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Originally Posted by Stephen
If you dip**** ****s vote for four more years of this arsehole you can stick your heads up your arse and **** off because I’ve had it with that ****ing moron and you deserve whatever **** you get. See you in four years you ****tards.
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By your recent standards, this is unusually verbose for you, Stephen !
Perhaps I'd use calmer language myself, but I think, on the global stage, it's a commonly held opinion: electing Trump once could be excused as an error of judgement, as being naively taken in by a conman. Voting him back into office, with full knowledge, would indicate an alarming shift in American attitudes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jwb
Nobody has close to the military capability of the US.
That includes everything from hardware to bases worldwide.
But a key part of that is the US Naval empire, inherited by the Brits after world war 2, through which we control the vast majority of international trade routes.
The other major part being the r&d for new weapons systems by which we help subsidize all the other world militaries by having the top technology and then exporting it overseas.
The vacuum question is real and has already been observed. See: Russia invading crimea. They wouldn't have dared that during the cold war. Once our attention was diverted to the middle east and they were fearful of losing crimea to a regime not sympathetic to the Kremlin, they considered it necessary to invade.
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I wouldn't argue with this appraisal of the role of the USA, though I'm not clear about the bold bit.
But how much importance should we attach to world dominance? After all, the USSR was a world power second only to the US, but that fact didn't do much good to gulag victim, Ivan Denisovich or millions of impoverished soviets. When it comes to quality of life for its citizens, a country's global position may only have an indirect effect.
Look at New Zealand; a small isolated country without military might or many exports (apart from lamb chops). They have only had one mass shooting event and within weeks the government enacted restrictive gunlaws to protect their citizens. They clamped down so effectively on covid that they have been able to return to normal life, afaik.
Powerful homeland or not, who, in the US or Europe, doesn't feel a twinge of envy when they hear about NZ ? In that sense, they are the true world leaders.