Trump’s ambush on Ukraine and his attacks on Denmark (and Europe in general), Canada, and Mexico have destroyed literal centuries of diplomacy. And after everything we’ve seen in the past 8 years, other countries have every right to say that American policy has a 2 year (at most) shelf life before being subject to the whims of whoever wins the elections, and any incoming administration can be expected to ignore or outright break the treaties of previous administrations – including (as we saw with Canada) treaties that they themselves negotiated. All American contracts and treaties come with an extra clause saying that they can and will unilaterally alter or break treaties at any time, for any reason.
Even if Democrats win in 2026, it won’t matter because Trump will simply veto any attempts at fixing what he broke. Even if a Democrat wins in 2028 and spends his entire term going on a Trump Apology Tour, what other leaders are going to want to put their trust back in the US when there’s a real chance that a Republican congress will come in and gum up the works in 2030? Or a Republican will come in and shit all over everything again in 2032?
Businesses need long-term stability. World leaders need long-term stability. Stability that can be largely expected to carry from one administration to the next, even if the finer points vary slightly. They don’t want to do business with someone who’s likely to openly break a treaty before the ink is even dry. Especially someone like Trump, who’s entire business history has been nothing but him making a deal, then unilaterally breaking the deal, forcing you to the negotiating table to accept a worse deal if you want to end up with anything at all after you’ve already honored your commitments, and then just stiffing you if you don’t accept his lopsided terms. Trump just did that to Ukraine. Trump just did that to Canada and Mexico. Why the fuck would any other world leader trust the US ever again after we re-elected this guy?
These relationships will take decades to rebuild. The US will lose significant amounts of influence and soft power in the process. And that’s assuming that we can ever get it back at all. We can’t even tell the world that this is the actions of one man that doesn’t reflect the values of the people, because we already saw what this man had to offer once. We had 4 years of it. Then 4 more years of him saying he was going to be re-elected so he can do exactly what he’s doing now. And we voted for him anyway. Trump said he was going to take a giant shit on our allies, and we collectively said “Yes, please.” The rest of the world has the absolute right to listen to the American people trying to apologize for this man and respond by telling them “You voted for this. You voted for him. Go fuck yourselves. Elections have consequences.”
Very right; even if America was to dramatically reverse course right now, it’s going to take a long long time to rebuild the international relations that have been absolutely demolished. That’s after rebuilding the federal government itself after purging the cancer that currently consumes it; and there’s going to be a lot more destruction before that happens.
I wish you luck America; it’s not going to be an easy journey.
You’re absolutely right. No one will ever trust the U.S. again as long as the republicans remain active in your political system. They’re nothing less than a bunch of fascist nazi terrorists.
Regardless if the Republicans are active in the system or not, it would still take decades and restructuring of our system to regain any trust. We’d need laws and enforcement of them to prevent ideologues from wrangling power through already illegal mechanisms.
While we could do that at any point, you can count on Americans voting like drunk Puritans.
Tangential to this, but I’ve always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn’t in the loop
Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.
The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet
Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he’d be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he’d be out of office and we’d be about half a year into Dubya’s first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.
Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.
Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we’re getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.
We receive their reply about a year into Obama’s first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.
Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn’t even get to take part in this particular conversation.
We won’t get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn’t croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)
So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president’s hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.
I came to a similar conclusion during Trump’s first term but for a slightly different reason - Trump isn’t being told anything about aliens other than “nope nothing here” because if he was, he would have blasted it on Twitter.
Not “Is breaking”. Has broken.
Trump’s ambush on Ukraine and his attacks on Denmark (and Europe in general), Canada, and Mexico have destroyed literal centuries of diplomacy. And after everything we’ve seen in the past 8 years, other countries have every right to say that American policy has a 2 year (at most) shelf life before being subject to the whims of whoever wins the elections, and any incoming administration can be expected to ignore or outright break the treaties of previous administrations – including (as we saw with Canada) treaties that they themselves negotiated. All American contracts and treaties come with an extra clause saying that they can and will unilaterally alter or break treaties at any time, for any reason.
Even if Democrats win in 2026, it won’t matter because Trump will simply veto any attempts at fixing what he broke. Even if a Democrat wins in 2028 and spends his entire term going on a Trump Apology Tour, what other leaders are going to want to put their trust back in the US when there’s a real chance that a Republican congress will come in and gum up the works in 2030? Or a Republican will come in and shit all over everything again in 2032?
Businesses need long-term stability. World leaders need long-term stability. Stability that can be largely expected to carry from one administration to the next, even if the finer points vary slightly. They don’t want to do business with someone who’s likely to openly break a treaty before the ink is even dry. Especially someone like Trump, who’s entire business history has been nothing but him making a deal, then unilaterally breaking the deal, forcing you to the negotiating table to accept a worse deal if you want to end up with anything at all after you’ve already honored your commitments, and then just stiffing you if you don’t accept his lopsided terms. Trump just did that to Ukraine. Trump just did that to Canada and Mexico. Why the fuck would any other world leader trust the US ever again after we re-elected this guy?
These relationships will take decades to rebuild. The US will lose significant amounts of influence and soft power in the process. And that’s assuming that we can ever get it back at all. We can’t even tell the world that this is the actions of one man that doesn’t reflect the values of the people, because we already saw what this man had to offer once. We had 4 years of it. Then 4 more years of him saying he was going to be re-elected so he can do exactly what he’s doing now. And we voted for him anyway. Trump said he was going to take a giant shit on our allies, and we collectively said “Yes, please.” The rest of the world has the absolute right to listen to the American people trying to apologize for this man and respond by telling them “You voted for this. You voted for him. Go fuck yourselves. Elections have consequences.”
TLDR:
Trust is extremely hard to build, but very easy to destroy.
The trust balloon. Takes many breaths to inflate it, and one little prick to pop it.
Very right; even if America was to dramatically reverse course right now, it’s going to take a long long time to rebuild the international relations that have been absolutely demolished. That’s after rebuilding the federal government itself after purging the cancer that currently consumes it; and there’s going to be a lot more destruction before that happens.
I wish you luck America; it’s not going to be an easy journey.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
You’re absolutely right. No one will ever trust the U.S. again as long as the republicans remain active in your political system. They’re nothing less than a bunch of fascist nazi terrorists.
Great comment. I’m saving this.
Regardless if the Republicans are active in the system or not, it would still take decades and restructuring of our system to regain any trust. We’d need laws and enforcement of them to prevent ideologues from wrangling power through already illegal mechanisms.
While we could do that at any point, you can count on Americans voting like drunk Puritans.
Tangential to this, but I’ve always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn’t in the loop
Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.
The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet
Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he’d be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he’d be out of office and we’d be about half a year into Dubya’s first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.
Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.
Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we’re getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.
We receive their reply about a year into Obama’s first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.
Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn’t even get to take part in this particular conversation.
We won’t get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn’t croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)
So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president’s hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.
I came to a similar conclusion during Trump’s first term but for a slightly different reason - Trump isn’t being told anything about aliens other than “nope nothing here” because if he was, he would have blasted it on Twitter.