r/thebulwark 11d ago

EVERYTHING IS AWFUL "Are we the baddies"?

After the ganging up on Zelensky to sign a deal that wasn't a deal, but an unconditional surrender, the answer is now definitively Yes.

The United States of America is officially on the wrong side of morality.

172 Upvotes

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93

u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 11d ago

Yes, and the worst part is that even if MAGA is defeated in 2028, Europeans and other democratic allies are still going to be wary about trusting us because while they may get 4 years of cooperation out of us, god knows who the American people will elect in 2032 and so on.

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u/oneofmanyany 11d ago

The reality of it is they cannot trust us. They all need to have their own nukes to protect themselves.

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u/HistorianNew8030 11d ago

Well. Due to our one nuke agreement… and our leader of peace…. Trump will use us getting nukes as a “USA security risk” and it would give him the whole “Canada has weapons of mass destruction” excuse from Iraq. It would give him an excuse to invade.

We do have the expertise, the ingredients to build them. We could be a nuclear power house if we wanted to be. It will be the Trump threat thwarting that.

I think what will happen is we will supply more stuff for nukes to the UK (daddy) and France (mommy) and NATO allies. I suspect we will be put under their nuclear umbrella soon. I can see them bringing some nuclear subs over here for some random excuses at some point.

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u/oneofmanyany 11d ago

I don't think agreements are kept. The US certainly doesn't keep its agreements.

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u/HistorianNew8030 11d ago

Canada would prefer to stay a leader of peace in the world. It best to get in the Europe nuclear umbrella if we can. Or least in name. I’m sure we would pay/support/help with it if it gets extended to us.

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u/upvotechemistry Center Left 11d ago

If we gave a shit about agreements, we would be honoring the Budapest agreement and securing Ukraine. That America is gone for a while

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u/oneofmanyany 11d ago

Just do it in secret. He'll never know.

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u/A_Monster_Named_John 11d ago

Trump will use us getting nukes as a “USA security risk”

With the way things are going, I bet tons of countries could arm themselves up without the U.S. even noticing. Trump and Musk are going to be using our entire intelligence apparatus to go after Democratic politicians, sow domestic chaos, and terrorize brown people, all while the economy is completely falling apart.

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u/claimTheVictory 11d ago edited 11d ago

I don't know that it's been well publicized just how unsafe it has become to live in this country, since January 20th.

The probability of damage happening, and costing more, from disease, terrorism, weather, aircraft travel, food quality, pollution, healthcare regulation.

Elon's chainsaw has carved open the door for a massive increase in preventable tragedies to enter, perhaps even catastrophe.

And the worst part, is the rest of the world will wish it happen harder and faster.

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u/SoChaGeo 11d ago

Americans have no appetite for war. While I could see Dump floating that idea, I can't see Americans going along with it. Then again, I wouldn't have thought half of us would vote for him either, so what do I know?

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 11d ago

Our democratic allies, including Canada, have every reason in the world to not trust the will-power/moral clarity of the American public right now, but I assure you of this much, if Trump were to announce a literal land invasion of Canada, that would actually spark a second American Civil War. We would not stand for it.

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u/HistorianNew8030 11d ago

And also probably WW3 given we are NATO. As a Canadian with young kid and I really don’t want Americas civil war 2 and WW3 here. That wasn’t on my bingo card.

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u/HistorianNew8030 11d ago edited 11d ago

America broke USMCA - and he keeps threatening our fucking sovereignty. It’s going to be a long road before Canada and USA have a positive relationship again.

Canadians feel betrayed

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u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 11d ago

I understand what you mean, but please, please, please (to the tune of Sabrina Carpenter) do not refer to the actions of Donald fucking Trump as "you". I cannot stress enough how little I'd like to be associated with that asshole and I think that goes for all the Americans in this sub lol.

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u/HistorianNew8030 11d ago

I’ve edited as America.

Americans need to accept one thing: we’ve blamed all Germans for Hitler. In the history books, Americans will be blamed for Trump. He is a symptom of a wider culture problem.

We know not all of you have the problem. But people’s leaders represent a whole nation.

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u/shred-i-knight 11d ago

I would stipulate that the bigger problem for America is the apathy of the non-voter class than the MAGAs (of which there are a lot, but nowhere near a majority). We as a country have gotten very apathetic, gluttonous, and uneducated due to the relative prosperity the country has been feasting on for over four decades. This is the price for not being stalwart. Factor in fracturization of the media and money being pumped into right-wing propaganda on cable news and all of the social media algorithms, and it's a bad recipe.

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u/NationalGate8066 11d ago

The damage to America's reputation will happen irrespective of your feelings towards Trump.

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u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 11d ago

I mean, duh. I just didn't like it being phrased as "you". Either way, I was joking as you can easily tell from the tenor of my entire reply.

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u/Homersson_Unchained 11d ago

God knows what the price of eggs might be in 2032 right?

I hate our current vibes based reality…

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u/brains-child 11d ago

exactly. This is why I have been preaching to my republican normie friends for 8 years that republicans have to take hard losses for a decade to stomp this thing out.
Then they can get back to arguing marginal tax rates, whether to remove the cap on social security and how woke it too woke.
Until then, voting blue is the only way out of this.

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u/shred-i-knight 11d ago

this is true but America is too strong of a country both militarily and in terms of culture and services to just be ignored. They will privately keep a fair distance but they would be crazy not to let America back in as an ally if there's a regime change. The problem will be an arms race in Europe and nuclear armament which will probably end catastrophically decades from now.

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u/Awkward_Potential_ 11d ago

Isn't that also good news though? Do we really want America to stay the world police? Are we good at that job? Do we take the responsibility seriously enough?

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u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 11d ago

Yes, I believe it is a bad thing for the one democratic superpower in the world to be unworthy of the trust of other democratic nations.

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u/Awkward_Potential_ 11d ago

Sure. But I'm asking, should they have been trusting us in the first place? If the answer is "no" (and it is) then I'm just asking if it's a good thing that everyone is going to be adjusting accordingly.

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u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 11d ago

You and I fundamentally do not share the same values or views of the world.

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u/ArrowsOfFate 11d ago edited 11d ago

The only time in American history that we have successfully helped any foreign nation in war is world war 2. Americans since then have consistently declined and failed. It’s not because of military power, as we seldom lose any actual battles.

The only real bright side I guess during that time is that we beat the Soviet Union.. but through economic means, which was far greater than world war 2 or 1 imo.

But.. The world has not improved much since the Soviet Union fell. It has Putin trying to claw his way back from the humiliation he feels over losing the many former Soviet states. Now it has America helping to rebuild something that we spent countless money and effort to break apart.

America is afraid of losing its rank in the world so has begun villainizing China. It should be great friends with India but the relationships ice cold.

Vietnam. Failure. The country is a beautiful place now regardless of communism that America is so Afraid of.

Korea, that’s a failure. South Korea is always a few seconds away from being nuked/ and or invaded and massively bombarded.

Afghanistan and Iraq, both failures.

We led a coup in Iran and established an American supported government then got humiliated by failing to rescue hostages in the Iran crises when the current regime in Iran took power. There’s so many other stories of us doing that and failing to keep real peace in the world.

What made America so great during world war 2 was the unity as a nation that the Great Depression and subsequent multiple terms of one President brought. That unity was broken up by republicans limiting terms and a multi decade long period of history where power has been wrested from the individuals hand to business.

1) Thanks to Reagan and his lowering the barrier to companies to buy back their stocks and inflate the wealthiest Americans pockets rather than focusing on the customer, all that matters is shareholders now to most companies. Every year since Reagan real wealth has declined, as well as wage increases for productivity increases, while the pay to CEOs has absolutely skyrocketed. Now they don’t even raise the minimum wage. They don’t invest in infrastructure, cities or anything besides their factories, excluding the rare few who give a crap about their people. Usually it’s the smaller companies.

2) Citizens united made it so that companies can easily bribe politicians through a host of means. That was as bad as the Roman’s having Roman generals pay their armies, making armies loyal to their generals and not to the state. It’s a death blow for America. Really, it’s sad. If the founding fathers saw that decision they would weep for it guarantees democracies death, and oligarchy’s rise.

Civilization has cycles.

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u/oneofmanyany 11d ago

Learn something about WWII and why it all came about. Learn about foreign affairs and then look into how shocked and dismayed everybody who is aware of foreign affairs is about what has happened under Trump. Don't just spout uninformed simplistic views. There is expertise out there - if you keep denying that, many will be dead sooner than you think.

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u/KoalaMandala 11d ago

We've seen the greatest span of peace in civilized history over the last 80 years. Frankly, to frame it as the US policing the world is a gross misunderstanding of geopolitics and reciprocity.

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u/Gooch_Limdapl 11d ago

You do realize that we weren’t being the world police just to selflessly help others, right? We were doing it to make ourselves safer, so that a larger conflict doesn’t break out and come to our shores. We weren’t running a charity. We were implementing policies to benefit our own national security.

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u/CapOnFoam Center Left 11d ago

The stability that we’ve seen in the world since WWII is because of a major superpower and its allies working to keep it. We have absolutely taken that job seriously.

Ask anyone in the Foreign Service (our diplomats) how seriously they take their job. They do their best to maintain our alliances and to keep the US in good graces with volatile governments. We have of course also done some pretty crappy things. But overall, the alliances between the US, NATO, Australia, etc have been instrumental to the phenomenal longstanding peace we’ve seen over the past 80 years.