
Other countries have limits on campaign donations, for example at the federal level in Canada:
* no donations are allowed by corporations
* individuals may only donate $1750 to the party, and $1750 to the local candidate
* people running for office can donate to their own campaign, to the tune of $5000
* leadership candidates (eg, for Prime Minister) can donate $25k to their own campaign
You want the "working class" to have more of a say? Make candidates beholden to normal people to get elected. Destroy the machinery of big-business donations for campaign, and campaign management funding.
That's it. That's the biggest, most significant fix, right there.
>...After all it was the only counter-balance that instilled a baseline fear of violent uprising from the workers class in the heart of the wealthy class.
Are people claiming that the USSR provided a valid counter-balance for the working class? At any rate, if the chances of political violence have actually decreased in democracies due to the end of the USSR, isn't that a good thing?
Yes! Western states had to ensure that life was better in a Capitalist country. Hence unions were tolerated, along with human rights, rule of law, anti corruption etc etc.
Unions have never been tolerated - they seized what little power they have through actual economic force. The kind that no king or government can oppose for long.
Human rights and fighting graft don't have very much to do with the USSR, unless you ignore the centuries or history there before the Communist Manifesto was even written.
Neither Trump, nor anybody in the Republican party is, and has never been, and will never be some kind of champion of the working class. If you're in it, you're just a useful idiot to him.
What you're seeing isn't a consequence of the working class finally acting in its interests by getting behind a billionaire slumlord and conman. What you're seeing is the consequence of billionaires figuring out that if you distract the working class with divisive identity politics and plain old bullshit (Trans athletes! The gays grooming your children! Antifa supersoldiers stealing elections! Socialist death panels killing granny!), you can swindle it out of anything.
Trump and his friends would have had no legs in a society that hasn't been thoroughly and irreparably broken by this stupidity and the normalization thereof.
> This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China.
The two systems are fundamentally different. In the ancient Chinese tributary system, based on the principle of "厚往薄来" China's reciprocation had to exceed the value of the tribute, thereby providing tangible benefits to the tributary states. This practice even led to later restrictions on the frequency of tribute missions from certain countries
I wish the western allies would dump their US bonds to drive bond yields into the ground and threaten US budgets, like the military one, that relying on cheap debt.
But this is a difficult decision to make, do you sacrifice possible (less likely) future earnings to destabilize a super power to save it from fascism but in turn risking a power vacuum to your disadvantage?
Id take this gamble but im a mere democratic citizen, that doesnt care about global pro-fascism support, like other right leaning governments do.
>I wish the western allies would dump their US bonds to drive bond yields into the ground
Dumping bonds would increase supply and drive down prices, but that increases yields because yields is the difference between the price you paid vs the face value of the bond.
When US bonds enter the secondary market at a discount, buyers are inclined to prefer them over the US-offerend ones who need to raise interest rates to stay competitve, so making them more expensive for the US.
Bond yield is the return an investor will realize on a bond, so driving down prices decreases yields. Sure, it can increase the absolute value of yield as it heads into the negative...
Undermining the USD doesn't help. Vacuum politics are not better. Vacuum politics lead to where we are today. Too many years of choosing "the least bad option" doesn't lead to a good place.
Let's take all this negative energy and do something better than criticize. Let's harness the energy into good action. What's something we all can agree is good for everybody and start a discussion around that? I'm not saying all crticism is a bad thing. I'd just like to see us all work together to accomplish something good.
I'll try to get the ball rolling, but if somebody has a better ball, I'm happy to go there.
I prefer free trade. I think everybody benefits if we lower trade barriers. But it needs to be "fair". Allowing corporation A to dump hazardous refuse cheaply into the river, but denying the same to corporation B is not fair to B and not all around good. So are there any good ideas about how to allow goods from different jurisdictions to compete by the same rules without Nationalistic interference?
Unfortunately there are all kinds of interdependencies that would make such a move quite risky. But you're right in that that is one way in which the screws can be put on.
I think what's most interesting to me is that they're also the party who's favorite amendment was written specifically to quell the rise of such leaders. They have explicitly talked about how that amendment was to protect the US from demagogues and autocrats.
They've been fairly quiet about that recently and I'm curious how they'll make that pivot. It's only a matter of time before someone on the left starts suggesting their constituents exercise that right in at least a symbolic nature. I've seen a rise in the exercise of this right by socialist groups and other radicals. But even if it is all symbolic it sets the stage for a powder keg moment. But if the right doesn't restrict this right then how far can they go and keep their heads?
It's morbidly fascinating and terrifying to me how they so successfully turned the right's worst nightmares into wet dreams. I do wonder, how far can it go? But I've never not wanted to know the answer to a question so much in my life. Please, I do not want to find out[0]
[0] no, you can't literally answer this. It can only be learned through the experience. So don't reply to me as if you have an exact answer, you only have speculation. But if you have a time machine, I'd appreciate next week's lotto numbers (and the week after ;)
> But if the right doesn't restrict this right then how far can they go and keep their heads?
They've already started talking about banning trans people from owning guns (based on the wildly bigoted premise that being trans is a dangerous mental illness).
If that goes through, I would expect to see other queer people next on the list, with similar justifications.
Or possibly they'd just jump straight to banning all left-wing people from owning guns, based on their declaration that we're "domestic terrorists". (Yes, they're talking about doing that, too.)
> "“We have to do something about this. We have to treat these people. We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other,” he insisted."
> "“I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country,” Jackson concluded. “That’s going to do great damage to normal, hard-working, law-abiding people.”"
> "The hard-right lawmaker, meanwhile, is not the only member of Congress who has seemingly called for transgender people to be locked up in mental institutions."
> "Speaking to reporters earlier this week, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) – who spearheaded the effort to bar trans women from using Capitol Hill bathrooms that don't correspond with their sex assigned at birth – repeatedly used anti-trans slurs while saying transgender people are “mentally ill” and “should be in a straitjacket.”"
Actual Nazi language. Aligns with the Fox News hosts talking about bringing back Aktion T4,
> A logical next step would be for POTUS to declare himself as the supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent
My brother in Christ, you Americans do this already and have been doing this at least since the end of WW2. Ever wondered why communism couldn't spread in Northern Europe, South America or many places of Asia?
> supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent.
You mean just make what is already de-facto practice, de-jure ?
> The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration, but who knows!
I’ve been hearing people pray this is a one time aberration for the last 10 years. At this point, the ride seems way more likely to get bumpier than not for the next 10 years.
- The invasion of Iraq while lying about WMD and against the UN vote, eroded international trust.
- The Patriot act was supposed to be temporary be was extended again and again.
- We got the reveal of mass spying by Snowden.
And... nothing. Obama didn't do anything about the wars, mass spying, or the patriot act. He was an elegant break from the dumbness, but didn't stop the elevator to keep climbing after him, just paused it for a few years.
All of it was just stepping stones after stepping stones.
It's not a one-time aberration; it's a sign of the times.
It's not the message anybody wants to hear, but until the other party makes a clear and irrevocable promise to cancel the tariffs / walk back the tantrum diplomacy if they return to office, I am willing to believe they might not. If the emotional chords being struck by the tough guy act are so positive that they're counterbalancing the negatives from reality, then it is as likely to be imitated as reversed.
The Democrats don't know what they are after the election, and they might even still win the next one just through the power of doing nothing and watching the current administration flush the country down the toilet, so I have no faith that they feel the need to distance themselves from tariffs or what other boneheaded policies have been passed. They'd only do it if they had to to win an election. They'd never do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
The Democratic party is just plain screwed. They lose supporters if they give plans, they lose supporters if they don't give plans; they lose supporters if they compromise, or if they stand form; they lose supporters if they're dogmatic, or if they're pragmatic; they lose supporters if they run a man, or if they run a woman, or a white person, or a colored person. Even when they do everything right, they lose supporters because their economic plan is "too complicated" or "uninspiring".
Meanwhile, the Republican party is an outright lifestyle now. Policy does not matter. Ideology barely matters insomuch as you can sell the charade under the guise of "strongman good". Consistency need not apply.
As a quick example: The sitting president ran on exposing the child sex trafficking ring of Epstein. It was one of their biggest rallies. Once elected, he ordered the FBI to destroy records with his name. Then he coordinated with numerous cronies who are not only denying his involvement now, but attempting to say it did not exist at all.
And their party just... Does it. The conversation is dead. The talking heads say how rediculous it all sounds and how glorious leader cannot be questioned. And the voters pretend they have no idea what you mean when you point out the change.
They live in a warped reality. Though I won't pretend the GOP has not long been the party of pedophiles, electing convicted or highly suspected officials to legislation repeatedly.
Meanwhile the Democrats must be absolutely perfect. Every tiny mistep, every perceived half-measure or improper leads to entire sects of their base boycotting them. See the last election with Israel/Palestine - how well boycotting the Democrats worked for both us and them.
On Israel/Palestine issue, it was not a "tiny misstep". I will remember Joe Biden as "Genocide Joe" for the rest of my life. My perception (naively) of both parties has changed, but I don't trust Democrats anymore because of this issue. They are all the same..
I just now remember Joe Biden openly taking bribes in the office, on camera. I remember his "Joe for Life" jokes as he paraded "Joe Biden 2028" hats. I remember his attempted coup on January 6th. I remember him deploying the military on domestic soil against US citizens and proclaiming random tariffs across our allied countries that change on a weekly basis.
I remember him being found civily liable for the rape of a woman. And referred to in multiple court documents on the rape of a 13 year old girl. And in the flight records and friend circle of a child sex trafficker. And that he tried to cover that sex trafficking ring up.
I remember him denying Fox news access to the White House or pentagon. And his administration's overt threats to take news stations off the air or deny them business mergers for not covering him in positive light.
And I definitely and absolutely remember him publishing an AI video on Twitter of a purged, captured Palestine turned into a gaudy gold resort for rich Americans.
How in the world is that whataboutism? You said they were they same, this is a direct retort by enumerating a mere fraction of the enormous list of behaviors enacted by an actual fascist takeover of the US government.
Biden did not handle the Palestine situation appropriately, but the utter audacity to claim the solution is the death of tens of millions of people through the demolition of aid and trade and the total regression of all climate change mitigation and global stability policy by aiding the installment of an outright, self-stated dictator...
I am so utterly tired of this rhetoric. It's like looking at Hitler or Stalin and saying "well... His opponent wasn't Christened by God himself."
Maybe, just maybe, we should aim for "basic decency and operating in the same objective reality to keep the basic tenants of peaceful society operating" before "go to war with a nuclear power over their religious jihad."
Not sure what you are referring to in your last sentence.
Democrats enabled genocide just like Republicans are doing the same now. I don't like or endorse current government and Trump but saying that we should support democrats because they are "decent" and talk in a politically correct way is wrong as well.
What would be the systematic changes to better protect democracy and a functioning civil society? I'm certainly no expert myself but I must imagine there are a lot of literature and experts.
It also helps reading about different countries, their histories and various forms of government and practices.
It's probably hard to go from dictatorship and totalitarianism to strong judicial systems and democracy. Instead you get a line of successive different dictators.
Run away if you can is the only practical, actionable thing one can do at this stage. And few people can actually do it.
I have, myself, rejected all mission offers to the US since January, but I have the luxury of not living there.
From the other side of the pond, the US future looks very grim, and I have no knowledge at my disposal that lets me see a path toward reversion that doesn't go through a violent phase.
It's a systemic problem; the POTUS is a symptom. And I don't see how such a large and complex system is going to get fixed fast enough to prevent something terrible from happening.
After that, it will go back to something more peaceful. But I wouldn't want to be there during the transition.
24 years ago, and someone did act. I see this all as a result of 9/11 and Bin Laden & company giving the US just what it needed to end up authoritarian. Effectively he won that day and managed to damage the USA in ways that it did not have a mechanism to effectively deal with. As a result the USA has made one own goal after another and it does not look like they've decided to stop doing so.
The forces that created today, are deeper - to the point that they used 9/11, as opposed to being defined by 9/11.
The crux of the issue today is fundament information economy on the right, that can support any narrative, even if it contradicts anything that came was said before, or has no basis in reality.
Trump has a 92% approval rating amongst republicans from a recent Fox poll. Other polls have him at 80%+.
It is a party truly running on faith, and had no need to traffic in facts.
This is the fountainhead of all the power that allows the situation to continue.
I’ve been looking at this and have stopped talking to friends in the US, because my urge is to tell them to GTFO.
And I feel like I’m going to sound crazy to them.
But the thing I keep remembering is a conversation with a student in the UK, post Brexit, but while they were figuring out how to do execute.
They were so earnest and hopeful, that the country would find a way through. So much so, that even with a background in finance and macroeconomics, I felt that maybe they would thread the needle.
I don’t see a path to the midterms, forget anything beyond that - and it seems so extreme to state, that I am quiet.
> And I feel like I’m going to sound crazy to them.
I'd talk anyway.
Even just hearing what it looks like from the outside may help, even help those who don't leave, even those who may have voted for Trump.
I don't know what will happen. An incompetent dictator may be stopped before becoming a dictator, or be easily overthrown, but if they cement their power… then my reference point is Pol Pot.
Kicking out all the undocumented migrants and finding local political undesirables to force onto the same farms feels very plausible, and will lead to famine.
Some people argue turbo-capitalism is inherently unstable and will lead to fascism. A systemic problem id like to see more discourse about, or what is the systemic problem you meant?
There is massive difference between Obama and Trump. Between project 2025, MAGA and literally anything Obama. The way Republicans back then acted, refused literally any cooperation and made bad faith putrages ober everything was also something else.
Remember when tan suit was not presidential enough? When saying that Martin Trayon looked like hypothetical Obama son in tepid statement somehow crossed taboo of what preaident can say?
America did not became like it is during Obama and not even Bush. It did lost some trust due to Iraq, sure, it was still not what it is now. But Obama being black did broke conservatives minds.
This was planed long ago with alot of foresight and malignent intent. Trump is only the lucky idiot stumbling on fertile ground and accelerating the process.
You can go as far back as Reagan or maybe even Nixon (although the The Heritage Foundation was born due to some people thinking he was too soft), the bucket does not stop at Bush Jr.
The root cause, or primary driver of the situation today is the exit of the Republican Party and the conservative media/political sphere from bipartisan politics and facts.
These two forces are the ones which rotate the flywheel that powers everything else.
Act in a bipartisan manner? Vote against the party lines ? - get primaried.
Cover something that doesn’t match the prevailing narrative ? Is not of utility to the party ? Be ignored.
Have a narrative that sells and can be used, but is absolutely bonkers or inaccurate? Doesnt matter, it’s going to be used.
This force constantly drove the base further and further right, removed any links to facts or reason at scale.
This in turn supports partisanship at all cost politics, and support for policies that have little to do with complex reality but everything to do with preferred narratives.
Trump has a 92% approval rating amongst republicans from a recent Fox Poll.
You work really really hard to tie conservative project to Obama. No, this is on republicans and conservatives 100%, they worked hard to achieve this and succeeded. The democrats and Obama have their own issues, but them not being saints does not make the above untrue.
I agree it was long term project, it took decades of propaganda and hard work on conservative side. But like, Obama was not part of conservative project nor step toward Project 2025.
Instead of trying to evaluate the argument on its merits:
- There is a long-term systemic problem, POTUS is a symptom.
- Democracy has been at risk for 20 years in the US, starting with the destruction of Habeas Corpus after 9/11, under thunderous applause.
- The opposition has been weak at best, and didn't show its value by attempting to reverse the worse of the trends when they had the chance. So nobody trusted them anymore. They didn't represent something to rally for, only the opposite of what you didn't want.
You attempt to put me in a tribe and judge me on that.
Except... I live in Europe. I don't care about your tribes, I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events. It's not an unexpected surprise.
Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.
> I live in Europe. I don't care about your tribes,
That is irrelevant. Regardless of where you live, your argument amounted to working really hard here to blame republican policies, radicalization and behavior on Obama. You tied together things that were in fact not alike at all.
>I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events
And insisting that Obama is in any way relevant to that long chain is either bad faith or just disinterest in what happened.
> Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.
But it is you who want to make it into that, except that "bad guys" are any random American politician you can think of. It does actually matter who did what.
As another European: Obama didn't make things (much) worse, but he also didn't do anything to really arrest the slide even though he had the opportunity to do so. At the same time: I realize that in many ways his hands were tied but he also simply never tried, when he could have. Similar to how it took him 7 long months to speak up when he really should have spoken up much, much earlier. Right now the whole democratic wing of the US establishment looks like it is along for the ride, rather than that they are fighting tooth and nail to arrest the further descent into madness.
Could he have done more? Sure. But he spent a lot of political capital getting the ACA done. Then he followed traditional political decorum when the GOP pushed him around that in hindsight was a mistake. If all the rules both written and unwritten are going to be thrown out, the obviously it's best for the person who throws them out.
I'm more pissed off at Obama's inaction in the last 7 months than about what he did during his tenure as president. He's still in 'nice guy' mode, we don't need nice guys right now, we need counterweight, and soon.
> I'm more pissed off at Obama's inaction in the last 7 months
This. There’s a deep vacuum of leadership in the Democratic Party. Obama is a widely trusted figure on the progressive side and has nothing to lose by saying plainly what everyone can see. Only Gavin Newsom has demonstrated a willingness to do this. At the Federal level, though, the leadership is MIA. I mean Obama owes no one anything now; but I do wish he would just say what needs to be said.
Again, following traditional decorum where past POTUS's usually stay out of the way for the current. Of course, at this point we all know the traditions are dead, and I agree Obama should be leading wherever he can.
The main argument is "it's been in the mix for 20 years", and part of demonstrating it has been was to state that even the Obama administration didn't do much to stop it, so it kept escalating.
Not only I don't conflate the two, but you make the whole Obama note the center of this discussion, while it was there for the purpose of illustration.
This is how tribe politics work and how the US fell to the best populists instead of trying to tackle society's problems.
I have no interest in discussing with you anymore, since you don't seem interested in talking about ideas, only find an enemy to your tribes.
From the point of view of us Europeans even the IRA was a crisis, so I see what Trump is doing trade-wise as a continuation of a longer US tradition. Biden also continued Trump's decision to keep the WTO's binding resolution mechanisms from functioning.
Don't forget that Obama showed to the whole world what american security assurance actually is, enabled putin and is one of the main reason for 2022 russian invasion. True Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Trump is not an aberration, he just not bothering to hide his actual face.
It’s the same problem today as it was then. It is actually hard if you’re a democracy answerable to your people.
Are you willing to bet even a 1% chance to trade Los Angeles for Vladivostok? Warsaw for St. Petersburg? Because Putin is certainly willing to play chicken. Obama, Biden and (maybe?) even Trump are not.
IMO the damage internationally is permanent unless constitutional changes are made to prevent such events in the future. The trust is completely gone.
The risk of making any deals that could be overturned in just four years is too great for many in the private sector and also for international treaties.
Germany founded the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht) to make sure they don't go Fascist again.
The US needs a similar structure with similar protections (term limits, mandatory retirement age, 2/3 majority needed for nominations and shared power of naming the members).
And it's explicitly a court for constitutional matters, not random cases.
I can’t think of any examples from history of nations which have had dictatorships take over from democratic systems and then had things improve without revolution or war as an impetus for change. I would be very happy for someone to point out one, but it seems to me that the rot of which trump is a symptom will likely take a significant blood letting to correct, if indeed it is to be corrected.
Really it's a question of where the threshold lies.
The American President is quite elderly, clearly diminished, and the ravages of age are inescapable no matter how beloved you are. However much Americans seem happy to tolerate his particular brand of authoritarianism, the horizon on his rule cannot realistically be more than a decade out.
Is that enough time to consolidate power? If not, is there a successor who can complete his objectives?
Neither seems clear to me, and one can at least imagine a world where things tick back after he exits the political stage.
Yeah, people keep talking about the danger Trump represents but Trump is nothing without tens of millions of enthusiastic supporters. Rank and file conservatives represent the real risk to the country. None of this would be possible without them and after Trump, they will do what they have always done. Do everything they can to find someone even worse. There will be no introspection or lessons learned. Just doubling down on degeneracy.
Remember the story of Nero watching Rome burn, and asking how could he and everyone involved be so fool? Well I'm not surprised any more. Feels like a perfectly believable story :/
The supporters of these lunatics don't look into any of that. It's Americans destroying America basically out of spite for "the other side". These people are terrorists in my opinion, but they view themselves as the true Americans.
Don’t forget DOGE, brainchild of Elon Musk, promising to save trillions from the deficit but ended up leaving with a wake in billions of waste and turmoil. A U.S. Senate investigation revealed that DOGE is responsible for at least $21.7 billion in taxpayer waste.
Trump is working hard to remove any notions that the USA are "leaders of the free world", and making it into the unapologetic "mafia boss of the American Empire".
That ship pretty much sank last time you voted for this mastermind. Nobody in their mind mind still thinks that about the US other than themself. Sorry
But it just might stop them from getting much worse still. 7 Months. That's not a whole lot of time. Now extrapolate with more and more of the brakes disabled.
We're not even in "extreme times". There's no major wars, the economy is strong, we're recovering from recent disasters better than most nations.
Literally everything here is self inflicted. The "extreme times" are just the rhetoric pushed by the Republican party, constantly making up new bogeyman about blood rivers in the streets of Chicago and trans hypnosis on children.
Meanwhile real extreme times are sneaking around beneath the surface, decades away but in clear sight, and the Republican party calls it a hoax.
In November, when people voted, the economy was relatively strong and things (return or manufacturing, balance in the dual mandate) we're looking good; before the innumerable self-inflicted gunshots.
As an US American living outside the US and just spending last week at a tech conference with nearly no US Americans there; this subject was pretty popular to overhear. Essentially, people are asking whether anyone should take the US seriously anymore, as a tourist destination, a place to continue career/education, a political ally, etc.
The gist was that the US is cooked from a reputation point of view. Whether that has any meaningful impact is yet to be seen.
Don't forget: as a tech partner. It's all momentum right now, and true, there is a lot of that. But lots of little conservative decisions are beginning to add up.
Who cares what people asking? America's reputation has long been built on the fact that America has the largest economy, the largest army, and does whatever the f.сk it wants.
The thing is that "does whatever the f*ck it wants" might have negative consequence in regards to "America has the largest economy". If the current GDP growth trends continue, it looks that China will surpass the America on this front unless there are significant changes in either country.
Why would they go there? Well, except in situations where they're not needed in America due to a lack of talent?
People don't go to America because the American president is a charming and polite gentleman. They go there because a talented factory worker can easily make 150k a year, and a talented software engineer 500k a year.
And what does Europe offer to those people? One and a half times a cashier's salary and commuting to work by eco-friendly bike? Seriously?
I make about half of what I did in the US, but take home more money. Insurance is cheap, no expensive healthcare, no car insurance, no car payment, childcare is subsidized and basically free, all other insurance is <4% of what I paid in the US, etc. Home is expensive, compared to what you get in the US, but payment is about the same.
All that in the US was over 7-8k a month of my paycheck, gone. I get all of that for less than 2k a month.
Let’s not even discuss how advanced the EU banking system is compared to the US… although it has been a few years since I’ve been back, so maybe it has gotten better?
In any case, the EU offers good jobs and a work/life balance you usually can’t find in the US, with smart people that you also usually can’t find in the US. It does have its warts, but it also isn’t candy mountain.
Well, in my case about 4 times a cashier’s salary (but really a cashier should be able to afford a good life too), and my kids can bike around so I don’t have to be their taxi and they aren’t stuck at home. Also a functioning democracy.
You may recall the Germans were forced by the allies to restore their credibility. Many hanged as a result. So if you ask me if the Americans are capable of fixing this problem themselves, my answer is no.
Germany never becomes the scientific and mathematical hub of the world as it once was. And it won't for the foreseeable future. So yeah, 100 years is on the optimistic side.
This is an under-rated point. Prior to WWII, most people pursuing doctorates in scientific fields learned (at least a little) German. Because German was the language of science.
Not anymore.
I fear that we're all going to need to learn Chinese.
Do you understand how flat and wartorn they were? Do you wish the same for the US?
If you are willing to take such extreme shortcuts then you can emulate the new Germany.
If not then understand that trust is a fickle thing. Quick to erode and hard to rebuild. What one administration detroys cannot simply be reinstated by the next.
Maybe 100 is a bit hyperbole. But at least 50. Being a neighbor to Germany I can assure you the reconciliation was not "quick" for us to be fully restored. And we still shiver when we follow Musks friends in Germany.
I love and is impressed with Germany and Germans. But it has not been an easy path for them.
Nothing good has ever come from Europe when we lean too far to the right. Be careful in what lessons you choose to take from us.
Exactly this. The EU has shown what happens when you let a minority run amok with the keys to the weapons locker. The scars are still plentiful and even if the last of the eyewitnesses are dying we are still steeped in the lore of the lead-up, the middle of and the aftermath of World War II. That Germany is seeing a resurgence of this is at least as scary as seeing how many other countries are easily programmed to start their march to the drumbeat of Nazi or ersatz ideology, only with slightly different scape-goats. For now it is not quite enough to tip the balance but that could happen at any moment. I hope we'll see the last of the bullet holes in the buildings patched before we start making new ones. That's the one use I have for russia right now: they seem to help us remember and it seems to serve as a uniting force.
Most confusing is how the majority of US people doesn't seem to see any of that while the rest of the world is fully aware that this is exactly what just happened.
Russia is neither the primary instigator nor benefactor of our dysfunction, and wishes it had 1/100th the influence over our elections that Israel does. This narrative never made any sense to me.
Some have spent 2x more money than Israel. Israel is 10th. I haven't heard anybody around me mention Liberia or the Marshall Islands, maybe a handful of times in my life.
These are the top 10 Foreign Principals from 2016 - 2024.
Foreign Principal Total Spending
1. Government of Liberia $350,486,671
2. Government of the Marshall Islands $283,901,646
3. Government of China $277,692,350
4. Japan External Trade Organization $277,638,402
5. Government of Saudi Arabia $238,415,218
6. Government of Bermuda $192,046,623
7. Barzan Holdings $155,775,778
8. ANO TV-Novosti $147,069,172
9. Government of the Bahamas $136,148,426
10 Government of Ireland $132,165,695
No Israeli principal in the top 10. It's obfuscated but Russia is in there (ANO TV-Novosti) and Qatar (Barzan Holdings).
Also, in the link you shared of "Industries", Israel is 7th in single issue. Some of the issues 1-6 have 10x levels of money spent. I wish it were broken down even more. I'm most interested in what makes up "miscellaneous issues".
Sure, maybe you're right, and the foreign countries purchasing our politicians is a much larger problem than just the one that Israel presents (though, I'm rather skeptical in terms of actual impact on foreign policy and on who gets elected in our country). I still don't think Russia deserves much mention in terms of election interference; they gotta step up their game if they want to compete.
do you think these are comparable? are you equating lobbying to the infiltration of government systems or coordinated efforts by Russian assets inside a campaign team to influence elections?
Consider how many of our politicians and administration officials have Russian heritage, on both sides of the isle, and it starts to make more sense. For that reason one should be careful spreading anti-Russianism on the net given the more aggressive policing our Russian overlords anre adopting over hate speech.
> Don’t forget: our insane support for genocide and an out-of-control genocidal regime that’s clearly trying to trigger WW3.
Look, I think the people involved should be waiting trial in the Hague as much as the next man, but let's be real. They could kill another 5.2 million people, and nobody would start WW3 over it.
Some people's lives are simply worth more than others to world powers, and in this case, the Thanksgiving Turkey getting a stay of execution would get more people to tune in to the telly.
I neither support Israel's genocide or appreciate the whataboutism. The US has many crosses to bear for our geopolitical endeavors in the last 80 years. That does not change Russia's current geopolitical endeavors.
I won't even entertain your insinuation that loaning weapons for an allied nations to defend itself with is remotely equivalent to invading a sovereign, western nation to attempt to annex land.
My point was that the US currently supports Ukraine resisting an invasion (which international observers believe qualifies as a genocide by Russia), and while Trump has spent a lot of time shilling for Russia, the US is on the net, not supporting Russia.
Why should anyone trigger ww3 even if there are mass murders somewhere?
Do you want to fight in ww3? You can go enlist in Ukraine to fight evil regime right now.
Also interesting that even Arab states don't want to do anything to help people of Gaza, to accept refuges. Why there is no blame on Egipt for keeping borders closed?
International law, basic common sense, and basic human decency recognizes that the welfare of people within the territory invaded by Israel is Israel's, not Egypt's responsibility.
Driving civilian populations out at gunpoint into neighboring countries is called a genocide.
(If I remember my history, there used to be a German word for that sort of thing, I think it started with an L...)
Since the goal is annexation and erasure of Ukranian identity and culture, the international community believes it to be one.
Some, but not all Soviet policies were genocidal.
> So that's ok, Egipt should not open border...
What Egypt is failing to do has no bearing on whether Israel is engaging in genocide in the territory it is invading. Israel is a sovereign state, it is responsible for its own actions.
I'll leave it to you and others who read this to evaluate the columnist's argument in the linked article vs. the UN commissioner's argument published last week in the same publication. https://archive.ph/FP2ek
The UN commissioner ignores all the obvious arguments against his case.
For instance, he ignores that Israel goes out of its way to warn civilians before attacking, and provides aid to civilians. He ignores that Israel could simply kill ALL the civilians with a bunch of bombs if its intent was actually genocide, and yet it has not.
This is not a serious debate. Israel is not genociding. If you disagree, you need to respond to the actual arguments. But nobody on the other side is doing so, because they can't, because Israel is not genociding.
Please wake up. When the dust settles and people start clearing all those buildings you destroyed you will see that 60,000 casualty number grow by multiples. How will you feel then about what Israel has done?
Casualties are a sad fact of war. But it's not genocide because Israel's doing everything it can to save the civilians while combatting Hamas. If genocide was defined by the number of deaths, would you say that the US was genocidal against germany during WW2? We killed 3 million civilians to defeat the Nazis.
This may, in the end, be for the best - if it dents American power over the long term.
I like America and Americans very much, but no state should wield the kind of power the United States currently holds, precisely for the reasons the Trump administration exemplifies. When a responsible government is in office, all is well and good. But when the political winds shift and a more capricious actor takes charge, such concentrated power can become dangerous.
I hope America’s allies have taken note and will adjust their policies accordingly.
You know what follows a power vacuum? War. I would rather have a status quo that feels at times chafing than the opportunity for everything to get absolutely horrendous in the not too distant future.
Nope, war is perpetuated by unhinged leaders and governments which enable them. When Bismarck created the concert of Europe, there was peace for the most part of that time period within Europe, when every power was curtailed by the other. When Bismarck was expelled and Wilhelm II took things in his own hands, WW1 happened.
You're going ot keep seeing more of this. The Japanese went through multiple rounds of the WH announcing they'd reached a deal and the Japanese saying politely but firmly that negotiations were still ongoing. The Japanese insisted on having everything in writing, and if you look at the executive order that was eventually published it's full of loopholes like 'best efforts' and 'aspirations' that articulate shared goals, but little the in the way of binding commitments.
Paper trail stuff.
But more importantly, when the first set of executive orders reducing tariffs rates went out, it conveniently mentioned Japanese investments but did not include tariff reductions for Japanese goods.
So the Japanese government pointed at the written agreement and told the trump admin to get their shit together.
A few days later, the tariff reductions on Japanese goods was hastily added on.
True, but the Japanese government is accountable to Japanese voters and their business community. If they see Trump reneging on or twisting an agreement they'll be more likely to blame Trump than the LDP. He's not popular there nowadays except among Sanseito members.
1. "Specific numbers about trade balance' isn't a negotiation term. It might be a prior that feeds into your position in negotiation, but it's not an outcome.
2. He lies when his lips move. When you're dealing with a pathological liar, there's no reason to believe anything he says that paints him in a good light - until it's been independently confirmed.
No but him and his crowd have been keen on denying reality on a daily basis, and it's scary how well it works. I have people around me who drink this BS, and will argue in support for it because the arguments against it requires nuance thinking. At least, with a paper, it's harder to do this. You have to admit he pretended the sky was red, when it's obviously blue. There is less nuances if you get something clear in writing.
It's not much, but it's better than the alternative.
Just remember all of the treaties that were signed (by you know who) before invading that very same country there after, leading up to WW2. A common strategy to give yourself the first move. the strategy is to cripple ongoing negotiating the east is succeeding in with other countries that no longer trust the US, this was going on way before ORang man election. Just remember not everything is public, that goes for other countries as well. Like really china is enemy all the sudden " Why exactly, oh wait you said " Because they're growing faster then US" What!!! oh i get it now" nooo I don't get it. Also the war torn countries tend to be under developed and are rich in natural reserves of what ever the world needs. The world is not as simple as even what the corrupt media tries to make it also. It does indeed go much deeper than that and without emotion but decisions that are occurring with opinions of many heads to influence any giving decision. Yet even the most sense you can make out of this whole mess well still leave you lost even more than before you calculated the "WHYS" and the "noes". Forget the problem, i tend to think that with each disastrous decision made how long will it take to fix THAT decision later. Something like telling Afghanistan to give back the ( Bagram base) back to US and simply receiving fuck off reply by the Taliban government is simply stupid. none other than Russia not that long ago met their government to spark relationship initiatives. Umm hello Afghanistan is literal the country of mountain men defeated the invasion of Russia in the past. Well this is good for two groups of the three, Russia and Afghanistan leaving US out. US you left Afghanistan, well because there was defeated in controlling the countries ( very strategic land being so central to everything in that land mass. Now leaving Israel is saying whats happening is bad like every human on this earth, is in no way possible for the US. This will be yet another HUGE might i add in capital letters LOST in the middle east. The massive mission of the US to achieve this in controlling the middle east. Sadly the people taking this blunt is the people in that small town taking the hit. Have you seen how many men they are detaining in each photo you see of the chaos happening. In the Blue and white flag there is no consideration for the children and men, They must stop reproduction of that ethnic group so their ability to take back that land from within is impossible. Why? because this same thing happened in Iraq, Syria Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia "kinda", Libya, Various other African countries, along with some eastern European countries.
The World is moving on to the future, It's what happens yet we are supposed to learn from our mistakes but, the only thing we really learn from what history has to tell us is that we get good at replicating that same mistake to others or ourselves. A 100 years ago we were trying to make car run on gasoline and go pas 20 mph, a 100 years ago we were trying to figure out how we can expand the use of electricity, a 100 years ago Photographs have to be mobile, but how.
The point is humans are animals and have the ignorance as a tribute because it's helped us survive. Its natural. whats not natural is for a planet to sustain an orbit for lengthy time period for life to to be sustained so evolution can exist. evolution./
People are confused about what these published agreements (like with the EU as well) are. They're not legal agreements, treaties, or even executive orders, although the corresponding orders to reduce the tariffs are of course executive orders.
But the agreements themselves are completely informal and an overview of what the US expects to see happen in order to maintain the tariff reductions. The interpretation of whether the other country or group of countries is abiding the agreement is entirely at the discretion of Trump.
So there's no such thing as a loop hole. If Trump isn't satisfied with e.g. the EU's progress towards implementing said agreement, he can increase tariffs back to where they were at his discretion, with or without reason given. So there's no such thing as a loop hole in this sort of agreement.
The loop hole is every nation just agrees to stop dealing with the US and isolate them. Sure, we’d all suffer horribly but at least the west would have a future, vs we all suffer horribly anyways and fall along with the US.
I don't think agreement is necessary. I think each will, in turn, come to their own conclusions.
In boardrooms around the world there is of course concern to protecting the existing US market. And in the short term there are lots of noises to placate the US.
At the same time there's a recognition that the US is not a stable long-term partner. The bigger conversation is around new markets, building diversity of markets, diversity of investment and so on.
"Global Trade" is mostly not an organised thing. It's a zillion small transactions between individuals, small companies and so on. Ultimately my (US) customers will pay the tarifs to their govt, or not (shrug). In the meantime I'm looking for non-US customers for my business growth. I'm investing anywhere except the US, because the current uncertainty is bad for making investment decisions.
Ultimately this process is a wake up call to suppliers who have focused on the US market. And to those future businesses to come. Diversify markets, because then you aren't beholden to them.
In 10 years time, regardless of who is in power, or the conditions then, the lesson will remain.
I think your take is correct. Governments around the world are going to say whatever they need to to get the lowest tariffs possible but trade will slowly reorient itself. I said before the election, if Trump works with Western allies then he'd probably get consensus to take on China with combined tariffs. We know what happened instead.
It doesn’t need to be dramatic or announced or even a major policy. Every country is finding out that dealing with Trump’s US is an expensive pain in the ass of unknowns, constant flux and mafia-like pay to play bribes.
Many countries will just deal with other countries because it’s cheaper, easier and less of a headache.
Tourism from foreigners in the US has taken a severe and extremely expensive nose dive. Everything else will too.
That's unlikely. Sovereign nations generally act in their own best interest. For a quite visual example, for most of the Ukrainian war, Ukraine worked as a key transit hub for a huge chunk of all Russian gas heading to the EU. Why? Because they assessed the billions of dollars they gained in transit fees as being more beneficial to themselves, and their war effort, than interrupting the flow would be.
Doing something self destructive to spite another country is often a sign of either incompetent leadership or of a country that's not truly sovereign - countries that end up with some major dependency (economic, military, or political) on another country can be compelled to act against their rational self interest.
So back to here, the effect of what Trump's doing is not particularly unique. The US has few, if any, allies and lots of countries that are simply nominally independent vassals. We say jump, and they only ask how high. But what he is doing that's particularly unique is making this entire charade 100% transparent and giving them absolutely 0 chance at saving face. I think he simply enjoys humiliating them, very possibly as a result of things that happened during the previous administration.
It will probably accelerate the shift to a multipolar world. I'm very much not a believer in the 5d chess stuff, but I would at least tease the possibility that this outcome might have been considered and not be seen as undesirable. If one considers the goal of solely advancing American interests, it's not clear that hegemony is beneficial. Hegemony entails endless wars and endless interventions around the world funded by endless debt. And as allies and enemies alike reach technological parity, it's becoming ever more dangerous.
And for what? How does this all positively affect the average American? In a purely transactional world, it's hard to see how America, in terms of the affects on Americans, would be worse off than in the current one where we expend just unimaginably massive amounts of resources trying to maintain hegemony.
Countries are already doing what is in their best interest, which is why all these "agreements" are essentially fake. Countries are simply saying nice things hoping to get keep tariffs low for as long as possible. But the actual plan, not even hidden, leaders from wester nations all over are saying it out loud, is to diversify trade.
Once trade is diversified, the US will be isolated naturally as it represents the least beneficial trade arrangement. Now, if MAGA is dethrowned somehow, sure, trade with the US will increase again, but the diversification you see happing now will be permanent. Things aren't going to go back to the way they were, the US has already given up it's spot as the economic leader of the west, and it's given up all its foreign soft-power, it's just a slow process to see it all play out.
I agree the trade diversification would obviously be the perfectly logical and smart play. The EU seems to be doing the opposite. The EU has become critically dependent upon US natural gas, imported at a sharp premium, while constantly speaking of efforts to "de-risk" explicitly with regards to China, and implicitly with regards to Russia. On top of this both imports and exports with the US have skyrocketed since 2022.
And 2021 is not some cherry picked COVID related oddity or something. It was a record high for exports and just under a record high (€235b in 2019) for imports. [1] So we're seeing an EU more dependent than ever upon the US while aiming to "de-risk" from the US' geopolitical adversaries. Annual results for 2025 are obviously not available yet, but so far this trend has not meaningfully changed. The EU continue to act like vassals.
I also am starting to doubt that these tariffs will be lifted, even if the DNC somehow wins 2028. They've been hesitant to make that a part of their platform, and the tariffs effectively amount to a very large tax revenue increase levied primarily at the largest corporations, which can be arbitrarily tweaked by the President - enabling him to, in effect, unilaterally raise or lower taxes by Executive Order. Government 'temporary emergency measures' are rarely temporary. That's where federal income taxes come from, and even the requirement of passports. We'll see, but I think we're looking at the new normal.
People keep describing Trump as transactional. He doesn't appear to be anything of the sort. He's vain, impulsive, inconsistent, impetuous, mean, and never holds up his end of a bargain. Definitely not transactional.
The loophole is real estate for Trump Towers or shinny golden trinkets or billion investment contracts for family. Not into old fashioned bribery? We‘ll the is a narrowly traded crypto coin to help you out.
The truth is Trump is a bad negotiator. He's easily played. He's also predictably dishonest. The only real move is to string him along, which he seems to be glad to do, particularly if someone flatters or threatens to punch him.
I assumed the soybean thing was more about sending a message. Soybeans are the number one US export crop. Shutting down the market is a big financial blow, makes the trade deficit worse, and angers farmers who otherwise would have happily sold to the Chinese.
Plenty of great negotitors across history did, too. Trump gets played. Repeatedly. Predictably. His political instincts have been sharp enough that I'm increasingly chalking this up to age, but maybe he just had a better team around him the first time around.
But his crony buddies stand to benefit from farmers going to bankrupt. Makes it difficult to understand if this is incompetence or intentional malice at play...
I've always had high regard for Trump as a talented scumbag grifter of note.
He's been noticeably and increasingly off game since it seemed he was only campaigning for re-election to avoid a mountain of looming bad legal outcomes.
Much of his early second term "wins" I've marked as momentum success from having a ready to go game plan care of the Project 2025 crowd. His carry through on tariffs, dodging Epstein complications, handling free speech issues, etc. have been more chaotic than cunning.
Do you even think he's sitting in on these negotiations? He can't remember Ishiba's name and just called him 'Mr Japan' when occasionally asked questions about him. My impression (and I've been watching these specific trade negotiations pretty closely) was that Scott Bessent was doing all the legwork and the Japanese seemed perfectly happy to talk to him instead of Trump. Whatever one might think of the policy arguments, Bessent seems coherent and professional whereas Trump comes off as shallow and erratic. I find it hard to imagine having hours-long focused and strategic conversation with him on a dry topic like trade policy.
It's an musing irony that Japan is a demographically much older society than the US and LDP in particular looks like a gerontocratic party, but between factionalism and parliamentary instability they actually cycle through leaders pretty efficiently
Funnily enough, according to some South Korean news, the Korean government deliberately postponed having a final written deal, or at least that's what some news articles claim, because it was such a horrible deal for Korea.
I think there's an implicit understanding that having a written deal would be worse for Korea because the deal will bind Korea and restrict its options, while Trump is a crazy guy and can and will do anything he wants, whether he signed something or not. I.e., any written deal with Trump has negative worth.
Such is the state of global trade negotiation these days.
Agreed. It was, initially, quite alarming (though no longer anymore) at how different the actual words in the Executive Orders differ from what was said about the policies they were, ostensibly, enforcing or creating.
I remember some estimates made after the US elections of what Stephen Miller's policy would cost. According to these estimates, following Miller's plan would require more or less the entire world's GDP to be invested in the US for several consecutive years. Obviously, this would require more than a little bullying to get there.
So far, we got the bullying, plenty of non-binding agreements, 100% of goodwill and soft power loss, increased soft power for China, a looming financial crisis, two wars between major powers getting closer by the day. We'll see whether the investments are coming, too.
Being an unreasonable, unmeetable deal on paper is just a feature. You're not supposed to meet the text of the deal. You're supposed to get under the table and ask "how can we facilitate this?" while palming a hundred dollar bill. It's like a police shakedown in less stable countries.
A more serious question for Korea is the US military protection against North Korea and/or China. They may yet end up in the unthinkable alliance with their historic enemy, Japan.
Lee Jae-myung is seeking closer relations with the PRC. I view it as part of the missing context to this spat. These events preceded the US administration's actions.
As things are going China could protect South Korea from North Korea as well as the USA. Also SK wouldn't be in the immediate wrath of China during an conflict escalation between USA and China. Practically SK should have a strong negotiation position against the blackmail demands of Trump.
Trump is bringing his enemies closer together and starting to loose allies to the other side too.
The PRC would be delighted to see South Korea enter the Sinosphere and abandon the US. If nothing else, China would see it as a return to historic norms where most of East Asia serves as tribute states to the Chinese empire.
But also likewise, Korea holds historic antagonism towards China, arguably just as much as it does to Japan. Most of the population would hate such a relationship, and despite some in the left thinking otherwise, most South Koreans still see the US as the favorable partner over China.
But with China’s continued rise, and the US seemingly evolving (irreversibly?) into the MAGA Empire, that perception isn’t guaranteed to never change either. The PRC isn’t doing itself much favors in courting its neighbors, so it’ll become a game of who is worse.
I have to ask: given how powerful the US is... which party outside of the US doesn't have some anti-American rhetoric?
In fact, France is the US' oldest ally and its best known president in the 20th century is largely remembered for making sure to remain militarily independent from the US.
Yep, most things Trump does make sense if we assume he's a Russian puppet. Russia really wants to divide West, to keep world hooked on fossil fuels, and to undermine democracy everywhere.
The things Trump does *also* make sense if you assume he's not a Russian puppet. He also wants to divide Europe against itself, keep the world hooked on (US) fossil fuels and to undermine threats to his rule. He doesn't need Russia for that, but their interests do sometimes align and it would be stupid not to take advantage of it.
I think this is more likely than some 'agent' plot. These people do not really care about countries, but what benefits them and their extended family. As Italians would say: "our thing".
His personal lawyer and mentor was also a lawyer for the major mafia families in NYC and a known blackmailer and fixer, the student has surpassed the master.
There are plenty of other explanations that fit the facts. This whole "Trump is a foreign agent" thing is just like the "twin towers were brought down by the CIA" conspiracy: people don't want to believe their own country could be so broken as to let this happen, and so it must have been some planned action by a group they hate.
I wish people who said things like this, or who believed that Trump is/was a Russian agent could see how silly and racist they look. America's problems are not caused by foreigners. They're caused by Americans.
The xenophobia exhibited by sentiments such as this simply demonstrate hatred and ignorance of the world outside of the USA, and demonstrate an incapacity to critically evaluate American culture and history.
I am not Xenophobic of Russia. I speak and read Russian and my partner is Russian. I also don’t hate the world outside of the USA. In have lived in that world for more than ten years. I simply think that trump is a patsy. Whether he knows he is or not doesn’t matter. Putin plays him like a fiddle.
That being said, I absolutely completely agree with you that American problems are caused by Americans.
Russia has puppet states and is actively working on building them. Russia is actively trying to influence elections in foreign countries too. Trump being suspect Russian puppet is not xenofobia, it is completely consistent with what Russia is and who Trump is.
That aside, US electorates has decided to award another term for Trump. FYI at that point Trump is not an unknown dark horse candidate anymore and he even won the popular vote. Last time a GOP president won popular vote was 20 years ago.
So it's very fair to attribute the so called erraticness to what American want in general instead of attributing it to Putin or other non American.
Completely consistent with what Russia is? Sure. With who Trump is? I'm not sure that I see it. Trump does not strike me as the kind of guy who would willingly be someone else's puppet.
Unwillingly? Sure. Being played? Sure. Knowingly being a puppet? No.
He acts like Putins puppet. I can see it both willingly and unwillingly. Trump admires powerful dictators and wants their validation. Putin is one. Also, I would not be surprised at all if there was unwilling component too.
to invest in US (i.e. to buy a piece of US) one has to sell something to US to get dollars while not buying US products in return, ie. an US trade deficit is needed. And that at the same time while US is introducing tariffs to reduce the said trace deficit.
We live in an economy that is highly virtualized, where the same unit of currency can be used several times simultaneously to borrow, lend, re-borrow, etc. so I'm not sure it's that simple.
If the US gets invested with such "virtual" ("out-of-thin-air", newly issued, etc.) dollars i guess it would be even worse as it would only inflate prices in US while not doing anything else.
Being the biggest reserve currency has a little-discussed perk where the reserves lower the average velocity of money, which blunts the inflationary pressure of money-printing. Eroding trust in the US will deplete these deep pools of USD and will result in a more direct linkage with domestic inflation in the future.
I think it's pretty significant that President Lee mentioned the 1997 financial crisis: arguably, it was Korea's version of 9/11. It shook the country in a way people didn't realize was possible, and the country was, in a sense, never the same after that.
Imagine a US politician saying "agreeing to this would be a disaster at the same level as 9/11."
Lee is basically telling Koreans that this is something he can never let go through, and he'll do everything to stop it from happening. (Of course whether Koreans buy it is another matter, but after watching ICE arresting hundreds of workers, I think most are willing to believe Lee rather than the US government.)
I heard that he was considering going to the recent Beijing meeting where Putin was, however he heard that Kim Jong Un would also be there, so he decided against it.
The tariffs. The overall situation. I do not understand why Wall Street isn't yet in a freefall. Did they find good sources of bubble fuel then to keep on the heat?
1. If you take out AI-related companies, SP500 is down YTD
2. Even then, because the exchange rate is down 10-15% against most countries, that mechanically increases the SP500 by 5-7.5% (because half of SP500 firm profits are from abroad)
3. Many ppl expect lots of inflation in the medium term (look at 10yr-3m spreads). Firms are basically Equity+Debt, and because inflation wipes out the value of Debt, then the value of Equity mechanically increases
So, that's my pet story why the market is at an ATH (source: am an economist, can't say where, but I know lots of well-known economists)
No one sells if they think there's other suckers who'll buy later. Everyone is ultimately trying to get out as late as possible with all the money - hence "the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" being evergreen.
The only thing I would add to your point #3 is this:
* Given the same profit margin, higher overall prices mean that firms will have higher profits.
* The value of an equity is the discounted sum of all future profits.
That is, stocks are a hedge against inflation. Investors are willing to pay "unreasonable" prices today because they expect that increased future cashflows will cause the price to become reasonable.
#3 isn't quite right because a rise in inflation changes the discount rates that are applied to future cash flows in the equity valuation process. And on top of that, for risk-averse investors the fundamental uncertainty we are living in also will alter their discount rates independently of monetary effects. The first two are true enough at least under certain definitions of what an "AI-related company" is.
(source: I am also an economist who specializes in financial economics and corporate finance)
The practical effects of the tariffs have been substantially more muted than most people expected. A lot of supply chain folks were genuinely expecting shelves to run empty by June or July. I would emphasize that “muted” isn’t “nonexistent”, and a lot of metrics would be down if not for AI investment. But it seems that a lot of people are still interested in buying from and selling to the US even with a crazy dictator in charge.
The shelves wont be empty, the stuff is freely available, it just costs more to the US consumer. Just because there's a giant tarif on Brazil doesn't mean Americans stop drinking coffee.
And of course people are still selling to the US. From our perspective nothing has changed. It's not costing us any more than it did before.
Markets remain up, bolstered partly by the AI stocks, but also because the market believes US consumers will continue to consume. Their appetite for consumption, and debt, remains unabated.
Am I building a factory in the US? No. The current administration makes that very unappealing. The US society is unstable right now, policy is fluid, enforcement of laws seems weak, the labor market is (justifiably) paranoid. As a foreigner I'm not even traveling to the US anytime soon. There are other, more appealing, opportunities to explore.
Which does manage to hit the nail on the head: people in general still don't understand what a tarriff is. They fully expect a tarriff to hit the foreign exporter somehow, when it's actually billed to the importer at point of import. The importers are the ones who place the orders. The exporters aren't impacted directly at all - it depends entirely on whether the orders stop coming in. The orders don't cost them more to fill in anyway.
The issue for the importer is cash flow. The tarifs have to be paid on entry, ie before the coffee is sold.
This suits large importers over small ones, they have the cash reserves to cope.
The other issue for importers is uncertainty. The tarifs might be high this week (when my stock arrives) but it might be low next week when my competitors stock arrives, putting me at a disadvantage.
So "shelves being bare" is primarily a business risk / cash flow issue. Partly handled with more frequent, smaller, orders (driving up consumer prices some more.)
And yes, I agree, most American consumers don't understand that fundamentally the goal of tarifs (good and bad) is to drive up the price. To that end though the administration is being very successful.
This isn't true, at least if you believe in standard economic theory (not believing standard economic theory is what got us in this mess!).
The issue is that the tariff increases the effective price to the consumer, so it shifts the demand curve downward by the cost of the tariff (the price consumers are willing to pay the producer for a given quantity of goods).
Markets always find their equilibrium, and the resulting equilibrium point is a lower transaction price and lower quantity than before. Quantifying the shift requires knowing both the supply and demand elasticities.
In other words, both the producer and consumer share the burden of the tariffs. The producer receives less from the consumer, and the consumer pays a higher total cost than before. Who pays more of the tariff is question that we again need the elasticities to answer.
It only hurts the producer if they don't find alternate markets.
There will absolutely be some short term pain. But in the long run it makes the producer stronger.
Now it's easy to cherry pick products that are easier to move than others. There absolutely will be winners and losers on the production side. It'll certainly be interesting to see this play out.
You are describing indirect impacts though. The exporters does not directly pay tarrifs except if they're also the importer, or acting as a facilitator on behalf of the customer. The change in demand is indirect - because it can only happen if customer behavior changes. Does the consumer care about 100% tarrifs on a $1 product with no internal competitors? Probably not. Demand may be completely unaffected, and in any case that's a problem for the importer who has to clear things through customs, not the exporter who simply has to label things appropriately like they always have.
But that's not what people think: People think the tarrifs work like a bill from the US government - like taxes, where they understand it's possible (though again, generally not how) to wind up owing the government more money in September.
What they imagine is very clearly something that looks like that - that companies directly pay some fee to access the US market and then sell things as normal. Or will be taxed some extra money after selling things to the US.
Yes it's all wildly inconsistent on the slightest inspection, but people are relating to this on a vibes level and then generally inventing the justification post facto because they certainly never thought about tarrifs till this president.
That's not wrong, but it isn't the full picture either.
Access to the US market has other values. If the manufacturer is carrying USD denominated debt, they or someone else must obtain those dollars through trade. Access to a large market may unlock economies of scale for producers. Losing access may drive up their overall costs to serve other markets.
These are just two of the most obvious things which I can immediately think of. There are likely other factors as well.
But that's the thing: they don't lose access. To lose access they'd have to actually be undercut by local producers, or untarriffed competitors. They experience the effect wholly through demand modification - and simply ship whatever orders come in, with some pressure to keep lowering prices if they can. It's a tarrif - not sanctions.
Part of it was that the China tariffs were canceled in May after around a month of operation, and that was short enough that it could be just covered by the inventory stockpiling that companies did on a massive scale in Q1. If they had gone on longer it would have been an ugly summer when those buffers were exhausted.
The dollar's down fairly severely, which does skew things a bit (US assets are priced in dollars, but most S&P500 companies would have substantial foreign income). S&P500 is down YTD in euro terms, say.
I was just reading an FT article mentioning the "inelastic markets hypothesis" that markets are predominantly driven by cash flows rather than rational analysis of value. People invest in index funds etc because the market goes up, the market goes up because people are buying. It's a bit of a bubble.
At this point, the real economy is completely decoupled from financial markets who are perfectly happy "investing" in bubble after bubble. If the markets were at all representative of the country's actual economic health, they'd have crashed long ago.
Considering that investment in local manufacturing is down, it's pretty safe to say they're not "working" in the sense of reinvigorating local industry.
Here's an even handed approach and overview of some of the tariff related stats. The presenter is a critic of tariffs, but concedes that the results thus far are not as simple as some here would suggest.
6:22
> This is just a matter of acknowledging the data on the graph and saying this is quite a difference from the way it was a year ago. And so, people who said this wouldn't happen, that's wrong. It did happen. There it is. And I think it's important to acknowledge that. Um, not only that, but a lot of people said, "Well, this is going to lead to the price of goods, especially automobiles, coming into the United States, is going to skyrocket." Well, so far that hasn't been the case.
>In fact, prices have come down. And you can go to Google and you can look it up and there's many articles discussing the fact that the Chinese automakers have largely been eating the tariffs so far.
In the first quote the video presenter is referring to the tariff percentages from 2024 to now, not prices. He never presents any data to back up his price claims, just a couple of news articles about automakers announcemens.
Everything in the video up until 20:30 is making supporting the claim that tariffs are higher now than they were in 2024 which I'd be surprised if anyone disagrees with.
After 20:30 is where I think the real meat of the video is:
"Um, now
I know some people will say you can't
win in a trade war. So even though Trump
has gotten, you know, these good uh
better levels than he had a year ago,
it's basically attacks. It's going to
lead to less efficiency and it's going
to cause growth to fall and nobody wins
a trade war. Now, if that's your
argument, I tend to agree with you. But that's a different
subject, right? If you want to say
that nobody wins in a war and that's
going to hurt everybody, fine. I'll go
down that road. I think it's a relative
game and if everybody falls but the
United States falls the least, then on a
relative basis, the United States has
maintained its hegemony."
That's the larger point here. We should be able to hold two different concepts in our minds when we describe the outcome. Yes, all things being equal tariffs and interventions create economic inefficiency. That is in my view, a rational first principle. We would prescribe actions based on that belief.
*As a redundant disclaimer for HN, that belief would put me in opposition to Trump's policies.
However when describing the outcome all things are not equal. We shouldn't fall into the trap of an appeal to utopia.
Selling into the US presents advantages on economies of scale. Overseas dollar denominated debt drives dollar demand. These factors affect decisions for producers selling into the US market.
The specific pricing data is subject to cherry picking and politicalization. Generally it is a bit strange to see the illiberal left taking exception with Trump's illiberal interventionism. You get the sense that if the interventions were rationalized by a different actor or for a different reason, the statistics would be spun in the other direction. This feels inconsistent and hypocritical.
The other key point is that the tariff doom prophesies haven't yet come to pass. Perhaps the doomsaying was merely more political bloviation? It would fit with the pattern of inconsistency.
Crazy request of $350 billion investment by SK. That's 20% of it's estimated 2025 GDP of $1700 billion. Could the US pledge 20% (6000 billion) to some other country?
Awfully nice of Myung to be so understanding after the US arrest of 300+ SK workers in Georgia a month ago.
I'm Korean. I really really don't know. Every day, I wake up to every new news:
- A tariff agreement signed, but then they immediately mention a different percentage (Japan)
- Korean(mostly) engineers arrested on suspicion of participating in the construction of a US factory (IIRC it is not claimed whether it's legal or not)
- H-1B visa situation
Looking at the current situation, there's no "guarantee" of tariff reductions through huge investment to US. Also there is no justification for the argument that countries that do not invest should do so as other countries do.
IMHO the situation is this: Are your actions make Trump feel good? The feeling can be induced by making him richer or boost his ego.
Those "X country will invest in US" stuff are about boosting his ego through good press. No one follows up anything, they use the "flood the zone" strategy, which doesn't allow the public to have long attention span.
Also, it appears that Trump likes numbers around $600B. Everyone is "investing" around $600B, even companies like Apple. When Mark Zuckerberg was asked what Meta invests, he threw the same number and later was caught ona hot mic asking Trump if he liked the number as he admitted that he was not prepared. So yes, just say you are investing $600B in USA thanks to Trump and smile to the cameras. Don't worry about the money, this is for boosting his ego and not about the money. Actually investing is dangerous, if it goes bad(like with factory incident) it creates problems for his campaign, helps his opponents and may hurt his ego, just do the show no need to complicate things.
If you want to do the money thing, you invest in his crypto or donate to his campaign etc.
> EU is similar, on 200B Budget they promised 600B investment.
As far as I can see, the EU 'promise' was pretty much just FDI by European companies in the US that was expected anyway; the commission even explicitly said that it could not guarantee any of this. Most 'promises' would be similar.
Completely impractical. Look at other countries. France and the UK are under enormous budget pressure, mostly due to the cost of funding the defense of the illegal war in Ukraine, but also due to other costly recent policy decisions. Both countries aren't considered poor, but they now have difficult decisions to make. That means anyone who thinks these investments such as these by any country can be from taxes or savings elsewhere are delusional. It would have to be loans.
Now look at Australia. It committed to a $368 billion ($1 billion per month for 30 years) submarine deal with the US. This program will never deliver any perceivable value to Australian people, it is more strategically beneficial for reviving a failing boat and ship building industry in the US. The US itself is supposedly building a new Columbia-class ballistic submarine at a cost of $110 each?
These are simply confabulated, made up numbers. And why is Korea building valuable, current generation facilities in other countries? It would make sense if it would result in for example, the sale of more Korean automobiles, but it isn't. It is basically a shakedown ("tribute").
France has spent about 3bn a year on aid to Ukraine (though some of this is in terms of transfer of military equipment rather than new spending, and some of it will be tied to loans funded by the income from confiscated Russian assets). France spends about 50bn a year on pensions (EDIT: Oh, wow, no, much more than that; that's a projected _deficit_), which is what's really driving its budgetary problems.
Curious question: how is a war illegal? Isn’t that just… war?
Or at least, most wars seem to be like that. Rarely is there the case where 2 countries consent to have war with each other. There always seems to be someone that aggresses and someone that is forced to defend. For if they wouldn’t then they face subjugation or worse.
>It committed to a $368 billion ($1 billion per month for 30 years) submarine deal with the US. This program will never deliver any perceivable value to Australian people
Ukrainians thought the same giving up nuclear weapons, and getting rid of a lot of other weapons, including old 300km range ballistic missiles, and selling off new missile development to Saudis or something like this - the kind of weapons mere presence of which would have affected the Russia's invasion calculations.
May be Australia would be better served by strategic weapons other than the submarines, yet i don't think Australia can avoid getting such strategic weapons or can get similar level of strategic defense cheaper.
Subs are definitely australia's best choice here. Subs are king of the ocean and are by far the best tool for enforcing territorial claims and warding off harassment of domestic vessels or harassment along international trading lanes at sea.
War is illegal under the international law for all UN member states. The main exceptions are self defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council.
Pretty sure the cost of helping Ukraine is pocket change compared to the rise in welfare payments since COVID and the "triple lock" to keep pensioners minted.
Do you have a source describing the "illegality"? This is genuine question - I have not found a source digging into the legal question.
The best I could find was a suggestion that their visa waivers were in fact correct for the purpose, except for the fact that their companies were using visa waivers over and over again. Or maybe the workers were? I'm not sure.
Hope you speak Korean! Straight from the horse's mouth. [0] The companies themselves were well aware they were working illegally. People were even doing visa runs to chain them, it doesn't get much more blatant then that.
It's pretty obvious and not a real point of contention. Being honest about this does not support the raid, and acting as if it does helps nobody and only hurts.
You have posed a reasonable question with good intentions. A simple Google search reveals:
>U.S. authorities said some of the detained Korean workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others entered legally but had expired visas or entered on visa waivers that prohibited them from working.
From PBS, a source with a well known editorial stance against the current administration.
>Like many of the Koreans who were working there, advocates and lawyers representing the non-Korean workers caught up in the raid say that some who were detained had legal authorization to work in the United States.
With any of these contentious partisan issues it is important to be wary of cherry picking. Typically events are selectively reported to fit a given partisan agenda.
It would be extreme to believe that entire groups are being arbitrarily detained and deported. Similarly, it isn't unreasonable to expect mistakes to be made. The reasonable thing to do with extreme claims such as the ones made in this thread is to do a simple Google search before engaging in partisan flames. It has become almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion here on any topic which may tangentially involve Trump.
What, precisely, does this mean? I don't think it means "crossed from Mexico or arrived on a small boat". I think it might actually mean "at the border interview, they said the purpose of their visit to the facility was 'business meetings' rather than 'work'", and the legality hinges on the precise knife edge of the W word.
It would be really, really useful to clarify exactly what the rules are for someone entering the US under a visa waiver for business purposes are, because I don't want to see my co-workers thrown in a gulag.
Thanks for your comment and sources. I've found similar information already. What I was really looking for was, say, an in-depth legal analysis of B1 visas and visa waivers.
But as far as I can tell now, there's not any really clear definition of what counts as work under those visa (waivers), and the ambiguity was tolerated by all parties. So, in effect, the only reasoning is (like always) "this is illegal because we say so".
It's almost impossible because one side goes into a tizzy when Trump's name is mentioned, then the other side or just people in the middle like you have to calmly layout their argument with evidence.
There is one side that makes it impossible. Let's not confuse that.
I don't generally favor Trump's policies or the opposition's. Yet it is impossible to have a discussion here without providing explicit disclaimers. Even with those disclaimers, we're constantly brigaded with red-herrings, non-sequiturs and ridiculous claims tilting at what is incorrectly perceived as Trump support.
It is difficult to even criticize Trump's policies, unless the criticism is one of the curated forms prescribed by the outrage-o-sphere.
If that’s true, shouldn’t the “illegal” label more correctly apply to the activity of the company knowingly employing them? What do you believe the workers did wrong?
The issue here was that subcontracting firms arranged to bring hundreds of people from South Korean. SK companies, including LG Energy Solution, reportedly advised workers and subcontracting firms to use the ESTA visa waiver, even after other visa applications had been repeatedly rejected.
If that’s not illegal, perhaps the legal system needs revamping. And blaming the workers in a situation like that is immoral scapegoating, pure and simple. It’s very on-brand for the US conception of labor rights, though.
> If that’s not illegal, perhaps the legal system needs revamping.
Advising people to commit visa fraud might well be illegal under US law, but given that it all happened in SK, would SK be interested in extraditing them? And would the US taxpayer support spending what that costs?
Knowingly hiring visa fraudsters is probably illegal, but proving intent would be difficult. And if you lower the burden of proof too far then companies will find any excuse to not hire non-white people, which probably isn't what you want.
The ESTA application emphasizes that it's personal and the conditions you have to comply with. I think that's well and good - if anything I think it would be better to scrap the H1-B system of tying people's work visas to specific jobs, that's a big part of what leads to immigration suppressing wages.
>The individuals arrested during the operation were found to be working illegally, in violation of the terms of their visas and/or statuses. People on short-term or recreational visas are not authorized to work in the U.S.
I myself once worked for a large German company at a large US software company, porting code to my company's platform. After a few flights back home to Germany and back immigration took me into the backroom, and I described in detail what I did. They stamped my passport and let me in for another 6 months of that work. I did that for a year before switching to another visa. It also worked out because I never even tried the slightest evasion and gave them everything I got, it's not like I cared, if I had been sent back, so what, I had no desire to immigrate. I'm sure under the exact same circumstances somebody giving them a worse impression of hiding something might not have been approved. But in any case, it's definitely legal, you CAN do some kinds of actual work on just a B1, even for an entire year.
It was legal, because I still was 100% employed and paid in Germany, and the job could not be done otherwise, the US company would not send us their source code.
Similarly, in the context of the Korean raid.
One other important point you neglect is that from what I read the legality of the activities were never even questioned to begin with! They simply arrested everyone. They did not know what they wer4e doing, they just needed the arrest numbers because ICE is under pressure themselves. They did not even have any interpreters. That makes any argument about the legality useless, since it didn't even matter for the arrests.
The parent comment asked what the alleged illegal activity was, and I provided a primary source straight from ICE. I'm not interested in debating your anecdotal experience or speculation. Whether they're wrong is for the courts to decide. I'm sure we'll hear about it soon enough.
You are attempting to shift the goalpost after I countered your wrong assertion directly. You wrote a short and very specific post, it is still there.
It does not matter that you quoted the ICE, not these days with all the lies, and since they never checked the people they arrested if they actually violated anything to begin with, that quote is useless. There is enough background information available about how that raid went off. They did not check before taking every single one of those people away.
And
> "People on short-term or recreational visas are not authorized to work in the U.S."
Your attempt to dismiss it based on me providing additional proof in form of an immigration-encounter directly countering your assertion is noted, but telling.
In addition, it should never come to having to go to the courts in the first place!! Taking away likely lawfully acting people in handcuffs to a very uncomfortable stay in ICE custody already causes severe damage, no court can undo that!
The only reason they can get away with it for the moment is because South Korea needs the military cooperation because of increasing threats at home.
But these methods look more like those of the mafia than that of a civilized state.
I'm saying that while not even minding one bit that/if the US now acts against illegal immigration, I never understood why they just let it happen for decades. I understand certain businesses did well with very low-cost labor that they could easily control and exploit due to the illegal status of the workers. The problem is that they now go far beyond that, because of the administrations desire for numbers and headlines, and pictures.
And if you have to rely on getting your rights through the courts you already lost - the system is expensive, time-consuming, and slow. Getting exonerated later after you were dragged away and put into prison clothing does not undo the damage! Having to go to court is additional punishment for normal people.
No, the parent comment asked for what the illegal activity was, of which we don't know of any, because nobody has proven any. You're talking about alleged illegal activity, and given the lack of trust in the US government right now, that doesn't carry a lot of water.
America has made more profits than countries that take manufacturing jobs from USA. It was totally win-win. Now America destroying these relationships by themselves. Even asking allies economic failure to fulfill their (or trump administration's) greed. Those economic failure possibilities will make their allies' manufacturing capabilities degrade. They don't even have any capabilities and proper plans for re-buliding domestic manufacturing industries to satisfy their needs. (price, capability)
They just want to feel like they are perpetual victims. It appeals to them and it justifies their cruelty towards others.
I guess this is a major difference between the far-left and the far-right. The far-left go out of their way to join the cause of various victims of oppression because they love to always be rooting for the underdog. The far-right also loves the under-dog arch but they don't go around trying to join desperate causes. Instead they manufacture their own narrative in which they are the perpetual victims. Much less noble, much more self-serving.
What's missing from this is China making a lot of soft calls to SK, basically saying 'we like you, we can pressure NK into a more peaceful position, invest with us, we're all Asians', and SK seems to be responding positively.
SK being closer to China would be a game changer for geopolitics, and they would need _very strong_ guarantees from China, so strong I don't think it's possible in the short term (unless NK has a regime change).
Do not assume that the rest of the world follows the US view of ethnic identity. Groups that would all be classified under “Asian” in the US would be considered different races in China. Regardless it is true that the PRC, even despite political differences, would be more in tune with the ROK culturally due to the long history of Korea falling under the influence of the Sinosphere which is something the United States should be more wary of as a competitive disadvantage when trying to maintain influence over the region.
I'm curious how the average Korean feels about what's going on in the US, or even how much they think about this stuff?
I know for example that in Canada and Europe, we're mostly all pretty disturbed about these trade disruptions, but I'm curious if Korean's feel equally 'put off'. Are they as dependent on the US as Canada and Europe?
We just hope Americans realize some day that the world is not taking advantage of them like Trump wants them to believe.
Korea is very dependent on America but this is a mutually beneficial situation. We are their customers and they are ours. Except Korea is more desparate so the US can afford to rip us off or kill contracts whenever it feels like it. We are always thankful to UN allies and the US for freeing SK from NK but Americans are not here to save us. They are here to snoop into beijing and control the pacific ocean.
Matters to exporters. Not to everyone. SK is a 2 Trillion $$$ economy. What numbers are involved here is in the 20-50 Billion a year. Not like life or death.
This is the crux of the problem. The value of US treasuries and the USD is based on the trust of the world in the US. Now, who knows what will happen to the USD. Will have to wait and see.
Freezing Russian assets was the beginning. Sanctions against Russia backfired, cutting them off from SWIFT encouraged alternatives as did Lloyd's of London refusing to insure Russian ships. All it did was make the non-NATO world develop alternatives.
Many comments focus on Trump, but I think the deeper problem lies with America itself. After all, America elected Trump twice.
I don't agree with Peter Zeihan on many of his views, but I think his point about the collapse of the global order set up by America is what's happening.
Trump is dismantling the global order/rule of laws established by America after WWII and the Cold War. I find it ironic that Ian Bremmer said the Chinese care more about the rule of law (established by America) than Americans do in this interview
> Ian Bremmer said the Chinese care more about the rule of law (established by America) than Americans do in this interview
I was confused why they didn't support Ukraine more. By not strongly condemning stuff like Crimea they seem to deeply undermine their position with regards to Taiwan
China knows NATO will turn on them if Russia is defeated. Also, the narrative that Russia launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine isn't strong outside the West. It's more complex, starting with Bush announcing Ukraine eligible for NATO membership, the Maidan coup, and 8 years of civil war against the 4 Eastern Oblasts that voted to secede from Ukraine.
Mmm,
I don't see how the historical context for the conflict is relevant
> 4 Eastern Oblasts that voted to secede from Ukraine
I mean.. "lol"
Most importantly for the current topic,
there is no international mechanism for regions to legally secede.
This is basically "not okay".
China can't possibly approve of that.
The whole Chinese claim to Taiwan rests on that not being okay.
Your first point makes more sense.
Maybe the goal is tieing up Europe with an idiotic conflict?
But they undermine themselves and don't really win much of anything
After two decades of reports on Trump's ties to Russian crime in his real estate and Russian government in his politics... You were confused why Trump and the Party of Trump do not strongly condemn Russia and regularly take stances that strengthen that geopolitical group's goals?
Both can be true. Historians can dig into economic conditions in interwar Germany, lack of deep sea ports, colonies, etc. But also: Adolf he one mad cookie.
The focus on trump is to not blame and upset the individual people. Reality is we all know that it's the Americans own fault, and basically what they wanted and obviously decided for and still do.
Converting allies into vassals is logical mid point of 'America First'. Best ROK can do is string US along and hope for a more benign successor regime.
Finally winning that Nobel peace prize by unifying all the countries that are not the US would be amazing. Independent California, Texas and some other parts left sorta-kinda OK-ish after the new American civil war can then also join that alliance later, achieving world peace. Trump gets a posthumous Nobel peace prize and each year we all celebrate by gold plating a hamburger or something.
It's not super crazy for all nations to agree on something. For instance with Gaza everyone except for the US kinda agreed what's going on is no good. I think tariffs are arguably even easier to agree on. I don't think there's a single nation that's ambivalent about the US tariffs - or feel it's "maybe not so bad"
Not sure if you're joking. The Gaza thing is pure virtue signal and you know it. It's easy for countries to recognize Palestine because recognizing
requires them to do nothing.
Reciprocal tariffs against the US is the opposite of nothing.
“Trump says the investments will be "selected" by him and controlled by the U.S., meaning Washington would have discretion over where the money will be invested.”
It's really astonishing to me how quickly we all (or, more specifically, Congress, which as done absolutely nothing to push back) accept that this is just how things work now.
Like the president deciding exactly where business investment should be made is the definition of a government command economy (remember that "Communism" bogeyman???), which used to be the antithesis of American economic policy (at least in theory), and now we're just all like "OK, cool". It's so sickening.
Right here on HN you'll find people that are arguing both that this is good and that the conservatives are rightfully attacking the federal institutions because the state got 'too big'. And in some cases those are the very same people!
They should effectively immediately freeze and potentially cancel any Korean investment in US and investigate all US companies based in their country. US behaving rogue should not go unpunished.
On November 5, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Trump even has the authority to impose tariffs. Nobody should make a deal until that's decided.
To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.
I'm Italian, used to our president mostly approving laws, commanding the armed forces (in theory, not in practice) and very few other things. And the best thing about our president is that it gets elected by the parliament requiring a very sensible majority. Thus pretty much all parties need to agree on one and they end up electing non-political figures (or politicians that have demonstrated high level of trust regardless of their party).
I think our system works great to be honest, and I already see the huge problems having an election-based president in Poland has with the government and president being from different parties and clashing with each other and the president vetoing for years a democratically elected government just to stir trouble.
In practice, the system of government in the US most closely resembles the system of government in Britain prior to Robert Walpole becoming the first prime minister in 1721. American culture places too much emphasis on talking and not enough on listening - it's very easy to claim to have the best constitution in the world if you pay no attention to what anyone else has done in the past two and a half centuries.
Italian system is multi-party system with hybrid proportional representation. Very different.
The US operates on a "separation of powers" FPTP winner-takes-all system: once one party has lined up control of both houses, the Presidency and the Supreme Court, they can do almost anything, and (thanks to SCOTUS control) without regard to constitutional legality.
The last remaining bulwark is the Democrat states, which is why Federal troops have been sent in to intimidate them.
>president vetoing for years a democratically elected government
I guess the president is democratically elected too. Clashing between political parties is normal, and one can argue that a system which makes them limit each other is just fine. The current layout (parliament majority belongs to A, the president is of B) may reverse in future. And then the same people who now claim that president's vetoes should be abolished may start to see it in a very different light.
One can argue that, if one doesn't look too closely how that "limiting of each other" tends to work in practice, and how it tends to work out in the end.
We have many, many examples of presidential republics, where both a president and a parliament have equal constitutional claim to represent the will of the people.
We see them reel from one constitutional crisis to another like a drunken sailor.
The US has fared comparatively well, as presidential republics go - so far. I don't know why, maybe because some groups have been more willing to yield to preserve the prestige of the institution as a whole. Given that it's the most prestigious presidential republic by a mile, that wouldn't be so surprising.
But it makes sense then, that this subservience will eventually get pushed further and further, until everything breaks.
> I guess the president is democratically elected too.
That's a bug, not a feature though.
What happens in practice is that you get president and government from different parties and they carry their political fights on instead of governing. The president vetoes the government just for the sake of sabotaging it for his parties political gains. We've had already multiple instances of president and government having almost independent foreign policies, crazy. Trump, e.g., has de facto been ignoring our prime minister Tusk (which by constitution should decide our foreign policy) and has been talking only with our president. And that's not on Trump, but our crappy Polish constitution for allowing this mess.
On top of that, governments are based on holding a majority votes, presidents just stay there whatever happens and whatever chaos they create.
I think that there should be a politically, democratically elected government whose job is to make laws, and the rest of institutions should be as bureaucratic and boring as possible, with as little political involvement as possible.
Again, I really like how in Italy or Germany the president is not involved into law and policy making. Ever noticed how all the countries that deviate towards autocracy...are all presidential based?
> To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.
It has. No US president ever went this far before.
Past US presidents have made remarks such as "If I'd tried to do that, I would have been impeached".
Congress has more power than the President but the current members of congress are not inclined to use it against Trump. Or at all.
Since SCMP was confiscated by the CCP it is constantly writing stories that undermine Korea, Japan and Australia, primarily for US and European audiences.
There are individual humans, and certainly mainly companies and countries, that could invest $350billion in the USA or the EU and not be destroyed. Buying land, building, expanding manufacturing or investing in new companies generally is considered a good thing!
Without commenting on any of the details or economics, the smart thing to have done would have been to make the $350bn thing be over 10 years and be slow to ramp up, then wait Trump out. I'm surprise he didn't do that.
I think this is what Japan did initially. Announce a huge number, 500 bn I think, and then slowly trickle out the news that it will be over 10 or so years.
But that didn't sit well with trump. There was news immediately that Japan must invest the whole amount immediately to escape tariffs.
I'm not sure a single country will to the "invest immediately" thing, like at all.
In the same way politician outside of the US trust anymore what Trump says when it comes to economics, a lot of countries seem to have started to response the same way. I.e. speak with Trump like he did with them, do hollow promises, and then backtrack and/or circumvent them.
The West has long been doing "industrial policy". At least since the end of WWII, and to some degree since before as well, but especially during the Cold War and even since then. You can say that the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. were all autocratic all that time if you like, but most wouldn't. Maybe today more people would feel that having an industrial policy makes a country autocratic, but keep in mind that industrial policy is not usually practiced by putting a gun to a business' executives' heads -- no, industrial policy is often practiced via incentives and disincentives, with force being very tenuously indirect.
and EU isn't even a country, and all(?/most) EU countries have the budged strictly sitting with the senate, i.e. outside of the hand of any of the leaders discussing deals with Trump
the chance that anything like that will pass those Senats also isn't exactly high
and all of this is public knowledge, so either Trump is incredible badly consulted to a point you wonder if it's malicious or more likely he doesn't care, and only care about a meaningless legally void promise he can present now probably some way smaller immediate subset of the promised actions. And then a few years down it's the "evil other countries" which he knowingly pressured to give him hollow promises they legally can't give, instead of it's seemingly bad/incompetent deal making (if you assume the goal is to actually make working deals and not to rail up people to have excuses for increasingly more extreme actions).
One condition that Washington has been broadly mandating is, when they ask for the money then it should be deposited in the treasury's account within a short period. Basically they control the pace of the investment and the detail is not even a part of the deal.
The leaders of countries have to deal with internal politics. Most People, with a capital P, do not like feeling abused and mugged, and will be angry at their leaders for acting so weak.
It seems that internal politics are winning out, at least in the moment, over the current US admins threats
No one needs to make an investment. The playbook—as all countries are figuring it out—to navigate the crisis is simple: agree in principle to the demands, let the narcissistic toddler self-pat, brag about how fantastic of a deal maker he is. Stall, delay to make things official. Let it all die down slowly. Need more time? How about blatant corruption like approving Trump Towers, or gifting a corporate jet? Or make a token investment, just enough to let him brag again.
What every country is doing is buying time. Just enough till the next election or (hopefully) sooner.
It should definitely never be overlooked how easy to manipulate he is with flattery, and by tiny (by standards of whole nations' economies) bribes that enrich his family company directly.
He has only been able to do what he has done because of the Republican bootlickers in Congress. If the Democrats can take both houses in the midterms they can shut him down.
Will there be a midterm? Will the national guard prevent elections from happening in the cities controlled by the Democrats where they are being deployed ensuring the "correct" outcome?
I'm starting to think that HNs soft prohibition against politics only applies to women and black people talking about their experiences in tech (disappeared.) At least four or five of these non-news items that just serve for endless anti-administration comments are hitting the front page every day. The Wikipedia page for goddamn Horst Wessel almost hit the front page last night, because according to people with George W. Bush's politics, everybody is a Nazi.
No, South Korea's new president saying something about an unfavorable trade treaty that hasn't happened yet is not news. Their last president declared martial law because he declared that the opposition party was subverted by Russian propaganda. The NYT, as they do, pretended not to know that it was wrong because US interests were hoping it would succeed.
And when you rail about how awful it was to raid a factory where Koreans on visas that didn't allow them to do physical work were doing physical work, and where one of them had been killed and another worker not from Korea cut in half in an accident; a site that was being reported over and over again for safety and workers rights violations, consider how that makes working people think of you.
Why do the outlets that you get your news from simply ignore things? Simply choose not to report on them? Instead we get "Somebody says something." You shouldn't see a story like that being reported as news unless there is nothing else going on. Israel is killing everyone in Gaza City right now.
But tariffs, though. Protectionism! Grover Norquist is smiling in Hell.
That being said, I understand that a lot of people are not from, in, or have any loyalty to the US. But US policy is not made for you. We've hollowed out our working population, and kept them alive with credit. America itself has to deleverage. AI is not going to save us, because it is stupid, and wringing productivity gains from it will be difficult and will not give us any relative advantage because it will be cheap to imitate. That's a couple trillion that we can expect to be wiped out in the very short term future. We need to take some medicine now (the wildly overvalued dollar has been our heroin for 50 years), and anyone who has been relying on US debt (whether in the form of US deficit spending on defense, or otherwise) to float their economies has to get off the teat.
We're a bad influence on SK anyway, and should never have been there. If they want to stop investing in the US they're free to, they're just going to feel it when they try to export to the US. If your economy will collapse when that happens, it's because your economy is making out better than our economy. Also, it's nothing like the IMF crisis to insist on a favorable trade deal. US elites have been bribed by ownership in foreign concerns not to insist. It'll still work - look at the people in office now, they love a bribe - but you have to renegotiate. That's how dirty business works; your counterparties are as trustworthy as the leverage you have over them. Nobody is going to cry over you being screwed because the people you bribed before are out of power.
It isn't immediately clear that the administration's heterodox approach to state capitalism is more destructive than what passes as orthodox. Personally I'm not a fan of either option. Given the general mainstream preference for interventionism, one could characterize it as a "progressive" approach to central planning.
A more coherent critique might lay out the shortcomings of both flavors of economic interventionism. Instead, we're stuck in a partisan debate over who has a better central planning approach. Maybe there are reasonable or pragmatic points to be made there, but admitting as much allows the possibility that perhaps Trump's interventions should be measured empirically, rather than rejected based on the a priori flaws of interventionism.
Partisans are free to pick and choose which statistics and time periods they feel best illustrate their case. Easy to see how this devolves into incoherence.
US unemployment is up, inflation is up, tourism is down, defence sales are being cancelled admidst the largest procurement expansion in history, foreign investment is down, business confidence has been shattered by an incoherent and arbitrarily changing tarrif regime.
Oh and the President is advocating that businesses should stop quarterly reporting...
Is it is more or less destructive than the alternative destruction? Who is it more economically destructive for? Over what time period is it more or less destructive than the alternative interventionism? Is 6 months a meaningful time horizon?
It becomes muddled very quickly. I would appeal for a consistent approach which opposes both forms of destructive interventionism.
>“Without a currency swap, if we were to withdraw $350 billion in the manner that the U.S. is demanding and to invest this all in cash in the U.S., South Korea would face a situation as it had in the 1997 financial crisis,” he said through a translator.
So do a currency swap? South Korea isn't failing, do surely there would people to offer liquidity or financing to make it possible.
There aren't a lot of counterparties to a $350Bn currency swap. SK is manoeuvring to make the Fed offering the swap and thus taking the FX risk as a requirement for this deal, which is I suspect why you're reading about this.
FX swaps are where Korea fronts up with however many trillion KRW, giving it to the Fed (or whoever else, but the Fed would be the only counterparty that would be able to accommodate that size), the Fed then hands over the USD to the Koreans.
Presumably, the Koreans would then invest that USD.
Then at some point in the future the trade would be unwound and each side would receive their own currency back.
There's no currency risk in the trade for either side (unless one side defaults).
Of course there is currency risk, that's why the swap would get marked to market. There is no "currency risk" in the sense that you are locked into an exchange rate and (in case of fixed for fixed) the interest rates on the principal, but there is still currency risk.
It's like saying there is no price risk in a long term LNG contract.
Even though I disagree with your implied claim that trust is eroding, you don't need trust for it to work. Economic principals cause it to naturally work. As you move along a price curve reducing the price you typically will make more sales.
No, for some products trust is more important than price. If the price is low but you can't trust it to work when you need it most then the price is irrelevant.
Not everyone is irrelevant to the American market. The negotiations around American tariffs are not relevant if you are not selling to America in the first place.
If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country.
Depending on how the one country treats the others, it might be ok - like it is kind of ok for some animals to live in a zoo, I guess. Or it could turn out very bad - all other countries becoming slave colonies of the one that rules the world.
Currently it seems like only two countries are really taking part in the AI race. The USA and China.
On a political level, I am not sure if there is still time for the rest of the world to try and avoid becoming 100% dependent on them. It looks like there is not even awareness of the issue.
On a personal level, it is an interesting question, how one should brace themselves for the times ahead.
It seems like the big improvements in the current AI flavor are done. It happened very quickly, and so did the diminishing returns. It's amazing compared to 2 years ago, it's great compared to a year ago, it's not that different to 6 months ago.
Lots of room in optimization and figuring out how to actually use it usefully. But I don't think any one country is now poised to take a leap ahead on this stuff. And Chinese researchers kind of showed that once the technique was out of the bag, catching up wasn't hard.
AI will empower the service industries, but I don't see it having much impact past administrative efficiency in all other industries relevant to international trade. It won't make minerals more abundant, it won't make farmland more available, for example. It could empower manufacturing a bit but they are bottlenecked by physical resources, supply chain access and other physical constraints as well so there are limits there.
I also think AI is ubiquitous now, no one country will "win". Maybe someone has a breakthrough, but information is globalized, it wouldn't take long for the technology to spread.
Again the actual constraints I believe will be physical. Who has the most chips, the most power, the most space etc, to run the AI.
> If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country
History is replete with these supposed silver bullets. (See: Marinetti.) They rarely pan out that way in the long run.
And if AGI really is that level of civilisation changer, the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)
> the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)
People are loyal (to whatever degree they're actually loyal), because it is a monkey virtue. Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything? If we're not smart enough to carefully design the AGI because we're stumbling around just trying to invent any AGI at all, we won't know how to make loyalty fundamental to its mind at all. And it's not as if it evolved from monkeys such that it would have loyalty as a vestige of its former condition.
> Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything?
I'm using the word loyal loosely. Replace it with controlled by if you prefer. (If it's not controlled by anyone, the question of which country it originates in is doubly moot.)
Sure. But I don't think I'd trust the leash made by the same guy who accidentally invented God. At least, I wouldn't trust that leash to hold when he put it around God's neck.
While eventually, given some absurd amount of time, we might learn to control these things, will we learn to control them before we've created them? Could we survive long enough to learn to do that, if we create them first? Legislation and regulation might slow down their creation sufficiently *IF* we only needed 12 months or 5 years or whatever, but if we instead need centuries then those safeguards won't cut it.
My only consolation, I think, is that I truly believe humans far too stupid to invent AGI. Even now, there are supposed geniuses who think LLMs are a some stepping stone to AGI, when I see no evidence that this is the case. You're all missing the secret sauce.
It's mind blowing to witness the speed and rapidity with which we have
* Completely alienated key allies via an erratic and unpredictable tariff policy
* Significantly undermined faith in US economic data and fiscal policy via overt politicization of key economic institutions
* Increased the deficit by almost $3 trillion after vowing to reduce the deficit
* Signaled far and wide that pay for play is the new norm, whether for pardons or favourable policy. Preferably paid in crypto, but with in kind payments being acceptable.
Is there any wonder that other countries are unwilling to trust the US? The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration, but who knows!
This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China. Every year, neighboring countries of China like Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam sent envoys to Imperial China, paying gold, women, and exotic products, in return for recognition of their sovereignty (subject to the supreme authority of Chinese emperor), military protection, and access to trade routes within China.
It is interesting to see the resurgence of such imperial practices in modern-day America. I think it worked out quite well for the Tang dynasty, but arguably that was because all East Asian feudal states were authoritarian monarchy back then. A logical next step would be for POTUS to declare himself as the supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent.
> This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China. Every year, neighboring countries of China like Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam sent envoys to Imperial China, paying gold, women, and exotic products, in return for recognition of their sovereignty (subject to the supreme authority of Chinese emperor), military protection, and access to trade routes within China.
The most irritating thing is that I specifically didn't want to see a return to form for this for China, but I never imagined that America in the 21st Century would somehow get there first. It was just out of fucking nowhere.
How could people NOT see this coming?
The prospects for the working class disappeared when you moved manufacturing to China. The population was subsequently dumbed down because there was no money for schools(except for the rich elite).
Probably because you’re talking about a whole different thing than what I was responding to. America shaking down Japan and Korea to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars wasn’t even on my bingo card for 2025, but perhaps your bingo card was more prophetic.
> but perhaps your bingo card was more prophetic
Usually I read these “how could you/they not see this coming?” statements less in reference to a specific occurrence and more like “Given this man’s profound and enduring disinterest in history, culture, economics and the global political process, along with his demonstrated venality, how could you not see that bad things would happen, this being an example…”
> prospects for the working class disappeared when you moved manufacturing to China
I think the prospects of the working class died with the crisis signaling the end of the USSR and by extension communist/socialist circles. After all it was the only counter-balance that instilled a baseline fear of violent uprising from the workers class in the heart of the wealthy class.
And in a way the final nail came with the free reign liberal policies that followed with Thatcher e Reagan, not so much about offshoring in itself.
The true problem is money in politics. No, this has nothing to do with Musk. Musk is just visible, but it's been going on in the US for a long, long time.
Other countries have limits on campaign donations, for example at the federal level in Canada:
* no donations are allowed by corporations
* individuals may only donate $1750 to the party, and $1750 to the local candidate
* people running for office can donate to their own campaign, to the tune of $5000
* leadership candidates (eg, for Prime Minister) can donate $25k to their own campaign
That's it.
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=lim&do...
All of these donations are heavily regulated, amounts of $100 I think require disclosure.
Another example, lobbyists must be registered. If you have lunch with a lobbyist, they can't pay for your lunch, you can't pay for theirs.
All of this takes corporate influence and most importantly the need for "big money" out of the equation.
Things such as third party advertising are covered too:
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=thi/ec...
With overall limits at the federal level from all third party contributions at $600k, and $5k per district:
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&document=i...
You want the "working class" to have more of a say? Make candidates beholden to normal people to get elected. Destroy the machinery of big-business donations for campaign, and campaign management funding.
That's it. That's the biggest, most significant fix, right there.
>...After all it was the only counter-balance that instilled a baseline fear of violent uprising from the workers class in the heart of the wealthy class.
Are people claiming that the USSR provided a valid counter-balance for the working class? At any rate, if the chances of political violence have actually decreased in democracies due to the end of the USSR, isn't that a good thing?
Yes! Western states had to ensure that life was better in a Capitalist country. Hence unions were tolerated, along with human rights, rule of law, anti corruption etc etc.
Unions have never been tolerated - they seized what little power they have through actual economic force. The kind that no king or government can oppose for long.
Human rights and fighting graft don't have very much to do with the USSR, unless you ignore the centuries or history there before the Communist Manifesto was even written.
Neither Trump, nor anybody in the Republican party is, and has never been, and will never be some kind of champion of the working class. If you're in it, you're just a useful idiot to him.
What you're seeing isn't a consequence of the working class finally acting in its interests by getting behind a billionaire slumlord and conman. What you're seeing is the consequence of billionaires figuring out that if you distract the working class with divisive identity politics and plain old bullshit (Trans athletes! The gays grooming your children! Antifa supersoldiers stealing elections! Socialist death panels killing granny!), you can swindle it out of anything.
Trump and his friends would have had no legs in a society that hasn't been thoroughly and irreparably broken by this stupidity and the normalization thereof.
I didn’t say people are acting in their best interest.
> This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China.
The two systems are fundamentally different. In the ancient Chinese tributary system, based on the principle of "厚往薄来" China's reciprocation had to exceed the value of the tribute, thereby providing tangible benefits to the tributary states. This practice even led to later restrictions on the frequency of tribute missions from certain countries
> A logical next step would be for POTUS to declare himself as the supreme leader of the world
Well, he is already positioning himself for being at least the US DFL, already suggesting a 3rd illegal mandate:
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
And the US, being the most powerful country in the world, barred, maybe China, the next step is not so far-fetched.
I wish the western allies would dump their US bonds to drive bond yields into the ground and threaten US budgets, like the military one, that relying on cheap debt.
But this is a difficult decision to make, do you sacrifice possible (less likely) future earnings to destabilize a super power to save it from fascism but in turn risking a power vacuum to your disadvantage?
Id take this gamble but im a mere democratic citizen, that doesnt care about global pro-fascism support, like other right leaning governments do.
>I wish the western allies would dump their US bonds to drive bond yields into the ground
Dumping bonds would increase supply and drive down prices, but that increases yields because yields is the difference between the price you paid vs the face value of the bond.
*Bond yields for the US.
When US bonds enter the secondary market at a discount, buyers are inclined to prefer them over the US-offerend ones who need to raise interest rates to stay competitve, so making them more expensive for the US.
Bond yield is the return an investor will realize on a bond, so driving down prices decreases yields. Sure, it can increase the absolute value of yield as it heads into the negative...
No, because "yield" almost always refers to yield to maturity.
Undermining the USD doesn't help. Vacuum politics are not better. Vacuum politics lead to where we are today. Too many years of choosing "the least bad option" doesn't lead to a good place.
Let's take all this negative energy and do something better than criticize. Let's harness the energy into good action. What's something we all can agree is good for everybody and start a discussion around that? I'm not saying all crticism is a bad thing. I'd just like to see us all work together to accomplish something good.
I'll try to get the ball rolling, but if somebody has a better ball, I'm happy to go there.
I prefer free trade. I think everybody benefits if we lower trade barriers. But it needs to be "fair". Allowing corporation A to dump hazardous refuse cheaply into the river, but denying the same to corporation B is not fair to B and not all around good. So are there any good ideas about how to allow goods from different jurisdictions to compete by the same rules without Nationalistic interference?
They hardly need to dump them. Merely not buy as much as they're expected to.
It may have happened during the week of "liberation day" when tariffs were announced, resulting in reduced bill buys.
https://fortune.com/2025/05/11/bond-vigilantes-most-powerful...
Unfortunately there are all kinds of interdependencies that would make such a move quite risky. But you're right in that that is one way in which the screws can be put on.
On the other hand, continuing to hold the bonds might also be risky...
Include also gunboat diplomacy, like done to Japan (“black ships”) or opium to China.
I think what's most interesting to me is that they're also the party who's favorite amendment was written specifically to quell the rise of such leaders. They have explicitly talked about how that amendment was to protect the US from demagogues and autocrats.
They've been fairly quiet about that recently and I'm curious how they'll make that pivot. It's only a matter of time before someone on the left starts suggesting their constituents exercise that right in at least a symbolic nature. I've seen a rise in the exercise of this right by socialist groups and other radicals. But even if it is all symbolic it sets the stage for a powder keg moment. But if the right doesn't restrict this right then how far can they go and keep their heads?
It's morbidly fascinating and terrifying to me how they so successfully turned the right's worst nightmares into wet dreams. I do wonder, how far can it go? But I've never not wanted to know the answer to a question so much in my life. Please, I do not want to find out[0]
[0] no, you can't literally answer this. It can only be learned through the experience. So don't reply to me as if you have an exact answer, you only have speculation. But if you have a time machine, I'd appreciate next week's lotto numbers (and the week after ;)
> But if the right doesn't restrict this right then how far can they go and keep their heads?
They've already started talking about banning trans people from owning guns (based on the wildly bigoted premise that being trans is a dangerous mental illness).
If that goes through, I would expect to see other queer people next on the list, with similar justifications.
Or possibly they'd just jump straight to banning all left-wing people from owning guns, based on their declaration that we're "domestic terrorists". (Yes, they're talking about doing that, too.)
> "They've already started talking about banning trans people from owning guns"
They've (I mean sitting Congressional representatives, not randos) have escalated their rhetoric considerably since that (*is* it rhetoric?)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... ("MAGA lawmaker calls to forcefully mass institutionalize trans people: ‘We have to get them off the streets!’" (September 17))
> "“We have to do something about this. We have to treat these people. We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other,” he insisted."
> "“I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country,” Jackson concluded. “That’s going to do great damage to normal, hard-working, law-abiding people.”"
> "The hard-right lawmaker, meanwhile, is not the only member of Congress who has seemingly called for transgender people to be locked up in mental institutions."
> "Speaking to reporters earlier this week, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) – who spearheaded the effort to bar trans women from using Capitol Hill bathrooms that don't correspond with their sex assigned at birth – repeatedly used anti-trans slurs while saying transgender people are “mentally ill” and “should be in a straitjacket.”"
Actual Nazi language. Aligns with the Fox News hosts talking about bringing back Aktion T4,
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... ("Fox News host apologizes for remarks about killing mentally ill homeless people")
> "Kilmeade added: “Or involuntary lethal injection or something — just kill ‘em.”"
Stop giving them ideas!
> A logical next step would be for POTUS to declare himself as the supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent
My brother in Christ, you Americans do this already and have been doing this at least since the end of WW2. Ever wondered why communism couldn't spread in Northern Europe, South America or many places of Asia?
> supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent.
You mean just make what is already de-facto practice, de-jure ?
Yay, how benevolent our new masters are.
> The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration, but who knows!
I’ve been hearing people pray this is a one time aberration for the last 10 years. At this point, the ride seems way more likely to get bumpier than not for the next 10 years.
Indeed, we already heard that in 2001:
- Bush was hated and considered a national shame.
- The invasion of Iraq while lying about WMD and against the UN vote, eroded international trust.
- The Patriot act was supposed to be temporary be was extended again and again.
- We got the reveal of mass spying by Snowden.
And... nothing. Obama didn't do anything about the wars, mass spying, or the patriot act. He was an elegant break from the dumbness, but didn't stop the elevator to keep climbing after him, just paused it for a few years.
All of it was just stepping stones after stepping stones.
It's not a one-time aberration; it's a sign of the times.
It's not the message anybody wants to hear, but until the other party makes a clear and irrevocable promise to cancel the tariffs / walk back the tantrum diplomacy if they return to office, I am willing to believe they might not. If the emotional chords being struck by the tough guy act are so positive that they're counterbalancing the negatives from reality, then it is as likely to be imitated as reversed.
The Democrats don't know what they are after the election, and they might even still win the next one just through the power of doing nothing and watching the current administration flush the country down the toilet, so I have no faith that they feel the need to distance themselves from tariffs or what other boneheaded policies have been passed. They'd only do it if they had to to win an election. They'd never do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
The Democratic party is just plain screwed. They lose supporters if they give plans, they lose supporters if they don't give plans; they lose supporters if they compromise, or if they stand form; they lose supporters if they're dogmatic, or if they're pragmatic; they lose supporters if they run a man, or if they run a woman, or a white person, or a colored person. Even when they do everything right, they lose supporters because their economic plan is "too complicated" or "uninspiring".
Meanwhile, the Republican party is an outright lifestyle now. Policy does not matter. Ideology barely matters insomuch as you can sell the charade under the guise of "strongman good". Consistency need not apply.
As a quick example: The sitting president ran on exposing the child sex trafficking ring of Epstein. It was one of their biggest rallies. Once elected, he ordered the FBI to destroy records with his name. Then he coordinated with numerous cronies who are not only denying his involvement now, but attempting to say it did not exist at all.
And their party just... Does it. The conversation is dead. The talking heads say how rediculous it all sounds and how glorious leader cannot be questioned. And the voters pretend they have no idea what you mean when you point out the change.
They live in a warped reality. Though I won't pretend the GOP has not long been the party of pedophiles, electing convicted or highly suspected officials to legislation repeatedly.
Meanwhile the Democrats must be absolutely perfect. Every tiny mistep, every perceived half-measure or improper leads to entire sects of their base boycotting them. See the last election with Israel/Palestine - how well boycotting the Democrats worked for both us and them.
[dead]
On Israel/Palestine issue, it was not a "tiny misstep". I will remember Joe Biden as "Genocide Joe" for the rest of my life. My perception (naively) of both parties has changed, but I don't trust Democrats anymore because of this issue. They are all the same..
Oh yes, all the same.
I just now remember Joe Biden openly taking bribes in the office, on camera. I remember his "Joe for Life" jokes as he paraded "Joe Biden 2028" hats. I remember his attempted coup on January 6th. I remember him deploying the military on domestic soil against US citizens and proclaiming random tariffs across our allied countries that change on a weekly basis.
I remember him being found civily liable for the rape of a woman. And referred to in multiple court documents on the rape of a 13 year old girl. And in the flight records and friend circle of a child sex trafficker. And that he tried to cover that sex trafficking ring up.
I remember him denying Fox news access to the White House or pentagon. And his administration's overt threats to take news stations off the air or deny them business mergers for not covering him in positive light.
And I definitely and absolutely remember him publishing an AI video on Twitter of a purged, captured Palestine turned into a gaudy gold resort for rich Americans.
Oh. Wait.
whataboutism..
How in the world is that whataboutism? You said they were they same, this is a direct retort by enumerating a mere fraction of the enormous list of behaviors enacted by an actual fascist takeover of the US government.
Biden did not handle the Palestine situation appropriately, but the utter audacity to claim the solution is the death of tens of millions of people through the demolition of aid and trade and the total regression of all climate change mitigation and global stability policy by aiding the installment of an outright, self-stated dictator...
I am so utterly tired of this rhetoric. It's like looking at Hitler or Stalin and saying "well... His opponent wasn't Christened by God himself."
Maybe, just maybe, we should aim for "basic decency and operating in the same objective reality to keep the basic tenants of peaceful society operating" before "go to war with a nuclear power over their religious jihad."
Not sure what you are referring to in your last sentence.
Democrats enabled genocide just like Republicans are doing the same now. I don't like or endorse current government and Trump but saying that we should support democrats because they are "decent" and talk in a politically correct way is wrong as well.
If you're seriously suggesting the difference between the two is political correctness, it's difficult to believe you're here in good faith.
What would be the systematic changes to better protect democracy and a functioning civil society? I'm certainly no expert myself but I must imagine there are a lot of literature and experts.
It also helps reading about different countries, their histories and various forms of government and practices.
It's probably hard to go from dictatorship and totalitarianism to strong judicial systems and democracy. Instead you get a line of successive different dictators.
> Obama didn't do anything about the wars
He pulled out of Iraq. He also found and killed Osama. That was the thing that GWB started the wars for in the first place but utterly failed at.
> mass spying, or the patriot act
You need a Congress willing to work with you. The Republican party's only objective was to "make him a one-term president".
Ironically, this sounds like the kind of thing some supporters of Trump said, and caused things to get even worse.
What is your call to action after demoralising people with any hope of change?
Run away if you can is the only practical, actionable thing one can do at this stage. And few people can actually do it.
I have, myself, rejected all mission offers to the US since January, but I have the luxury of not living there.
From the other side of the pond, the US future looks very grim, and I have no knowledge at my disposal that lets me see a path toward reversion that doesn't go through a violent phase.
It's a systemic problem; the POTUS is a symptom. And I don't see how such a large and complex system is going to get fixed fast enough to prevent something terrible from happening.
After that, it will go back to something more peaceful. But I wouldn't want to be there during the transition.
The time to act was 20 years ago I'm afraid.
24 years ago, and someone did act. I see this all as a result of 9/11 and Bin Laden & company giving the US just what it needed to end up authoritarian. Effectively he won that day and managed to damage the USA in ways that it did not have a mechanism to effectively deal with. As a result the USA has made one own goal after another and it does not look like they've decided to stop doing so.
The forces that created today, are deeper - to the point that they used 9/11, as opposed to being defined by 9/11.
The crux of the issue today is fundament information economy on the right, that can support any narrative, even if it contradicts anything that came was said before, or has no basis in reality.
Trump has a 92% approval rating amongst republicans from a recent Fox poll. Other polls have him at 80%+.
It is a party truly running on faith, and had no need to traffic in facts.
This is the fountainhead of all the power that allows the situation to continue.
You too ?
I’ve been looking at this and have stopped talking to friends in the US, because my urge is to tell them to GTFO.
And I feel like I’m going to sound crazy to them.
But the thing I keep remembering is a conversation with a student in the UK, post Brexit, but while they were figuring out how to do execute.
They were so earnest and hopeful, that the country would find a way through. So much so, that even with a background in finance and macroeconomics, I felt that maybe they would thread the needle.
I don’t see a path to the midterms, forget anything beyond that - and it seems so extreme to state, that I am quiet.
> And I feel like I’m going to sound crazy to them.
I'd talk anyway.
Even just hearing what it looks like from the outside may help, even help those who don't leave, even those who may have voted for Trump.
I don't know what will happen. An incompetent dictator may be stopped before becoming a dictator, or be easily overthrown, but if they cement their power… then my reference point is Pol Pot.
Kicking out all the undocumented migrants and finding local political undesirables to force onto the same farms feels very plausible, and will lead to famine.
>It's a systemic problem
Some people argue turbo-capitalism is inherently unstable and will lead to fascism. A systemic problem id like to see more discourse about, or what is the systemic problem you meant?
Marx argued about the inherent instability of capitalism.
> Some people argue turbo-capitalism is inherently unstable and will lead to fascism.
I could even agree with this. The only problem is that ALL opponents of turbocapitalism, if you look closely, suggest simply skipping a step.
There is massive difference between Obama and Trump. Between project 2025, MAGA and literally anything Obama. The way Republicans back then acted, refused literally any cooperation and made bad faith putrages ober everything was also something else.
Remember when tan suit was not presidential enough? When saying that Martin Trayon looked like hypothetical Obama son in tepid statement somehow crossed taboo of what preaident can say?
America did not became like it is during Obama and not even Bush. It did lost some trust due to Iraq, sure, it was still not what it is now. But Obama being black did broke conservatives minds.
> Republicans back then acted, refused literally any cooperation
The reps denied Obama a supreme court nomination for almost 2 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland
This was planed long ago with alot of foresight and malignent intent. Trump is only the lucky idiot stumbling on fertile ground and accelerating the process.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
Yes, but critical policies stayed the way they were, and the social order didn't smooth back to pre 2001. There was no move in that direction.
It was a short break, not a rebuilding.
Hence, what's happening today is not going to be a one time event. It's been escalating since 2001, and at best, stagnating under Obama.
You can go as far back as Reagan or maybe even Nixon (although the The Heritage Foundation was born due to some people thinking he was too soft), the bucket does not stop at Bush Jr.
The situation fundamentally starts in the 1960s.
The root cause, or primary driver of the situation today is the exit of the Republican Party and the conservative media/political sphere from bipartisan politics and facts.
These two forces are the ones which rotate the flywheel that powers everything else.
Act in a bipartisan manner? Vote against the party lines ? - get primaried.
Cover something that doesn’t match the prevailing narrative ? Is not of utility to the party ? Be ignored.
Have a narrative that sells and can be used, but is absolutely bonkers or inaccurate? Doesnt matter, it’s going to be used.
This force constantly drove the base further and further right, removed any links to facts or reason at scale.
This in turn supports partisanship at all cost politics, and support for policies that have little to do with complex reality but everything to do with preferred narratives.
Trump has a 92% approval rating amongst republicans from a recent Fox Poll.
You work really really hard to tie conservative project to Obama. No, this is on republicans and conservatives 100%, they worked hard to achieve this and succeeded. The democrats and Obama have their own issues, but them not being saints does not make the above untrue.
I agree it was long term project, it took decades of propaganda and hard work on conservative side. But like, Obama was not part of conservative project nor step toward Project 2025.
This type of comment is a problem.
Instead of trying to evaluate the argument on its merits:
- There is a long-term systemic problem, POTUS is a symptom.
- Democracy has been at risk for 20 years in the US, starting with the destruction of Habeas Corpus after 9/11, under thunderous applause.
- The opposition has been weak at best, and didn't show its value by attempting to reverse the worse of the trends when they had the chance. So nobody trusted them anymore. They didn't represent something to rally for, only the opposite of what you didn't want.
You attempt to put me in a tribe and judge me on that.
Except... I live in Europe. I don't care about your tribes, I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events. It's not an unexpected surprise.
Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.
> I live in Europe. I don't care about your tribes,
That is irrelevant. Regardless of where you live, your argument amounted to working really hard here to blame republican policies, radicalization and behavior on Obama. You tied together things that were in fact not alike at all.
>I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events
And insisting that Obama is in any way relevant to that long chain is either bad faith or just disinterest in what happened.
> Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.
But it is you who want to make it into that, except that "bad guys" are any random American politician you can think of. It does actually matter who did what.
As another European: Obama didn't make things (much) worse, but he also didn't do anything to really arrest the slide even though he had the opportunity to do so. At the same time: I realize that in many ways his hands were tied but he also simply never tried, when he could have. Similar to how it took him 7 long months to speak up when he really should have spoken up much, much earlier. Right now the whole democratic wing of the US establishment looks like it is along for the ride, rather than that they are fighting tooth and nail to arrest the further descent into madness.
> he had the opportunity to do so
Could he have done more? Sure. But he spent a lot of political capital getting the ACA done. Then he followed traditional political decorum when the GOP pushed him around that in hindsight was a mistake. If all the rules both written and unwritten are going to be thrown out, the obviously it's best for the person who throws them out.
I'm more pissed off at Obama's inaction in the last 7 months than about what he did during his tenure as president. He's still in 'nice guy' mode, we don't need nice guys right now, we need counterweight, and soon.
> I'm more pissed off at Obama's inaction in the last 7 months
This. There’s a deep vacuum of leadership in the Democratic Party. Obama is a widely trusted figure on the progressive side and has nothing to lose by saying plainly what everyone can see. Only Gavin Newsom has demonstrated a willingness to do this. At the Federal level, though, the leadership is MIA. I mean Obama owes no one anything now; but I do wish he would just say what needs to be said.
Again, following traditional decorum where past POTUS's usually stay out of the way for the current. Of course, at this point we all know the traditions are dead, and I agree Obama should be leading wherever he can.
This is one of those break-the-glass situations.
The main argument is "it's been in the mix for 20 years", and part of demonstrating it has been was to state that even the Obama administration didn't do much to stop it, so it kept escalating.
Not only I don't conflate the two, but you make the whole Obama note the center of this discussion, while it was there for the purpose of illustration.
This is how tribe politics work and how the US fell to the best populists instead of trying to tackle society's problems.
I have no interest in discussing with you anymore, since you don't seem interested in talking about ideas, only find an enemy to your tribes.
From the point of view of us Europeans even the IRA was a crisis, so I see what Trump is doing trade-wise as a continuation of a longer US tradition. Biden also continued Trump's decision to keep the WTO's binding resolution mechanisms from functioning.
Don't forget that Obama showed to the whole world what american security assurance actually is, enabled putin and is one of the main reason for 2022 russian invasion. True Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Trump is not an aberration, he just not bothering to hide his actual face.
Yip, it was he who wimped out of the USA's obligations (stated and inferred) in the Budapest Declaration when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.
It's actually hard for a nation with 14 aircraft carriers to stuff-up this badly.
It’s the same problem today as it was then. It is actually hard if you’re a democracy answerable to your people.
Are you willing to bet even a 1% chance to trade Los Angeles for Vladivostok? Warsaw for St. Petersburg? Because Putin is certainly willing to play chicken. Obama, Biden and (maybe?) even Trump are not.
Then expect a world full of nuclear armed, partially failing authoritarian countries.
At minimum I fully expect South Korea to go nuclear in the near future. I wouldn’t be surprised if Japan follows.
IMO the damage internationally is permanent unless constitutional changes are made to prevent such events in the future. The trust is completely gone.
The risk of making any deals that could be overturned in just four years is too great for many in the private sector and also for international treaties.
This is the key.
Germany founded the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht) to make sure they don't go Fascist again.
The US needs a similar structure with similar protections (term limits, mandatory retirement age, 2/3 majority needed for nominations and shared power of naming the members).
And it's explicitly a court for constitutional matters, not random cases.
I can’t think of any examples from history of nations which have had dictatorships take over from democratic systems and then had things improve without revolution or war as an impetus for change. I would be very happy for someone to point out one, but it seems to me that the rot of which trump is a symptom will likely take a significant blood letting to correct, if indeed it is to be corrected.
Really it's a question of where the threshold lies.
The American President is quite elderly, clearly diminished, and the ravages of age are inescapable no matter how beloved you are. However much Americans seem happy to tolerate his particular brand of authoritarianism, the horizon on his rule cannot realistically be more than a decade out.
Is that enough time to consolidate power? If not, is there a successor who can complete his objectives?
Neither seems clear to me, and one can at least imagine a world where things tick back after he exits the political stage.
Vance seems more than willing and able to continue MAGA.
Willing? Perhaps. Able? Hmmm...
As in, assume the throne and carry on the agenda? Or be accepted by the MAGA population?
Yeah, people keep talking about the danger Trump represents but Trump is nothing without tens of millions of enthusiastic supporters. Rank and file conservatives represent the real risk to the country. None of this would be possible without them and after Trump, they will do what they have always done. Do everything they can to find someone even worse. There will be no introspection or lessons learned. Just doubling down on degeneracy.
Remember the story of Nero watching Rome burn, and asking how could he and everyone involved be so fool? Well I'm not surprised any more. Feels like a perfectly believable story :/
Don't forget the 800,000 layoffs so far this year.
He did say we'd get tired of all the winning.
> The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration
It's literally the second go-around.
Trust wasn't completely lost the first time. Because of the hope that you mentioned.
But now, unlike then, the rest of world is taking note that the USA is simply going to be like this periodically, and planning accordingly.
James David says hello.
Also the first time around, there was also a contingent of old school Republicans around him acting as a guard rail.
> James David says hello.
After some googling and following the leads, I have come to the conclusion that this must refer to USA Vice President James David "J.D." Vance.
> The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration, but who knows!
Bit late for that.
For real. Bud, he was elected twice. And the Republican party survived Bush.
The supporters of these lunatics don't look into any of that. It's Americans destroying America basically out of spite for "the other side". These people are terrorists in my opinion, but they view themselves as the true Americans.
> Increased the deficit by almost $3 trillion after vowing to reduce the deficit
After vowing to and dismantling half the federal government services, ostensibly in order to reach the goal of a reduced deficit...
Don’t forget DOGE, brainchild of Elon Musk, promising to save trillions from the deficit but ended up leaving with a wake in billions of waste and turmoil. A U.S. Senate investigation revealed that DOGE is responsible for at least $21.7 billion in taxpayer waste.
https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/...
Musk has verified blood on his hands: https://archive.is/YknTv
You forgot to mention the insane immigration policy during a time when birth rates have plummeted below replacement rates.
> The only hope we have is that the current bout of madness in Washington DC is a one time aberration
Or even just a two-time thing.
2016 to 2020 would have been a one time aberration.
Trump is working hard to remove any notions that the USA are "leaders of the free world", and making it into the unapologetic "mafia boss of the American Empire".
> leaders of the free world
That ship pretty much sank last time you voted for this mastermind. Nobody in their mind mind still thinks that about the US other than themself. Sorry
A good policy of enlightening all the fools who imagined that some kind of "free world" exists.
Yes. The strength of the dollar is based on stability
Trump is a symptom not a cause. The right has been planning this for many decades and many think it started with Powell Memorandum, 1971.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
> Trump is a symptom not a cause.
I can’t remember where I read it and searching isn’t finding anything.
Someone stated that extreme times lead to extreme leaders. The way to lead in extreme times is to be more extreme.
Removing Trump would not solve America’s problems.
But it just might stop them from getting much worse still. 7 Months. That's not a whole lot of time. Now extrapolate with more and more of the brakes disabled.
We're not even in "extreme times". There's no major wars, the economy is strong, we're recovering from recent disasters better than most nations.
Literally everything here is self inflicted. The "extreme times" are just the rhetoric pushed by the Republican party, constantly making up new bogeyman about blood rivers in the streets of Chicago and trans hypnosis on children.
Meanwhile real extreme times are sneaking around beneath the surface, decades away but in clear sight, and the Republican party calls it a hoax.
> the economy is strong,
In what way? The stock market is not the economy.
There's no way the U.S. economy can completely weather what's going on.
Other countries will be pulling back and switching as much as possible.
> Other countries will be pulling back and switching as much as possible.
Yes, because of US actions, the US being unreliable and unpridictable.
In November, when people voted, the economy was relatively strong and things (return or manufacturing, balance in the dual mandate) we're looking good; before the innumerable self-inflicted gunshots.
We do not live in "extreme times".
And the weaker the US gets, the less other countries will put up with its bullshit.
No, the US has completely and utterly destroyed all credibility it had. It is a farce.
There is no hope for it to return. US allies have credible evidence that the American populace are untrustworthy, uncaring, and frankly, stupid.
The only way for the US to restore credibility is to prosecute. And then survive another 100 years without doing it again.
The remaining influence it has economically and militarily should be considered to be "running on fumes."
US allies are looking for an exit strategy and aren't going to reconsider. Russia won.
I fully anticipate this to be downvoted, I don't care. You are coping if you think America can pull itself out of this.
This is a very silly take. It's going to take America 100 years to restore credibility? It didn't even take post war Germany that long.
As an US American living outside the US and just spending last week at a tech conference with nearly no US Americans there; this subject was pretty popular to overhear. Essentially, people are asking whether anyone should take the US seriously anymore, as a tourist destination, a place to continue career/education, a political ally, etc.
The gist was that the US is cooked from a reputation point of view. Whether that has any meaningful impact is yet to be seen.
Don't forget: as a tech partner. It's all momentum right now, and true, there is a lot of that. But lots of little conservative decisions are beginning to add up.
Who cares what people asking? America's reputation has long been built on the fact that America has the largest economy, the largest army, and does whatever the f.сk it wants.
The thing is that "does whatever the f*ck it wants" might have negative consequence in regards to "America has the largest economy". If the current GDP growth trends continue, it looks that China will surpass the America on this front unless there are significant changes in either country.
I’m hoping we finally see more investment and talent shift to Europe.
Why would they go there? Well, except in situations where they're not needed in America due to a lack of talent?
People don't go to America because the American president is a charming and polite gentleman. They go there because a talented factory worker can easily make 150k a year, and a talented software engineer 500k a year.
And what does Europe offer to those people? One and a half times a cashier's salary and commuting to work by eco-friendly bike? Seriously?
I make about half of what I did in the US, but take home more money. Insurance is cheap, no expensive healthcare, no car insurance, no car payment, childcare is subsidized and basically free, all other insurance is <4% of what I paid in the US, etc. Home is expensive, compared to what you get in the US, but payment is about the same.
All that in the US was over 7-8k a month of my paycheck, gone. I get all of that for less than 2k a month.
Let’s not even discuss how advanced the EU banking system is compared to the US… although it has been a few years since I’ve been back, so maybe it has gotten better?
In any case, the EU offers good jobs and a work/life balance you usually can’t find in the US, with smart people that you also usually can’t find in the US. It does have its warts, but it also isn’t candy mountain.
Well, in my case about 4 times a cashier’s salary (but really a cashier should be able to afford a good life too), and my kids can bike around so I don’t have to be their taxi and they aren’t stuck at home. Also a functioning democracy.
You may recall the Germans were forced by the allies to restore their credibility. Many hanged as a result. So if you ask me if the Americans are capable of fixing this problem themselves, my answer is no.
Germany never becomes the scientific and mathematical hub of the world as it once was. And it won't for the foreseeable future. So yeah, 100 years is on the optimistic side.
This is an under-rated point. Prior to WWII, most people pursuing doctorates in scientific fields learned (at least a little) German. Because German was the language of science.
Not anymore.
I fear that we're all going to need to learn Chinese.
Do you understand how flat and wartorn they were? Do you wish the same for the US?
If you are willing to take such extreme shortcuts then you can emulate the new Germany.
If not then understand that trust is a fickle thing. Quick to erode and hard to rebuild. What one administration detroys cannot simply be reinstated by the next.
Maybe 100 is a bit hyperbole. But at least 50. Being a neighbor to Germany I can assure you the reconciliation was not "quick" for us to be fully restored. And we still shiver when we follow Musks friends in Germany.
I love and is impressed with Germany and Germans. But it has not been an easy path for them.
Nothing good has ever come from Europe when we lean too far to the right. Be careful in what lessons you choose to take from us.
Exactly this. The EU has shown what happens when you let a minority run amok with the keys to the weapons locker. The scars are still plentiful and even if the last of the eyewitnesses are dying we are still steeped in the lore of the lead-up, the middle of and the aftermath of World War II. That Germany is seeing a resurgence of this is at least as scary as seeing how many other countries are easily programmed to start their march to the drumbeat of Nazi or ersatz ideology, only with slightly different scape-goats. For now it is not quite enough to tip the balance but that could happen at any moment. I hope we'll see the last of the bullet holes in the buildings patched before we start making new ones. That's the one use I have for russia right now: they seem to help us remember and it seems to serve as a uniting force.
Post war Germany wasn’t Germany. It was rebuilt in the US’ image.
The Germans didn't reelect someone with authoritarian traits.
So yeah, that looks really bad from the outside looking in. There's just no more benefit of the doubt, this is what was voted for.
To put it in English terms:
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me
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Most confusing is how the majority of US people doesn't seem to see any of that while the rest of the world is fully aware that this is exactly what just happened.
> Russia won.
Russia is neither the primary instigator nor benefactor of our dysfunction, and wishes it had 1/100th the influence over our elections that Israel does. This narrative never made any sense to me.
You should research what the DOGE script kiddies did before they joined the government. Because that wasn't a coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind...
These countries are the top 10 countries by lobbying dollars from 2016 - 2024:
Country Total Spending
1. China $460,738,925
2. Japan $436,459,337
3. Liberia $353,239,848
4. South Korea $325,835,687
5. Saudi Arabia $311,450,797
6. Marshall Islands $285,094,040
7. Qatar $257,773,194
8. United Arab Emirates $242,674,892
9. Bahamas $242,481,453
https://www.opensecrets.org/fara
Some have spent 2x more money than Israel. Israel is 10th. I haven't heard anybody around me mention Liberia or the Marshall Islands, maybe a handful of times in my life.
These are the top 10 Foreign Principals from 2016 - 2024.
Foreign Principal Total Spending
1. Government of Liberia $350,486,671
2. Government of the Marshall Islands $283,901,646
3. Government of China $277,692,350
4. Japan External Trade Organization $277,638,402
5. Government of Saudi Arabia $238,415,218
6. Government of Bermuda $192,046,623
7. Barzan Holdings $155,775,778
8. ANO TV-Novosti $147,069,172
9. Government of the Bahamas $136,148,426
10 Government of Ireland $132,165,695
No Israeli principal in the top 10. It's obfuscated but Russia is in there (ANO TV-Novosti) and Qatar (Barzan Holdings).
Also, in the link you shared of "Industries", Israel is 7th in single issue. Some of the issues 1-6 have 10x levels of money spent. I wish it were broken down even more. I'm most interested in what makes up "miscellaneous issues".
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=Q
Sure, maybe you're right, and the foreign countries purchasing our politicians is a much larger problem than just the one that Israel presents (though, I'm rather skeptical in terms of actual impact on foreign policy and on who gets elected in our country). I still don't think Russia deserves much mention in terms of election interference; they gotta step up their game if they want to compete.
do you think these are comparable? are you equating lobbying to the infiltration of government systems or coordinated efforts by Russian assets inside a campaign team to influence elections?
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Consider how many of our politicians and administration officials have Russian heritage, on both sides of the isle, and it starts to make more sense. For that reason one should be careful spreading anti-Russianism on the net given the more aggressive policing our Russian overlords anre adopting over hate speech.
> You are coping if you think America can pull itself out of this.
I find such a comment from someone who themselves is coping thinking any of this matters outside of extreme online bubbles hilarious.
I guess I misread the article. I thought it was about the US bullying its allies into poverty but I guess it's about nothing at all, actually.
Not really when you realize people elected a seriously mentally ill person.
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Source?
Actual reality.
Interesting, I seem to notice the exact opposite from "actual reality", how do you suppose we correct this incongruity?
Don’t forget: our insane support for genocide and an out-of-control genocidal regime that’s clearly trying to trigger WW3.
> Don’t forget: our insane support for genocide and an out-of-control genocidal regime that’s clearly trying to trigger WW3.
Look, I think the people involved should be waiting trial in the Hague as much as the next man, but let's be real. They could kill another 5.2 million people, and nobody would start WW3 over it.
Some people's lives are simply worth more than others to world powers, and in this case, the Thanksgiving Turkey getting a stay of execution would get more people to tune in to the telly.
They have begun sending drones and military jets over a hundred kilometers into NATO nation borders. Sorry, 350 km. They're testing waters.
Surely, you realize that the US is as of today, still sending weapons to Ukraine.
The genocidal regime[1] that it is actively supporting is a little further south.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
I neither support Israel's genocide or appreciate the whataboutism. The US has many crosses to bear for our geopolitical endeavors in the last 80 years. That does not change Russia's current geopolitical endeavors.
I won't even entertain your insinuation that loaning weapons for an allied nations to defend itself with is remotely equivalent to invading a sovereign, western nation to attempt to annex land.
What?
That's not the point I was making.
My point was that the US currently supports Ukraine resisting an invasion (which international observers believe qualifies as a genocide by Russia), and while Trump has spent a lot of time shilling for Russia, the US is on the net, not supporting Russia.
Why should anyone trigger ww3 even if there are mass murders somewhere?
Do you want to fight in ww3? You can go enlist in Ukraine to fight evil regime right now.
Also interesting that even Arab states don't want to do anything to help people of Gaza, to accept refuges. Why there is no blame on Egipt for keeping borders closed?
International law, basic common sense, and basic human decency recognizes that the welfare of people within the territory invaded by Israel is Israel's, not Egypt's responsibility.
Driving civilian populations out at gunpoint into neighboring countries is called a genocide.
(If I remember my history, there used to be a German word for that sort of thing, I think it started with an L...)
Funny, why did we accept millions of Ukrainians refugees while most of the Ukrainian territory was not at war?
Because Ukrainians do not hold Muslim terrorist views?
What if someone said “because Ukrainians don’t hold genocidal Judaism views”?
You should seek therapy?
>Driving civilian populations out at gunpoint into neighboring countries is called a genocide.
Technically, it is called ethnic cleansing. All genocide is ethnic cleansing; not all ethnic cleansing reaches the level of genocide.
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>>not Egypt's responsibility
So that's ok, Egipt should not open border to help Arab neighbors
>> Driving civilian populations out at gunpoint into neighboring countries is called a genocide
Forced resettlement is not a genocide. Does russia also doing genocide in Ukraine (again, as many times in history)?
Forced resettlement => Ethnic cleansing
> Does russia also doing genocide in Ukraine
Since the goal is annexation and erasure of Ukranian identity and culture, the international community believes it to be one.
Some, but not all Soviet policies were genocidal.
> So that's ok, Egipt should not open border...
What Egypt is failing to do has no bearing on whether Israel is engaging in genocide in the territory it is invading. Israel is a sovereign state, it is responsible for its own actions.
That's not genocide.
- https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/opinio...
- https://www.scholarsfortruthaboutgenocide.com/
I'll leave it to you and others who read this to evaluate the columnist's argument in the linked article vs. the UN commissioner's argument published last week in the same publication. https://archive.ph/FP2ek
The UN commissioner ignores all the obvious arguments against his case.
For instance, he ignores that Israel goes out of its way to warn civilians before attacking, and provides aid to civilians. He ignores that Israel could simply kill ALL the civilians with a bunch of bombs if its intent was actually genocide, and yet it has not.
This is not a serious debate. Israel is not genociding. If you disagree, you need to respond to the actual arguments. But nobody on the other side is doing so, because they can't, because Israel is not genociding.
Please think about this.
Please wake up. When the dust settles and people start clearing all those buildings you destroyed you will see that 60,000 casualty number grow by multiples. How will you feel then about what Israel has done?
You are still ignoring the arguments.
Casualties are a sad fact of war. But it's not genocide because Israel's doing everything it can to save the civilians while combatting Hamas. If genocide was defined by the number of deaths, would you say that the US was genocidal against germany during WW2? We killed 3 million civilians to defeat the Nazis.
Good luck in your bubble.
This may, in the end, be for the best - if it dents American power over the long term.
I like America and Americans very much, but no state should wield the kind of power the United States currently holds, precisely for the reasons the Trump administration exemplifies. When a responsible government is in office, all is well and good. But when the political winds shift and a more capricious actor takes charge, such concentrated power can become dangerous.
I hope America’s allies have taken note and will adjust their policies accordingly.
You know what follows a power vacuum? War. I would rather have a status quo that feels at times chafing than the opportunity for everything to get absolutely horrendous in the not too distant future.
Nope, war is perpetuated by unhinged leaders and governments which enable them. When Bismarck created the concert of Europe, there was peace for the most part of that time period within Europe, when every power was curtailed by the other. When Bismarck was expelled and Wilhelm II took things in his own hands, WW1 happened.
You're going ot keep seeing more of this. The Japanese went through multiple rounds of the WH announcing they'd reached a deal and the Japanese saying politely but firmly that negotiations were still ongoing. The Japanese insisted on having everything in writing, and if you look at the executive order that was eventually published it's full of loopholes like 'best efforts' and 'aspirations' that articulate shared goals, but little the in the way of binding commitments.
The more times you can announce you "made a deal" , the better the TV ratings
And if you say "in two weeks", people - and the media - will forget and won't check up on it later.
They just remember you made something happen.
insisted on having everything in writing
Just curious, how would this help with anything, other than documentation purposes?
Paper trail stuff. But more importantly, when the first set of executive orders reducing tariffs rates went out, it conveniently mentioned Japanese investments but did not include tariff reductions for Japanese goods.
So the Japanese government pointed at the written agreement and told the trump admin to get their shit together. A few days later, the tariff reductions on Japanese goods was hastily added on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/business/japan-tariffs-us...
https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15953967
I went and got some articles mentioning this mess.
Paper trail, to be referenced later, so TFG can't be all "huh, never said that, never agreed to that" etc. etc.
I don’t understand why you think it would stop that, given how comprehensive a record of self-contradiction he already has.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/business/japan-tariffs-us...
https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15953967
Well, having the paper agreement certainly helped last time. (A month ago.)
There's also a Language barrier. So making sure there is a written agreement ensures that both sides understand what was agreed upon.
Maybe more in that it gives the Japanese an easy out to change terms when America inevitably breaks the deal.
True, but the Japanese government is accountable to Japanese voters and their business community. If they see Trump reneging on or twisting an agreement they'll be more likely to blame Trump than the LDP. He's not popular there nowadays except among Sanseito members.
and then what? Trump put specific numbers about trade balance on paper with China during previous trade war, which China just ignored.
1. "Specific numbers about trade balance' isn't a negotiation term. It might be a prior that feeds into your position in negotiation, but it's not an outcome.
2. He lies when his lips move. When you're dealing with a pathological liar, there's no reason to believe anything he says that paints him in a good light - until it's been independently confirmed.
>everything in writing
Agreements on paper doesn't mean anything to Trump.
Despite negotiating the USMCA with Canada and Mexico during his first term, Trump still threatened to impose tariffs on both countries.
What is the point of having an agreement like USMCA?
No but him and his crowd have been keen on denying reality on a daily basis, and it's scary how well it works. I have people around me who drink this BS, and will argue in support for it because the arguments against it requires nuance thinking. At least, with a paper, it's harder to do this. You have to admit he pretended the sky was red, when it's obviously blue. There is less nuances if you get something clear in writing.
It's not much, but it's better than the alternative.
Just remember all of the treaties that were signed (by you know who) before invading that very same country there after, leading up to WW2. A common strategy to give yourself the first move. the strategy is to cripple ongoing negotiating the east is succeeding in with other countries that no longer trust the US, this was going on way before ORang man election. Just remember not everything is public, that goes for other countries as well. Like really china is enemy all the sudden " Why exactly, oh wait you said " Because they're growing faster then US" What!!! oh i get it now" nooo I don't get it. Also the war torn countries tend to be under developed and are rich in natural reserves of what ever the world needs. The world is not as simple as even what the corrupt media tries to make it also. It does indeed go much deeper than that and without emotion but decisions that are occurring with opinions of many heads to influence any giving decision. Yet even the most sense you can make out of this whole mess well still leave you lost even more than before you calculated the "WHYS" and the "noes". Forget the problem, i tend to think that with each disastrous decision made how long will it take to fix THAT decision later. Something like telling Afghanistan to give back the ( Bagram base) back to US and simply receiving fuck off reply by the Taliban government is simply stupid. none other than Russia not that long ago met their government to spark relationship initiatives. Umm hello Afghanistan is literal the country of mountain men defeated the invasion of Russia in the past. Well this is good for two groups of the three, Russia and Afghanistan leaving US out. US you left Afghanistan, well because there was defeated in controlling the countries ( very strategic land being so central to everything in that land mass. Now leaving Israel is saying whats happening is bad like every human on this earth, is in no way possible for the US. This will be yet another HUGE might i add in capital letters LOST in the middle east. The massive mission of the US to achieve this in controlling the middle east. Sadly the people taking this blunt is the people in that small town taking the hit. Have you seen how many men they are detaining in each photo you see of the chaos happening. In the Blue and white flag there is no consideration for the children and men, They must stop reproduction of that ethnic group so their ability to take back that land from within is impossible. Why? because this same thing happened in Iraq, Syria Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia "kinda", Libya, Various other African countries, along with some eastern European countries.
The World is moving on to the future, It's what happens yet we are supposed to learn from our mistakes but, the only thing we really learn from what history has to tell us is that we get good at replicating that same mistake to others or ourselves. A 100 years ago we were trying to make car run on gasoline and go pas 20 mph, a 100 years ago we were trying to figure out how we can expand the use of electricity, a 100 years ago Photographs have to be mobile, but how. The point is humans are animals and have the ignorance as a tribute because it's helped us survive. Its natural. whats not natural is for a planet to sustain an orbit for lengthy time period for life to to be sustained so evolution can exist. evolution./
People are confused about what these published agreements (like with the EU as well) are. They're not legal agreements, treaties, or even executive orders, although the corresponding orders to reduce the tariffs are of course executive orders.
But the agreements themselves are completely informal and an overview of what the US expects to see happen in order to maintain the tariff reductions. The interpretation of whether the other country or group of countries is abiding the agreement is entirely at the discretion of Trump.
So there's no such thing as a loop hole. If Trump isn't satisfied with e.g. the EU's progress towards implementing said agreement, he can increase tariffs back to where they were at his discretion, with or without reason given. So there's no such thing as a loop hole in this sort of agreement.
The loop hole is every nation just agrees to stop dealing with the US and isolate them. Sure, we’d all suffer horribly but at least the west would have a future, vs we all suffer horribly anyways and fall along with the US.
I don't think agreement is necessary. I think each will, in turn, come to their own conclusions.
In boardrooms around the world there is of course concern to protecting the existing US market. And in the short term there are lots of noises to placate the US.
At the same time there's a recognition that the US is not a stable long-term partner. The bigger conversation is around new markets, building diversity of markets, diversity of investment and so on.
"Global Trade" is mostly not an organised thing. It's a zillion small transactions between individuals, small companies and so on. Ultimately my (US) customers will pay the tarifs to their govt, or not (shrug). In the meantime I'm looking for non-US customers for my business growth. I'm investing anywhere except the US, because the current uncertainty is bad for making investment decisions.
Ultimately this process is a wake up call to suppliers who have focused on the US market. And to those future businesses to come. Diversify markets, because then you aren't beholden to them.
In 10 years time, regardless of who is in power, or the conditions then, the lesson will remain.
I think your take is correct. Governments around the world are going to say whatever they need to to get the lowest tariffs possible but trade will slowly reorient itself. I said before the election, if Trump works with Western allies then he'd probably get consensus to take on China with combined tariffs. We know what happened instead.
This is the ideal outcome. Just produce the trade blockade that the US is trying to achieve through policy.
And like other blockaded nations, North Korea and Palestine, the US will reach its intended levels of greatness within minutes.
It doesn’t need to be dramatic or announced or even a major policy. Every country is finding out that dealing with Trump’s US is an expensive pain in the ass of unknowns, constant flux and mafia-like pay to play bribes.
Many countries will just deal with other countries because it’s cheaper, easier and less of a headache.
Tourism from foreigners in the US has taken a severe and extremely expensive nose dive. Everything else will too.
That's unlikely. Sovereign nations generally act in their own best interest. For a quite visual example, for most of the Ukrainian war, Ukraine worked as a key transit hub for a huge chunk of all Russian gas heading to the EU. Why? Because they assessed the billions of dollars they gained in transit fees as being more beneficial to themselves, and their war effort, than interrupting the flow would be.
Doing something self destructive to spite another country is often a sign of either incompetent leadership or of a country that's not truly sovereign - countries that end up with some major dependency (economic, military, or political) on another country can be compelled to act against their rational self interest.
So back to here, the effect of what Trump's doing is not particularly unique. The US has few, if any, allies and lots of countries that are simply nominally independent vassals. We say jump, and they only ask how high. But what he is doing that's particularly unique is making this entire charade 100% transparent and giving them absolutely 0 chance at saving face. I think he simply enjoys humiliating them, very possibly as a result of things that happened during the previous administration.
It will probably accelerate the shift to a multipolar world. I'm very much not a believer in the 5d chess stuff, but I would at least tease the possibility that this outcome might have been considered and not be seen as undesirable. If one considers the goal of solely advancing American interests, it's not clear that hegemony is beneficial. Hegemony entails endless wars and endless interventions around the world funded by endless debt. And as allies and enemies alike reach technological parity, it's becoming ever more dangerous.
And for what? How does this all positively affect the average American? In a purely transactional world, it's hard to see how America, in terms of the affects on Americans, would be worse off than in the current one where we expend just unimaginably massive amounts of resources trying to maintain hegemony.
Countries are already doing what is in their best interest, which is why all these "agreements" are essentially fake. Countries are simply saying nice things hoping to get keep tariffs low for as long as possible. But the actual plan, not even hidden, leaders from wester nations all over are saying it out loud, is to diversify trade.
Once trade is diversified, the US will be isolated naturally as it represents the least beneficial trade arrangement. Now, if MAGA is dethrowned somehow, sure, trade with the US will increase again, but the diversification you see happing now will be permanent. Things aren't going to go back to the way they were, the US has already given up it's spot as the economic leader of the west, and it's given up all its foreign soft-power, it's just a slow process to see it all play out.
I agree the trade diversification would obviously be the perfectly logical and smart play. The EU seems to be doing the opposite. The EU has become critically dependent upon US natural gas, imported at a sharp premium, while constantly speaking of efforts to "de-risk" explicitly with regards to China, and implicitly with regards to Russia. On top of this both imports and exports with the US have skyrocketed since 2022.
---
2021: Imports = €232 billion, Exports = €399 billion
2022: €359, €508
2024: €335, €532
---
And 2021 is not some cherry picked COVID related oddity or something. It was a record high for exports and just under a record high (€235b in 2019) for imports. [1] So we're seeing an EU more dependent than ever upon the US while aiming to "de-risk" from the US' geopolitical adversaries. Annual results for 2025 are obviously not available yet, but so far this trend has not meaningfully changed. The EU continue to act like vassals.
I also am starting to doubt that these tariffs will be lifted, even if the DNC somehow wins 2028. They've been hesitant to make that a part of their platform, and the tariffs effectively amount to a very large tax revenue increase levied primarily at the largest corporations, which can be arbitrarily tweaked by the President - enabling him to, in effect, unilaterally raise or lower taxes by Executive Order. Government 'temporary emergency measures' are rarely temporary. That's where federal income taxes come from, and even the requirement of passports. We'll see, but I think we're looking at the new normal.
[1] - https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/isdb_results/factsheets/country...
People keep describing Trump as transactional. He doesn't appear to be anything of the sort. He's vain, impulsive, inconsistent, impetuous, mean, and never holds up his end of a bargain. Definitely not transactional.
> People keep describing Trump as transactional. He doesn't appear to be anything of the sort.
I think they are using the word transactional as a euphemism for something else.
I think it is fair to characterize him as transactional. And also as stupid and narcissistic.
It is the combination that makes the orange.
The loophole is real estate for Trump Towers or shinny golden trinkets or billion investment contracts for family. Not into old fashioned bribery? We‘ll the is a narrowly traded crypto coin to help you out.
The truth is Trump is a bad negotiator. He's easily played. He's also predictably dishonest. The only real move is to string him along, which he seems to be glad to do, particularly if someone flatters or threatens to punch him.
He negotiates in bad faith. No deal is final. He will change the terms to meet his whims.
The Chinese understand. Notice how there are no soybean purchases from China this year. They do not trust the US on important things like food.
I assumed the soybean thing was more about sending a message. Soybeans are the number one US export crop. Shutting down the market is a big financial blow, makes the trade deficit worse, and angers farmers who otherwise would have happily sold to the Chinese.
> He negotiates in bad faith
Plenty of great negotitors across history did, too. Trump gets played. Repeatedly. Predictably. His political instincts have been sharp enough that I'm increasingly chalking this up to age, but maybe he just had a better team around him the first time around.
He singlehandedly annihilated the US soybean market.
That's not a good thing. Lots of farmers going bankrupt now.
But his crony buddies stand to benefit from farmers going to bankrupt. Makes it difficult to understand if this is incompetence or intentional malice at play...
> He singlehandedly annihilated the US soybean market.
Again... He's done this twice now.
No. It's explicitly self-destructive. He gets off on setting things on fire, including himself.
> increasingly chalking this up to age
I've always had high regard for Trump as a talented scumbag grifter of note.
He's been noticeably and increasingly off game since it seemed he was only campaigning for re-election to avoid a mountain of looming bad legal outcomes.
Much of his early second term "wins" I've marked as momentum success from having a ready to go game plan care of the Project 2025 crowd. His carry through on tariffs, dodging Epstein complications, handling free speech issues, etc. have been more chaotic than cunning.
Do you even think he's sitting in on these negotiations? He can't remember Ishiba's name and just called him 'Mr Japan' when occasionally asked questions about him. My impression (and I've been watching these specific trade negotiations pretty closely) was that Scott Bessent was doing all the legwork and the Japanese seemed perfectly happy to talk to him instead of Trump. Whatever one might think of the policy arguments, Bessent seems coherent and professional whereas Trump comes off as shallow and erratic. I find it hard to imagine having hours-long focused and strategic conversation with him on a dry topic like trade policy.
It's an musing irony that Japan is a demographically much older society than the US and LDP in particular looks like a gerontocratic party, but between factionalism and parliamentary instability they actually cycle through leaders pretty efficiently
Funnily enough, according to some South Korean news, the Korean government deliberately postponed having a final written deal, or at least that's what some news articles claim, because it was such a horrible deal for Korea.
I think there's an implicit understanding that having a written deal would be worse for Korea because the deal will bind Korea and restrict its options, while Trump is a crazy guy and can and will do anything he wants, whether he signed something or not. I.e., any written deal with Trump has negative worth.
Such is the state of global trade negotiation these days.
Agreed. It was, initially, quite alarming (though no longer anymore) at how different the actual words in the Executive Orders differ from what was said about the policies they were, ostensibly, enforcing or creating.
I remember some estimates made after the US elections of what Stephen Miller's policy would cost. According to these estimates, following Miller's plan would require more or less the entire world's GDP to be invested in the US for several consecutive years. Obviously, this would require more than a little bullying to get there.
So far, we got the bullying, plenty of non-binding agreements, 100% of goodwill and soft power loss, increased soft power for China, a looming financial crisis, two wars between major powers getting closer by the day. We'll see whether the investments are coming, too.
It's a personal shakedown. What they're actually asking for is this: https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
Being an unreasonable, unmeetable deal on paper is just a feature. You're not supposed to meet the text of the deal. You're supposed to get under the table and ask "how can we facilitate this?" while palming a hundred dollar bill. It's like a police shakedown in less stable countries.
A more serious question for Korea is the US military protection against North Korea and/or China. They may yet end up in the unthinkable alliance with their historic enemy, Japan.
Lee Jae-myung is seeking closer relations with the PRC. I view it as part of the missing context to this spat. These events preceded the US administration's actions.
https://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_view.htm?Seq_Code=18451...
As things are going China could protect South Korea from North Korea as well as the USA. Also SK wouldn't be in the immediate wrath of China during an conflict escalation between USA and China. Practically SK should have a strong negotiation position against the blackmail demands of Trump. Trump is bringing his enemies closer together and starting to loose allies to the other side too.
The PRC would be delighted to see South Korea enter the Sinosphere and abandon the US. If nothing else, China would see it as a return to historic norms where most of East Asia serves as tribute states to the Chinese empire.
But also likewise, Korea holds historic antagonism towards China, arguably just as much as it does to Japan. Most of the population would hate such a relationship, and despite some in the left thinking otherwise, most South Koreans still see the US as the favorable partner over China.
But with China’s continued rise, and the US seemingly evolving (irreversibly?) into the MAGA Empire, that perception isn’t guaranteed to never change either. The PRC isn’t doing itself much favors in courting its neighbors, so it’ll become a game of who is worse.
Historically he has had bouts of anti-American rhetoric.
The same can be said with the Korean liberal/left parties in general, to varying degrees.
So while he is currently presenting himself as more of a centrist and pragmatist, it remains to be seen if he remains so.
Conspiracy theorists on the Korean right claim it is Trump that is playing into LJM’s hand in providing an excuse to pivot to the PRC.
I have to ask: given how powerful the US is... which party outside of the US doesn't have some anti-American rhetoric?
In fact, France is the US' oldest ally and its best known president in the 20th century is largely remembered for making sure to remain militarily independent from the US.
Is almost like a foreign agent is in charge.
Yep, most things Trump does make sense if we assume he's a Russian puppet. Russia really wants to divide West, to keep world hooked on fossil fuels, and to undermine democracy everywhere.
The things Trump does *also* make sense if you assume he's not a Russian puppet. He also wants to divide Europe against itself, keep the world hooked on (US) fossil fuels and to undermine threats to his rule. He doesn't need Russia for that, but their interests do sometimes align and it would be stupid not to take advantage of it.
> but their interests do sometimes align
I think this is more likely than some 'agent' plot. These people do not really care about countries, but what benefits them and their extended family. As Italians would say: "our thing".
His personal lawyer and mentor was also a lawyer for the major mafia families in NYC and a known blackmailer and fixer, the student has surpassed the master.
> As Italians would say: "our thing".
Ouch.
There are plenty of other explanations that fit the facts. This whole "Trump is a foreign agent" thing is just like the "twin towers were brought down by the CIA" conspiracy: people don't want to believe their own country could be so broken as to let this happen, and so it must have been some planned action by a group they hate.
Broken countries are easy targets for foreign owned actors to take control.
Trump is 100% American.
I wish people who said things like this, or who believed that Trump is/was a Russian agent could see how silly and racist they look. America's problems are not caused by foreigners. They're caused by Americans.
The xenophobia exhibited by sentiments such as this simply demonstrate hatred and ignorance of the world outside of the USA, and demonstrate an incapacity to critically evaluate American culture and history.
I am not Xenophobic of Russia. I speak and read Russian and my partner is Russian. I also don’t hate the world outside of the USA. In have lived in that world for more than ten years. I simply think that trump is a patsy. Whether he knows he is or not doesn’t matter. Putin plays him like a fiddle.
That being said, I absolutely completely agree with you that American problems are caused by Americans.
Russia has puppet states and is actively working on building them. Russia is actively trying to influence elections in foreign countries too. Trump being suspect Russian puppet is not xenofobia, it is completely consistent with what Russia is and who Trump is.
That aside, US electorates has decided to award another term for Trump. FYI at that point Trump is not an unknown dark horse candidate anymore and he even won the popular vote. Last time a GOP president won popular vote was 20 years ago.
So it's very fair to attribute the so called erraticness to what American want in general instead of attributing it to Putin or other non American.
Or that foreign influence campaigns on social media are having a good return on their investment cost.
Completely consistent with what Russia is? Sure. With who Trump is? I'm not sure that I see it. Trump does not strike me as the kind of guy who would willingly be someone else's puppet.
Unwillingly? Sure. Being played? Sure. Knowingly being a puppet? No.
He acts like Putins puppet. I can see it both willingly and unwillingly. Trump admires powerful dictators and wants their validation. Putin is one. Also, I would not be surprised at all if there was unwilling component too.
> to be invested in the US
to invest in US (i.e. to buy a piece of US) one has to sell something to US to get dollars while not buying US products in return, ie. an US trade deficit is needed. And that at the same time while US is introducing tariffs to reduce the said trace deficit.
You assume that the current admin is not simply asking for gifts.
We live in an economy that is highly virtualized, where the same unit of currency can be used several times simultaneously to borrow, lend, re-borrow, etc. so I'm not sure it's that simple.
If the US gets invested with such "virtual" ("out-of-thin-air", newly issued, etc.) dollars i guess it would be even worse as it would only inflate prices in US while not doing anything else.
Maybe?
What we're discussing is clearly beyond my ability to grasp (macro-)economics.
Being the biggest reserve currency has a little-discussed perk where the reserves lower the average velocity of money, which blunts the inflationary pressure of money-printing. Eroding trust in the US will deplete these deep pools of USD and will result in a more direct linkage with domestic inflation in the future.
It is inflating prices but also doing a lot more contrary to nothing.
"require more or less the entire world's GDP to be invested in the US for several consecutive years"
Whoever wrote that is making stuff up now, even worse than Sam Altman asking for trillions of dollars to build data centers
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...
I think it's pretty significant that President Lee mentioned the 1997 financial crisis: arguably, it was Korea's version of 9/11. It shook the country in a way people didn't realize was possible, and the country was, in a sense, never the same after that.
Imagine a US politician saying "agreeing to this would be a disaster at the same level as 9/11."
Lee is basically telling Koreans that this is something he can never let go through, and he'll do everything to stop it from happening. (Of course whether Koreans buy it is another matter, but after watching ICE arresting hundreds of workers, I think most are willing to believe Lee rather than the US government.)
I heard that he was considering going to the recent Beijing meeting where Putin was, however he heard that Kim Jong Un would also be there, so he decided against it.
The tariffs. The overall situation. I do not understand why Wall Street isn't yet in a freefall. Did they find good sources of bubble fuel then to keep on the heat?
Three reasons IMO.
1. If you take out AI-related companies, SP500 is down YTD
2. Even then, because the exchange rate is down 10-15% against most countries, that mechanically increases the SP500 by 5-7.5% (because half of SP500 firm profits are from abroad)
3. Many ppl expect lots of inflation in the medium term (look at 10yr-3m spreads). Firms are basically Equity+Debt, and because inflation wipes out the value of Debt, then the value of Equity mechanically increases
So, that's my pet story why the market is at an ATH (source: am an economist, can't say where, but I know lots of well-known economists)
No one sells if they think there's other suckers who'll buy later. Everyone is ultimately trying to get out as late as possible with all the money - hence "the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" being evergreen.
The only thing I would add to your point #3 is this:
* Given the same profit margin, higher overall prices mean that firms will have higher profits.
* The value of an equity is the discounted sum of all future profits.
That is, stocks are a hedge against inflation. Investors are willing to pay "unreasonable" prices today because they expect that increased future cashflows will cause the price to become reasonable.
> Firms are basically Equity+Debt, and because inflation wipes out the value of Debt, then the value of Equity mechanically increases
I don’t think this holds water as an explanation. The equity risk premium is basically zero.
This is a good analysis. I was wondering the same and you nailed it.
#3 isn't quite right because a rise in inflation changes the discount rates that are applied to future cash flows in the equity valuation process. And on top of that, for risk-averse investors the fundamental uncertainty we are living in also will alter their discount rates independently of monetary effects. The first two are true enough at least under certain definitions of what an "AI-related company" is.
(source: I am also an economist who specializes in financial economics and corporate finance)
The practical effects of the tariffs have been substantially more muted than most people expected. A lot of supply chain folks were genuinely expecting shelves to run empty by June or July. I would emphasize that “muted” isn’t “nonexistent”, and a lot of metrics would be down if not for AI investment. But it seems that a lot of people are still interested in buying from and selling to the US even with a crazy dictator in charge.
The shelves wont be empty, the stuff is freely available, it just costs more to the US consumer. Just because there's a giant tarif on Brazil doesn't mean Americans stop drinking coffee.
And of course people are still selling to the US. From our perspective nothing has changed. It's not costing us any more than it did before.
Markets remain up, bolstered partly by the AI stocks, but also because the market believes US consumers will continue to consume. Their appetite for consumption, and debt, remains unabated.
Am I building a factory in the US? No. The current administration makes that very unappealing. The US society is unstable right now, policy is fluid, enforcement of laws seems weak, the labor market is (justifiably) paranoid. As a foreigner I'm not even traveling to the US anytime soon. There are other, more appealing, opportunities to explore.
Which does manage to hit the nail on the head: people in general still don't understand what a tarriff is. They fully expect a tarriff to hit the foreign exporter somehow, when it's actually billed to the importer at point of import. The importers are the ones who place the orders. The exporters aren't impacted directly at all - it depends entirely on whether the orders stop coming in. The orders don't cost them more to fill in anyway.
The issue for the importer is cash flow. The tarifs have to be paid on entry, ie before the coffee is sold.
This suits large importers over small ones, they have the cash reserves to cope.
The other issue for importers is uncertainty. The tarifs might be high this week (when my stock arrives) but it might be low next week when my competitors stock arrives, putting me at a disadvantage.
So "shelves being bare" is primarily a business risk / cash flow issue. Partly handled with more frequent, smaller, orders (driving up consumer prices some more.)
And yes, I agree, most American consumers don't understand that fundamentally the goal of tarifs (good and bad) is to drive up the price. To that end though the administration is being very successful.
(I think tariffs are stupid)
> The exporters aren't impacted directly at all
This isn't true, at least if you believe in standard economic theory (not believing standard economic theory is what got us in this mess!).
The issue is that the tariff increases the effective price to the consumer, so it shifts the demand curve downward by the cost of the tariff (the price consumers are willing to pay the producer for a given quantity of goods).
Markets always find their equilibrium, and the resulting equilibrium point is a lower transaction price and lower quantity than before. Quantifying the shift requires knowing both the supply and demand elasticities.
In other words, both the producer and consumer share the burden of the tariffs. The producer receives less from the consumer, and the consumer pays a higher total cost than before. Who pays more of the tariff is question that we again need the elasticities to answer.
It only hurts the producer if they don't find alternate markets.
There will absolutely be some short term pain. But in the long run it makes the producer stronger.
Now it's easy to cherry pick products that are easier to move than others. There absolutely will be winners and losers on the production side. It'll certainly be interesting to see this play out.
You are describing indirect impacts though. The exporters does not directly pay tarrifs except if they're also the importer, or acting as a facilitator on behalf of the customer. The change in demand is indirect - because it can only happen if customer behavior changes. Does the consumer care about 100% tarrifs on a $1 product with no internal competitors? Probably not. Demand may be completely unaffected, and in any case that's a problem for the importer who has to clear things through customs, not the exporter who simply has to label things appropriately like they always have.
But that's not what people think: People think the tarrifs work like a bill from the US government - like taxes, where they understand it's possible (though again, generally not how) to wind up owing the government more money in September.
What they imagine is very clearly something that looks like that - that companies directly pay some fee to access the US market and then sell things as normal. Or will be taxed some extra money after selling things to the US.
Yes it's all wildly inconsistent on the slightest inspection, but people are relating to this on a vibes level and then generally inventing the justification post facto because they certainly never thought about tarrifs till this president.
That's not wrong, but it isn't the full picture either.
Access to the US market has other values. If the manufacturer is carrying USD denominated debt, they or someone else must obtain those dollars through trade. Access to a large market may unlock economies of scale for producers. Losing access may drive up their overall costs to serve other markets.
These are just two of the most obvious things which I can immediately think of. There are likely other factors as well.
But that's the thing: they don't lose access. To lose access they'd have to actually be undercut by local producers, or untarriffed competitors. They experience the effect wholly through demand modification - and simply ship whatever orders come in, with some pressure to keep lowering prices if they can. It's a tarrif - not sanctions.
Part of it was that the China tariffs were canceled in May after around a month of operation, and that was short enough that it could be just covered by the inventory stockpiling that companies did on a massive scale in Q1. If they had gone on longer it would have been an ugly summer when those buffers were exhausted.
The value of the dollar is not so great. If you look at the S&P priced in euros it paints a different picture.
I think there’s an expectation on the Supreme Court to overturn many of the tariffs when it takes up the case in November.
There’s already a market forming in trading the right to tariff refunds.
Markets hit all time highs in 2007, even though the shit was already very close to the fan, and the smell was propagating.
I'm not saying the bubble is about to burst, only that this is not a great indicator.
The dollar's down fairly severely, which does skew things a bit (US assets are priced in dollars, but most S&P500 companies would have substantial foreign income). S&P500 is down YTD in euro terms, say.
They're still high on AI.
I was just reading an FT article mentioning the "inelastic markets hypothesis" that markets are predominantly driven by cash flows rather than rational analysis of value. People invest in index funds etc because the market goes up, the market goes up because people are buying. It's a bit of a bubble.
(article https://www.ft.com/content/6f549890-c2a6-4823-a095-c8ea73f7e...)
At this point, the real economy is completely decoupled from financial markets who are perfectly happy "investing" in bubble after bubble. If the markets were at all representative of the country's actual economic health, they'd have crashed long ago.
Would it be possible that the tariffs are working? I'm clueless when it comes to these things, so it's a pure guess.
Considering that investment in local manufacturing is down, it's pretty safe to say they're not "working" in the sense of reinvigorating local industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWjpDxvqSSE
Here's an even handed approach and overview of some of the tariff related stats. The presenter is a critic of tariffs, but concedes that the results thus far are not as simple as some here would suggest.
6:22
> This is just a matter of acknowledging the data on the graph and saying this is quite a difference from the way it was a year ago. And so, people who said this wouldn't happen, that's wrong. It did happen. There it is. And I think it's important to acknowledge that. Um, not only that, but a lot of people said, "Well, this is going to lead to the price of goods, especially automobiles, coming into the United States, is going to skyrocket." Well, so far that hasn't been the case.
>In fact, prices have come down. And you can go to Google and you can look it up and there's many articles discussing the fact that the Chinese automakers have largely been eating the tariffs so far.
Very interesting perspective in the video, thanks for sharing.
In the first quote the video presenter is referring to the tariff percentages from 2024 to now, not prices. He never presents any data to back up his price claims, just a couple of news articles about automakers announcemens.
Everything in the video up until 20:30 is making supporting the claim that tariffs are higher now than they were in 2024 which I'd be surprised if anyone disagrees with.
After 20:30 is where I think the real meat of the video is:
"Um, now I know some people will say you can't win in a trade war. So even though Trump has gotten, you know, these good uh better levels than he had a year ago, it's basically attacks. It's going to lead to less efficiency and it's going to cause growth to fall and nobody wins a trade war. Now, if that's your argument, I tend to agree with you. But that's a different subject, right? If you want to say that nobody wins in a war and that's going to hurt everybody, fine. I'll go down that road. I think it's a relative game and if everybody falls but the United States falls the least, then on a relative basis, the United States has maintained its hegemony."
That's the larger point here. We should be able to hold two different concepts in our minds when we describe the outcome. Yes, all things being equal tariffs and interventions create economic inefficiency. That is in my view, a rational first principle. We would prescribe actions based on that belief.
*As a redundant disclaimer for HN, that belief would put me in opposition to Trump's policies.
However when describing the outcome all things are not equal. We shouldn't fall into the trap of an appeal to utopia.
Selling into the US presents advantages on economies of scale. Overseas dollar denominated debt drives dollar demand. These factors affect decisions for producers selling into the US market.
The specific pricing data is subject to cherry picking and politicalization. Generally it is a bit strange to see the illiberal left taking exception with Trump's illiberal interventionism. You get the sense that if the interventions were rationalized by a different actor or for a different reason, the statistics would be spun in the other direction. This feels inconsistent and hypocritical.
The other key point is that the tariff doom prophesies haven't yet come to pass. Perhaps the doomsaying was merely more political bloviation? It would fit with the pattern of inconsistency.
It depends on from what angle you are looking at it. If the goal is to destabilize the US, then yes, the tariffs are working.
Crazy request of $350 billion investment by SK. That's 20% of it's estimated 2025 GDP of $1700 billion. Could the US pledge 20% (6000 billion) to some other country?
Awfully nice of Myung to be so understanding after the US arrest of 300+ SK workers in Georgia a month ago.
> Could the US pledge 20% (6000 billion) to some other country?
Of course US can do that, it can provide a temporary boost to the leader of that country. It doesn't mean anything other than that.
Qatar pledged 1 trillion dollars investment in US: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-pr...
Their GDP is 200B USD. EU is similar, on 200B Budget they promised 600B investment.
As you can see, %20 of GDP investment is a rookie number. People do 3x to 5x of GDP these days.
I don't know why Koreans are making fuss of it, maybe they don't get the Western politics?
I'm Korean. I really really don't know. Every day, I wake up to every new news:
- A tariff agreement signed, but then they immediately mention a different percentage (Japan)
- Korean(mostly) engineers arrested on suspicion of participating in the construction of a US factory (IIRC it is not claimed whether it's legal or not)
- H-1B visa situation
Looking at the current situation, there's no "guarantee" of tariff reductions through huge investment to US. Also there is no justification for the argument that countries that do not invest should do so as other countries do.
IMHO the situation is this: Are your actions make Trump feel good? The feeling can be induced by making him richer or boost his ego.
Those "X country will invest in US" stuff are about boosting his ego through good press. No one follows up anything, they use the "flood the zone" strategy, which doesn't allow the public to have long attention span.
Also, it appears that Trump likes numbers around $600B. Everyone is "investing" around $600B, even companies like Apple. When Mark Zuckerberg was asked what Meta invests, he threw the same number and later was caught ona hot mic asking Trump if he liked the number as he admitted that he was not prepared. So yes, just say you are investing $600B in USA thanks to Trump and smile to the cameras. Don't worry about the money, this is for boosting his ego and not about the money. Actually investing is dangerous, if it goes bad(like with factory incident) it creates problems for his campaign, helps his opponents and may hurt his ego, just do the show no need to complicate things.
If you want to do the money thing, you invest in his crypto or donate to his campaign etc.
> EU is similar, on 200B Budget they promised 600B investment.
As far as I can see, the EU 'promise' was pretty much just FDI by European companies in the US that was expected anyway; the commission even explicitly said that it could not guarantee any of this. Most 'promises' would be similar.
> Could the US pledge 20% (6000 billion) to some other country?
Maybe to destroy it? :)
$6T is in the ballpark of the costs of the Afghanistan and Gulf War episode II (+subsequent occupation) foreign policy adventures.
Completely impractical. Look at other countries. France and the UK are under enormous budget pressure, mostly due to the cost of funding the defense of the illegal war in Ukraine, but also due to other costly recent policy decisions. Both countries aren't considered poor, but they now have difficult decisions to make. That means anyone who thinks these investments such as these by any country can be from taxes or savings elsewhere are delusional. It would have to be loans.
Now look at Australia. It committed to a $368 billion ($1 billion per month for 30 years) submarine deal with the US. This program will never deliver any perceivable value to Australian people, it is more strategically beneficial for reviving a failing boat and ship building industry in the US. The US itself is supposedly building a new Columbia-class ballistic submarine at a cost of $110 each?
These are simply confabulated, made up numbers. And why is Korea building valuable, current generation facilities in other countries? It would make sense if it would result in for example, the sale of more Korean automobiles, but it isn't. It is basically a shakedown ("tribute").
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/15/aukus-will-cos...
France has spent about 3bn a year on aid to Ukraine (though some of this is in terms of transfer of military equipment rather than new spending, and some of it will be tied to loans funded by the income from confiscated Russian assets). France spends about 50bn a year on pensions (EDIT: Oh, wow, no, much more than that; that's a projected _deficit_), which is what's really driving its budgetary problems.
Curious question: how is a war illegal? Isn’t that just… war?
Or at least, most wars seem to be like that. Rarely is there the case where 2 countries consent to have war with each other. There always seems to be someone that aggresses and someone that is forced to defend. For if they wouldn’t then they face subjugation or worse.
Russia never sent a war declaration to Ukraine. It's not legally a war (that's why Putin and cronies call it 'special operation')
What the hell. Just because it's not called by a country like that doesn't mean it is one.
hence "illegal". A legal war have a war declaration and an explicit casus Belli (regime change, "removing terrorist", "protecting the civilians" etc)
>It committed to a $368 billion ($1 billion per month for 30 years) submarine deal with the US. This program will never deliver any perceivable value to Australian people
Ukrainians thought the same giving up nuclear weapons, and getting rid of a lot of other weapons, including old 300km range ballistic missiles, and selling off new missile development to Saudis or something like this - the kind of weapons mere presence of which would have affected the Russia's invasion calculations.
May be Australia would be better served by strategic weapons other than the submarines, yet i don't think Australia can avoid getting such strategic weapons or can get similar level of strategic defense cheaper.
Subs are definitely australia's best choice here. Subs are king of the ocean and are by far the best tool for enforcing territorial claims and warding off harassment of domestic vessels or harassment along international trading lanes at sea.
Thats not the primary budget issue in France and UK.
> mostly due to the cost of funding the defense of the illegal war in Ukraine
What is a "legal" war supposed to be?
A war would be legal when the _casus belli_ leading up to it would be a non-military action.
For example, Egypt might have casus belli if Sudan stopped the Nile's flow, a non military action with significant impact.
War is illegal under the international law for all UN member states. The main exceptions are self defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council.
Of course, nobody really cares about that.
Was the idea here that because the UN declares that war is illegal, that no country will do war anymore?
I mean, wtf.
After WW1 and WW2 and with the threat of nuclear war, people were willing to try any amount of talking as a less horrific option.
Pretty sure the cost of helping Ukraine is pocket change compared to the rise in welfare payments since COVID and the "triple lock" to keep pensioners minted.
Arrest of illegal workers that is
Do you have a source describing the "illegality"? This is genuine question - I have not found a source digging into the legal question.
The best I could find was a suggestion that their visa waivers were in fact correct for the purpose, except for the fact that their companies were using visa waivers over and over again. Or maybe the workers were? I'm not sure.
Hope you speak Korean! Straight from the horse's mouth. [0] The companies themselves were well aware they were working illegally. People were even doing visa runs to chain them, it doesn't get much more blatant then that.
It's pretty obvious and not a real point of contention. Being honest about this does not support the raid, and acting as if it does helps nobody and only hurts.
[0] https://www.teamblind.com/kr/post/%ED%98%84%EC%B0%A8-%EC%97%...
You have posed a reasonable question with good intentions. A simple Google search reveals:
>U.S. authorities said some of the detained Korean workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others entered legally but had expired visas or entered on visa waivers that prohibited them from working.
From PBS, a source with a well known editorial stance against the current administration.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/south-korean-workers-retu...
>Like many of the Koreans who were working there, advocates and lawyers representing the non-Korean workers caught up in the raid say that some who were detained had legal authorization to work in the United States.
LA Times, similar
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-09-14/famili...
With any of these contentious partisan issues it is important to be wary of cherry picking. Typically events are selectively reported to fit a given partisan agenda.
It would be extreme to believe that entire groups are being arbitrarily detained and deported. Similarly, it isn't unreasonable to expect mistakes to be made. The reasonable thing to do with extreme claims such as the ones made in this thread is to do a simple Google search before engaging in partisan flames. It has become almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion here on any topic which may tangentially involve Trump.
> "illegally crossed the U.S. border"
What, precisely, does this mean? I don't think it means "crossed from Mexico or arrived on a small boat". I think it might actually mean "at the border interview, they said the purpose of their visit to the facility was 'business meetings' rather than 'work'", and the legality hinges on the precise knife edge of the W word.
It would be really, really useful to clarify exactly what the rules are for someone entering the US under a visa waiver for business purposes are, because I don't want to see my co-workers thrown in a gulag.
Thanks for your comment and sources. I've found similar information already. What I was really looking for was, say, an in-depth legal analysis of B1 visas and visa waivers.
But as far as I can tell now, there's not any really clear definition of what counts as work under those visa (waivers), and the ambiguity was tolerated by all parties. So, in effect, the only reasoning is (like always) "this is illegal because we say so".
Thanks again for the info.
It's almost impossible because one side goes into a tizzy when Trump's name is mentioned, then the other side or just people in the middle like you have to calmly layout their argument with evidence.
There is one side that makes it impossible. Let's not confuse that.
Agreed. That's what makes it so inane.
I don't generally favor Trump's policies or the opposition's. Yet it is impossible to have a discussion here without providing explicit disclaimers. Even with those disclaimers, we're constantly brigaded with red-herrings, non-sequiturs and ridiculous claims tilting at what is incorrectly perceived as Trump support.
It is difficult to even criticize Trump's policies, unless the criticism is one of the curated forms prescribed by the outrage-o-sphere.
> It is difficult to even criticize Trump's policies
Are you serious?
this comment is troubling, as I understand they all had visas to work temporarily in building the facility
If that’s true, shouldn’t the “illegal” label more correctly apply to the activity of the company knowingly employing them? What do you believe the workers did wrong?
Visas are granted to individuals not companies. Working outside your visa status is illegal in most developed countries.
The issue here was that subcontracting firms arranged to bring hundreds of people from South Korean. SK companies, including LG Energy Solution, reportedly advised workers and subcontracting firms to use the ESTA visa waiver, even after other visa applications had been repeatedly rejected.
If that’s not illegal, perhaps the legal system needs revamping. And blaming the workers in a situation like that is immoral scapegoating, pure and simple. It’s very on-brand for the US conception of labor rights, though.
> If that’s not illegal, perhaps the legal system needs revamping.
Advising people to commit visa fraud might well be illegal under US law, but given that it all happened in SK, would SK be interested in extraditing them? And would the US taxpayer support spending what that costs?
Knowingly hiring visa fraudsters is probably illegal, but proving intent would be difficult. And if you lower the burden of proof too far then companies will find any excuse to not hire non-white people, which probably isn't what you want.
The ESTA application emphasizes that it's personal and the conditions you have to comply with. I think that's well and good - if anything I think it would be better to scrap the H1-B system of tying people's work visas to specific jobs, that's a big part of what leads to immigration suppressing wages.
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Strange, how they always seem to 'forget' that part
What specific illegal activity was happening? Honest question, I’ve not seen any reference to such a thing before your and the other guy’s comment.
>The individuals arrested during the operation were found to be working illegally, in violation of the terms of their visas and/or statuses. People on short-term or recreational visas are not authorized to work in the U.S.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-leads-multi-agency-ope...
That is wrong.
Summary: https://www.hooyou.com/b1-visa/b1-activities.html
I myself once worked for a large German company at a large US software company, porting code to my company's platform. After a few flights back home to Germany and back immigration took me into the backroom, and I described in detail what I did. They stamped my passport and let me in for another 6 months of that work. I did that for a year before switching to another visa. It also worked out because I never even tried the slightest evasion and gave them everything I got, it's not like I cared, if I had been sent back, so what, I had no desire to immigrate. I'm sure under the exact same circumstances somebody giving them a worse impression of hiding something might not have been approved. But in any case, it's definitely legal, you CAN do some kinds of actual work on just a B1, even for an entire year.
It was legal, because I still was 100% employed and paid in Germany, and the job could not be done otherwise, the US company would not send us their source code.
Similarly, in the context of the Korean raid.
One other important point you neglect is that from what I read the legality of the activities were never even questioned to begin with! They simply arrested everyone. They did not know what they wer4e doing, they just needed the arrest numbers because ICE is under pressure themselves. They did not even have any interpreters. That makes any argument about the legality useless, since it didn't even matter for the arrests.
The parent comment asked what the alleged illegal activity was, and I provided a primary source straight from ICE. I'm not interested in debating your anecdotal experience or speculation. Whether they're wrong is for the courts to decide. I'm sure we'll hear about it soon enough.
You are attempting to shift the goalpost after I countered your wrong assertion directly. You wrote a short and very specific post, it is still there.
It does not matter that you quoted the ICE, not these days with all the lies, and since they never checked the people they arrested if they actually violated anything to begin with, that quote is useless. There is enough background information available about how that raid went off. They did not check before taking every single one of those people away.
And
> "People on short-term or recreational visas are not authorized to work in the U.S."
is just plain wrong (for B1, but also ESTA -- https://www.nnuimmigration.com/esta-business/ "Incidental business activity"), no matter whom you quote!
Your attempt to dismiss it based on me providing additional proof in form of an immigration-encounter directly countering your assertion is noted, but telling.
In addition, it should never come to having to go to the courts in the first place!! Taking away likely lawfully acting people in handcuffs to a very uncomfortable stay in ICE custody already causes severe damage, no court can undo that!
The only reason they can get away with it for the moment is because South Korea needs the military cooperation because of increasing threats at home.
But these methods look more like those of the mafia than that of a civilized state.
I'm saying that while not even minding one bit that/if the US now acts against illegal immigration, I never understood why they just let it happen for decades. I understand certain businesses did well with very low-cost labor that they could easily control and exploit due to the illegal status of the workers. The problem is that they now go far beyond that, because of the administrations desire for numbers and headlines, and pictures.
And if you have to rely on getting your rights through the courts you already lost - the system is expensive, time-consuming, and slow. Getting exonerated later after you were dragged away and put into prison clothing does not undo the damage! Having to go to court is additional punishment for normal people.
No, the parent comment asked for what the illegal activity was, of which we don't know of any, because nobody has proven any. You're talking about alleged illegal activity, and given the lack of trust in the US government right now, that doesn't carry a lot of water.
I can't take these nonsenses anymore.
America has made more profits than countries that take manufacturing jobs from USA. It was totally win-win. Now America destroying these relationships by themselves. Even asking allies economic failure to fulfill their (or trump administration's) greed. Those economic failure possibilities will make their allies' manufacturing capabilities degrade. They don't even have any capabilities and proper plans for re-buliding domestic manufacturing industries to satisfy their needs. (price, capability)
They just want to feel like they are perpetual victims. It appeals to them and it justifies their cruelty towards others.
I guess this is a major difference between the far-left and the far-right. The far-left go out of their way to join the cause of various victims of oppression because they love to always be rooting for the underdog. The far-right also loves the under-dog arch but they don't go around trying to join desperate causes. Instead they manufacture their own narrative in which they are the perpetual victims. Much less noble, much more self-serving.
It's an old story. Check out Aesop's "The Wolf and the Lamb".
What's missing from this is China making a lot of soft calls to SK, basically saying 'we like you, we can pressure NK into a more peaceful position, invest with us, we're all Asians', and SK seems to be responding positively.
SK being closer to China would be a game changer for geopolitics, and they would need _very strong_ guarantees from China, so strong I don't think it's possible in the short term (unless NK has a regime change).
Do not assume that the rest of the world follows the US view of ethnic identity. Groups that would all be classified under “Asian” in the US would be considered different races in China. Regardless it is true that the PRC, even despite political differences, would be more in tune with the ROK culturally due to the long history of Korea falling under the influence of the Sinosphere which is something the United States should be more wary of as a competitive disadvantage when trying to maintain influence over the region.
I'm curious how the average Korean feels about what's going on in the US, or even how much they think about this stuff?
I know for example that in Canada and Europe, we're mostly all pretty disturbed about these trade disruptions, but I'm curious if Korean's feel equally 'put off'. Are they as dependent on the US as Canada and Europe?
Average korean:
We just hope Americans realize some day that the world is not taking advantage of them like Trump wants them to believe.
Korea is very dependent on America but this is a mutually beneficial situation. We are their customers and they are ours. Except Korea is more desparate so the US can afford to rip us off or kill contracts whenever it feels like it. We are always thankful to UN allies and the US for freeing SK from NK but Americans are not here to save us. They are here to snoop into beijing and control the pacific ocean.
You don't understand. Americans elected a rapist. YOU are his next target.
Read Aesop's "The Wolf and the Lamb", and good luck.
They knew exactly what they were doing, and they will do it again.
Matters to exporters. Not to everyone. SK is a 2 Trillion $$$ economy. What numbers are involved here is in the 20-50 Billion a year. Not like life or death.
1-3% of GDP is nothing to sneeze at. I’m having hard time believing this investment into US would pay off anytime soon if at all.
There's a problem here. World depending so much on one country. It's a single point of failure.
The US has more foreign dependencies, than it has countries depending on it, on every level except military.
And even then, a lot of its military dependants are just kidding themselves that the seps will come to their aid if required.
Its ephemeral.
Up until recently it was a good trade-off.
The US sold trust, and it burned it all up for someone's ego. Unfortunate.
This is the crux of the problem. The value of US treasuries and the USD is based on the trust of the world in the US. Now, who knows what will happen to the USD. Will have to wait and see.
Freezing Russian assets was the beginning. Sanctions against Russia backfired, cutting them off from SWIFT encouraged alternatives as did Lloyd's of London refusing to insure Russian ships. All it did was make the non-NATO world develop alternatives.
But does it really or is it just something Americans learned to think? Everything is still well here in Switzerland.
Many comments focus on Trump, but I think the deeper problem lies with America itself. After all, America elected Trump twice.
I don't agree with Peter Zeihan on many of his views, but I think his point about the collapse of the global order set up by America is what's happening.
Trump is dismantling the global order/rule of laws established by America after WWII and the Cold War. I find it ironic that Ian Bremmer said the Chinese care more about the rule of law (established by America) than Americans do in this interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvzx-ecTrw
> Ian Bremmer said the Chinese care more about the rule of law (established by America) than Americans do in this interview
I was confused why they didn't support Ukraine more. By not strongly condemning stuff like Crimea they seem to deeply undermine their position with regards to Taiwan
China knows NATO will turn on them if Russia is defeated. Also, the narrative that Russia launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine isn't strong outside the West. It's more complex, starting with Bush announcing Ukraine eligible for NATO membership, the Maidan coup, and 8 years of civil war against the 4 Eastern Oblasts that voted to secede from Ukraine.
Mmm, I don't see how the historical context for the conflict is relevant
> 4 Eastern Oblasts that voted to secede from Ukraine
I mean.. "lol"
Most importantly for the current topic, there is no international mechanism for regions to legally secede. This is basically "not okay". China can't possibly approve of that. The whole Chinese claim to Taiwan rests on that not being okay.
Your first point makes more sense. Maybe the goal is tieing up Europe with an idiotic conflict? But they undermine themselves and don't really win much of anything
After two decades of reports on Trump's ties to Russian crime in his real estate and Russian government in his politics... You were confused why Trump and the Party of Trump do not strongly condemn Russia and regularly take stances that strengthen that geopolitical group's goals?
given the context.. the "they" here means China
Both can be true. Historians can dig into economic conditions in interwar Germany, lack of deep sea ports, colonies, etc. But also: Adolf he one mad cookie.
The focus on trump is to not blame and upset the individual people. Reality is we all know that it's the Americans own fault, and basically what they wanted and obviously decided for and still do.
> Trump is dismantling the global order/rule of laws
He’s doing nothing of the sort.
He’s dismantling how every country sees, trust, trades and deals with the US, and only the US.
Everyone else will just look to everyone else and the US won’t be involved
With so many investments, imagine how many ICE raids there could be!
Oh man, this but unironically
Converting allies into vassals is logical mid point of 'America First'. Best ROK can do is string US along and hope for a more benign successor regime.
Why have nations not come together to collectively shut down this whole tariff blackmail thing?
If everyone came together and signed up for a Chinese-style reciprocal tariff system then wouldn't this whole charade be over instantly?
I get some nations decided flattering Trump would work out (Vietnam? UK?) but even in the best case they still get tariffs.. just lower..
And how has the tariffs not completely tanked the stock market? Are markets assuming this is just temporary madness and it'll get rolled back?
Why do you think that is not the case? This is exactly what is happening, local example is Switzerland just signed a few free trade agreements.
The US dollar is down. The market is tanking, you just need to change your POV
> Why have nations not come together ...
> If everyone came together
Finally winning that Nobel peace prize by unifying all the countries that are not the US would be amazing. Independent California, Texas and some other parts left sorta-kinda OK-ish after the new American civil war can then also join that alliance later, achieving world peace. Trump gets a posthumous Nobel peace prize and each year we all celebrate by gold plating a hamburger or something.
It's not super crazy for all nations to agree on something. For instance with Gaza everyone except for the US kinda agreed what's going on is no good. I think tariffs are arguably even easier to agree on. I don't think there's a single nation that's ambivalent about the US tariffs - or feel it's "maybe not so bad"
Agreeing something is bad is easy. Agreeing how go about fixing it is not easy.
Not sure if you're joking. The Gaza thing is pure virtue signal and you know it. It's easy for countries to recognize Palestine because recognizing requires them to do nothing.
Reciprocal tariffs against the US is the opposite of nothing.
$350 billion investment to avoid tariffs.
“Trump says the investments will be "selected" by him and controlled by the U.S., meaning Washington would have discretion over where the money will be invested.”
It's really astonishing to me how quickly we all (or, more specifically, Congress, which as done absolutely nothing to push back) accept that this is just how things work now.
Like the president deciding exactly where business investment should be made is the definition of a government command economy (remember that "Communism" bogeyman???), which used to be the antithesis of American economic policy (at least in theory), and now we're just all like "OK, cool". It's so sickening.
Right here on HN you'll find people that are arguing both that this is good and that the conservatives are rightfully attacking the federal institutions because the state got 'too big'. And in some cases those are the very same people!
At this point the debate has been reduced to which flavor of central planning you prefer or dislike least.
Really goes to show how full of hot air all the pearl clutching and hand wringing was over any Biden policy.
[dead]
You can choose to invest 350 billion in the real economy, or 350 million in TrumpCoin.
> $350 billion investment to avoid tariffs
$500 billion for Stargate!
How many of Trump's investment deals from the first term panned out?
They should effectively immediately freeze and potentially cancel any Korean investment in US and investigate all US companies based in their country. US behaving rogue should not go unpunished.
On November 5, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Trump even has the authority to impose tariffs. Nobody should make a deal until that's decided.
To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.
I'm Italian, used to our president mostly approving laws, commanding the armed forces (in theory, not in practice) and very few other things. And the best thing about our president is that it gets elected by the parliament requiring a very sensible majority. Thus pretty much all parties need to agree on one and they end up electing non-political figures (or politicians that have demonstrated high level of trust regardless of their party).
I think our system works great to be honest, and I already see the huge problems having an election-based president in Poland has with the government and president being from different parties and clashing with each other and the president vetoing for years a democratically elected government just to stir trouble.
In practice, the system of government in the US most closely resembles the system of government in Britain prior to Robert Walpole becoming the first prime minister in 1721. American culture places too much emphasis on talking and not enough on listening - it's very easy to claim to have the best constitution in the world if you pay no attention to what anyone else has done in the past two and a half centuries.
Italian system is multi-party system with hybrid proportional representation. Very different.
The US operates on a "separation of powers" FPTP winner-takes-all system: once one party has lined up control of both houses, the Presidency and the Supreme Court, they can do almost anything, and (thanks to SCOTUS control) without regard to constitutional legality.
The last remaining bulwark is the Democrat states, which is why Federal troops have been sent in to intimidate them.
>president vetoing for years a democratically elected government
I guess the president is democratically elected too. Clashing between political parties is normal, and one can argue that a system which makes them limit each other is just fine. The current layout (parliament majority belongs to A, the president is of B) may reverse in future. And then the same people who now claim that president's vetoes should be abolished may start to see it in a very different light.
The problem is how difficult it is to remove someone once they are in power. In parliamentary democracies, it's simply loss of majority.
One can argue that, if one doesn't look too closely how that "limiting of each other" tends to work in practice, and how it tends to work out in the end.
We have many, many examples of presidential republics, where both a president and a parliament have equal constitutional claim to represent the will of the people.
We see them reel from one constitutional crisis to another like a drunken sailor.
The US has fared comparatively well, as presidential republics go - so far. I don't know why, maybe because some groups have been more willing to yield to preserve the prestige of the institution as a whole. Given that it's the most prestigious presidential republic by a mile, that wouldn't be so surprising.
But it makes sense then, that this subservience will eventually get pushed further and further, until everything breaks.
It's no coincidence that most of the countries that at some point become more autocratic are presidential republics.
Linz has argued that presidential republics have the following issues:
- dual democracy legitimacy (both president and legislature claim popular mandate)
- rigidity (fixed term rather than parliamentary approval prevents adaptation to crises)
- winner take all logic (total exclusion of opposition from power)
- personalization of power (authority concentration)
Further, the Carnegie Endowment in 2025 found that autocratic transitions occur at "striking speed" in presidential systems.
[1] https://kellogg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/old_files/documen...
> I guess the president is democratically elected too.
That's a bug, not a feature though.
What happens in practice is that you get president and government from different parties and they carry their political fights on instead of governing. The president vetoes the government just for the sake of sabotaging it for his parties political gains. We've had already multiple instances of president and government having almost independent foreign policies, crazy. Trump, e.g., has de facto been ignoring our prime minister Tusk (which by constitution should decide our foreign policy) and has been talking only with our president. And that's not on Trump, but our crappy Polish constitution for allowing this mess.
On top of that, governments are based on holding a majority votes, presidents just stay there whatever happens and whatever chaos they create.
I think that there should be a politically, democratically elected government whose job is to make laws, and the rest of institutions should be as bureaucratic and boring as possible, with as little political involvement as possible.
Again, I really like how in Italy or Germany the president is not involved into law and policy making. Ever noticed how all the countries that deviate towards autocracy...are all presidential based?
> To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.
It has. No US president ever went this far before. Past US presidents have made remarks such as "If I'd tried to do that, I would have been impeached".
Congress has more power than the President but the current members of congress are not inclined to use it against Trump. Or at all.
Yes, who knows, maybe the Supreme Court Royale Of The United Monarchy will restrain the monarch.
Hes been stacking the Supreme Court for years, how do you think that will go?
Also Trump asked for 90% of the profit from investment? If that's the case then that is not investment at all.
Protection money. Pay or we will withdraw our military support.
Also Trump asked to direct where the investment goes himself. It looks more like a gift than an investment.
Seems to be a dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45328828
Since SCMP was confiscated by the CCP it is constantly writing stories that undermine Korea, Japan and Australia, primarily for US and European audiences.
There are individual humans, and certainly mainly companies and countries, that could invest $350billion in the USA or the EU and not be destroyed. Buying land, building, expanding manufacturing or investing in new companies generally is considered a good thing!
I am stupid. Why there is no economical block being discussed to nullify or reduce those effects?
Without commenting on any of the details or economics, the smart thing to have done would have been to make the $350bn thing be over 10 years and be slow to ramp up, then wait Trump out. I'm surprise he didn't do that.
trump and his cronies would never accept that.
I think this is what Japan did initially. Announce a huge number, 500 bn I think, and then slowly trickle out the news that it will be over 10 or so years.
But that didn't sit well with trump. There was news immediately that Japan must invest the whole amount immediately to escape tariffs.
I'm not sure a single country will to the "invest immediately" thing, like at all.
In the same way politician outside of the US trust anymore what Trump says when it comes to economics, a lot of countries seem to have started to response the same way. I.e. speak with Trump like he did with them, do hollow promises, and then backtrack and/or circumvent them.
Also, appart from authocratic ones, no country can or should decide where private companies will invest.
The West has long been doing "industrial policy". At least since the end of WWII, and to some degree since before as well, but especially during the Cold War and even since then. You can say that the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. were all autocratic all that time if you like, but most wouldn't. Maybe today more people would feel that having an industrial policy makes a country autocratic, but keep in mind that industrial policy is not usually practiced by putting a gun to a business' executives' heads -- no, industrial policy is often practiced via incentives and disincentives, with force being very tenuously indirect.
> autocratic all that time if you like, but most wouldn't
yeah because that is not how autocracy is defined
Having a policy and making incentives != promising a sum of investment to another country.
and EU isn't even a country, and all(?/most) EU countries have the budged strictly sitting with the senate, i.e. outside of the hand of any of the leaders discussing deals with Trump
the chance that anything like that will pass those Senats also isn't exactly high
and all of this is public knowledge, so either Trump is incredible badly consulted to a point you wonder if it's malicious or more likely he doesn't care, and only care about a meaningless legally void promise he can present now probably some way smaller immediate subset of the promised actions. And then a few years down it's the "evil other countries" which he knowingly pressured to give him hollow promises they legally can't give, instead of it's seemingly bad/incompetent deal making (if you assume the goal is to actually make working deals and not to rail up people to have excuses for increasingly more extreme actions).
One condition that Washington has been broadly mandating is, when they ask for the money then it should be deposited in the treasury's account within a short period. Basically they control the pace of the investment and the detail is not even a part of the deal.
> I'm surprise he didn't do that.
The leaders of countries have to deal with internal politics. Most People, with a capital P, do not like feeling abused and mugged, and will be angry at their leaders for acting so weak.
It seems that internal politics are winning out, at least in the moment, over the current US admins threats
Look at it as being all internal politics - that’s where a leader’s power comes from
If you think being an US antagonist is bad, try being an ally.
South Korea, Japan, Philippines, are all proxy states and hostages to the US defense budget.
No one needs to make an investment. The playbook—as all countries are figuring it out—to navigate the crisis is simple: agree in principle to the demands, let the narcissistic toddler self-pat, brag about how fantastic of a deal maker he is. Stall, delay to make things official. Let it all die down slowly. Need more time? How about blatant corruption like approving Trump Towers, or gifting a corporate jet? Or make a token investment, just enough to let him brag again.
What every country is doing is buying time. Just enough till the next election or (hopefully) sooner.
It should definitely never be overlooked how easy to manipulate he is with flattery, and by tiny (by standards of whole nations' economies) bribes that enrich his family company directly.
> What every country is doing is buying time. Just enough till the next election or (hopefully) sooner.
Is that enough? I do not think this is about one person. US seems to be changed.
Anyone playing for the next election isn't paying attention. Power has been seized, it will not be released.
He has only been able to do what he has done because of the Republican bootlickers in Congress. If the Democrats can take both houses in the midterms they can shut him down.
Will there be a midterm? Will the national guard prevent elections from happening in the cities controlled by the Democrats where they are being deployed ensuring the "correct" outcome?
I'm starting to think that HNs soft prohibition against politics only applies to women and black people talking about their experiences in tech (disappeared.) At least four or five of these non-news items that just serve for endless anti-administration comments are hitting the front page every day. The Wikipedia page for goddamn Horst Wessel almost hit the front page last night, because according to people with George W. Bush's politics, everybody is a Nazi.
No, South Korea's new president saying something about an unfavorable trade treaty that hasn't happened yet is not news. Their last president declared martial law because he declared that the opposition party was subverted by Russian propaganda. The NYT, as they do, pretended not to know that it was wrong because US interests were hoping it would succeed.
And when you rail about how awful it was to raid a factory where Koreans on visas that didn't allow them to do physical work were doing physical work, and where one of them had been killed and another worker not from Korea cut in half in an accident; a site that was being reported over and over again for safety and workers rights violations, consider how that makes working people think of you.
Reference, notorious Nazi outlet The American Prospect: Following ICE Raid in Georgia, Concerns Raised About Human Trafficking at Hyundai https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-08-ice-raid-georgia-pla...
Why do the outlets that you get your news from simply ignore things? Simply choose not to report on them? Instead we get "Somebody says something." You shouldn't see a story like that being reported as news unless there is nothing else going on. Israel is killing everyone in Gaza City right now.
But tariffs, though. Protectionism! Grover Norquist is smiling in Hell.
That being said, I understand that a lot of people are not from, in, or have any loyalty to the US. But US policy is not made for you. We've hollowed out our working population, and kept them alive with credit. America itself has to deleverage. AI is not going to save us, because it is stupid, and wringing productivity gains from it will be difficult and will not give us any relative advantage because it will be cheap to imitate. That's a couple trillion that we can expect to be wiped out in the very short term future. We need to take some medicine now (the wildly overvalued dollar has been our heroin for 50 years), and anyone who has been relying on US debt (whether in the form of US deficit spending on defense, or otherwise) to float their economies has to get off the teat.
We're a bad influence on SK anyway, and should never have been there. If they want to stop investing in the US they're free to, they're just going to feel it when they try to export to the US. If your economy will collapse when that happens, it's because your economy is making out better than our economy. Also, it's nothing like the IMF crisis to insist on a favorable trade deal. US elites have been bribed by ownership in foreign concerns not to insist. It'll still work - look at the people in office now, they love a bribe - but you have to renegotiate. That's how dirty business works; your counterparties are as trustworthy as the leverage you have over them. Nobody is going to cry over you being screwed because the people you bribed before are out of power.
It isn't immediately clear that the administration's heterodox approach to state capitalism is more destructive than what passes as orthodox. Personally I'm not a fan of either option. Given the general mainstream preference for interventionism, one could characterize it as a "progressive" approach to central planning.
A more coherent critique might lay out the shortcomings of both flavors of economic interventionism. Instead, we're stuck in a partisan debate over who has a better central planning approach. Maybe there are reasonable or pragmatic points to be made there, but admitting as much allows the possibility that perhaps Trump's interventions should be measured empirically, rather than rejected based on the a priori flaws of interventionism.
Partisans are free to pick and choose which statistics and time periods they feel best illustrate their case. Easy to see how this devolves into incoherence.
US unemployment is up, inflation is up, tourism is down, defence sales are being cancelled admidst the largest procurement expansion in history, foreign investment is down, business confidence has been shattered by an incoherent and arbitrarily changing tarrif regime.
Oh and the President is advocating that businesses should stop quarterly reporting...
> businesses should stop quarterly reporting
That might actually not be such a bad thing, if it removes some of the pressure to think overly short-term from the company management.
I agree that the outcome will be destructive.
The questions are:
Is it is more or less destructive than the alternative destruction? Who is it more economically destructive for? Over what time period is it more or less destructive than the alternative interventionism? Is 6 months a meaningful time horizon?
It becomes muddled very quickly. I would appeal for a consistent approach which opposes both forms of destructive interventionism.
Many things are luck and uncontrollable events. So what you do is focus on not f.ing things up. Current usg is doing the exact opposite.
Agreed. That's a summarized version of the (ECP, knowledge problem) argument against economic interventionism.
It's a shame SK is a vassal state. Koreans deserve better than serving thankless americans.
>“Without a currency swap, if we were to withdraw $350 billion in the manner that the U.S. is demanding and to invest this all in cash in the U.S., South Korea would face a situation as it had in the 1997 financial crisis,” he said through a translator.
So do a currency swap? South Korea isn't failing, do surely there would people to offer liquidity or financing to make it possible.
I’m not convinced that we know more about South Korea’s economic situation than their Prime Minister’s office.
There aren't a lot of counterparties to a $350Bn currency swap. SK is manoeuvring to make the Fed offering the swap and thus taking the FX risk as a requirement for this deal, which is I suspect why you're reading about this.
That's... not how FX swaps work.
FX swaps are where Korea fronts up with however many trillion KRW, giving it to the Fed (or whoever else, but the Fed would be the only counterparty that would be able to accommodate that size), the Fed then hands over the USD to the Koreans.
Presumably, the Koreans would then invest that USD.
Then at some point in the future the trade would be unwound and each side would receive their own currency back.
There's no currency risk in the trade for either side (unless one side defaults).
Of course there is currency risk, that's why the swap would get marked to market. There is no "currency risk" in the sense that you are locked into an exchange rate and (in case of fixed for fixed) the interest rates on the principal, but there is still currency risk.
It's like saying there is no price risk in a long term LNG contract.
What do you think happens if the exchange rate moves between the point of handover and the point in the future where the trade is unwound?
Why would the South Korean government trade even more resources for this deal?
What is the benefit they or their people would get?
Lower tariffs which will result in more American money coming in.
For that to work you need trust. And guess what is being eroded even faster than the value of the USD right now?
Even though I disagree with your implied claim that trust is eroding, you don't need trust for it to work. Economic principals cause it to naturally work. As you move along a price curve reducing the price you typically will make more sales.
No, for some products trust is more important than price. If the price is low but you can't trust it to work when you need it most then the price is irrelevant.
>then the price is irrelevant
Not everyone is irrelevant to the American market. The negotiations around American tariffs are not relevant if you are not selling to America in the first place.
There are more perspectives to this than just the USA one.
> So do a currency swap?
It is the US who refuses to do.
If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country.
Depending on how the one country treats the others, it might be ok - like it is kind of ok for some animals to live in a zoo, I guess. Or it could turn out very bad - all other countries becoming slave colonies of the one that rules the world.
Currently it seems like only two countries are really taking part in the AI race. The USA and China.
On a political level, I am not sure if there is still time for the rest of the world to try and avoid becoming 100% dependent on them. It looks like there is not even awareness of the issue.
On a personal level, it is an interesting question, how one should brace themselves for the times ahead.
I don't think the AI race to ruin the internet has any relevance to what will bring food to the plate in the next 2 decades.
It seems like the big improvements in the current AI flavor are done. It happened very quickly, and so did the diminishing returns. It's amazing compared to 2 years ago, it's great compared to a year ago, it's not that different to 6 months ago.
Lots of room in optimization and figuring out how to actually use it usefully. But I don't think any one country is now poised to take a leap ahead on this stuff. And Chinese researchers kind of showed that once the technique was out of the bag, catching up wasn't hard.
AI will empower the service industries, but I don't see it having much impact past administrative efficiency in all other industries relevant to international trade. It won't make minerals more abundant, it won't make farmland more available, for example. It could empower manufacturing a bit but they are bottlenecked by physical resources, supply chain access and other physical constraints as well so there are limits there.
I also think AI is ubiquitous now, no one country will "win". Maybe someone has a breakthrough, but information is globalized, it wouldn't take long for the technology to spread.
Again the actual constraints I believe will be physical. Who has the most chips, the most power, the most space etc, to run the AI.
> If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country
History is replete with these supposed silver bullets. (See: Marinetti.) They rarely pan out that way in the long run.
And if AGI really is that level of civilisation changer, the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)
> the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)
People are loyal (to whatever degree they're actually loyal), because it is a monkey virtue. Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything? If we're not smart enough to carefully design the AGI because we're stumbling around just trying to invent any AGI at all, we won't know how to make loyalty fundamental to its mind at all. And it's not as if it evolved from monkeys such that it would have loyalty as a vestige of its former condition.
> Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything?
I'm using the word loyal loosely. Replace it with controlled by if you prefer. (If it's not controlled by anyone, the question of which country it originates in is doubly moot.)
>Replace it with controlled by if you prefer.
Sure. But I don't think I'd trust the leash made by the same guy who accidentally invented God. At least, I wouldn't trust that leash to hold when he put it around God's neck.
While eventually, given some absurd amount of time, we might learn to control these things, will we learn to control them before we've created them? Could we survive long enough to learn to do that, if we create them first? Legislation and regulation might slow down their creation sufficiently *IF* we only needed 12 months or 5 years or whatever, but if we instead need centuries then those safeguards won't cut it.
My only consolation, I think, is that I truly believe humans far too stupid to invent AGI. Even now, there are supposed geniuses who think LLMs are a some stepping stone to AGI, when I see no evidence that this is the case. You're all missing the secret sauce.
All we can do is hope that it's China's population that succumbs first to the mediocrity and decay of offloading their thinking to machines.