abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Everything you've written is accurate.
But in Southeast Asia, this issue is far more serious than just another partisan talking point. Would anyone here be content to base your national security strategies and projections on the assurances of the Trump administration? Seriously?
He has already proclaimed that he doesn't want to pay to have US forces stationed in Japan and South Korea (it actually costs far less to base them there than in the US) and that it's fine if they develop their own nuclear weapons. Whether serious or literal or both or neither, this is terrifying to the grownups who have to take these problems seriously and literally, and no amount of internet forum-style phallus brandishing and teenage virginal masturbatory fantasies about winning future wars with China from the likes of Steve Bannon will put this sort of toothpaste back in the tube.
The leaders, and citizens, on all sides of the conflict in question, want the US to fulfill a steady, consistent, thoughtful, and reliable role. The Trump administration's half-baked belligerent posturing to run up the political scorecard further still with domestic Chuds and Bubbas achieves the exact opposite effect.
This is why Obama was a vastly more effective and credible presence in the region, despite his rhetorical restraint. "Speak softly and carry a big stick," a Republican once said - not "shriek unhingedly and cast doubt on whether you have the brains, led alone to will, to even wield it."
When states all over the world no longer feel like the US is a country to be taken seriously, they will stop thinking about national security as a collaborative practice bound by norms, and increasingly take matters into their own hands. And this represents an incredibly dangerous diminishing of the system that has kept the world more or less stable since Hitler, not because the US is some uniquely benevolent gift from god, as the neo-Cons insist they believe, but because it has served as a moderating force in world affairs, no matter how many times and how stupidly and counter-productively the US violates its own rules.
If the conservatives/Republicans on here and beyond want to play the "liberals stop hitting yourselves" game when there are protests about domestic issues like executive overreach and the erosion of fair elections and legal norms, that's one thing. It's obviously hypocritical and, in the long-run, it hurts you too, but at least the effects are mostly quarantined.
But in light of what we already know about Trump and especially Bannon and foreign policy, it would be a good time for Americans of all political persuasions to grow up and at the very least demand a more mature approach to global affairs. A middle finger to your domestic betters is one thing, but the rest of the world's reaction likely won't be as meek and harmlessly patronising as the Clinton Democrats.
It always astonishes how parochial and myopic Americans can be about the global resonance of their ridiculous domestic pantomimes - it's as though they're performing their absurd family melodramas front and centre in the living room, facing a full plate-glass bay window, and no matter how much the neighbours gathered outside implore, it never occurs to the inmates that you can see in from the outside the window too.
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