We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
WW2 was long enough ago that no one you end up talking about it actually experienced it themselves, but it's recent enough that people who felt their country did "Good", can still ride that high wave without being pulled down by everything that came after.
Right, I didn't mean "Everyone who was alive during WW2 is today dead", that's obviously not true, it was just 80 years ago or so.
What I meant was that most people who discuss WW2 with others online, mostly talk from the perspective of not having experienced the war themselves, nor did the person who they speak to, most likely.
If you go to countries that were invaded, people have been in contact with their grandparents. It's not "something that happened far away", it's "stories from family I've known".
Of course in the US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens. Of course not everybody cares: many people still buy Teslas in Europe. But I think the WW2 memory is not as far as you make it sound.
> US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens.
What should have happened? The US has put emphasis on freedom from its inception, although in practice it still had McCarthyism which to say at least, harrased communists.
What do you mean? There are countries where one can go to jail for doing Nazi salutes. Just like in the US it is not tolerated to joke about shooting a kid at school (if you have seen the recent Snapchat story).
What should have happened, if you ask me, is that a lot more people should have boycotted Tesla and his other companies.
The good os also kind of is problematic. As in nazism was just a kind of hyper-imperialism by young countries to outrace other empires. And now 30 years after the "end of history" aka playing nice to bring down another empire, its back to the starting point.
If there are actually people out there walking around thinking that just getting the trains running on time justified the murder of 6 million ‘undesirables’ or many different shades, and this isn’t just some epic troll, then we are way more cooked than I had dared believe. And I don’t think you can hand wave away such large and obtuse generalisations by saying ‘Poe’s Law applies’.
Arguing on the internet has always been a fool’s game, and there have always been people who have made sport of it for the lolz, but honestly, why even entertain such vacuous opinions for outrage’s sake on a forum like this?
Aid is a hard problem that is true but the world is a worse place after USAid got raised by Trump. Aid should probably be atleast 100x the current rate, it should not be called aid either.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us??
Yes, the world should get it for free, but that mean nothing because the US gets something back at all. It's mad. I'm not from the US, but it's obvious why cutting global funding was popular in the US.
Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Niels Bohr, the Great Dane, was one of these skid greasers! He worked with the queen of Sweden, and also used his academic contacts in various countries to secure jobs/visas.
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
>Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Perhaps that's because most of those refugees could more easily shelter in neighboring countries that they are more culturally similar to... if shelter was actually the primary thing that they were seeking.
Despite what Hollywood says, WW2 was more to do with German militarism and expansionism than the Jewish question. The Allies were certainly willing to use pro-Jewish sentiments and some Jewish troops, but it was never presented as the main issue.
I don't know where Hollowood ever said it WW2 was about Jews.
IDK if things have changed but generally the whole narrative in the US is presented as unwitting yankies discovering the horrors of the death camps. It's debated how much some levels of the government knew, but it certainly wasn't public knowledge in the US.
There was definitely some knowledge of how Jews were being treated by Germany very early on, and some people were very vocal in condemning it, although they cleaned up their act during the Berlin Olympics. The Holocaust really seems to have escalated during the war itself, and with the invasion of the USSR. By this time the British Empire was already at war with them.
Patriotism and threat seem to have been the main motivators for most people in the west.
Difficult to pin something as all consuming as WW2 on "about" anything, but we can look at who fired the first shots, which was clearly the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the east and the German invasion of Poland in the West (followed shortly after by the USSR invading Poland and later Finland from the other direction.)
It is not at all a given that, had Germany stayed within her international borders, that the Holocaust would have on its own triggered WW2. After all, mass murder in the Congo Free State didn't trigger invasion of Belgium.
There are many films that combine the two. Inglourious Basterds is one of them. German attacks on the Jews were heavily criticised in the west but not the prime motivator
Many people in the British Empire were told to fight for the mother country or even to preserve the empire (which was largely gone by the seventies, with some major territories becoming independent in the later 1940s.)
> Originally their plan was just to force them to leave
That is 1930s pre-war Germany and Austria; and around 550k people by the most generous calculation. Yes, the world wronged them. But you cannot say death camps happened because the US didn’t hand out enough visas.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (home of 3-3.5m Jews) and in 1941 the USSR (home of another 1-2m Jews) no one was being forced to leave (or live) anymore. People were being killed with bullets to the head or back, and when this started to be unbecoming/too inefficient, the German state devised an industrial approach to the killing of humans.
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
"Neutrality" for a country (as per the Hague convention) basically means that you cannot help a belligerent and you have to treat the belligerents equally.
So I assume that if you open your borders to all fleeing citizens, that's neutral, and if you close it to all, that's neutral as well.
There is a difference between someone running from persecution and someone leaving because they might be conscripted into invasion they agree with or because they dont like the economy. Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here. You could sorta a little equate Ukrainians, a little.
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
> That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
Ah another week another instance of this maga level crap. Read up on [1], read up on Geneva accepting migrants way after it was clear that Switzerland will starve since it was 100% surrounded by axis. Even after federal government forbade that.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.
When the US wins, it tends to be quick, clean, and easily forgotten. Consider our victories against ISIS, or against Saddam in the Gulf War. Both cases where an expansionist power violated territorial integrity norms by engaging in conquest, and was defeated by a US-led coalition.
I really hope you're referring to GW1, rather than 2. And yeah, if you weren't a Kurd who believed GW Bush, then that was a pretty effective war from the US (and global) perspective.
Only if you ignore the rise of ISIS and various militias, along with the collapse of Iraqi society (mind you, the sanctions had done a pretty good job of wrecking that before GW2 anyway).
You guys will define "winning" so narrowly that if the Middle East continues to be volatile, that means the US must've lost. The type of victory that the US achieved in WW2 is an atypically high standard for "victory".
> You guys will define "winning" so narrowly that if the Middle East continues to be volatile, that means the US must've lost. The type of victory that the US achieved in WW2 is an atypically high standard for "victory".
Sorry what, I wasn't aware that I was a member of you guys.
Look, the US invaded Iraq in GW2, they killed off Saddam very quickly, but taking control of the country and settling down all of the violence took well over a decade, and dealing with ISIS took much the same amount of time.
You can regard that as a victory, but it sure doesn't look like much of one to me, particularly as Saddam (for all his faults) suppressed the militias like ISIS who ended up becoming a major concern for the US.
In a world where the US had never invaded Iraq, do you think the region would look much different today?
I mean a few years after WW2 the US stopped the communists from taking over South Korea. Maybe that isn't good for the "world" but it was good for the millions of South Koreas.
"Difficult to defend America as reality-based when it's going around renaming bodies of water that do not belong to it."
I didn't claim that Trump was reality-based.
"Also I'm not sure people understand what Swiss (or for that matter Irish) neutrality means."
It's a moral facade that allows them to dodge responsibility. The US has given far more than Switzerland, and also gets blamed far more, for not giving yet more. How does that make sense? As I said, the European worldview is not typically reality-based.
Another saying is: "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
The US sent billions to Ukraine, and what did we get in return? Europeans telling us that "the last time the US did anything good for the world was WW2".
It's not about hegemons vs non-hegemons either. China sends war supplies to Russia and Europe barely complains.
How about this: Consider our loss of support for Ukraine as an abandonment of aspirations of hegemony in Eastern Europe. Bingo, now we no longer have "great power" in that region, nor "great responsibility". Ukraine is your problem now.
Ultimately, you're just playing language games. There's no reason a Swiss taxpayer should be less responsible than an American taxpayer. This is all just anti-Americanism.
People like to scapegoat the US whenever they're dissatisfied regarding anything, virtually anywhere around the world. There's frequently a creative way to blame the US. And because people are impossible to please, and they are always dissatisfied, the US is always blamed. I'm sick of it.
The thing is, if you don't help us in Eastern Europe, you don't just lose hegemonial status there. You lose all of Europe and with that the very foundation of your power.
It's not Anti-Americanism, but if you want to go out with the belle of the ball, you actually have to try.
You don't get to date her by default, and she is getting increasingly tired of your entitled attitude.
Ukraine already is our problem, the vast majority of support comes from Europe. It's your continued insistence that you don't even have to try while expecting us to stay by your side that is the issue. A friend that keeps asking for more while not helping in need is not a friend at all.
>The thing is, if you don't help us in Eastern Europe, you don't just lose hegemonial status there. You lose all of Europe and with that the very foundation of your power.
If that means you're going to stop blaming us for everything, it sounds fantastic.
BTW if you think Europe is "the very foundation" of American power you're delusional.
>You don't get us by default, and we are getting increasingly tired of your entitled attitude.
As I stated in another comment thread:
"For years our leaders told you to be less dependent on us. Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us. It's mind-blowing how out-of-touch you guys can be."
> BTW if you think Europe is "the very foundation" of American power you're delusional.
You do know American power projection is mostly based on bases on European soil? That your economy is greatly benefiting from integration with ours? You think America can be significant on a world stage where Europe turns away? You think you could stomach losing access to the world's largest market of wealthy consumers? You think your sanctions would be effective if we didn't go along?
Every single power mechanism available to the US is dependent on our cooperation.
> Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us
Of course it's a favour to you. We supported your nonsense in exchange for you dealing with the military grunt work. Out of touch is only the one that tries to kill the golden goose because it sometimes needs feeding.
(Of course, military strength rests on a basis of economic strength. That's international relations 101.)
This is why I say that Europeans are delusional. They're uninformed about the most basic facts about the world. The claim that the US economy is "mostly" based on integration with Europe is just astonishing. Your colonial empires are long gone, but your colonial mentality is remarkably unchanged. No wonder you think of yourself as a "belle" with this level of delusional self-regard.
Europe is not one country in a list. It's one trade union, that together is bigger than any other economy on your graph. Also note that you haven't acknowledged any of the other, more important points.
It's not just your economy that depends on us. It's every single measure of power. Rammstein. Sigonella. SWIFT.
Every single dimension of American power is based on governments in Europe granting it. I would suggest you stop being so ungrateful before we stop doing so.
We are the Belle of the Ball, the only superpower that has both China and the US dependent on them. Whoever we choose to support is who wins global dominance. And right now, the US is being a bit of a shitty boyfriend.
So the statement "the US economy is mostly based on integration with the European economy" is astonishingly ignorant and arrogant. If you can't acknowledge that in your next reply, I don't think there is any point in me leaving more comments after this one.
>Every single dimension of American power is based on governments in Europe granting it. I would suggest you stop being so ungrateful before we stop doing so.
This is an extremely bold statement on your part, given Europe's extreme dependence on US weapon systems.
Regarding military bases, I'm evaluating relative to a counterfactual where the US recedes back into isolation. Prior to WW2 we had a policy of avoiding alliances in peacetime. From that perspective, why would we need to project power in Europe... if we weren't defending Europe? We have our own oil now. No need to be in the Middle East anymore. Again, it's Europeans telling me that they're doing me a favor by letting the US defend them for the past 8 decades. Just mind-blowing.
Maybe we should start arming Russia so we'd be competitive with China for status as your "boyfriend".
Here's a life hack. Learn to use Google. You claimed: "You do know American power projection is mostly based on bases on European soil?" Google search for: "What fraction of US military bases are in Europe?"
The answer? 4-5%. Is the claim that American power projection is "mostly" based on bases on European soil prima facie plausible if only 4-5% of our bases are on European soil? Doing a quick Google can help you understand the yawning delta between your beliefs and the facts.
And BTW, I think Trump is a terrible president and I'm quite upset about the whole Greenland thing. But Europeans are the most annoying people in the world, bar none. I'd honestly prefer an alliance with China over an alliance with Europe. Should be a good way to achieve world peace, if nothing else. I care more about peace than "winning" "global dominance".
You're confusing base survival and global dominance. Nobody's saying the US couldn't scrape by by itself, but to keep your current position, you cannot just abandon your allies.
For power projection, it's not just about fractions. Its about geography, it's about networks. Without those 5%, no convenient access to Africa or the Middle East, no global intelligence network, a crippled sanctions mechanism.
Speaking of the Middle East, most of us never wanted you to go there and create one mess after another for us to deal with. From the first time you went, it was always despite protests from Europe. The fact you're trying to frame your adventurism as some sort of favor to us is indicative of the hubris I'm talking about.
You already are conspiring with Russia, throwing fancy parties for our enemies on your soil. Don't think we haven't noticed the Alaskan schmooze-fest.
Finally, you're underestimating the economic ties by being so focused on goods (even though 20% is a huge fraction, imagine what it would mean for any companies revenue to go down by that much!) Think about the website you're on though! Services are not even included in these 20%. Think about the consequences for the tech industry if they lose Europe as customer base!
I don't think Googling some numbers makes up for a lack of systemic reasoning. You are treating your greatest asset as a burden and we do not appreciate it.
Why does Europe get to be the belle? Why can't the US be the belle? Early in the invasion of Ukraine, when Biden was sending billions of dollars in support, the internet was full of anger from Europeans that the US wasn't sending even more. Did you ever think that we might be getting "increasingly tired of your entitled attitude"?
Because there's three grand powers in the world and two of them are locked in contest. The third one is the only one that can shift the balance of powers, so it gets to be kingmaker.
I don't know. It's your leadership that started the contest in the first place, take it up with them.
Either way though, they decided to care and now they're trying to abandon their winning hand. You don't get to both play the game and then pretend you don't care.
>You don't get to both play the game and then pretend you don't care.
Why not? You seem to think that these silly arguments based on your invented verbal classifications such as who is "playing the game" should count as constraints on US foreign policy.
The fundamental problem is that we gave you a sweetheart deal for decades. You got used to it and took it for granted. Aspects of that deal are being renegotiated. You're now saying: "Where are my entitlements?" But they were never entitlements.
In any case--good luck buddy. I think you're beyond my help.
Because now that you started it, the Chinese won't stop playing. Your own behavior is what creates constraints, the irony is that you haven't even realized my language is purely descriptive of geopolitical grand strategy while yours is enacting the late stage imperial hubris I'm describing.
And it was you that is throwing away the sweetheart deal and still being arrogant about it.
You're correct that they were never entitlements. They were the bare minimum compensation for our support.
I don't consider European "support" to have much value. It seems to mostly come in the form of whining, lectures, and things which would happen anyways, such as trade.
One recurring issue here has been that the American public is apparently operating under the assumption that their personal preferences are directly translatable into geopolitical reality. You can want things and you can even vote for them, but you are within a larger system who's other factors or trajectory you don't control.
Personally, I think realistically with that in mind, the EU should work for rapprochement with China considering America's current loss of ambition.
Most importantly, I think this whole frame is way too stuck in the inane back-and-forth between states, when I believe Climate Change is the defining issue of our time - for all of us, independent of national allegiance.
With this humanity defining issue in mind, the American behavior becomes particularly dangerous, not honoring their international commitments and actively making the problem worse while pretending the world could be the same as a hundred years ago.
We need to move forward and deal with the problems of right now, instead of harking back to some perceived glory days. History flows forwards, not backwards. We don't have time for these petty squabbles, we can't afford to wait for you to get your house in order.
The final irony is that now apparently you're praising the Swiss model after just calling it "moral facade that allows them to dodge responsibility"? Which one is it? An example to inspire or a dodge to avoid? Once again, you want your cake and eat it.
I want the US to stop being the designated country which gets blamed whenever anything goes wrong. What am I allowed to do in order to make that happen, O European Master?
> I want the US to stop being the designated country which gets blamed whenever anything goes wrong.
You don't get to be simultaneously one of the biggest actors on the global stage and exempt from scrutiny on how you interact with the rest of the world.
The system you helped build is the system you're decrying. I don't know what to tell you, this is not about my desires, it is simply about geopolitical realities.
Some random blog post where some dude used Claude is not a serious source. Reuters reports that U.S. emissions accounted for 36% of the global increase in 2025, with U.S. emissions rising 3.2% year-on-year versus 0.3% in China: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-leads-global-co2-...
More importantly, you exited the Paris agreement. Again, this is about systemic consequences of your behavior, not some insular self-perception.
> I'm tired of being the designated punching bag.
Then stop giving the rest of the world the surface to do so, get your house together and stop complaining about the world being unfair to you. This is the reality we live in, this is the reality you were instrumental in building.
We all gotta live with it, your sudden lack of desire or ambition doesn't change the fact that this is how the world works. Changes in your self-conception do not change the incentives of other actors.
You can complain about scrutiny all you want, but it won't make it disappear. You're playing one of the major powers, and you get judged by those standards, whether you like it or not.
>You don't get to opt out of being one of the biggest actors globally and thus always involved and evaluated on how you interact with the rest of the world.
China is also one of the biggest actors. They didn't exactly provide support to Ukraine. They're happy to sell gear to Russia. Now you're planning your rapprochement with them.
Face it, you hold the US to a standard that you hold no other nation.
This business about "the system you set up" is just another way of you admitting that you took us for granted. We're tired of being taken for granted. We're burnt out. You haven't said a single positive thing about the US in this thread, have you?
>Then stop acting like one
Bro this is literally just bullying. I've had enough.
> China is also one of the biggest actors. They didn't exactly provide support to Ukraine.
Yes, their geopolitical alignment is different. They did provide support to Russia, which they have shared interests with. That is precisely my point - you have to nurture your alliances, you don't get to just have them.
> Face it, you hold the US to a standard that you hold no other nation.
The US is in a position that no other nation is in. Your complaint is effectively about the US' position as the most powerful nation in the world.
> This business about "the system you set up" is just another way of you admitting that you took us for granted. We're tired of being taken for granted.
You are the ones taking us for granted. You think we owe you loyalty, while at the same time wanting to reduce any support. You claim to want us to become more independent, yet at the same time get upset when we put in place measures to do so. No! Gratitude has to be earned, it isn't just given. Disengagement never comes for free, it always means a disentanglement of interests.
> You haven't said a single positive thing about the US in this thread, have you?
I could turn this question right around and start listing my own grievances, but I won't because it would a silly, petty, ego-based distraction from the systemic analysis at hand.
> Bro this is literally just bullying. I've had enough.
If you think I've made a factual or argumentative error, point it out. Calling an argument 'bullying' doesn't address the argument, especially when I've been polite throughout.
> How about this: Consider our loss of support for Ukraine as an abandonment of aspirations of hegemony in Eastern Europe.
But you are not abandoning those aspirations, that's the problem. The US has spent decades embedding itself into the security and foreign policy structures of other countries, effectively giving itself veto power over the decisions of tens of countries. Now it unwilling to use that power responsibly, but at the same time it is unwilling to give it up too.
There is a strange assumption in the US establishment that their current position in the world is the natural order of things and not the result of decades of Cold War era cooperation. Despite all the complaints about allies freeloading, the establishment seems utterly shocked and confused when those allies start reducing their dependence on the US, for example, by pivoting investments into their own weapons production instead of buying American.
You want the benefits of having allies dependent on the US, while treating any attempt by allies to become more self-reliant as a problem. Talk about entitlement!
US defense leadership has been pretty consistent about wanting europe to expand defense funding, but spent on american defense industry, rather than European capacity and technology
it has also been very unfriendly to europe building up any sovereignty, eg. to continue trading with Iran on the euro when the US pulled out of the JCPOA
>US defense leadership has been pretty consistent about wanting europe to expand defense funding, but spent on american defense industry, rather than European capacity and technology
Try listening to the actual words that US leadership says instead of the creative interpretations that Europeans come up with.
>"One of the self-evident conclusions of the war in Ukraine was … the European continent and America'[s] underinvestment … in [their] defense industrial base[s] — the ability to produce munitions [and] emerging technologies rapidly and field them, was a blind spot exposed through the aggression against Ukraine," he said.
>The U.S., Ukraine and Europe are all expanding their industrial bases, but more must be done.
US leadership has been consistent in encouraging Europe to expand its defense-industrial base. Excluding the US from weapons procurement is not the same thing.
I doubt that. But there's a broader lesson here. Many critics of US foreign policy assume, without justification, that any US foreign policy involvement means the US is entirely to blame for any suboptimal outcome. Positive outcomes (for example, a long, unprecedented period of peace and prosperity in Europe) are conveniently excluded from the analysis.
Of course, it's always possible to raise your expectations so that every outcome counts as "negative", so you always get a chance to blame the US.
The Swiss are very clever. By staying quiet they avoid responsibility for anything or blame for anything. When the US stays neutral, we are told we are "complicit" or "abandoning allies".
Euromaidan was (a) good (b) organic (you cannot pay people enough to get shot in the street) and (c) to the extent that there was "US" sponsorship, it was mostly by the Open Society Foundation, which is run by a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis and therefore knows what oppression looks like, and has donated the majority of his fortune to the freedom of Eastern Europe. He's 96.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world.
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
Could you share some examples of Swiss being cozy with the Nazis? Wikipedia seems to make the counter case [0]. Switzerland did trade energy with Nazis - but they were dependent on Germany for their coal needs. Switzerland also kept the gold Nazis stuffed in their country-but that is OK I think for a neutral country.
Switzerland let in their country (and thus saved the lives) of some Jewish people. They also hosted Allied airmen. They hosted the famous Lucy spy ring - which helped Russians incommensurably.
To me it seems the Swiss helped the Allies more than can be expected from a neutral country, not to mention they were completely surrounded by Axis powers.
- Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"? Half of France was occupied for most of the war, after all. And enough people were collaborating.
- Would you say that the UK was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They considered not fighting against them in the beginning.
- Would you say that the US was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They didn't do anything for years, until Pearl Harbour, right?
I think it's always more complicated than just blaming an entire country.
I am not an expert in modern history, but my understanding is that Switzerland was entirely surrounded. I guess they did their best to avoid getting occupied? Certainly some assholes in Switzerland profited from the war, but that's true in many (most? all?) other countries.
> Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"?
Vichy France? Yes, of course. It's taught to French school children as a deeply disgraceful chapter of French history, despite it being under significant pressure. The North was under military occupation, having put up a fight. Collaborationist politicians were put to death after the war.
> the [UK/US] was far, far too cozy with the Nazis?
Who's "We" here? The US pursued its own interests from a (seemingly) nice, safe distance until it was attacked. The Swiss had no such luxury of distance, and also pursued their own interests so long as they were not attacked.
We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
WW2 was long enough ago that no one you end up talking about it actually experienced it themselves, but it's recent enough that people who felt their country did "Good", can still ride that high wave without being pulled down by everything that came after.
What? My grandmother experienced it herself, she saw bombings.
Right, I didn't mean "Everyone who was alive during WW2 is today dead", that's obviously not true, it was just 80 years ago or so.
What I meant was that most people who discuss WW2 with others online, mostly talk from the perspective of not having experienced the war themselves, nor did the person who they speak to, most likely.
I think it depends a lot on the country.
If you go to countries that were invaded, people have been in contact with their grandparents. It's not "something that happened far away", it's "stories from family I've known".
Of course in the US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens. Of course not everybody cares: many people still buy Teslas in Europe. But I think the WW2 memory is not as far as you make it sound.
> US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens.
What should have happened? The US has put emphasis on freedom from its inception, although in practice it still had McCarthyism which to say at least, harrased communists.
> What should have happened?
What do you mean? There are countries where one can go to jail for doing Nazi salutes. Just like in the US it is not tolerated to joke about shooting a kid at school (if you have seen the recent Snapchat story).
What should have happened, if you ask me, is that a lot more people should have boycotted Tesla and his other companies.
The good os also kind of is problematic. As in nazism was just a kind of hyper-imperialism by young countries to outrace other empires. And now 30 years after the "end of history" aka playing nice to bring down another empire, its back to the starting point.
USAid did "good" for the world, but because people took it for granted and it wasn't in the news until it was stopped (which has cost lives).
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If there are actually people out there walking around thinking that just getting the trains running on time justified the murder of 6 million ‘undesirables’ or many different shades, and this isn’t just some epic troll, then we are way more cooked than I had dared believe. And I don’t think you can hand wave away such large and obtuse generalisations by saying ‘Poe’s Law applies’.
Arguing on the internet has always been a fool’s game, and there have always been people who have made sport of it for the lolz, but honestly, why even entertain such vacuous opinions for outrage’s sake on a forum like this?
Aid is a hard problem that is true but the world is a worse place after USAid got raised by Trump. Aid should probably be atleast 100x the current rate, it should not be called aid either.
You’re deluded.
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https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/how-many-kills-does-do...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C3b2dd7NFZg
You are full of it.
You do not show much insider knowledge though. If you want to make a point do it, do not say things that will only evoke emotions.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
Bankrolling is an editorial word that implies almost a one way benefit.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us??
Bailey: "Did you know that the US basically never does anything good for the world?"
Motte: "Well when the US does something good for the world the US also benefits."
Yes, the world should get it for free, but that mean nothing because the US gets something back at all. It's mad. I'm not from the US, but it's obvious why cutting global funding was popular in the US.
The US has been by far the largest funder of medical and other scientific research since WW2 which has benefited billions immensely.
Sure. Even more so the handful of patent holders in the US.
Want to ignore those patents? Unless you have nukes you're not.
Do EU countries not have patents for what they research?
Are the people helped or cured less helped or cured because the developers retained rights?
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Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
> closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Niels Bohr, the Great Dane, was one of these skid greasers! He worked with the queen of Sweden, and also used his academic contacts in various countries to secure jobs/visas.
> He worked with the queen of Sweden
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
>Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Perhaps that's because most of those refugees could more easily shelter in neighboring countries that they are more culturally similar to... if shelter was actually the primary thing that they were seeking.
Despite what Hollywood says, WW2 was more to do with German militarism and expansionism than the Jewish question. The Allies were certainly willing to use pro-Jewish sentiments and some Jewish troops, but it was never presented as the main issue.
Not sure why this is down voted.
“Go save the Jews” was hardly a motivating factor for any nation in the war.
I don't know where Hollowood ever said it WW2 was about Jews.
IDK if things have changed but generally the whole narrative in the US is presented as unwitting yankies discovering the horrors of the death camps. It's debated how much some levels of the government knew, but it certainly wasn't public knowledge in the US.
Well, that or fighting the Japanese.
There was definitely some knowledge of how Jews were being treated by Germany very early on, and some people were very vocal in condemning it, although they cleaned up their act during the Berlin Olympics. The Holocaust really seems to have escalated during the war itself, and with the invasion of the USSR. By this time the British Empire was already at war with them.
Patriotism and threat seem to have been the main motivators for most people in the west.
Downvoted but basically correct.
Difficult to pin something as all consuming as WW2 on "about" anything, but we can look at who fired the first shots, which was clearly the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the east and the German invasion of Poland in the West (followed shortly after by the USSR invading Poland and later Finland from the other direction.)
It is not at all a given that, had Germany stayed within her international borders, that the Holocaust would have on its own triggered WW2. After all, mass murder in the Congo Free State didn't trigger invasion of Belgium.
I think Hollywood says exactly that. Most WW2 films are about war, not the Holocaust.
There are many films that combine the two. Inglourious Basterds is one of them. German attacks on the Jews were heavily criticised in the west but not the prime motivator
Many people in the British Empire were told to fight for the mother country or even to preserve the empire (which was largely gone by the seventies, with some major territories becoming independent in the later 1940s.)
It's also why Germany did the death camps. Originally their plan was just to force them to leave but most countries were not allowing them to do so.
> Originally their plan was just to force them to leave
That is 1930s pre-war Germany and Austria; and around 550k people by the most generous calculation. Yes, the world wronged them. But you cannot say death camps happened because the US didn’t hand out enough visas.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (home of 3-3.5m Jews) and in 1941 the USSR (home of another 1-2m Jews) no one was being forced to leave (or live) anymore. People were being killed with bullets to the head or back, and when this started to be unbecoming/too inefficient, the German state devised an industrial approach to the killing of humans.
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
"Neutrality" for a country (as per the Hague convention) basically means that you cannot help a belligerent and you have to treat the belligerents equally.
So I assume that if you open your borders to all fleeing citizens, that's neutral, and if you close it to all, that's neutral as well.
There is a difference between someone running from persecution and someone leaving because they might be conscripted into invasion they agree with or because they dont like the economy. Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here. You could sorta a little equate Ukrainians, a little.
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
> That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
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There is a definition of neutrality [1][2] based on the Hague convention.
[1]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague05.asp
[2]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague13.asp
Ah another week another instance of this maga level crap. Read up on [1], read up on Geneva accepting migrants way after it was clear that Switzerland will starve since it was 100% surrounded by axis. Even after federal government forbade that.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campione_d%27Italia
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
They walked a fine line.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.
Neutral and lucky. Others (e.g. Belgium) not so much.
> funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2
Cut them some slack - its the last time they "won" a war.
When the US wins, it tends to be quick, clean, and easily forgotten. Consider our victories against ISIS, or against Saddam in the Gulf War. Both cases where an expansionist power violated territorial integrity norms by engaging in conquest, and was defeated by a US-led coalition.
> against Saddam in the Gulf War
I really hope you're referring to GW1, rather than 2. And yeah, if you weren't a Kurd who believed GW Bush, then that was a pretty effective war from the US (and global) perspective.
We won in Iraq 2 as well, and considering the fight against conventional Iraqi forces, they were quickly defeated.
> We won in Iraq 2 as well,
Only if you ignore the rise of ISIS and various militias, along with the collapse of Iraqi society (mind you, the sanctions had done a pretty good job of wrecking that before GW2 anyway).
>the rise of ISIS and various militias
Where is ISIS now?
>the collapse of Iraqi society
Iraq's human development index is currently higher than it's ever been. It has a fairly typical human development index for its region. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index?t...
You guys will define "winning" so narrowly that if the Middle East continues to be volatile, that means the US must've lost. The type of victory that the US achieved in WW2 is an atypically high standard for "victory".
> You guys will define "winning" so narrowly that if the Middle East continues to be volatile, that means the US must've lost. The type of victory that the US achieved in WW2 is an atypically high standard for "victory".
Sorry what, I wasn't aware that I was a member of you guys.
Look, the US invaded Iraq in GW2, they killed off Saddam very quickly, but taking control of the country and settling down all of the violence took well over a decade, and dealing with ISIS took much the same amount of time.
You can regard that as a victory, but it sure doesn't look like much of one to me, particularly as Saddam (for all his faults) suppressed the militias like ISIS who ended up becoming a major concern for the US.
In a world where the US had never invaded Iraq, do you think the region would look much different today?
I mean a few years after WW2 the US stopped the communists from taking over South Korea. Maybe that isn't good for the "world" but it was good for the millions of South Koreas.
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Difficult to defend America as reality-based when it's going around renaming bodies of water that do not belong to it.
Also I'm not sure people understand what Swiss (or for that matter Irish) neutrality means.
"Difficult to defend America as reality-based when it's going around renaming bodies of water that do not belong to it."
I didn't claim that Trump was reality-based.
"Also I'm not sure people understand what Swiss (or for that matter Irish) neutrality means."
It's a moral facade that allows them to dodge responsibility. The US has given far more than Switzerland, and also gets blamed far more, for not giving yet more. How does that make sense? As I said, the European worldview is not typically reality-based.
With great power comes great responsibility, it's not that complicated a concept.
Switzerland doesn't have any aspirations to be the global hegemon, so they don't get graded on the global hegemon scale.
Another saying is: "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
The US sent billions to Ukraine, and what did we get in return? Europeans telling us that "the last time the US did anything good for the world was WW2".
It's not about hegemons vs non-hegemons either. China sends war supplies to Russia and Europe barely complains.
How about this: Consider our loss of support for Ukraine as an abandonment of aspirations of hegemony in Eastern Europe. Bingo, now we no longer have "great power" in that region, nor "great responsibility". Ukraine is your problem now.
Ultimately, you're just playing language games. There's no reason a Swiss taxpayer should be less responsible than an American taxpayer. This is all just anti-Americanism.
People like to scapegoat the US whenever they're dissatisfied regarding anything, virtually anywhere around the world. There's frequently a creative way to blame the US. And because people are impossible to please, and they are always dissatisfied, the US is always blamed. I'm sick of it.
The thing is, if you don't help us in Eastern Europe, you don't just lose hegemonial status there. You lose all of Europe and with that the very foundation of your power.
It's not Anti-Americanism, but if you want to go out with the belle of the ball, you actually have to try.
You don't get to date her by default, and she is getting increasingly tired of your entitled attitude.
Ukraine already is our problem, the vast majority of support comes from Europe. It's your continued insistence that you don't even have to try while expecting us to stay by your side that is the issue. A friend that keeps asking for more while not helping in need is not a friend at all.
>The thing is, if you don't help us in Eastern Europe, you don't just lose hegemonial status there. You lose all of Europe and with that the very foundation of your power.
If that means you're going to stop blaming us for everything, it sounds fantastic.
BTW if you think Europe is "the very foundation" of American power you're delusional.
>You don't get us by default, and we are getting increasingly tired of your entitled attitude.
As I stated in another comment thread:
"For years our leaders told you to be less dependent on us. Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us. It's mind-blowing how out-of-touch you guys can be."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574103
> BTW if you think Europe is "the very foundation" of American power you're delusional.
You do know American power projection is mostly based on bases on European soil? That your economy is greatly benefiting from integration with ours? You think America can be significant on a world stage where Europe turns away? You think you could stomach losing access to the world's largest market of wealthy consumers? You think your sanctions would be effective if we didn't go along?
Every single power mechanism available to the US is dependent on our cooperation.
> Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us
Of course it's a favour to you. We supported your nonsense in exchange for you dealing with the military grunt work. Out of touch is only the one that tries to kill the golden goose because it sometimes needs feeding.
>That your economy is mostly based on integration with ours?
The US is one of the world's least import/export-dependent economies.
Furthermore, you can see a list of our top 10 import/export partners here; only one is European: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa
The US became the world's largest economy around 1890, half a century prior to the start of NATO: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
Of the 20 most valuable companies in the world, 16 are American: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
(Of course, military strength rests on a basis of economic strength. That's international relations 101.)
This is why I say that Europeans are delusional. They're uninformed about the most basic facts about the world. The claim that the US economy is "mostly" based on integration with Europe is just astonishing. Your colonial empires are long gone, but your colonial mentality is remarkably unchanged. No wonder you think of yourself as a "belle" with this level of delusional self-regard.
Europe is not one country in a list. It's one trade union, that together is bigger than any other economy on your graph. Also note that you haven't acknowledged any of the other, more important points.
It's not just your economy that depends on us. It's every single measure of power. Rammstein. Sigonella. SWIFT.
Every single dimension of American power is based on governments in Europe granting it. I would suggest you stop being so ungrateful before we stop doing so.
We are the Belle of the Ball, the only superpower that has both China and the US dependent on them. Whoever we choose to support is who wins global dominance. And right now, the US is being a bit of a shitty boyfriend.
>Europe is not one country in a list. It's one trade union, that together is bigger than any other economy on your graph.
Wikipedia states the EU is only about 20% of our total trade. Recall that trade itself is a relatively small fraction of our economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
So the statement "the US economy is mostly based on integration with the European economy" is astonishingly ignorant and arrogant. If you can't acknowledge that in your next reply, I don't think there is any point in me leaving more comments after this one.
>Every single dimension of American power is based on governments in Europe granting it. I would suggest you stop being so ungrateful before we stop doing so.
This is an extremely bold statement on your part, given Europe's extreme dependence on US weapon systems.
Regarding military bases, I'm evaluating relative to a counterfactual where the US recedes back into isolation. Prior to WW2 we had a policy of avoiding alliances in peacetime. From that perspective, why would we need to project power in Europe... if we weren't defending Europe? We have our own oil now. No need to be in the Middle East anymore. Again, it's Europeans telling me that they're doing me a favor by letting the US defend them for the past 8 decades. Just mind-blowing.
Maybe we should start arming Russia so we'd be competitive with China for status as your "boyfriend".
Here's a life hack. Learn to use Google. You claimed: "You do know American power projection is mostly based on bases on European soil?" Google search for: "What fraction of US military bases are in Europe?"
The answer? 4-5%. Is the claim that American power projection is "mostly" based on bases on European soil prima facie plausible if only 4-5% of our bases are on European soil? Doing a quick Google can help you understand the yawning delta between your beliefs and the facts.
And BTW, I think Trump is a terrible president and I'm quite upset about the whole Greenland thing. But Europeans are the most annoying people in the world, bar none. I'd honestly prefer an alliance with China over an alliance with Europe. Should be a good way to achieve world peace, if nothing else. I care more about peace than "winning" "global dominance".
You're confusing base survival and global dominance. Nobody's saying the US couldn't scrape by by itself, but to keep your current position, you cannot just abandon your allies.
For power projection, it's not just about fractions. Its about geography, it's about networks. Without those 5%, no convenient access to Africa or the Middle East, no global intelligence network, a crippled sanctions mechanism.
Speaking of the Middle East, most of us never wanted you to go there and create one mess after another for us to deal with. From the first time you went, it was always despite protests from Europe. The fact you're trying to frame your adventurism as some sort of favor to us is indicative of the hubris I'm talking about.
You already are conspiring with Russia, throwing fancy parties for our enemies on your soil. Don't think we haven't noticed the Alaskan schmooze-fest.
Finally, you're underestimating the economic ties by being so focused on goods (even though 20% is a huge fraction, imagine what it would mean for any companies revenue to go down by that much!) Think about the website you're on though! Services are not even included in these 20%. Think about the consequences for the tech industry if they lose Europe as customer base!
I don't think Googling some numbers makes up for a lack of systemic reasoning. You are treating your greatest asset as a burden and we do not appreciate it.
Why does Europe get to be the belle? Why can't the US be the belle? Early in the invasion of Ukraine, when Biden was sending billions of dollars in support, the internet was full of anger from Europeans that the US wasn't sending even more. Did you ever think that we might be getting "increasingly tired of your entitled attitude"?
Because there's three grand powers in the world and two of them are locked in contest. The third one is the only one that can shift the balance of powers, so it gets to be kingmaker.
Why should I care about winning this contest?
I don't know. It's your leadership that started the contest in the first place, take it up with them.
Either way though, they decided to care and now they're trying to abandon their winning hand. You don't get to both play the game and then pretend you don't care.
>You don't get to both play the game and then pretend you don't care.
Why not? You seem to think that these silly arguments based on your invented verbal classifications such as who is "playing the game" should count as constraints on US foreign policy.
The fundamental problem is that we gave you a sweetheart deal for decades. You got used to it and took it for granted. Aspects of that deal are being renegotiated. You're now saying: "Where are my entitlements?" But they were never entitlements.
In any case--good luck buddy. I think you're beyond my help.
Because now that you started it, the Chinese won't stop playing. Your own behavior is what creates constraints, the irony is that you haven't even realized my language is purely descriptive of geopolitical grand strategy while yours is enacting the late stage imperial hubris I'm describing.
And it was you that is throwing away the sweetheart deal and still being arrogant about it.
You're correct that they were never entitlements. They were the bare minimum compensation for our support.
I don't consider European "support" to have much value. It seems to mostly come in the form of whining, lectures, and things which would happen anyways, such as trade.
Obama also considered you guys to be freeloaders: https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2016/03/t...
I don't particularly want the US to be a empire. I like the Swiss model better. We did something like this successfully pre-WW2.
Since the US alliance has been so burdensome for you, you should be happy about this development.
One recurring issue here has been that the American public is apparently operating under the assumption that their personal preferences are directly translatable into geopolitical reality. You can want things and you can even vote for them, but you are within a larger system who's other factors or trajectory you don't control.
Personally, I think realistically with that in mind, the EU should work for rapprochement with China considering America's current loss of ambition.
Most importantly, I think this whole frame is way too stuck in the inane back-and-forth between states, when I believe Climate Change is the defining issue of our time - for all of us, independent of national allegiance.
With this humanity defining issue in mind, the American behavior becomes particularly dangerous, not honoring their international commitments and actively making the problem worse while pretending the world could be the same as a hundred years ago.
We need to move forward and deal with the problems of right now, instead of harking back to some perceived glory days. History flows forwards, not backwards. We don't have time for these petty squabbles, we can't afford to wait for you to get your house in order.
The final irony is that now apparently you're praising the Swiss model after just calling it "moral facade that allows them to dodge responsibility"? Which one is it? An example to inspire or a dodge to avoid? Once again, you want your cake and eat it.
I want the US to stop being the designated country which gets blamed whenever anything goes wrong. What am I allowed to do in order to make that happen, O European Master?
You're doing it again in this comment with regard to greenhouse gas emissions. Ours have been dropping. See https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/who-emits-the-most-co
I'm tired of being the designated punching bag.
> I want the US to stop being the designated country which gets blamed whenever anything goes wrong.
You don't get to be simultaneously one of the biggest actors on the global stage and exempt from scrutiny on how you interact with the rest of the world.
The system you helped build is the system you're decrying. I don't know what to tell you, this is not about my desires, it is simply about geopolitical realities.
Some random blog post where some dude used Claude is not a serious source. Reuters reports that U.S. emissions accounted for 36% of the global increase in 2025, with U.S. emissions rising 3.2% year-on-year versus 0.3% in China: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-leads-global-co2-...
More importantly, you exited the Paris agreement. Again, this is about systemic consequences of your behavior, not some insular self-perception.
> I'm tired of being the designated punching bag.
Then stop giving the rest of the world the surface to do so, get your house together and stop complaining about the world being unfair to you. This is the reality we live in, this is the reality you were instrumental in building.
We all gotta live with it, your sudden lack of desire or ambition doesn't change the fact that this is how the world works. Changes in your self-conception do not change the incentives of other actors.
You can complain about scrutiny all you want, but it won't make it disappear. You're playing one of the major powers, and you get judged by those standards, whether you like it or not.
>You don't get to opt out of being one of the biggest actors globally and thus always involved and evaluated on how you interact with the rest of the world.
China is also one of the biggest actors. They didn't exactly provide support to Ukraine. They're happy to sell gear to Russia. Now you're planning your rapprochement with them.
Face it, you hold the US to a standard that you hold no other nation.
This business about "the system you set up" is just another way of you admitting that you took us for granted. We're tired of being taken for granted. We're burnt out. You haven't said a single positive thing about the US in this thread, have you?
>Then stop acting like one
Bro this is literally just bullying. I've had enough.
> China is also one of the biggest actors. They didn't exactly provide support to Ukraine.
Yes, their geopolitical alignment is different. They did provide support to Russia, which they have shared interests with. That is precisely my point - you have to nurture your alliances, you don't get to just have them.
> Face it, you hold the US to a standard that you hold no other nation.
The US is in a position that no other nation is in. Your complaint is effectively about the US' position as the most powerful nation in the world.
> This business about "the system you set up" is just another way of you admitting that you took us for granted. We're tired of being taken for granted.
You are the ones taking us for granted. You think we owe you loyalty, while at the same time wanting to reduce any support. You claim to want us to become more independent, yet at the same time get upset when we put in place measures to do so. No! Gratitude has to be earned, it isn't just given. Disengagement never comes for free, it always means a disentanglement of interests.
> You haven't said a single positive thing about the US in this thread, have you?
I could turn this question right around and start listing my own grievances, but I won't because it would a silly, petty, ego-based distraction from the systemic analysis at hand.
> Bro this is literally just bullying. I've had enough.
If you think I've made a factual or argumentative error, point it out. Calling an argument 'bullying' doesn't address the argument, especially when I've been polite throughout.
There is a strange assumption in the US establishment that their current position in the world is the natural order of things and not the result of decades of Cold War era cooperation. Despite all the complaints about allies freeloading, the establishment seems utterly shocked and confused when those allies start reducing their dependence on the US, for example, by pivoting investments into their own weapons production instead of buying American.
You want the benefits of having allies dependent on the US, while treating any attempt by allies to become more self-reliant as a problem. Talk about entitlement!
First, I have serious disagreements with current US leadership.
Second, everything I've seen from the current US defense leadership has been consistent on encouraging Europe to build up its defense-industrial base.
US defense leadership has been pretty consistent about wanting europe to expand defense funding, but spent on american defense industry, rather than European capacity and technology
it has also been very unfriendly to europe building up any sovereignty, eg. to continue trading with Iran on the euro when the US pulled out of the JCPOA
>US defense leadership has been pretty consistent about wanting europe to expand defense funding, but spent on american defense industry, rather than European capacity and technology
Try listening to the actual words that US leadership says instead of the creative interpretations that Europeans come up with.
We did. Maybe you should, too?
You're arguing with your imagination, my friend. Your leadership actually is like that, and the ignorance makes the arrogance look worse.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-p...
https://www.politico.eu/article/washington-lobbies-eu-agains...
>"One of the self-evident conclusions of the war in Ukraine was … the European continent and America'[s] underinvestment … in [their] defense industrial base[s] — the ability to produce munitions [and] emerging technologies rapidly and field them, was a blind spot exposed through the aggression against Ukraine," he said.
>The U.S., Ukraine and Europe are all expanding their industrial bases, but more must be done.
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/406681...
US leadership has been consistent in encouraging Europe to expand its defense-industrial base. Excluding the US from weapons procurement is not the same thing.
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I doubt that. But there's a broader lesson here. Many critics of US foreign policy assume, without justification, that any US foreign policy involvement means the US is entirely to blame for any suboptimal outcome. Positive outcomes (for example, a long, unprecedented period of peace and prosperity in Europe) are conveniently excluded from the analysis.
Of course, it's always possible to raise your expectations so that every outcome counts as "negative", so you always get a chance to blame the US.
The Swiss are very clever. By staying quiet they avoid responsibility for anything or blame for anything. When the US stays neutral, we are told we are "complicit" or "abandoning allies".
Euromaidan was (a) good (b) organic (you cannot pay people enough to get shot in the street) and (c) to the extent that there was "US" sponsorship, it was mostly by the Open Society Foundation, which is run by a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis and therefore knows what oppression looks like, and has donated the majority of his fortune to the freedom of Eastern Europe. He's 96.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world.
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
Could you share some examples of Swiss being cozy with the Nazis? Wikipedia seems to make the counter case [0]. Switzerland did trade energy with Nazis - but they were dependent on Germany for their coal needs. Switzerland also kept the gold Nazis stuffed in their country-but that is OK I think for a neutral country.
Switzerland let in their country (and thus saved the lives) of some Jewish people. They also hosted Allied airmen. They hosted the famous Lucy spy ring - which helped Russians incommensurably.
To me it seems the Swiss helped the Allies more than can be expected from a neutral country, not to mention they were completely surrounded by Axis powers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_during_World_War_I...
Genuinely interested:
- Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"? Half of France was occupied for most of the war, after all. And enough people were collaborating.
- Would you say that the UK was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They considered not fighting against them in the beginning.
- Would you say that the US was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They didn't do anything for years, until Pearl Harbour, right?
I think it's always more complicated than just blaming an entire country.
I am not an expert in modern history, but my understanding is that Switzerland was entirely surrounded. I guess they did their best to avoid getting occupied? Certainly some assholes in Switzerland profited from the war, but that's true in many (most? all?) other countries.
> Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"?
Vichy France? Yes, of course. It's taught to French school children as a deeply disgraceful chapter of French history, despite it being under significant pressure. The North was under military occupation, having put up a fight. Collaborationist politicians were put to death after the war.
> the [UK/US] was far, far too cozy with the Nazis?
ok bro.
Well, "bro", I was trying to see what you consider "far, far too cozy".
So apparently you consider that Switzerland was obviously just like Vichy France? At least obviously-enough to "ok bro" me?
Who's "We" here? The US pursued its own interests from a (seemingly) nice, safe distance until it was attacked. The Swiss had no such luxury of distance, and also pursued their own interests so long as they were not attacked.
The argument is much cleaner if immutable past actions remain un-weaponized.
If somebody wants to tap me for reparations over chattel slavery in the US, and all I can say is that my in-country ancestors fought for the Union.
Which, along with $5, will get you a cup of coffee down' the beanery.