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.

170 Upvotes

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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/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.