Unfortunately I have to agreed. Protection rackets seem to be pretty much the defining activity when Trump is allowed to run the show, but I doubt appeasement in itself is really going to buy Taiwan anything.
What's to stop him from taking the bribes and then just fabricating some of his trademark bullshit about how the Taiwanese "have been very unfair" and Xi's people were actually totally in the right all along.
The US right-wing has a large contingent that wants to pivot focus away from Europe and towards Asia.
The US abandoning European allies can be perceived through the lens of general isolationism (or even an outright support for fascism) but it can also be perceived as part of this pivot to Asia.
Time will tell. Elon Musk has so much of his net worth tied up in China, however, that I would bet more on abandonment. If Elon was out of the picture I'd bet more on support.
How could you? Trump declined to say he'd defend Poland or Lithuania, both NATO members, when asked by a reporter (obviously this was overshadowed by the Zelenskyy thing)...
Because putin demanded NATO roll back to 1990 borders in exchange for a Ukraine peace deal. So of course he wouldn't defend Poland or Lithuania, they won't be in NATO anymore.
Nope. The US is doing all it can to become irrelevant geopolitically in Europe, that's not to start a war with China with a very uncertain outcome. Economic ties is (was) the really last bastion that would have motivated the US to intervene.
Wild how quickly Europe has just given up on the US after all the money we’ve spent on them for decades. We need your help (a majority of sane Americans), not condemnation. If you don’t think Trump won’t do the same to you, you’re sorely mistaken.
Maybe they were never really allies to begin with, and have waited for Europe to become complacent enough to put down the hammer in our weakest moment.
Only a fool would expect America to come to their aid now, and we'd better hide our oil/minerals lest we get a double dose of dictator-flavoured freedom...
I mean, I think you can at least understand why directly interfering with the domestic politics of a representative democracy might be challenging.
And the Europeans are helping. Trump is not getting the straight forward quick foreign policy wins that he was chasing. Europe is going to keep sticking their "European peacekeeper" (however you want to characterize it) proposal into the Ukraine mix, and Putin is going to have a hard time swallowing that deal.
When the EU tariffs come, you can bet that EU is going to try to make it sting as much as possible.
But ultimately it's up to Americans to make the best of these opportunities.
Europe can't cure American political disease. The public discourse, general political education and health of American institutions is alarmingly bad. IMO it's unlikely that these trends will stop. America is suited to isolationism and Trump type views of the world aren't going away from the US voter mindset.
The US is pivoting from Europe to the Pacific precisely to better protect the likes of Taiwan. The Trump admin is filled with China hawks. Taiwan doesn’t have trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of people to fund its own defense, Europe does.
I'm not from or in the US, but I was mildly hopeful about the Taiwan situation when Marco Rubio was made part of the administration, as he seems to care more about the Pacific than Trump does. I think it's still a bit too early for defeatism.
Are you willing to get drafted and fight to defend Taiwan and whatever comes as a result of that? Are you willing to die for Taiwan, or have your kids die for Taiwan? Honest question.
Many people used to sign up for military service since their ancestors fought on American soil for American interests, and were actually raised under the presumption that this is the main purpose of the American army (or protecting American interests abroad, such as protecting American vessels on international waters). As it's become ever-more-apparent to the group most likely to enroll in the military (conservatives) that this is no longer the case, military enlistment has gone way down.
I honestly have concluded that the HN crowd is so far removed from normal America that they cannot understand it. If you think people sign up for the military due to poverty and not pride, you are deluded. The vast majority of recruits into the military do so out of sense of duty and pride in the country. Remove either of those, and it's no shock military enrollment has gone down. America has had much poorer times and has experienced periods of much stronger growth than today, and had not had the same recruitment crisis as it does today.
> 1815 ignoring the civil war and fights against native Americans.
Why would you ignore those?
Also WWII was fought on American soil in the pacific. The various guano atolls, as well as the islands of the Phillipines.
> Over 60 percent of 2016 enlistments came from neighborhoods with a median household income between $38,345 and $80,912. The quintiles below and above that band were underrepresented, with the poorest quintile providing 19 percent of the force and the richest Americans enlisting at a rate of 17 percent. The modern force comes predominantly from the middle-class households highlighted in Reeves’ article.
I can personally tell you that minorities don’t join the military because they think the country has been so great to them. This goes back to how the military treated Black Americans during WWII (The Tuskegee experiment) and when they came back they were still subjected to Jim Crow laws and how White upper class Americans avoided the draft at a much higher percentage.
The idea that “no Vietcong ever called me ni%%%” was pervasive.
All of the recruiters who come to minority majority high schools and colleges don’t mention “patriotism”. They mention job and education opportunities.
that's I suppose the risk one is willing to take when enrolling into the army?.. You're raising though a very good point, the US army is really large and it's not clear anymore what its purpose is anymore (not against Russia anymore, not against China soon/anymore, then what for?)
I don't necessarily believe maintaining a ludicrously strong military for the purposes of defending our homeland is a bad idea. Maybe I'm just being silly, but like, why would you not want the strongest military you could possibly muster to defend your nation?
Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong? But I don't think so.
I'm hesitant to even say this because it sounds so callous and naive, so with apologies in advance: how would one maintain a superior military if that military isn't involved in any aspect of combat for long stretches of time? To use a sports analogy, could you build a Super Bowl capable (American) football team if none of the players or coaches have done more than watch football on TV and played lots of flag football scrimmages amongst themselves?
(I'm wondering about this after reading today's NYT article about the escalating use of drone warfare in Ukraine.)
Between WWI and WWII, the US didn't get in any "hot practice". (Which is what I think you're talking about?) That didn't stop us from learning what we needed to know. Nor did it stop us from fielding a formidable military. The new technologies at the time were wielded by us to deadly effect. Carriers and tanks in particular. We didn't just sit around and get really good at digging trenches and moving dreadnoughts around.
The same will happen here. I guarantee you, the American military will be among the best in the world at employing the services of satellites, autonomous ordinance and surveillance, and cyber offensives.
You have concerns about our facility with drones? Be assured, we'll be able to work out how to create nightmarish swarms just as well as Europeans or Chinese can. We'll have the same facility with working with countermeasures and mitigating countermeasures as well.
> That didn't stop us from learning what we needed to know.
Actually, it did. At the beginning of its intervention, US weaponry and tactics were way below their European counterparts, even in nuclear research. The difference was made through sheer power of scale and speed of adaptation, not pre-war innovation.
In the same way, the US military is currently as good as it is precisely because it sees significant deployments very frequently (Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq), which means they learn hard lessons and develop technologies solving real problems, at a rate that no other military can match.
Because there will always be engagements. There will always be some random rebel group attacking American ships in the middle east (we've been at war with various pirates in Somalia since the beginning of this country, and even before that). There will always be skirmishes and encroachments, terror attacks, etc.
> why would you not want the strongest military you could possibly muster to defend your nation?
Because it comes at the opportunity cost of other things we could spend money on. For example, you could cut education to fund military even more, but it would eventually catch up to us.
Because at the end of WWII, there was a general recognition that oceans were no longer going to protect us. We would either have to participate in worldly affairs on an active basis, or eventually be destroyed, if not conquered.
Given that we would be forced to 'participate,' with isolationism no longer being an option, it was logical enough for us to strive for domination.
That actually worked pretty well, considering that we were the only genuine superpower left on earth at the dawn of the 21st century. It worked until our enemies figured out how to attack us from within by playing a literal Trump card.
We're talking about drafts, which would certainly occur if America and China went to war. Both countries would start attacking the mainland. Are you willing sacrifice your son's life for that?
Deploying the US army on US soil against US citizens would essentially be the end of the country. Whatever the outcome is would be a fundamentally different place. The military is an effective mechanism for pacifying the masses through employment.
> Deploying the US army on US soil against US citizens would essentially be the end of the country. Whatever the outcome is would be a fundamentally different place.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”[1]
Looking at current Ukraine situation, the drone pilots are a couple of kilometers behind the front. The radio range of the drones is not that big. Yes there are higher tech ones, but there are still people exposed at the front.
I’m guessing you haven’t served in the military, and aren’t really familiar with the projections of how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is likely to unfold.
We haven’t had a draft in decades, what makes you bring it up now? Are you implying that only people serving in the military should have a say in foreign policy?
Because if we go to war with China, they have a lot more people to throw at us than we have active in the military. Any slightly protracted war will require a draft. I'm sure you filled out your draft card when you turned 18 like I did, even when there was no draft. That's so if and when they needed to reinstate it, it would pick up almost seamlessly where it left off.
>Are you implying that only people serving in the military should have a say in foreign policy?
No, I'm implying before people rah rah to defend Taiwan, they actually understand what that means; it probably won't mean sending only active duty and reserves after a year or two and that a draft will most likely occur.
I do hope it wouldn’t come to that, but I also don’t think we can afford to immediately capitulate to any state with more manpower out of fear and still consider ourselves to be a world power.
If China has us completely militarily outmatched then of course we can’t afford to provoke them, but it’s not my sense that we’re ready to accept that currently.
I agree. What's the point of a massive military if you can't scare people with it? All I'm saying is we need to be careful what we wish for and understand what we are getting into. If congress thinks the population is itching to go to war, they might just get us into one (again).
Like you said, we haven't had a draft in decades. People might think we won't ever have one, and those people would be mistaken.
Naval warfare is more about hardware than manpower. American casualties in the Pacific Theater of WW2 were only ~100k dead and ~200k wounded.
The US alone would lose in that as well, because its shipbuilding capacity is minimal. But together with South Korea and Japan, it could compete against China on a level ground.
China has the ability to strike the American heartland, including naval production, in ways Japan did not.
We’re also at risk of losing strategic depth: how many more years of provocations from Washington do you think it would take a South American, Mexican or the Caribbean country to start letting Chinese drones, ships and missiles on their territory? (How confident are you in our intelligence community that this hasn’t already happened?)
The phrasing of your question makes it sound like you clearly do not think Taiwan is worth defending. Perhaps a more interesting question would be - where is the line for you to consider a war is worth fighting for? Is it only when your country is being attacked and you need to defend it? If so, take a guess what WW1 and WW2 would have looked like if everyone had that opinion.
You didn't answer the question. It's easy to send other people's kids to war (see Iraq, Afghanistan). It's a different problem when you have your own skin in the game.
>If so, take a guess what WW1 and WW2 would have looked like if everyone had that opinion.
WWI Would have been merely a local conflict between Austria and Serbia. WWII would have been about the same as it was historically, if it happened at all, see previous answer on WWI.
As an aside and ironically, both Wilson and FDR campaigned on not getting us into WWI and WWII.
I suspect there are not many outside your own acquaintances willing to have their children drafted to defend Taiwan.
Just being realistic. Americans were committed to these things because leadership committed us to these things and would make it illegal for us to get out of it. Given an actual choice, not many Americans would have willingly gone to, say, Vietnam. Maybe a few brainwashed anti-communists, but the average American thought, "Hey, not my circus, not my monkeys." I suspect even fewer would be willing to go fight for Taiwan.
The average American's attitude is, "Call me when they attack Hawaii." Until that point, most genuinely don't care. That's why Trump's current moves in Europe will be applauded by his base. Because people have severely overestimated the desire of the American every-man and -woman to defend foreign nations.
You can't give people a choice. If given a choice, they'll always say no.
You either fight far away or you fight at home. The choice to fight though is not yours to make. Its the choice of the defectors of law, of Despots and murderers. You can fight them today, while they rob you with a stick or tomorrow, when they have a gun. But fight you must.
That's just the sort of macho thinking that has caused so many military endeavors to fail throughout history. Maybe the politics is about soundbites like that one? I don't know? I'm not a politician. But the actual prosecution of a military conflict is about outcomes. Not soundbites.
Will there be a good outcome or not?
I mean, if it makes you feel any better, you can think of it this way. Our past has taught us that, without question, it is best to fight far away, but only after an enemy has been weakened by others.
I know how that sounds to many non-US citizens. But I'm just being honest about how the thinking in America has developed historically.
It looks like the war in Ukraine should be beneficial to the United States. We send some surplus equipment and ramp up ammo production (jobs!) while weakening a prominent geopolitical adversary all without spilling American blood.
Letting Ukraine fall will embolden Russia who will continue their march across Europe until it is necessary to spill American blood.
Similarly we may not have a choice in Taiwan. Japan and The Philippines at least aren’t keen to have an emboldened imperialist China in their backyards. If they intervene US aid at least will be in our best interest.
Isolationism is not a guaranteed ideal strategy in all situations. Looking only at boondoggles like Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan doesn’t mean all US intervention is harmful to the national interest.
> Some folks are born made to wave the flag - Hoo, they're red, white and blue. And when the band plays "Hail to the chief", Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord
After seeing people convinced to send their children to the Middle East for more nebulous reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the country can be found willing.
I think that ship has sailed under the current administration.