If only there was some way to fight a war with no loss of life… It would be nice to see a double shot, Serbian defeat combined with a Trump impeachment… But I’m afraid this kind of fantasy is one step away from being a neocon.
Could his love for Mother Russia get any more obvious?
Sounds like Serbia is looking for a causus belli to let them take back Kosovo. Now that a Russian puppet is installed in the US, let’s provoke Kosovo into a war and not need to worry about any US intervention!
Trump is threatening BMW with tariffs if they build a plant in Mexico? He realizes that they aren’t an American company, right?
Or does everyone in the world have to build all their plants here?
Yes, all companies need to build plants in the US, regardless of they are a US owned entity. It was the same shit he spewed at Toyota a couple of weeks back when they talked about a new plant that was never even planned for the US. The guy is an imbecile.
I can’t imagine how he is going to get people to build plants here en Masse, unless he is planning to go to war with the unions.
The problem with forcing companies to build plants here is that they’ll do the same to us, forcing for example General Motors to build plants in India, China, Germany, etc. This is bad, because we need the world markets more than the world needs ours.
What a fucking moron:
Well, he’s saying “Crimea, Ukraine and the build-up of Russian nukes” as though they are bad things – so, progress??
To be fair, China already does do this.
Hey guys, it’s cool.
Hehe. Rats agree with dogs that cats are obsolete.
I don’t know why I keep on ending up batting for Trump in this thread, but last I checked NATO has been obsolete since, um… 1991 or so? Their current activities involve depriving Putin of shipments of high grade botox and T-72 spotting in the Ukraine.
@HumanTon that’s quality backpeddling, and I mean that as a compliment. @clay Tinfoil hat territory, especially considering it was floating around pre-election when it could have harmed him.
The simple explanation is usually the best, which is Russia interfered with an election in order to support a candidate they felt would serve their interests. Trump accepted it because it worked in his favour, and he is soft on Russia, and appears to have some advisors who have connections there.
To go beyond that is just speculation. Maybe he’s the next Kim Philby, most likely he is’t. Either way you won’t get an answer in this news cycle.
Perhaps it’s simply the case that Putin and Trump appeal to each others vanity.
By that argument NATO was obsolete since its inception. The point is that Russia’s foreign policy is based almost entirely on bullying nearby weaker states. That’s what they do. Any nearby military alliance threatens that policy. The UN won’t intervene if Russia bullies Latvia or Georgia or Armenia or Ukraine because a) they don’t care, and b) Russia has a veto. NATO is the only force that opposes Russia’s regional ambitions.
They’ve lost their raison d’etre. Now all they have to do is shirtfront Putin now and again.
But I’m kinda curious why you think it’s equivalent to saying the alliance was obsolete even in the presence of the USSR.
NATO never fought the USSR, much as they aren’t going to fight Russia, but their presence constrained Soviet regional ambitions in Europe, which are the same as Russian ambitions today except for the placement of the hegemonic boundary. The Soviets wanted more of central Europe, and eventually western Europe as well, whereas today’s Russians want to reclaim former Iron Curtain domination in eastern Europe, hence their recent bullying throughout the region of their influence, from Sweden to Armenia, but especially focused on the Baltics and Ukraine.
So it’s all the same thing in terms of NATO being a military alliance that does virtually no fighting. They have the same minatory effect on Russian ambition that they had on Soviet ambition, which is of course why Russia lies about them having no function anymore, and which is also why so many of these small bordering countries are so keen to join NATO.
NATO is an alliance of like-minded nations banded together to provide a common defense. It happened that for a long time the USSR was the most likely threat, and indeed was the impetus for the alliance’s formation. There’s no reason that it couldn’t still perform its function now, as it still is a group of like-minded nations which are stronger together than separately.
What is obsolete perhaps is the original military focus and structure of NATO, as times have changed. But the nations in NATO do form a bloc that has different values and ideas than, say, Russia or the like, and thus, it makes sense to retain the alliance.
In re factories, though, the irony is that these factories are largely robotic, and they employ very few people compared to the old style manufacturing concerns. People who cheer this sort of grandstanding about jobs and tariffs I think have an image of vast assembly lines filled with thousands of blue collar workers (that those workers were nearly all unionized seems to escape people too), when the reality today is clean, nearly antiseptic facilities run by a handful of people supervising a lot of robots. Whether it’s in South Carolina or in Botswana makes no difference to the job count really.
I don’t think you have a robust knowledge of the past 75 years of counterintelligence if you think it’s tinfoil hat territory. It would still be “floating around” if Buzzfeed has not decided to release it publicly. Just because something was or wasn’t released publicly doesn’t affect the veracity. Plus, if you think it can’t harm him now – well, that’s simply not true. It’s going to continue to be a question in the air and a dent in his reputation until such time as it is disproven. One of the great things about democracies is that they tend to get leakier the more corrupt they become. I suspect that this is the first of many documents, some true and other false, that will be leaked during this administration. I would strongly caution you not to underestimate the counterintelligence capabilities of the Russian intelligence organizations. One of the reasons it’s folly for Trump to ignore the CIA is because the US also has very sophisticated offensive CI capabilities, but without direction from Trump, they’ll never be used.