That isn't really philosophy, but rather doom and gloom theories.
Control the narrative on what exactly, how I write a bootstrap script for my servers? Or what type of flower is in this photo. Not everything is politics luckily.
The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
This is how politicians speak. A loss of trust is actually very serious. The Norwegian foreign minister is saying that the US is no longer sharing our values. That is a _big_ change for us.
Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh.
You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
> The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the American public. I am interested in America's standing in the world. More than half of Americans do not support these lunatics. Unfortunately due to our inherently unfair electoral system which gives preference to money and land over voters, it requires about 60~70% of Americans voting against them consistently for at least a decade to overcome the lunatics. That's just a very high bar to clear.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
Open to suggestions. The only ideas I have for relinquishing control of the US from the billionaires back to the people would, rightly, get me banned from HN.
Well maybe it is, but to give more "power" to a rual vote then one from a city is also something we do in Norway.
What I have problems with is the winner-take-all and that leads to a two party system. If you had 5 parties not 2. I'm sure that 80% of the voters would me more happy 80% of the time :)
There is a way in which this whole situation has been revealing to me about how little some outside the US actually understand about US politics and civic structures, or alternatively have their own form of isolationism.
The heterogeneity in the US — culturally and in terms of political-legal structures — is far greater than those in Europe and Canada seem to understand sometimes. This is now combined with a corruption of democratic legal processes (e.g., gerrymandering) that make options outside of outright civil war a needle increasingly difficult to thread. There is a reason people are bringing up Hungary — it would be absurd to equate the EU with Hungary for the same reasons it's absurd to paint the entire US with a broad brush.
Something like 90% of people in the US opposed what was going on with Greenland. Just about the only people in favor of it in the US were the presidential administration and people trying to curry favor with it. What do you expect the other 90% to do? The legislators being petitioned were busy with a deluge of other immediate domestic problems — maybe people outside the US didn't understand the scope of the unaccountable fascist police occupation going on in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles? Protesters in Minneapolis were being murdered by these thugs. That's not even getting into the dismantling of social safety nets, rampant corruption, Venezuela, etc etc etc
People outside the US do not want a US civil war. It's happened before and if it happened again would happen along the same geopolitical lines as before. It would be devastating not just to the US but to the rest of the world.
Treating everyone in the US as the same, without recognizing the very real divisions involved, or the structural stresses involved, doesn't help anything.
Everything happening in the US could happen everywhere. If you have enough politicians distorting and destroying traditional democratic mechanisms in favor of a criminal fascist and party domination, people have fewer and fewer options left outside of things that no one wants.
"The complete disinterest in international allies" is a dishonest statement, and I can only assume reflects total ignorance of what is happening in the US, and/or a self-serving defense mechanism to avoid really confronting the difficulty of what those in the US are faced with.
I do not think you understand, you have to start repairing things. You can not only be against something you have to stand up for something that is better. Your number of 90% support for Denmark and Greenland does not show in anyway.
>"Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban."
Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries.
>"Trust is broken forever."
This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
What's ironic to me in these discussions is how similar Ukraine was at one time to the current US administration (probably not by coincidence). Things change quickly.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
As an American, that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn (unless we're buying a tshirt or something) and have been for many presidential administrations. Why would Americans be interested at all in what allies have to say when it's always negative anyway? When someone tells you you're their enemy long enough you begin to believe them.
As for the discussion of moving tech stacks to Europe, if that's where your company is why did that not make obvious sense day 0? Why would you place your critical infrastructure in another country not beholden to your laws? If you're based in Europe then you should host in Europe, and even further, host in your country.
> that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn
457 British solders dead in Afghanistan supporting US operations beg to differ.
Mate, seriously, step away from the propaganda and pay attention to what is happening to your democracy. Then you might understand why your allies are losing trust.
It should be a matter of shame, not pride, to the British that they followed a jingoistic US into a needless war in Afghanistan which achieved nothing but much senseless death.
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
What makes you say that wars are unnecessary? You don't get to see what would have happened in the absence of a war. Keeping some countries like Iran in check by restricting their arsenal, or weakening their economies and military capabilities seems absolutely necessary for world peace for example.
You answer your own post, almost everyone saw the US as an ally. That is the reason for trusting you, and why these posts are worrying. If we break economic and military ties, the alliance grows weaker.
You are right that there have always been a hostility against these kind of actions, but now you are doing it against allies. So you are breaking the trust.
trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense.
As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.
Yes. This is important to understand, the trust is broken for a long time. I do not think people will understand what has happend the last year. Europe is slowly (we always move slowly) moving away from US tech. The impact will not be seen/understood completely before 10-15 years have past
As vga1 says, a lot of American services are used by us. American goods too but not quite as much. When Trump complains about his trade balance he always ignores the revenue from services. The trade balance isn't actually bad when you include them.
But also influence through alliance. Even a superpower can't go it alone and use their military to bend others to its will.
An invasion threat isn't easily forgotten. Eventually things will be ok but America will have to prove itself again. Trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback.
Even if Trump is replaced by a Democrat, the conditions that made Trump happen are still there. That won't change from one day to the next. And don't forget he already happened twice.
10-20 years of decent administrations will make things ok again. But of course our economies will be much more decoupled by then. That process has been set in motion now and won't easily stop. That can start going the other way again but things will have to meaningfully change then over time.
As for Hungary I still don't trust them as far as I can throw them. I would have been happy to bump them back to candidate EU member during the Orban reign and let them prove themselves. Don't forget this Magyar guy is still super conservative. Just less anti EU. But unfortunately EU law didn't provide for the ability to throw a country out. That was a huge oversight.
You are right of course. Germany eventually rebuilt trust within Europe, but now have a highly decoupled economy from their neighbors. As you correctly point out.
1.) after ww 2 European economies were very decoupled
2.) One guy mentions Netherlands but if we can think about Poland, Israel, Ukraine. Israel and Ukraine because Germany supported these countries militarily, in Poland financially but still ww2 is not forgotten.
Btw. You can ask Canadian people what they thought about their annexation threats.
When I was young there was still a lot of ill will and distrust against the Germans and that was 40+ years after the war.
We were still joking about wanting our bikes back (the nazis stole everything metal at the end of the war to make weapons). And didn't like them at beach resorts etc. People would much rather buy American than German products.
That's over now but it took a very long time. Which was exactly my point. Time and consistently good politics will heal this but time it will take.
Of course the sooner you turn things around the better but the disconnection has already been set in motion and big ships turn slowly.
EU wokeup from their sleep with backstabs all around. What a rude awakening indeed. Possibly some were dismissed when they raised this scenario as unlikely.
I didn't say never. I just said, if America gets a sane administration again, things won't be automatically back to normal. There will be caution for years. Also, any new administration will spend years undoing all the destruction that has been done until things can be considered normal again.
In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.
GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.
Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator.
It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.
No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. The real enduring toxic legacy is the packing of SCOTUS, sold to voters as a means of overturning Roe V Wade but in fact a massive enabler for corruption and gerrymandering. Those guys are there until they die or Democrats grow a spine, probably the former.
>Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems.
Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully.
The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries.
The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
reply