Biden presidency and 2024 election campaign

[KenH]

[pietillidie]

Good posts, all.

Whatever the answer, the options at the very least can't be geriatric or pathologically deranged, FFS. The dumbness with which people approach life-and-death roles warrants a collective Darwin Award.

[What'sinaname]

Trump is making a calculated gamble on the waning support for Ukraine by going after NATO.

By election day, support for the US's investment in the Ukraine will likely dip well below 50% - it's 54% now, down from 66%.

[What'sinaname]

and Biden is toast too. The Hur report is the nail in his coffin. The DNC has 7 months to get its shit together.

[pietillidie]

^Barely five minutes later, Trump is toast again for encouraging Putin to attack European countries who don't kiss his ring. That's the classic malignant narcissist cycle: has some good news, feels invincible, opens his mouth and boastfully leaks his real thoughts. Rinse, repeat.

If that's not the end of the dangerous sicko, nothing will be.

[What'sinaname]

It means a lot of NATO countries will have to uplift their spending on defense, including Australia. We’re looking at around $50 billion more - I’m ok with that if it means less to the arts.

But seriously, it means less social security, so maybe conscription is the way to go, and shift the cost from social security to defense.

[stui magpie]

^

Oh wow, man you just went way OTT.

Look, everyone knows that STEM subjects are much more important than arts and humanities but creative stupid people need support too and art can be nice, except when councils sponsor it.

[Culprit]

Imagine going back to the 80s and telling the Republicans that in 2024 you guys want Russia to win. You can't make this stuff up.

[roar]

Imagine telling Hungarians that their PM will be a defender of Russian aggression.

[David]

Far be it from me to defend Trump, but it seems to me like there's a lot of hay being made out of a single (somewhat ambiguous) line in a speech, which as far as I can tell was about exercising leverage over NATO countries that were unable to keep up with fees by threatening them with lack of protection. If we were to take Trump out of the equation and present you with any other scenario in which a defence pact required mutual engagement, would people be inclined to see associated conditions as a problem? Or is there a principle that such pacts should always be unconditional? Underneath all the soundbites, that seems to be the question at hand.

No doubt it's unwise for Trump to act so undiplomatically, and no doubt he went too far by suggesting he'd "encourage" Russia to attack states that don't pay their way, but there's also something to be said for tough love and using leverage. And as someone who's no particular fan of NATO and who would be happy to see countries like our own become less dependent on (and less subservient to) the US, I struggle to see any such reorientation that might occur as a result of that approach as a bad thing. The EU, Australia and others should be more independent, and the US should pull back from its past role on the world stage. An organisation like NATO in which countries are essentially debtors to the US is not conducive to that.

[pietillidie]

^It's merely a pledge, replete with very distinctive historical post-war contingencies, and all kinds of current economic contingencies. The reason being the very recent and still resolving peace settlement in Europe, of which Ukraine's borders are a part. (And I bet Trump won't encourage Putin to invade countries who aren't meeting their climate pledge, which includes the US, although Biden has made strides).

People are clueless about the EU, a motley assortment of dozens of countries with all kinds of crap going on at any one time, who barely five minutes ago hated each other. Countries like Spain and Ireland were impoverished until very recently. 2% might be the pledge, but some countries could hardly feed themselves until recently, while others couldn't have built up a military or military spending infrastructure without tempting fate due to all kinds of fragile relationships, including the Cold War divide.

Barely 20 years ago, a mere dozen countries first joined the Eurozone. Ten years before that a mere dozen countries signed the Maastricht Treaty. Anyone with half a clue knows there will be a budgeting difference between countries until such a time as greater synchronisation allows for a formal binding commitment, by which time the US will no longer be 'in charge' thereof.

The EU has literally only got to a state of being able to bring together something more binding than a pledge this year. There simply is no earlier history that could've supported something else. Not because of profligacy, but because of history and complexity. Washington has understood this all along, and accepted this as a win for all concerned for decades.

Trump hasn't the slightest notion of just how recent the EU as a coherent bloc really is. Russian aggression on one border has already cost the US-oriented financial markets tens of billions of dollars because so much capital is routed through the US in reward for its pre-eminence. Meanwhile, each EU nation itself is internally riven, and subject to crazies arising trying to undermine both the EU and NATO.

Isolated, naturally protected entities such as the Anglophone countries have are forever projecting their circumstances on a very tenuous and very recent settlement, which also happens to be the most crucial stability project on the planet by a country mile, spouting air-headed nonsense based on some imaginary EU in their head.

The military spending and infrastructure of most EU countries fell off the map post-war to preserve peace and not agitate neighbours, including a menacing Soviet Union. The UK was literally miles away from the iron curtain, hence it could maintain a solid military infrastructure; many EU countries were obviously within the Soviet Union.

A good place to start for people to understand Europe today is to go way back to the fall of the Roman Empire, whose fringes held together the most dense collective of rival peoples in human history by far to that point, from Gaul east. As Rome withdrew, these growing populations clashed, hence their diaspora to lands like Great Britain, and the endless wars, border and ethnic skirmishes involving all kinds of empires, including Ottoman and Central Asian invasions, right up to the very recent collapse of Yugoslavia, by way of world wars, civil wars and a Cold War, making the EU as we now know it a damned miracle.

Even the dumbest US presidents have understood this, taking the lead and trying to hold Europe together as best they can for their own sake, and also recognising that Europe is where their own modernity came from.

America had none of that to deal with, occupying a vast, isolated, fecund land of hunter-gatherers with little hope of resistance. Hopelessly ignorant tools like Trump think everywhere is like that, with absolutely no grasp of the incredibly complex history of Europe, and why it has literally, actually, really taken this long to forge agreements that might make a unified military force funded by formal commitments a possibility.

It does my head trying to explain this to people, even as the far right and thugs like Putin try to undo progress to date. Everyone seems to study European history, but no one ever seems to understand it.

[doriswilgus]

[Magpietothemax]

[Culprit]

Trump wants to be just like Putin. Eliminate all those who oppose him with SDS "Sudden Death Syndrome".

[Skids]

How is Trump now odds on?

Trump $1.85
Sleepy $3.50
Newsom & Obama $9
Harris $21
Haley & Kennedy $31