Comment by ericmay
3 days ago
It’s not a one-way street on principle. Italy could go do whatever it wanted. It’s a one-way street in capabilities to take action.
There isn’t anything stopping Italy, the sovereign state, from doing anything it thinks it could do. What is stopping it from bombing San Francisco (besides it not making sense whatsoever) would be that the US would physically stop the Italian Air Force and navy.
The US spend years building the UN and the system of international law and it benefits a lot from it. The US is like 4% of the world population and 2% of the area, but dominates pretty much anything you care to measure. It is really not in US interest to overthrow the current system. Its wild that the main threat to international order is coming from the US. Not just this latests development, but the talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, the undermining WTO and WHO etc. Read Hobbes, even the strong do not benefit from “jungle law”.
People who drive policy believe it has already collapsed; now it’s just about asserting control over the resources that will let US(or them personally) thrive in an isolationist, post-AGI world.
Interesting, can you link me to more?
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The conspiracy nuts are taking over.
The lunatic fringe has long seen global institutions as arms of a shadowy conspiracy to destroy national sovereignty and impose a world government. Far from being instruments for exerting US control, they’re seen as holding us down.
It’s just like vaccines. Why would a country deliberately weaken and sicken its population by discouraging the most effective medical interventions ever devised? Because the nuts have take over and conspiracy theories have gone mainstream.
The point is we should be adult enough in 2026 to have an international order that we can draw a line between our modern behavior and what we did in the bronze age.
If you think this kind of caveman-era diplomacy is the future And want humans to be a multi-planetary species then lol, good luck.
>should
This word is doing a lot of lifting here. You are essentially saying "the world should be better" without even a hint of suggestion of what a minority of countries could do to achieve it (in the presence of adversarial, nuclear states)
Right.
Let's say someone is sick and they want to roll around in dog shit to cure themselves. I can say that's a bad idea and not be a doctor with a clinical diagnosis. That's a valid position.
Unilaterally bombing a country, overthrowing its government and installing a puppet leader to capture its oil reserves can be called a bad idea.
I don't need to have a fellowship at Georgetown or some sophisticated alternative.
Some things are obvious: stabbing your eye is a bad idea. no ophthalmology degree required.
It's also rather telling that nobody in Caracas seems to have really tried to stop the US from doing this, it doesn't take all that much to shoot down at least one helicopter.
You'd expect them to have air defenses on high alert 24/7 prepared to immediately respond to any US actions.
They're using Russian air defense that don't seem like much of a barrier for the US military (iirc same hardware Iran has)
Big difference between helicopters in Caracas and fancy stealth aircraft over Iran.
You could shoot down a helicopter with a WW2 AA gun.
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No not really. Actual leftists (as opposed to authoritarians who have seized the language) have a tendency to cede power gracefully.
Look at Dilma Rousseff who stepped down without much of a fight. Mujica, Allende, Morales, the left wing is really bad at holding on to power because they give into perceptions and affectations of mass sentiment regardless of their authenticity or accuracy.
It's part of the praxis.