https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1786968298636423210

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture

BUT.

AT.

WHAT.

COST!

You’re also blind if you just say “America bad” at every opportunity.

It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You don’t need to aim to carefully when you’ve got a target rich environment.

No, many of the things he’s doing are absolutely not in the interest of the billionaire class

Its not in the best long term interests of the country. But then neither is having a billionaire class to begin with. Trump’s looting various cash-rich institutions and easily extorted organizations and individuals for the benefit of his cronies. That’s necessarily bad for the targets of exploitation and good for his in-group, however you might project their futures over the long term.

And yes, he’s serving some of them, particularly Peter Thiel. But he’s mostly serving Putin and himself.

Nobody in Russia, least of all Vladimir Putin, is well-served by the US continuing to arm and instigate conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. And yet that’s exactly what our foreign services continue to do. You can trace this right back to 2018, when Trump shoveled out a bunch of anti-aircraft missile systems and anti-tank weapons to Ukrainian Nationalists.

Trump’s firmly in the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex. And that occasionally breaks for or against Russia, depending on who is buying. But it is always and forever a policy that favors more international conflicts and more arms sales because US exports of weapons is a GOP moneymaker.

And even Hillary isn’t the devil incarnate you think she is.

Hillary and Trump were friends. They’ve been political allies and social circle buddies since the 1990s. She egged him on to run in 2016 because she thought he’d be her cat’s paw.

If you hate Trump, you should despise Hillary.

Because his brand of “politics” is dumb, destabilizing shit that’s bad for America and Americans.

We’ve had dumb, destabilizing policies in this country since its founding. That’s got nothing to do with the politics of the civil services. Plenty of civil servants are full-on MAGA adherents (and have been even before his first election in '16). Plenty more are die-hard Hillarycrat Libs who have dragged the country in another direction. Trump’s game is to stack his MAGA cronies above the Hillarycrats withint compromising the function of the civil service entirely, rendering it useless.

Trump only serves himself, Putin, and indirectly, Xi.

Jesus fuck dude. Have you really been watching US politics for this long and still not seen Trump acting in the explicit interests of the American billionaire class? Why do you think the Chinese President is closer to his heart than the people he pulled into his own cabinet - Lutnick, McMahon, Vought, and Loeffler? Nevermind Peter Thiel, a man who has become the nation’s premiere military contractor over the last year.

Nevermind fucking Israel.

How are you liberals this fucking blind? Trump’s CIA is systematically picking apart what’s left of Russian industry. His Pentagon is fixated on purging Chinese businesses from the Western Hemisphere. His Treasury has made cryptocurrency speculation a central tenant of fiscal policy. But y’all can’t stop saying “Foreign Men Did This” every time you look at your own decayed socio-economic system.

Also, did you just link me Trump admin propaganda

Go Lib Out to the WaPo if that’s your poison of choice.

Or reference Congress.gov for an official definition.

Or just bury your head in the sand for another four years.

Trump complained that a secret inner cabal of career bureaucrats would oppose him. And he wasn’t wrong. The various federal agencies are a seven layer dip of careerist holdovers from prior administrations, many of who were hostile to his brand of politics for one reason or another.

Trump’s framing of the existence and internal opposition by career bureaucrats was that of some insidious anti-American cabal. But the fundamental problem is one every new President faces. Namely, the Burrowing In of political appointees to civil service career roles.

This isn’t a new problem, either. Thomas Jefferson was complaining about the problem hires left behind under the Adams administration. Burrowed-in Democrats plagued Lincoln for much of his tenure and were behind many of the smears aimed at Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion (an Eisenhower-era plot that cost Allen Dulles his job when it humiliated JFK).

How presidents deal with recalcitrant career staffers and opposition party moles can define their administrations. This isn’t a problem Trump just made up. It’s one he doesn’t know how to deal with gracefully.

I was gonna say, only now?

We love to play the “Obama/Biden were the good ones, they knew how to bomb people and sanction countries ethically” game.

For all Trump’s poison, he was dead to rights on the idea of the Deep State - the core bureaucracy of the US government that demands global hegemony and just can’t decide how to achieve it.

Trump’s been miserable at executing hegemony the liberal way. And we’re expected to believe this will make his administration a failure.

But then you look at fascist Middle Eastern states expanding their territory, South American dictatorships sprouting like weeds, and far-right parties gaining ground all over Europe. Hard to ignore that Palantir is doing just fine. White Nationalists are having a heyday from Texas to Tel Aviv.

Clearly, US hegemony is expanding, just not in the way the Clinton/Cheney neocons imagined it.

Corporate Media can’t seem to decided whether we’re undergoing a fascist takeover or finally Making America Great Again.

I dread to read what the history books say about our country in another ten years, knowing what kind of fucked up AI is writing them today.

Chile swings between extreme reactionary and soggy liberal, much like most countries trapped within the US sphere of influence.

Boric’s been caught in the same South American dragnet of economic pressure as every other non-US aligned country on the continent. And the heavily privatized economy - vulnerable to market manipulations and outsider financed media influence - is ripe for these kinds of faux-populist shifts, precisely because Boric couldn’t make actual socialization of the economy a part of his platform.

Now we’ve got another Milei running a South American economy. And the US knocking hard on the door of Venezuela, ready to install Maria Corina Machado if they can oust Maduro before Trump/Hegseth get distracted by another spot on the map. Get ready for predictable results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_diplomacy

Curiously, the three other global leaders in Medical Diplomacy are Cuba, China, and Taiwan. One of the biggest critiques of Trump’s cuts to USAID has been “you’re opening up inroads for evil foreign influence peddling campaigns”.

And there’s been a certain confirmation of this, from the African side of the conversation.

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

In South Sudan, specifically, Chinese diplomats have been aggressively peddling direct aid and coordinating international aid.

Meanwhile, the American administrations have persisted in its campaign of economic sanction as a tool to pressure players in the region

Apparently a bunch of right wing Internet media keeps trying to name him “Edward Crabtree” and cover up the fact that he’s Muslim

As for the concern about markets, I think it’s exaggerated. Nobody in their right mind is expecting to keep their assets in foreign banks if they pursue a war of agression.

Glances at the US and Venezuela

Glances at Israel and… everyone else

Oh cool, you’re a real person under here

Chinese businesses in the textile district have long operated within what investigators call the “Prato system”, marked by corruption and irregular practices, including labour and safety abuses as well as tax and customs fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Italy#Largest_crime_groups

Real “I’m shocked to discover there’s gambling going on in the casino!” energy in these allegations.

Mafia families have a long and storied history of partnering with state police and prosecutors to rub out rival gangs and cartels. And given Meloni’s own mafia connections, combined with regular press criticism of the same, I can’t say I’m surprised to see her government rediscovering religion on anti-mafia policing as her polling numbers sag.

Without the mafia designation or Chinese cooperation, Tescaroli’s case in the China Truck trial relies on the fragile scaffolding of Italian procedure, and the willingness of translators to show up.

Who do they have running this investigation? Kash Patel?

Sino-Soviet split is over, bro. You aren’t going to wish it back by shitposting.

Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?

The Very Same!

I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.

It is nearly non-existent in US History textbooks, which is a big fat “W” from the perspective of the capitalist-friendly intelligence services.

One reason why Buenos Aires didn’t make the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War

Read through that and tell me what we missed.

The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.

Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.

But the idea that we simply didn’t use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics… that’s all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we’d have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our “all out” invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.

Vietnam lost over a million of its people during the US invasion and occupation. It’s all cutesy and smug to tally this as a Big L for Team USA. But I don’t think anyone in that country values the W/L record over the hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, and other loved ones who died to feed the American war machine’s rapacious appetite.

That’s before we even talk about the ecological damage that haunts Vietnam to this day. Or the deaths in Laos and Cambodia racked up in collateral. Or the tenuous diplomatic relationships between the various South Pacific neighbors based on Cold War grudges, which have re-emerged as a shooting war between Thailand and Cambodia just last month.

I can think of a few reasons why the US Navy wouldn’t want to fire high explosives into a contain full of flammable materials, depending on the range of their artillery.

Also definitely possible they’re just doing Privateer shit with Navy assets. I do wonder whether the vessel gets impounded or just escorted to a friendly port in El Salvador or Honduras and quietly re-flagged and titled.

Never loud enough such that they can hear you from an artillery battery.

Sort of half the joke. Some natives sued for peace. Other natives fought to the last man. None of them won in the end, because they were outgunned, outnumbered, and outflanked. The survivors were just the ones who were best at survival, not the most committed to a particular ideology or position.

Billions of poor people are giving their money

Well… their labor