this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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That's only because Iran and Palestine aren't nuclear powers. Go look up Trump's policy towards them, you may learn a thing or two.
Trump was also at least as hawkish on eastward NATO expansion and escalating the conflict with Russia to open war with an Amerikan proxy as any other US president in the last 30 years. He broke disarmament treaties, had the Donbass shelled by Ukrainian nazis, moved troops eastwards from Germany to Poland. Let's not even get started on the 2% goal for NATO funding that popped up under Trump and has never gone away. Or how he kicked off a trade war with China. Or the travel ban for the Chinese. How gullible can you be?
I'm sick and tired of a way too vocal minority on this site pretending that Trump is "at least better on foreign policy than the Dems" because you like his aesthetics better than Biden's. First of all, you're doing a liberalism. Secondly, you're doing a lesser evilism. FUCK THAT. Thirdly, you're ignoring that his unilateralism, just like Dubya's before him, isn't actual isolationism, let alone anti-imperialism, but simply works as part of a greater good cop bad cop scheme with the dems in how they treat AmeriKKKas allies abroad. The GOP shits on our governments openly to apply pressure, then after the next electoral circus show the Dems swoop in to "mend relations" again, every good little lib here in Europe loves the USA again (and then the Dems are free to blow up one of our pipelines). You cannot vote your way out of the genocidal foreign policy of the USA. It is bipartisan consensus and you're simply falling for the RepubliKKKan ruse that gives you the illusion of "some amount of choice" on this matter.
Let's not even get me started on your "i support not genociding trans people BUT" reasoning up there. I have a really hard time not to start screaming at you rn, what the actual fuck am i reading there?
Yeah, this is one of the worst takes I see frequently on here. I think it's a mix of terminally-online contrarianism and anti-lib contrarianism. It's trolling libs with (generously) an intent to have them consider how close both parties are on foreign policy. But they mostly miss that point, because no one gets subtext and we're staking out a bad position ourselves, so it comes across as uninformed or confusing (do these communists support Trump??).
The good things Trump did (detente with the DPRK, attempted Syria withdrawal) are due to dumb luck and are easily undermined by NatSec ghouls/subsequent administrations. The they are offset, at least, by the bad things he did (a complete 180 on Iran, taking us to the brink of war multiple times), which were also due to dumb luck, but which are much harder to undo.
I don't see a lot of people arguing that trump isn't as bad as Biden. The argument I see (and one I subscribe to myself) is that Biden is better at being bad. They're both horrible ghouls that would murder a child for a nickel, and they can at best be said to be indifferent about various causes.
got kicked out after a short while, to be replaced with 
.
The argument is that Trump was incompetent. While he attempted to suppress minorites in the US he saw massive nationwide demonstrations in response. He tried to antagonize Iran, but failed to escalate the situation to anything that didn't just make him look foolish and wasted precious US resources. Attempts like seizing Iranian tankers were widely condemned, which caused further cracks in US soft power. The world as a whole started to distance itself - The Korea's started peace negotiations without the us, and South America turned leftward. His needling in Venezuela failed, his coup in Bolivia was overturned and the US stooge that was
It's not that he didn't attempt these things, it's that he failed. Meanwhile Biden has seen the overturning of Roe v Wade, increases in transphobic laws with little to no resistance from the general us population, and a war in Europe that put the place at its heel. He escalated tensions with china early on and elsewhere the meddling of the American empire can once again be felt.
Trump is not good and definitely hawkish is every way, but at this point it is no longer deniable that Biden has crossed the line that perhaps most American presidents wouldn’t dare to cross.
Trump liked to pretend to be a master businessman by persuading the Europeans to spend 4% of their GDP into defense, only to be laughed at. Biden literally started a war and forced Europe into austerity to pay for their defense spending (while killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians at the same time).
Trump tried to persuade Merkel to build LNG terminals to get rid of Europe’s Russian gas dependency. The project eventually went nowhere because nobody took him seriously. Biden literally bombed their gas pipeline and ended European prosperity for the century (yes, the European economy is a dead zone now. It is not going to come back for a long time).
Trump started petty trade wars with China, which were reciprocated proportionally by the Chinese. Biden literally started a tech sanction against China that has no proportional response, and ended the friendly relationship between US and China. There is no reconciliation between the two at this point.
Biden raised the interest rates to 5% in one year and plunged many countries into famine and energy shortage, exacerbating debt crisis across the developing world. Hundreds of millions of people (if not billions) in the Global South are literally suffering to slow the decline of the US Empire.
These are the lines that I doubt even Obama would dare to cross. Whether you like it or not, Biden seems very keen on setting the world on fire and starting fights with the entire world. And he might very well win, that’s the scariest part.
None of this will get better after the next election, regardless of who wins. The ratchet effect works both ways, there is no way to elect yourself out of imperialism.
That’s literally what I said. Biden has crossed the line that nobody else has dared to cross. Everyone is going to try to be as ghoulish as possible now because Biden has proved that it is the way to go.
That's what you think! I voted for the other guy
The American plot to drive Ukraine away from Russia goes back at least 10 years. Our plot to stoke fascism there goes back probably 70. Biden was in office when the war popped off, but using Ukraine to antagonize Russia is one of the clearest examples of a bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Had Trump won in 2020 we'd be about where we are now on the war.
Contrast this with Trump much more literally committing an act of war against Iran by assassinating Qasem Soleimani. This is after he tore up the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal for no reason.
I am not disputing that, Trump resumed arming the Azov during his presidency. His hands are far from clean. The war in Ukraine was going to happen one way or another.
However, it is also true that Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric came after his meeting with the newly elected Biden in early 2021, which set off the alarm for the Russians to begin with - also why you saw Russia scrambling for diplomatic talks all of 2021 that culminated in the failed US-Russia Summit in June 2021.
Zelensky was elected as the peace president to bridge the divide between Russia and Ukraine. We don’t know what Biden said to him, but it is clear that the Biden administration took on a much more aggressive stance re: Ukraine compared to Trump’s.
And I am not disputing that Trump is hawkish. I am saying that Biden is much more willing to escalate against near-peer nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China.
I can see Biden taking a different stance in Ukraine, but I can also see his meeting with Zelensky as being the natural development of the situation. I definitely see Biden's rhetoric towards China as a continuation of Trump's, which was a lot more hostile than Obama's (although that progression I'm guessing was also determined largely by the evolving situation/long-term interests in the area).
That’s my point. Our criticism of Biden is not that he is better or worse than Trump, it is that he had crossed a line and set a precedent that will define the US foreign policy forward.
If before US presidents were still more averse to provoking nuclear armed states and performing economic terrorism on their own allies, now all bets are off. Without punishment, every future presidential candidate is going to be defined by how ghoulish they can get. This process is irreversible.
That’s why Biden’s tech sanction is so much more worse than Trump’s trade wars, because it has no proportional responses. To understand how China views Biden’s tech sanctions, you need to read the Chinese sci fi novel Three Body Problem. This is how many people in China are looking at it.
With Trump’s petty trade wars, reconciliation was still possible. There is no more reconciliation between the two powers after the tech sanction, which only drives the world closer to the brink of a nuclear war. This is what is at stake here.
Provoking nuclear powers was standard operating procedure for the U.S. until detente. After a short break it again became central U.S. policy with our funding of anti-Soviet terrorists in Afghanistan. In the 90s we openly meddled in Soviet/Russian internal politics and poked the Taiwan bear.
This is bad, but hardly new.
Could you elaborate a little? I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and am not really getting the connection, but maybe it’s something you can only understand from actually reading.
Trump said better things to a camera because he is a serial liar and will say anything that sounds good at the time regardless of previous statements or intent.
It's a straight up reactionary position to imply, in any way, that the fascist is the best option.
Obviously the best option is if Americans rose up to overthrow their corrupt government that only produces fascists as political candidates.
The choice of Trump vs Biden is only a choice of open fascism and crypto fascism. It's not reactionary to point out that at least the open fascist is reviled by America's traditional allies and had a great amount of trouble rallying support internationally.
I see no benefit to anyone if the EU sleepwalks into a shooting war with Russia following the crypto Fash because at least he's civil.
It's chan-brained to support the fascist because he is ostensibly LE FUNNY, too.
Don't worry, I'm not voting for Trump. Anything Trump did that was "better" was only because he was incompetent.
Well yeah, thats exactly my point. From a moral perspective, Trump is every bit as abominable as any other US president in every way and worse in many ways. That being as it is, the stakes of his morally repugnant behavior were much lower because he wasn't constantly trying to ratchet up tensions with Russia and China into war, at least to the degree that Biden has. Yeah Trump treated Palestine and Iran like shit, buy nobody can reasonably say that's going to lead to WWII.
I agree with everything you said in your second paragraph too. Trump is an absolute peice of shit. However the current piece of shit in the White House is driving the world towards nuclear war in a way that the previous one wasn't, at least to nearly the same degree.
Nowhere in my post did I say or suggest that Trump is "better on foreign policy". I called upon Dems to recognize that Biden's foreign policy is drawing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than those of Trump's. I'd have absolutely no basis to say anything I've said if Biden's foreign policy was substantially better than Trump's, but like you said both parties are two sides of the same coin. You accuse me of engaging in "lesser evilism" and maybe you're right. Shitty American foreign policy that does not lead to nuclear war is the lesser evil of shitty American foreign policy that does lead to nuclear war.
Nowhere in my post did I mean to imply that the solution is to vote. I'm not American, my votes don't matter anyway. Like you said, I cannot vote to opt out of my country being targeted at repeated American provocations against our sovereignty. The onus is on you, the Americans, to do something about your genocidal foreign policies.