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Comment by nickorlow

6 days ago

US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods.

At this point US has close to zero (if not negative) "soft" power.

  • Trade and tarriff relief are an option still. Despite how shitty the US has been and the distrust that will cause in the future access to US markets will be very attractive until the economy collapses. Soft power isn't just from countries liking you after all.

    • Access to US market? Is that a joke you are trying to crack? An “access” that literally depends upon how loud the orange fool farted on the commode that morning — that access and that market? I mean do you really not see what’s happening or you are just being a nice contrarian? Because this baffles me.

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    • > Trade and tarriff relief are an option still.

      That surely is running out of steam. Everyone's got whiplash from trying to watch America and it's tariffs. How do you know it won't be applied anyway, or forgiven for whatever flavour of the day policy it changes to.

      There is very little point in conceding to it when you'll have another opportunity for something else that might be more amicable before the inks dry on that tariff.

    • > Trade and tarriff relief are an option still

      Are they though? Trump tried to use them to get ownership of Greenland a few weeks ago and just gave up. Then he tried to bully Canada again, and also gave up again. I think at this point nobody takes his offers of relief or threats seriously anymore, since any deal you make can be invalidated a couple weeks later.

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    • Bro literally nobody trusts you any more. We do what you say, you put tariffs on us, we don't do what you say, you put tariffs on us.

      We don't care any more. We don't like you. Do you understand?

Which soft power are you talking about?

  • I think we're all aware that EU is trying to become more independent, but as of right now basically everything they do online, or really anything with technology at all, is American in some way. That's a lot of "soft power" and it will take decades, maybe a century, for EU or UK to replace it.

  • Sure, it's decreasing under Trump, but to pretend the richest, most militarily powerful, most culturally influential nation on the planet somehow doesn't have any soft power is... certainly a choice.

    • Republicans are spending all of US's remaining soft power on stealing Greenland.

      If it ends with the Navy showing its non-soft power, Europe won't have any fucks left to give about some website.

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  • Anyone who wants to trade in USD. Protection of maritime trade routes. Nuclear shield. Netflix, YouTube, Nvidia, OpenAI, Amazon.

    • To be honest, only the last few holdouts in Europe still believe in the US nuclear shield. The fact that Germany is trying to make a deal with France should tell you everything.

      Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI are completely meaningless and we could drop it tomorrow. NVIDIA and AWS are a different story. The only problem is that once things become transactional (as opposed to mutually trusting allies), Europe can leverage ASML and possibly ARM. So it doesn’t bring much soft power anymore, only mutually assured economic destruction.

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In the same way they used their soft power to influence them not to block twitter and facebook? Because that power is slowly going from soft to limp...

This comment generated a lot of activity. It's very interesting watching the vote count of it move with the daylight (it went down during night in US/day in EU, and went back up when the US woke back up)