Comment by adev_

As an outsider as well, I think the damage done will be hard to reverse in just a decade. You lost trust of your closest allies. Even after the current presidential term, why would we (Europeans, Canadians, ..) invest in ties with the US, when the _next next_ president can be an entire shitshow again?

The American people have shown that they are okay voting for the same nationalistic rhetoric twice. If it was just once, maybe it's a fluke. Now it seems more like a pattern hinting at the mindset of ~50% of Americans.

Also, if I want to be really pessimistic, I'd look at history, at some point Roman turned on Roman (Caesar crossing the Rubicon) after years/decades of political turmoil. The things happening today in Minnesota etc could be preludes a similar Rubicon crossing moment that will shatter the republic..

As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.

We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.

I don't know how you get rid of that. It's You.

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I get that America/the West is far from perfect.

> what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective?

I honestly do not know.

Academia works with networking between peers and moves where the money is.

In Academia, the relation between researchers and the 'names' in the domain matters a lot. But the money stream matters even more.

When relations are created, I do not see them 'ending' just because US decided to play the good guys again and open the money stream again.

It will help to restore some links yes, but will probably not cut any ties created with other countries.

You are not going to find much because China is not yet part officially of Horizons (South Korea and Japan are but not China).

Most of these collaborations happens under the hood and are peer-to-peer and project based.

I can speak for the fields that I am close to:

- For Astrophysics, China already provide both hardware and computing resources to some projects. Conferences in China are in common and exchange are frequents. Rumors of collaborations on Space and scientific satellites are also on the way.

- For nuclear physics, China is actively participating in several software stack used for nuclear fusion. There is also mutual collaborations on some nuclear fusion reactors and they regularly host conferences where EU researchers are invited. They progressed tremendously compared to 10y ago.

- For particle physics, China was historically playing alone and was planning to create and operate their own particle collider similar to the LHC in size. This is not on the table anymore. There is a deeper collaborations with several EU institutes including CERN, they also voiced their interest in the FCC project.

- For Neurosciences, their labs has permissions to execute wet experiments on animals that are forbidden on most EU territories and that I will not describe. A lot of data are shared both way between China and several EU labs. Many neurosciences related conferences have emerged in China, exchanges are much more common that they were.

- For HPC and A.I, this is by far the most active and pushed research domain actually. Alibaba, Tencent and others are even proposing computing resources for free on some projects in exchange of conference attendance in China and collaborations. There is not much collaboration on hardware (due to embargos and NDAs) but a lot of collaborations on software.

I’m unfamiliar with academia but doesn’t this only measure formal funding? It doesn’t measure collaboration with separate EU funding.

The damage is done.

Scientific collaborations are built on trust, not on an election mandate. And the trust is undeniably damaged.

Which funding agency will accept to bring money to the table if the other partner is likely to run home and abandoned everything on the next election 2y later ?

This was already a problem with long term collaboration with NASA and the back and forth of Congress funding, Trump just extended the same issue to all other STEMs fields.

It’s both.

Every authoritarian country thrives on “we’re surrounded by enemies, enemies everywhere” trope.

But, of course, all those glorious leaders happily shake hands and dine with each other, patting their backs and sharing ideas on how to keep peasants in check and themselves in power.