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[+] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    I'd argue America has shown it's the one country that other countries do have a right to interfere with. After ~70 years of being the drunken, overconfident, asshole that's ruining the experience for everyone at the bar because we've decided we're the bouncer. On some level we've kinda made ourselves everyone's problem.

    It's not a perfect analogy, because in a bar everyone else could just leave, and that's not an option when you're sharing a planet.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    If another country kidnapped Trump

    It would imply a seismic shift in the military capacity of the United States. We'd be looking at a country whose dozen-odd aircraft carriers and legions of armored cavalry and massive panopticon of intelligence gathering had fully failed to prevent the most high profile security disaster since 9/11.

    Americans would be celebrating too

    Liberals would be celebrating quietly while they made big frowny faces about the deplorable state of national security publicly. Conservatives would be frothing with rage and threatening to nuke half a dozen major metropolitan areas. JD Vance would be dick deep in a celebratory couch cushion in between photo-ops where he demanded bloody-fisted retribution.

    Another country has no rights to interfere in America.

    There's no such thing as "rights" with regard to national sovereignty. Only Might Makes Right. The people of the various states can defend themselves and one another via an international commitment to mutual aid. Or nationalist kingpins can build up military fiefs and raid one another's exposed flanks as opportunity presents. But the idea that any given national leadership is above intervention has never been true.

    If anything, its the opposite of true. Country leaders appear to have a prerogative to engage one another - diplomatically or militarily - in pursuit of foreign policy aims. Had Venezuelans been as active in bribing and extorting American politicians as the Saudis or the Israelis, I suspect they'd be in a lot better of a position than they are today.

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