Comment by arjie
1 day ago
> the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.”
It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done.
Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish.
The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)
I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:
1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left
2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
Is this true? From years of watching Top Gear any Chinese car that was tested was laughably bad.
For EVs, yes, absolutely
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Maybe I'm dating myself, but I remember when the same was said of Japanese cars.
First we laughed at them, then we fought them, then they won, then we solved the problem with protectionist tariffs.
> The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly
Uhhh no? How did they screw up? They were notified late, and then they did what they were supposed to do.
Trump is the populist candidate elected to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
His economic policy has way more overlap with Bernie's than people tend to understand. Both believe immigration lowers wages, and both believe tariffs are imperative (you have to dig back to pre-2017 talk from Bernie, he changed his website/talking points after Trump won).
Edit: People struggle so hard with politics because everyone is totally blinded by there side. Here are populist things Trump has done/trying to do
- remove taxes on tips
- implement tariffs on foreign goods
- implement strict immigration policy (note sanders wanted a pathway to citizenship, he did not want an open border, and he never addressed how he would handle millions showing up at the border)
- block corporate landlords from single family home ownership
- create a government funded college level education program to get free bachelor degrees.
- take government ownership stake in large American companies (us steel, intel)
- cap interest rates on credit cards
- lower central bank interest rates
- de-criminalizing drugs, reschedule marijuana
- pro crypto
- pro prediction markets
Guys, you can hate Trump, you can accurately access he isn't intelligent or competent, criticize his brutish approach, but if you cannot recognize he is a populist, you are objectively lost-in-the-sauce.
Whether you believe in immigration reform or that we need tariffs to protect domestic industries or not, Trump executed both in the absolute worst way possible. And destroying USAID, threatening to take Greenland by force, constantly threatening to pull out of NATO, abducting the leader of another country, and invading Iran with almost no preparation or planning were not things Bernie would have done.
Just specific to tariffs, if you are a US company that wants to setup domestic manufacturing you have no idea what the situation will be next week much less several years from now. The chaos isn’t good for anyone but Trump. The rule of law is as much about stability as it is freedom.
>Trump is the populist candidate elected to put the US back on competitive economic footing
The US is (and was when he was elected) something of an economic miracle, so if that was the reason, it was certainly misguided. The one economic issue that you could have pointed to was the US national debt, which Trump increased significantly in his first term and is now just exploding his second, so if that was the reason, it was certainly a bad idea.
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I sorta doubt Bernie would've been causing the insane tariff chaos that Trump is constantly doing. How it's done matters immensely.
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And yet the economy outside the great AI bubble is continuing to slow down. The rest of the world doesn't want our stuff. We make uncompetitive products.
My own megacorp is continuing to build mass manufacturing capacity in Europe, specifically because tariffs are causing hassles for US import and export, and our EU buyers are demanding EU made after the bull decided to destroy all diplomatic relations built the last few decades.
Support for anything Trump in this context is completely detached from reality. Unhinged.
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You're finding somethere where nothing exists on the basis of semantics. Donald Trump is not a populist and he stated economic policy is simply "stated". Society just has become so trusting that someone can go about bald-faced lying about their beliefs and actions, while doing the opposite, without consequence.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are on polar opposite ends of ideologies.
Bernie Sanders has a lifetime record of integrity, working to fairly distribute wealth, and good and transparent governance.
Donald Trump has a lifetime record of bankruptcies, fraud convictions, lying about his policies for the working while governing for the richest people, using government to enrich himself, and using government to hide his misdeeds and shield himself and his business partners from accountability. Donald Trump says he is many things he is not, and simply believing the words that come out of his mouth is being gullible.
I am not even a Bernie Sanders supporter.
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Yet it isn't fair to people that rely on such assistance to drop it without a plan to substitute the assistance provider. It was all done overnight. One day you had outposts serving people in need, the other they had their doors closed.
So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.
The world has never been thankful for the positive things the US has done. The only thing it ever garnered were the briefest of superficial nods. China gets drastically more respect with their approach than the US ever has, while doing a tiny fraction of the good.
The US saved tens of millions of Russians from starvation a century ago. Culturally they have absolutely no clue about that, they're entirely oblivious in terms of their own history. The good deeds never garnered the US any positive credit. Only the bad deeds garner the US bad credit aplenty.
You do good things because they are good, not to be thanked. It's so bizarre to frame saving lives as something that requires reciprocation.
I want my country to pay for these programs because they save lives and my country is rich enough to afford it. The way people talk about this stuff so amorally is incredibly off-putting.
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You have underestimated the soft power that US has by being the leader of the world. Now with more isolationism, things will change and that soft power will deteriorize over time. Who knows what will come next but definitely the US cannot project its soft power like before.
> As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in.
What's about EU? EU is bigger than the USA in total population and it has comparable if not larger total GDP. Why did not they step in where USA failed?
The US has about a 50% higher gdp, while having 30% less population. Not only this, but the EU can barely fund it's military obligations, let alone others. You frame it as the US failing, but I think it's more the US winning since they didn't really lose anything. I would argue they gained, since now the EU and it's competitors are having to spend money to solve things like this, and the EU and Asia are far closer to Ebola outbreaks and spreading due to population movements than the US is.
Why should the US fund some people in Africa who can't control the outbreak of a very easily contained disease, instead of it's own people.
You are discounting the notion that other powers have something to gain by letting the US own this fuckup a bit more before reacting
And you are discounting the notion that most of those other powers existed before the US. China did. Europe did. Ottoman empire/islam did. They didn't help. Where are the signs they've changed?
I can't get my roof replaced in less than a year. These things take time .
> Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.
Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.
The US was a force for good in the world. There may be a million counterpoints but contemporary American was and still barely is a massive win for the world.
Lol.
The old system recognized that you need an alive world to exploit, financially and through debt. The new system is hoping to rule through raw power because it’s being ran by shortsighted idiots who do not recognize they are standing on the shoulders of more tactical rulers.
Neither of them noble.
China is there when there is money to make or resources to grab, but in the last decades never helped any one else than themselves.