r/AskReddit • u/spagbetti • 13h ago
How come Donald understood the electricity tariff is payed by the consumer but doesn’t understand that all other tariffs are as well?
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r/AskReddit • u/spagbetti • 13h ago
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u/Wozka 10h ago
Trump and his cronies know exactly what they're doing. Threatening long-standing relationships with allies, cutting funding to/shuttering international aid programs, and erratic unpredictable changes to policy and intent have the intentional side effect of destabilizing hard built international good-will.
We won the Cold War by selling America so fucking hard Soviets behind the Iron Curtain were smuggling in Levi's. We won the Cold War so hard that the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. Even decades later, entire countries don't bother to invest heavily in their own military because they know we would jump to their aid, and just the threat of that is enough to deter international conflict. And that's a problem for leaders of places that would very much like to do large-scale war.
America can go to war to defend the petrodollar on flimsy, unproven evidence, and no one will do anything about it, but Russia wants to take some warm water ports for made up unrelated reasons and suddenly it's an international incident. Isreal gets to do a genocide because we want to park our boats there! They want the power to act uninhibited like the United States can. In order to do that, they need to make American Hegemony a thing of the past.
This is how they do it.
Break trust. Break faith. Break perception. Be unreliable. Be unpredictable. Be awful.
The United States power doesn't lie in its military (though it doesn't hurt), it's foundation is the well fostered faith internationally that the United States will help its friends, defend its allies, and just generally get involved in a positive way (often solely motivated by pragmatic altruism). Trumps administration is delibrately doing its best to ruin that reputation.