Unfortunately I have to agreed. Protection rackets seem to be pretty much the defining activity when Trump is allowed to run the show, but I doubt appeasement in itself is really going to buy Taiwan anything.
What's to stop him from taking the bribes and then just fabricating some of his trademark bullshit about how the Taiwanese "have been very unfair" and Xi's people were actually totally in the right all along.
The US right-wing has a large contingent that wants to pivot focus away from Europe and towards Asia.
The US abandoning European allies can be perceived through the lens of general isolationism (or even an outright support for fascism) but it can also be perceived as part of this pivot to Asia.
Time will tell. Elon Musk has so much of his net worth tied up in China, however, that I would bet more on abandonment. If Elon was out of the picture I'd bet more on support.
How could you? Trump declined to say he'd defend Poland or Lithuania, both NATO members, when asked by a reporter (obviously this was overshadowed by the Zelenskyy thing)...
Because putin demanded NATO roll back to 1990 borders in exchange for a Ukraine peace deal. So of course he wouldn't defend Poland or Lithuania, they won't be in NATO anymore.
Nope. The US is doing all it can to become irrelevant geopolitically in Europe, that's not to start a war with China with a very uncertain outcome. Economic ties is (was) the really last bastion that would have motivated the US to intervene.
Wild how quickly Europe has just given up on the US after all the money we’ve spent on them for decades. We need your help (a majority of sane Americans), not condemnation. If you don’t think Trump won’t do the same to you, you’re sorely mistaken.
Maybe they were never really allies to begin with, and have waited for Europe to become complacent enough to put down the hammer in our weakest moment.
Only a fool would expect America to come to their aid now, and we'd better hide our oil/minerals lest we get a double dose of dictator-flavoured freedom...
I mean, I think you can at least understand why directly interfering with the domestic politics of a representative democracy might be challenging.
And the Europeans are helping. Trump is not getting the straight forward quick foreign policy wins that he was chasing. Europe is going to keep sticking their "European peacekeeper" (however you want to characterize it) proposal into the Ukraine mix, and Putin is going to have a hard time swallowing that deal.
When the EU tariffs come, you can bet that EU is going to try to make it sting as much as possible.
But ultimately it's up to Americans to make the best of these opportunities.
Europe can't cure American political disease. The public discourse, general political education and health of American institutions is alarmingly bad. IMO it's unlikely that these trends will stop. America is suited to isolationism and Trump type views of the world aren't going away from the US voter mindset.
The US is pivoting from Europe to the Pacific precisely to better protect the likes of Taiwan. The Trump admin is filled with China hawks. Taiwan doesn’t have trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of people to fund its own defense, Europe does.
I'm not from or in the US, but I was mildly hopeful about the Taiwan situation when Marco Rubio was made part of the administration, as he seems to care more about the Pacific than Trump does. I think it's still a bit too early for defeatism.
Are you willing to get drafted and fight to defend Taiwan and whatever comes as a result of that? Are you willing to die for Taiwan, or have your kids die for Taiwan? Honest question.
Many people used to sign up for military service since their ancestors fought on American soil for American interests, and were actually raised under the presumption that this is the main purpose of the American army (or protecting American interests abroad, such as protecting American vessels on international waters). As it's become ever-more-apparent to the group most likely to enroll in the military (conservatives) that this is no longer the case, military enlistment has gone way down.
I honestly have concluded that the HN crowd is so far removed from normal America that they cannot understand it. If you think people sign up for the military due to poverty and not pride, you are deluded. The vast majority of recruits into the military do so out of sense of duty and pride in the country. Remove either of those, and it's no shock military enrollment has gone down. America has had much poorer times and has experienced periods of much stronger growth than today, and had not had the same recruitment crisis as it does today.
> 1815 ignoring the civil war and fights against native Americans.
Why would you ignore those?
Also WWII was fought on American soil in the pacific. The various guano atolls, as well as the islands of the Phillipines.
> Over 60 percent of 2016 enlistments came from neighborhoods with a median household income between $38,345 and $80,912. The quintiles below and above that band were underrepresented, with the poorest quintile providing 19 percent of the force and the richest Americans enlisting at a rate of 17 percent. The modern force comes predominantly from the middle-class households highlighted in Reeves’ article.
I can personally tell you that minorities don’t join the military because they think the country has been so great to them. This goes back to how the military treated Black Americans during WWII (The Tuskegee experiment) and when they came back they were still subjected to Jim Crow laws and how White upper class Americans avoided the draft at a much higher percentage.
The idea that “no Vietcong ever called me ni%%%” was pervasive.
All of the recruiters who come to minority majority high schools and colleges don’t mention “patriotism”. They mention job and education opportunities.
that's I suppose the risk one is willing to take when enrolling into the army?.. You're raising though a very good point, the US army is really large and it's not clear anymore what its purpose is anymore (not against Russia anymore, not against China soon/anymore, then what for?)
I don't necessarily believe maintaining a ludicrously strong military for the purposes of defending our homeland is a bad idea. Maybe I'm just being silly, but like, why would you not want the strongest military you could possibly muster to defend your nation?
Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong? But I don't think so.
I'm hesitant to even say this because it sounds so callous and naive, so with apologies in advance: how would one maintain a superior military if that military isn't involved in any aspect of combat for long stretches of time? To use a sports analogy, could you build a Super Bowl capable (American) football team if none of the players or coaches have done more than watch football on TV and played lots of flag football scrimmages amongst themselves?
(I'm wondering about this after reading today's NYT article about the escalating use of drone warfare in Ukraine.)
Between WWI and WWII, the US didn't get in any "hot practice". (Which is what I think you're talking about?) That didn't stop us from learning what we needed to know. Nor did it stop us from fielding a formidable military. The new technologies at the time were wielded by us to deadly effect. Carriers and tanks in particular. We didn't just sit around and get really good at digging trenches and moving dreadnoughts around.
The same will happen here. I guarantee you, the American military will be among the best in the world at employing the services of satellites, autonomous ordinance and surveillance, and cyber offensives.
You have concerns about our facility with drones? Be assured, we'll be able to work out how to create nightmarish swarms just as well as Europeans or Chinese can. We'll have the same facility with working with countermeasures and mitigating countermeasures as well.
> That didn't stop us from learning what we needed to know.
Actually, it did. At the beginning of its intervention, US weaponry and tactics were way below their European counterparts, even in nuclear research. The difference was made through sheer power of scale and speed of adaptation, not pre-war innovation.
In the same way, the US military is currently as good as it is precisely because it sees significant deployments very frequently (Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq), which means they learn hard lessons and develop technologies solving real problems, at a rate that no other military can match.
Because there will always be engagements. There will always be some random rebel group attacking American ships in the middle east (we've been at war with various pirates in Somalia since the beginning of this country, and even before that). There will always be skirmishes and encroachments, terror attacks, etc.
> why would you not want the strongest military you could possibly muster to defend your nation?
Because it comes at the opportunity cost of other things we could spend money on. For example, you could cut education to fund military even more, but it would eventually catch up to us.
Because at the end of WWII, there was a general recognition that oceans were no longer going to protect us. We would either have to participate in worldly affairs on an active basis, or eventually be destroyed, if not conquered.
Given that we would be forced to 'participate,' with isolationism no longer being an option, it was logical enough for us to strive for domination.
That actually worked pretty well, considering that we were the only genuine superpower left on earth at the dawn of the 21st century. It worked until our enemies figured out how to attack us from within by playing a literal Trump card.
We're talking about drafts, which would certainly occur if America and China went to war. Both countries would start attacking the mainland. Are you willing sacrifice your son's life for that?
Deploying the US army on US soil against US citizens would essentially be the end of the country. Whatever the outcome is would be a fundamentally different place. The military is an effective mechanism for pacifying the masses through employment.
> Deploying the US army on US soil against US citizens would essentially be the end of the country. Whatever the outcome is would be a fundamentally different place.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”[1]
Looking at current Ukraine situation, the drone pilots are a couple of kilometers behind the front. The radio range of the drones is not that big. Yes there are higher tech ones, but there are still people exposed at the front.
I’m guessing you haven’t served in the military, and aren’t really familiar with the projections of how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is likely to unfold.
We haven’t had a draft in decades, what makes you bring it up now? Are you implying that only people serving in the military should have a say in foreign policy?
Because if we go to war with China, they have a lot more people to throw at us than we have active in the military. Any slightly protracted war will require a draft. I'm sure you filled out your draft card when you turned 18 like I did, even when there was no draft. That's so if and when they needed to reinstate it, it would pick up almost seamlessly where it left off.
>Are you implying that only people serving in the military should have a say in foreign policy?
No, I'm implying before people rah rah to defend Taiwan, they actually understand what that means; it probably won't mean sending only active duty and reserves after a year or two and that a draft will most likely occur.
I do hope it wouldn’t come to that, but I also don’t think we can afford to immediately capitulate to any state with more manpower out of fear and still consider ourselves to be a world power.
If China has us completely militarily outmatched then of course we can’t afford to provoke them, but it’s not my sense that we’re ready to accept that currently.
I agree. What's the point of a massive military if you can't scare people with it? All I'm saying is we need to be careful what we wish for and understand what we are getting into. If congress thinks the population is itching to go to war, they might just get us into one (again).
Like you said, we haven't had a draft in decades. People might think we won't ever have one, and those people would be mistaken.
Naval warfare is more about hardware than manpower. American casualties in the Pacific Theater of WW2 were only ~100k dead and ~200k wounded.
The US alone would lose in that as well, because its shipbuilding capacity is minimal. But together with South Korea and Japan, it could compete against China on a level ground.
China has the ability to strike the American heartland, including naval production, in ways Japan did not.
We’re also at risk of losing strategic depth: how many more years of provocations from Washington do you think it would take a South American, Mexican or the Caribbean country to start letting Chinese drones, ships and missiles on their territory? (How confident are you in our intelligence community that this hasn’t already happened?)
The phrasing of your question makes it sound like you clearly do not think Taiwan is worth defending. Perhaps a more interesting question would be - where is the line for you to consider a war is worth fighting for? Is it only when your country is being attacked and you need to defend it? If so, take a guess what WW1 and WW2 would have looked like if everyone had that opinion.
You didn't answer the question. It's easy to send other people's kids to war (see Iraq, Afghanistan). It's a different problem when you have your own skin in the game.
>If so, take a guess what WW1 and WW2 would have looked like if everyone had that opinion.
WWI Would have been merely a local conflict between Austria and Serbia. WWII would have been about the same as it was historically, if it happened at all, see previous answer on WWI.
As an aside and ironically, both Wilson and FDR campaigned on not getting us into WWI and WWII.
I suspect there are not many outside your own acquaintances willing to have their children drafted to defend Taiwan.
Just being realistic. Americans were committed to these things because leadership committed us to these things and would make it illegal for us to get out of it. Given an actual choice, not many Americans would have willingly gone to, say, Vietnam. Maybe a few brainwashed anti-communists, but the average American thought, "Hey, not my circus, not my monkeys." I suspect even fewer would be willing to go fight for Taiwan.
The average American's attitude is, "Call me when they attack Hawaii." Until that point, most genuinely don't care. That's why Trump's current moves in Europe will be applauded by his base. Because people have severely overestimated the desire of the American every-man and -woman to defend foreign nations.
You can't give people a choice. If given a choice, they'll always say no.
You either fight far away or you fight at home. The choice to fight though is not yours to make. Its the choice of the defectors of law, of Despots and murderers. You can fight them today, while they rob you with a stick or tomorrow, when they have a gun. But fight you must.
That's just the sort of macho thinking that has caused so many military endeavors to fail throughout history. Maybe the politics is about soundbites like that one? I don't know? I'm not a politician. But the actual prosecution of a military conflict is about outcomes. Not soundbites.
Will there be a good outcome or not?
I mean, if it makes you feel any better, you can think of it this way. Our past has taught us that, without question, it is best to fight far away, but only after an enemy has been weakened by others.
I know how that sounds to many non-US citizens. But I'm just being honest about how the thinking in America has developed historically.
It looks like the war in Ukraine should be beneficial to the United States. We send some surplus equipment and ramp up ammo production (jobs!) while weakening a prominent geopolitical adversary all without spilling American blood.
Letting Ukraine fall will embolden Russia who will continue their march across Europe until it is necessary to spill American blood.
Similarly we may not have a choice in Taiwan. Japan and The Philippines at least aren’t keen to have an emboldened imperialist China in their backyards. If they intervene US aid at least will be in our best interest.
Isolationism is not a guaranteed ideal strategy in all situations. Looking only at boondoggles like Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan doesn’t mean all US intervention is harmful to the national interest.
> Some folks are born made to wave the flag - Hoo, they're red, white and blue. And when the band plays "Hail to the chief", Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord
After seeing people convinced to send their children to the Middle East for more nebulous reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the country can be found willing.
Page loaded, I read the story for a bit then the entire page went black with "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
2025 when websites implement their own blue screens of death.
For the most part you have exactly the same levers to pull at people in the United States, sans voting in elections, but most Americans don’t even do that, and some specific things that require a physical presence, like protesting at the White House specifically.
Setting aside that you can do things about this and effect change, caring about something isn’t the same as being able to affect that thing, so your reasoning “people outside the US don’t care because they can’t do anything about it” is a bit off.
You can prepare for negative second-order effects. Perhaps not every individual article is helpful for that but it’s hard to say they are not in aggregate.
I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse. That and once you've given something away for free, for so long, it's very hard to then charge for it.
People aren't rational when it comes to money. They will haggle and loose sleep over very small amounts, but have no problem overpaying thousands of dollars when it's a big purchase or throwing away their life savings.
Based on previous conversations on this topic, I think the issue is that people don't actually prioritise the mini size above all else.
In other words whatever size the audience is for a mini phone they are further fragmented into people who want a flagship phone vs mid range phone vs budget phone.
And those market segments are too small to make it worth Apple or even most android manufacturers effort.
Exactly. So many people commented on tech sites that they loved the mini sized device but didn’t buy it because they want a pro spec mini. Like there aren’t any trade offs by making the phone smaller. Apple arguably made the best small phone ever made and plenty of supposedly small phone lovers turned their nose up at it. Turns out even they value other things more than the size.
Yeah. The Galaxy Fold was genuinely innovative, and surprisingly practical. Huawei did an early folding phone too.. before the sanctions.
Chinese companies do far more innovative stuff than they're given credit for by Americans, but putting one more fold and an even sillier price tag on their premium phone than the competition isn't it
Catching a cab from the airport in a new country after a flight is a pretty common thing to do no matter where you're going. Depending on flight length you might well be too tired to really navigate public transport in a new city in a foreign language.
Countries where you're likely to be kidnapped (or driven to a bad neighborhood, and charged a lot of money to get back, etc.). Russia, Brazil, Mexico, etc.
I don't travel to Russia anymore, and won't go to Rio or Mexico City without private security.
We can’t transition everyone consumption to "clean energy" and make every consumption "green". What we have today is because coal and oil are cheap and efficient and we’ll need a substancial level of consumption reduction to remove those from our toolbox.
Dollars are great to incentive some consumption shift but the hard work is to be done in the consumption quantity.
Solar and wind are far cheaper than fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheaper in Texas than pretty much any where else in the world, and they don't subsidize green, yet Texas installs far more solar and batteries than new fossil generation.
It's our billionaires; the people who own our media and our politicians.
The overwhelming majority of scientists agree we need action.
Even with billions spent on propaganda, the majority of citizens believe we need action.
A tiny minority of our corporate media and politicians believe we need action, and their bosses/owners are happy to fire them if they speak up too well. Look what happened to Greta once she started talking about capitalism - instant blackout on coverage.
So again, this isn't a species problem. It's very much a billionaire problem, and they are not like us. Billionaires realize this, and we need to realize it as well.
You sound like someone who hasn’t been to dozens of city council meetings where the vast majority of liberal urban dwellers would rather remove all transportation alternatives if it would make it easier for them to park their second car in front of their house.
These are just excuses for why people won't bother.
In reality, only mass behavioral change by individuals will make a difference. There is no political change without mass individual behavioral change. There is no pressure on the rich or corporations without the masses giving a crap.
Your excuses are exactly the message corporations and the rich love to hear because it means their propaganda is working.
Yes the issue is the species. Billionaires are a product of our species. What you describe is a similar thinking that murderers, drug addicts or queers are somehow dissimilar to the general population. This is not the case. The issue is a product of how a human mind works, and it presents this way because humanity improved thinking faster than how fast ecosystems could adapt. The result is a dominant species that behaves very similarly to how invasive species work.
Yes, what you say is technically true, billionaires have infinite more power than you and I, and they could very well take care of a lot of bad things in the world, if they somehow chose to. And so, this power comes with responsibility as well, or so some think. Maybe we indeed could design a system that takes care that no individual rises to these unnatural heights. But, the incentives are not there. The incentives in the human say that more = better. Not in everyone, and people can certainly grow in character, a LOT - but we are talking a big number of people here, as long as there will be some that are highly functional, and also have a craving for infinite power, there will be such power imbalances in the world.
So again, the issue boils down to species. And if we survive ourselves, I expect this trend to continue.
Let me also bring up another species problem: Look at how much friction giving up straws caused. Fucking straws, man. I don't think it can get any more petty than that.
Tackling climate change would've required people to potentially change their lives, possibly drastically and in doing so likely have a lower standard of living.
And they didn't want to.
They don't want to drive less, they don't want to fly less, they don't want smaller houses, they may say they want to do something about climate change but only so long as it doesn't actually meaningfully effect them.
The environmental movement between 1970-1990 made great changes in the way people lived. What stopped it was all out effort by the fossil fuel industry to ensure nothing would affect their profits.
I bet you can think of ways to reduce carbon output without changing square footage or miles driven.
You look at the history of the sierra club. They went from an organization fighting dams and the army corp, to a group fighting neighborhood development and densification in Marin county.
You can be an environmentalist (I am) and realize that much of the 'environmentalist movement' is self-serving nonsense; e.g., plastic recycling. It doesn't mean you don't care... it just means the world is less altruistic than you thought.
The fact that they changed behavior is immaterial to whether they improved or damaged the environment on net.
You look at California’s sprawl in the face of climate change, and you have to condemn a significant amount of the cliched 70’s environmentalism movements as as much about aesthetics as they were genuinely concerned about the environment.
I mean, maybe? Media stations are the first target in most coups... Cutting off alternative voices limits opposition, which is probably why Musk, Ellison, and whatever Saudi princes bought Twitter; and why TikTok was neutered.
What I'm really 'implying' (ie, saying explicitly) is that we have a billionaire problem. They're strip-mining our future, and using every tool money can buy to do so. This includes the tools in the media and political class. It's blatant and in our face now, after years of being behind the scenes.
It's not a billionaire problem. It's an America problem.
The symbolic moment when humanity lost the fight against climate change was July 25, 1997. US Senate passed the Byrd–Hagel Resolution 95–0, effectively saying that it would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Because the only superpower did not take the lead in the fight, it was doomed to fail.
If all it costs them were never having access to those chips again the chinese would've taken Taiwan already.
The chinese want to invade Taiwan because they think it's a rebel province, their only consideration is whether the US will oppose them militarily if they do.
It's clearly not just about the chips.
China didn't attack Taiwan before 1987, when TSMC was founded.
There are many disincentives. The biggest one is that China is confident that they'll get full control of Taiwan without violence.
They believe that the US is in a state of terminal decline and Europe will never overcome centuries of infighting. A significant portion of the population of Taiwan wants to reunify. They fully expect that they can just continue to nurture supporters within Taiwan and wait out the West and Taiwan will just fall into their lap.
Why would they go to war when they think they can get everything they want without war?
> The chinese want to invade Taiwan because they think it's a rebel province, their only consideration is whether the US will oppose them militarily if they do.
IIRC, the US's wargaming shows that if it tries to intervene, it will lose. Taiwan is too far from the US and too close to China.
The US has unrivaled force projection capabilities; half the worlds carrier fleets, the largest navy by tonnage, and the technology to execute unprecedented combined arms maneuvers.
China has insane defense-in-depth; more missiles than you can shake a stick at, the largest navy by number of ships, a vast arsenal of countermeasures, and a 4:1 population advantage.
China can't stand toe-to-toe with the US anywhere except the immediate vicinity of China. In that vicinity, nobody can get close if China doesn't want them to.
> China can't stand toe-to-toe with the US anywhere except the immediate vicinity of China. In that vicinity, nobody can get close if China doesn't want them to.
I think you have a typo there.
Personally, I think if the US wants to defend Taiwan from invasion, it needs to stock them up with a massive amounts of missile/artillery/whatever systems and ammunition, and that needs to be distributed all over the island so there's no concentrated stockpile to attack.
But the US cupboard is bare, and Ukraine made it barer. IIRC, in an all-out war the US itself will run out of missiles in a few days or weeks, and lacks the capacity to replenish them at a reasonable rate.
I think that ship has sailed under the current administration.