USA Politics

Reality isn't a left-right issue. If Trump did good things, I would say so. In fact, I've said before that I agree that NATO members should be investing their 2% of GDP into defense, as per the NATO agreement (a stance Trump shares). And he signed a bill that moved the needle on criminal justice reform, good on him.

It's just that everything else is bad.
 
The 2% stance is interestingly also one of the few Trumpist demands that have some support in Germany.
 
GhostofCain said:
Centre opinions?? Some of the European views presented here would be considered definitely centre-leaning. To us Donald Trump is fairly close to the far right.
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From what I understand Europeans see all Americans as conservative as even the most left leaning American is still right of center for European standards.

Mosh said:
Frankly you can go back at least 5 years in this thread to find similar discussions with the same people and Travis wasn't persuaded then. Those conversations had a similar trajectory too as what's going on right now. So I'm not sure if I really see the value in any of this.
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It never hurts to have a continued dialogue.
 
Onhell said:
From what I understand Europeans see all Americans as conservative as even the most left leaning American is still right of center for European standards.
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No, I wouldn't go that far, at least in the case of Germany. The terms "conservative" and "liberal" have very different meanings here. Most people who are educated in these matters would probably not try to equate the American political spectrum with the German one.
 
Perun said:
No, I wouldn't go that far, at least in the case of Germany. The terms "conservative" and "liberal" have very different meanings here. Most people who are educated in these matters would probably not try to equate the American political spectrum with the German one.
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I'll be the first to admit my obvious ignorance on the matter. Again, It's what I've been told, haven't exactly polled and surveyed each individual country.
 
Perun said:
The 2% stance is interestingly also one of the few Trumpist demands that have some support in Germany.
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I support it because I believe that NATO has to be strong in the face of a resurgent Russia and growing China, and because we can't count on the USA to be a participant member of NATO anymore.
 
Perun said:
The terms "conservative" and "liberal" have very different meanings here.
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Americans' misuse of the terms "liberal" and "liberalism" is probably my biggest politics pet peeve.

I cringe every time an American conservative attacks "liberalism" by targeting left-wingers who are clearly at odds with liberalism.

Onhell said:
From what I understand Europeans see all Americans as conservative as even the most left leaning American is still right of center for European standards.
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Too far. "Most left-leaning Americans" are Marxists and other brands of socialists, and there are plenty of them. If you mean to say among prominent politicians who actually seem to have a shot at presidency, "the most left leaning American" is probably Bernie Sanders, who is center-left for European standards. It is true that American political spectrum is shifted further toward right-wing than Western Europe, but not that much. Also, I'd advise differentiating between Western Europe and the rest of Europe in this regard. There are many European countries that are also quite right-wing heavy, like Austria, Poland and Hungary.

Another issue is that the left-right spectrum is insufficient because social and economic views can clash. Fascists, for example, are extremely right-wing socially, but they usually aren't as right-wing as a libertarian conservative economically. Which is why you see weird stuff like American conservative pundits considering the welfare state as necessarily a left-wing idea, even though some countries that are extremely conservative socially still have a welfare state or at least a prominent social safety net, like the aforementioned Austria, Poland and Hungary.
 
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The Flash said:
Which is why you weird stuff like American conservative pundits considering the welfare state as necessarily a left-wing idea, even though some countries that are extremely conservative socially still have a welfare state or at least a prominent social safety net, like the aforementioned Austria, Poland and Hungary.
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Would you say that American conservative have a view of "Me first and fuck the rest" while in Europe we have a completely different attitude when it comes to the welfare state? :D
 
GhostofCain said:
Would you say that American conservative have a view of "Me first and fuck the rest" while in Europe we have a completely different attitude when it comes to the welfare state? :D
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I think Europeans are more in tune with the interdependent relationship between the well-being of the individual and the well-being of the community, and also more optimistic with regard to the likelihood of people contributing to & and benefiting from a welfare state as opposed to simply benefiting from a welfare state. That, and also they have experienced the sociopolitical chaos of the bust period of a laissez-faire boom/bust cycle in a much more fearful fashion than did Americans, having either come face-to-face with fascism and communism, or more directly feeling the threat of fascism and communism externally and internally.
 
OK, the President of the United States says in public that a former vice president and his son are corrupt. He doesn't say they might be or that there is reason to suspect it - he says they are without a doubt corrupt and that not only Ukraine, but also China should investigate them.

In a normal world, that alone would surely be close to justify impeachment, no?
 
Donald says it's time to bring the soldiers back home, it's been a long time, it's been decades for some of them ...

The Syrian civil war started in 2011 you doofus. And your campaign against ISIL started in 2014.

But it did come from a man who talked about airfields in a speech about the US war of independence.
 
He might be referring to soldiers dispatched in multiple operations, though.

The US' decision to pull out is major news, considering recent developments. Turkey is about to begin an invasion of SDF-held Northern Syrian territories, what this means is that the US will not be defending SDF forces against Turkey, though they did provide vast amounts of arms to the SDF prior to the decision and Trump did warn Turkey tweeting "if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey". Russia also appears to have given green light to the Turkish operation. Assad's regime is silent on the issue, though it's hard to imagine Russia green lighting the operation if Assad were to be opposed to it. He did declare SDF forces as a threat to Syria's territorial integrity last month.

Inevitable, really. The US set the stage for an all-out war between Turkish Armed Forces and Syrian Democratic Forces by refusing to see what they were doing for what it is and simply trying to buy time. The entities that form the SDF have direct ties to the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group that has been engaged in a conflict with Turkey for 40+ years and has carried out a countless number of attacks on civilians and public institutions. Using, among the local forces in the region, only the SDF to battle ISIS, allowing them to retain control of vast areas that previously were not in their control and ethnically cleanse Turkmen and Arab populations from said areas was always going to initiate a military response from Turkey. The US continued to ignore it, tried to buy time, and in the process not only initiated another conflict, but also pushed Turkey further towards Russian influence.

This is how many times the US have completely bottled its intervention-based strategic pursuits and helped create/exacerbate complicated problems in the region?
 
Ugh, too many

Come to think of it, I'm struggling to think of another post-war instance (aside from 1991) where the US has come out of a conflict on top
 
How did the US come out on top in 1991? All they did was scare Hussein back to Iraq, but lied to the Iraqi people, promising liberation and then turning their back on them which, of course, bit them in the ass the second time around.
 
US has contributed to ME instability since 1970s, at least. They've found ways to profit from those conflicts and the humanitarian thing is just an excuse so public opinion supports deployment.
 
Yeah, I somehow equate shah period with 70s but they brought him in way earlier.
 
To be fair, ME instability goes to the aftermath of WWI at least, I think, and it's not the US that were the main power/s involved.
 
Definitely, Europeans just passed that torch to them post WW2. Sykes-Picot agreement sealed the borders. Now the borders weren't invented just like that, they do fairly represent the etymological/tribal big picture, but in a simplest possible way leaving tons of enclaves with some peoples now being "surrounded" by other peoples' nation state. If you take a look at the early 20th century demographic map linked on the Sykes Picot wiki you can see the basic shape of contemporary Iraq, but also huge number of holes in those modern Iraqi borders which became quite problematic later on.

Middle East is pretty simple. It was Ottoman for centuries. It was Ottoman for so long, that what was before them isn't of any relevancy. Once Ottomans were in decline, Euros sat down and agreed on how to exploit the resources. That is the #1 and only source of today's issues.
 
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