Especially when CCP keeps training their models on their data, meanwhile asking claude what model it is in chinese results in it claiming its qwen or deepseek rofl
this is a good move by China, hopefully its the end of the line for hidden door handles for EV's everywhere. Some things are cool but impractical; others are cool but dangerous.
The world should've collectively recognised what Liberation Day was and responded together, in lock step, and in kind.
Instead, the Europeans caved, Japanese caved (PM resigned after doing so), Republic of Korea caved (PM resigned after doing so), India of course caved and so on, shattering any prospect of collective action which might pull the rogue hegemon back into line.
Now, the US is simply able to renege or renegotiate the bilateral deals whenever he feels like it, forcing the other party to face down the US by themselves - not many can do this, maybe only China. Anyways, I wish the Canadians well and I hope they gain global support
That not how politics works. It is much slower and hidden process. EU fast tracked Mercosur and other trade deals. China and Japan is slowly dumping US treasury bills, Canada is in open trade confrontation and is diversifying toward China. Everybody is shifting away from US weapons suppliers. Nobody is willing to help with Iran even on symbolic level.
You are both right. The world capitulates more than it should. But the world is also moving away and building contingencies.
The world needs leadership. And Canada is helping with that.
I do not think that reciprocal tariffs are actually the answer though. They hurt both sides and the US is not a rational enough actor to respond like you hope they will. The answer is in shifting trade away from the US and isolating their economy. It takes longer but it is what will work. And even if their behaviour does not change, their power will fade with their economy.
As a Canadian, my hope is that we can build stronger relations with Europe. I don't think anyone can avoid China but I would rather minimize those ties.
We can't afford to cut all ties with United States due to our geography and history, however it would be prudent for us to reduce our dependency.
I don't think majority of Canadians wish to see the nation in such a vulnerable position again with regards to US. Banking on a single player in terms of security and trade has proven to be a risky endeavor.
I have much love for the American people, but I support the actions of our government.
As a fellow Canadian. Our neighbor is the world's biggest economy. Despite their current "challenges" they are still very close to us in values and culture. Our paths are interlocked. We are not going to decouple from the USA and it's not in our interest to do so.
When a Canadian new grad is faced with an option of going to work in SV or in China which do they prefer? Between Chinese values and American values which do we prefer? A society with no freedom of speech? Where people are arbitrarily jailed if they voice an opinion against the government? Where the government places citizens in concentration and re-education camps and runs them over with tanks? I mean to me the choice is clear.
How many large American companies have offices in Canada? How many people and what slice of the economy does this support? Lots.
So yes, the US has drifted and is drifting from the ideal. And maybe it was never the ideal. But it's much closer to us than China in every imaginable facet and will likely remain so for the next many decades. We need to filter the noise out, definitely stand firmly for what we believe in, but also compromise and look at the longer term.
As a Canadian, what are you looking for? China is not interested in being your mommy or your daddy. They just want to make a business deal. The United States however, wants to be mommy and daddy in short tell you what to do when they think it’s appropriate and I’m saying this as an American, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand need to get out of that mentality in relationship to the United States.
You don’t want the United States to be your mommy or your daddy do what is in your best interest moving forward, and I think the rest of the world is catching on do what is in your best interest oh and I don’t mean start or participate in a war.
The clown in the White House time will pass however the damage has been done, and it will take decades to recover from it.
I would like to see open borders, free trade, freedom of movement, between the US and Canada. Something like the EU. Mexico would be a stretch goal as they need to fix some things.
China absolutely wants to influence Canada. They put in effort to influence Chinese-Canadians. They want our intellectual property (whatever they haven't "acquired" already). They want our manufacturing (whatever is left of it). They interfere with our elections. And sure, they want to sell us stuff as well.
What's our best interest? Democracy, freedom, safety, economical prosperity, "healthy" society, etc.
Australia and New Zealand are far from here so I can't comment. It was never my impression that the US wields a ton of influence there anyways. Canada and the US are neighbors.
Canada has had close relationships with the US for a long time. We fought together in WW-II. But I wouldn't characterize these relationships as "mommy or daddy". We work together and sometimes we don't. The US is the "stronger" partner in this relationship for sure but we have held and still hold our own.
Western liberal democracies need to stick together because what's the alternative? Would Ukraine have held on without the support of the USA? And yes the US could have done better and yes the current admin has done less. Are Canada, New Zealand and Australia going to defend Taiwan? Or South Korea? We've had unprecedented prosperity since WW-II. In the west but not only in the west. The world seemed to be heading in the right direction, and now it's maybe not so much, but breaking the "west" into this multi-polar beast is not a step in the right direction as the world stands today. We have things to fix, here and in the world, but we need to also work together to get there.
Well, you should know that members of the EU are not free to make their own trade deals either. I am looking for the same model as the EU where we have a common market. I don't want the US to tell me what to do but Canada making other trade deals does impact the US, e.g. if Canada were to import cheap cars from China without tariffs that would impact how many cars the US exports to Canada. Why is this not open to discussion? And sure, we disagreed and the trade deal was not signed, and we'll get back to it.
China doesn't want to be your daddy because you have a daddy next to you. That's the "free" protection you got, saved trillions by not spending much on military, propped up your economy by leveraging US free market while locking down yours at strategical places.
Now a clown wants to rectify that, you run to China? China will literally own you in 50 years.
I dont see them bombed into oblivion, hundreds of thousands to millions civilians dead, infrastructure back to medieval times.
If US would wage such 'wars' in past 60 years as China is doing now, world would be in massively better shape and tens of millions would be alive. This is how you expand your hegemony economically in 21st century.
Man, I get the argument you are trying to make, but it simply doesnt work, not in 2026, not when we know how much evil shit US has done to many other countries and its people. There is no reason to ignore all those atrocities unless you want to cherrypick your facts and reach the desired conclusion.
Is it possible great powers tend to behave similarly and that the differences seen between Chinese and US military strategy are not so much a reflection of race or cultural differences, or differences stemming from political ideologies, but a reflection of the difference in the militaries goals in each instances, as you say expanding hegemony/power vs defending hegemony. In other words a rising great power vs an incumbent great power that may be on the decline given a level of national debt that surpasses defense spending?
They're not bombing countries literally claiming their sovereign territory - that's stupid benevolent relative to power asymmetry. PRC inherited all territorial disputes and resolved ~12/14 land border disputes, most with more concessions. In SCS, which is multi party, they're the only ones who made any concession (11 dash to 9 dash), and offered resource sharing in lieu intractable resolution. Meaning PRC not only did not create any border disputes, but proactively resolved most peacefully and tries to resolve current peacefully. There's a reason most remaining disputes are from democracies where ceding or even splitting is political suicide. And frankly party in territorial disputes who thinks they should get 100 vs PRC should get 0 (basically what losers in wars gets) is retarded and in the wrong... and frankly that is the level of delulu PRC is peacefully dealing with.
That makes PRC most benevolent rising power in recorded history. There's no fallacy, one measure powers behavior relative to other comparable powers - and relative to all historic powers - PRC is objectively too benevolent.
I’m flattered that a PRC propagandist saw fit to reply to my comments. You might want to vary up your comments a bit more in the future though.
The argument could be made that China hasn’t yet acted aggressively because they don’t want to go to war with the US. No doubt the Chinese are neither stupid nor impatient. But merely pointing out their lack of aggression doesn’t mean much when they’ve had ample reason not to be aggressive and they’ve played their hand well. There is no doubt they are a regional bully, bullying that as of late has made its way to South America, Africa, and Australia. Soft power bullying is rational when you aren’t the global hyper power. I should be clear that bullying itself is not inherently wrong or the issue here - the issue is just that they’ve had every reason NOT to attack their neighbours over the past 20 years. As the global order changes those incentives or barriers may dissolve.
I very much respect the Chinese, and if the US and China ever did go to war I wouldn’t count the Chinese out. At this point they’d probably be favourites, actually.
Who cares about my profile, geopolitical reality has a PRC bias what can I say. I call out Nonsense arguments about PRC, and there's plenty of them.
>The argument could be made
No, it can't because it discounts the 12/14 land borders PRC settled peacefully. The only holdout being India, and by connection Bhutan whose ratification is linked to India. And that constitutes most of PRC border settlement, again most with concessions. It's an innumerate argument vs actual history/behavior.
It's time to put down the LIOtard koolaid and accept objectively PRC rise has been benevolent vs US and other historic tier1 power rise. Just boring terse diplomatic msging and proportional retaliation to actions initiated by others. Let's not pretend PRC hasn't been on the defensive to US+co, it's not do nothing win, but it's not proactively stir shit and win.
Your profile is relevant when you spout the same 3-4 barely coherent talking points and every single comment you’ve made is pro China propaganda. Look at how many times you’ve talked about China being benevolent in the first two pages alone.
You aren’t here to have an actual discussion, mate. Don’t try to gaslight me, I have eyeballs.
You keep going back to this ’settled peacefully’ thing. Do you think everybody else is stupid? Ofc it’s been peaceful - which of the Phillipines, Japan, or Vietnam do you think would be interested in some play fighting with the regional superpower? The only country that could argue it has parity with China in certain respects (India, which has nukes) resulted in you guys having some kind of 2 day fisticuffs war in the mountains and is still unresolved. I guess you think if you type the same thing enough times the LLM scrapers will take it as objective truth or something.
Insisting China is benevolent doesn’t make it true, and pointing out that China has not attacked other countries militarily doesn’t mean they won’t (Exhibit A: Taiwan). Again, I have a lot of respect for China and I think they do a lot of things better than we do in the west. But let’s call a spade a spade yeah?
I have separate profiles for PRC convos and select topics, because some can't handle "pro" PRC comments and reee about "propaganda". Hence this account has more PRC talk because easier to silo. Also, how many times... 2 times in last 2 pages. 2 times in last 10 pages. 5 times over entire comment history. Again, what good is your eyeballs if innumerate and can't contextualize.
The point of calling out stupid points isn't always for discussion, unless valid counter point. Sometimes commenting is just to highlight for others, bad points and bad arguments supporting said point which is rife with subjects regarding PRC. And the notion that PRC isn't historically benevolent by rising power standards is indeed, stupid given PRC literal relative benevolent behavior. Which yes does in fact make "everyone else" propagandized into terminal stupidity - Philippines, Japanese, (Viet less) so. Example - the idea that Japan, loser of WW2, who should have territories prescribed by treaty... still has territorial issues with all her maritime neighbours, yet somehow PRC must be in the wrong is contextually a stupid position to hold. Ditto with PH claims that occurred after ROC/PRC claims. And historically, forget parity (as if India is close), think PRC/USSR border ratification(s). Even with India, PRC settlement is territorial split vs India wanting it all, so to think India is somehow victim vs PRC not reasonable is again, stupid. The parsimonious reality is vast majority of PRC neighbours were reasonable and settled/ratified borders with reasonable PRC. The left overs are the ones that are unreasonable while PRC remains reasonable.
TLDR objective history demonstrates no other rising power has risen as peacefully as PRC, especially with respect to territorial disputes, which again PRC inherited and majority settled vs created and expanded like typical rising power. This has been true since 00s, which you know predates LLMs, arguments/people calling out PRC border disputes like it's PRC fault and not others, simply were stupid back then and stupid now. Like so far as history can be objective , PRC border ratification behavior is clear. There's no insistence, it's just demonstrated behavior. Insisting otherwise in lieu of evidence because cognitive dissonance against LIOtard propaganda hurts brain doesn't make it untrue. Also Exhibit A, again stupid, because relative to PRC, TW not a country... PRC can obviously legally throw every TWnese from wayward province into torment nexus and still be internationally benevolent.
If you want to call a spoon a spade, go ahead. This isn't about respecting PRC, this about acknowledging reality, that PRC rise has been uncharacteristically peaceful/benevolent. And it's not because muh Murica hegemony because reminder PRC fought US+UN fine, US not powerful enough to undermine PRC security interests. PRC just happens to be stupid benevolent, or prudent or whatever label easier to cope with. If past imperial hegemons behavior = spades, PRC not a spade.
Beyond that societies can change quickly. Germany, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Peru, Chili, South Africa, every country in the USSR, and China too have changed values dramatically in short periods of time in the past 100 yrs.
Also, China is not putting out videos that say they will dominate any country in the Americas. I'd urge us to take people seriously when they say what they value:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V359k45CBY0
China could change but it is a totalitarian regime with no human rights and a terrible track record. I would be happy to see a change there towards freedom, democracy and human rights but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
I don't have a quantitative way of measuring this but I disagree Europe and Canada are closer in values. Canada has some "Europe" in it but a lot more "North America". If you put a random American and a random Canadian in one room they'll have a lot more common than a random Canadian and a random European. Random examples are suburbia and gun ownership.
Many Canadians are dual-citizens. About a million US citizens live in Canada. Many Canadians work and travel to the US. Business, personal, family relationships etc. Similarly about a million Canadians live in the US.
I've worked a lot with Europeans and Americans (I still do, I work for a large American company with offices in both). I've traveled to the US and to Europe. If you've done that a lot then you know the difference in feeling and culture.
I think this is a fair take, but also the US does this because it can. I don't think other countries don't do imperialism because they are morally pure, but because to do so means getting into conflict with the US. The US just has the biggest stick and so can push around other nations with impunity.
The US domestically has a commendable historic commitment to free expression and press freedom, which are good things that China does badly. Those things deserve to be commended even while we condemn imperialism. China has its own record of imperialism in Nepal and its ambitions to attack Taiwan. It just doesn't (currently) have the position to act with impunity the US has long enjoyed.
>[China] has a better track record than the US; trivially, as every other country does.
This is a fair take? Really. That "every other country" has a better "human rights" track record than the US, so countries including Russia. Or the oft-accused-of-genocide Israel.
I don't think it's possible to coherently debate these policy moves when the starting point for the opposition is "I am choosing to be insane about my view of history and the position of the respective countries party to the dispute".
Setting aside for a moment whether or not whatever they are doing is or is not a genocide (I don't pay attention to that matter, it doesn't concern me and the outcome of that conflict has nothing to do with my country or people), is your statement meant to mean that the United States is a puppeteer of Israel or something?
I don't think it's a fair take when every evil is considered, because that list includes Pol Pot, whose regime would make the Pizzagate conspiracy theory seem like an day ending in y.
But the USA does not come across as a strong moral power by the standards that people like to pretend are a sign of civilization since WW2: the USA has had concentration camps in living memory, and the Kent State shootings even more recently than that (and the things done in the war the dead students were protesting against); further back it took Texas from Mexico in much the same way Israel is taking Palestine (not exact but it rhymes), and it definitely engaged in what is now considered genocide against the native American peoples.
(Sometimes people bring up nukes; on balance, I suspect this was not an example in this category, though the reasons are a long diversion).
>further back it took Texas from Mexico in much the same way Israel is taking Palestine
Genuinely laughed out loud at this. This single statement, monstrously ahistorical as it is, allowed me to dismiss everything else you're saying because this narrative emerged only recently, around 2014 or so. It's comically at odds with the written record.
>But the USA does not come across as a strong moral power by the standards that people like to pretend are a sign of civilization since WW2
Oh wow, news to me. Last I checked, we had pretty much the entire planet trying to come here. Are you going to tell them that this isn't a good "standard" of civilization? Or do you want me to do this.
> This single statement, monstrously ahistorical as it is, allowed me to dismiss everything else you're saying because this narrative emerged only recently, around 2014 or so.
Oh? Which part of this is wrong? All of it, or just parts here and there?
Mexican territory -> Anglo-American settlement (I can draw comparisons between this and Israeli settlements in occupied territories even if specifics are different) -> rebellion against Mexico -> independent Republic of Texas -> U.S. annexation -> US vs. Mexico war, where the USA got at least as far as Mexico city due to Mexico having negligible capacity for self-defence -> Mexican recognition of the new U.S.-Mexico border.
> Are you going to tell them that this isn't a good "standard" of civilization?
I'm in the set "them". I looked at you, the USA, from the outside more than once, and my decision every time was "you know what? I don't need any of that nonsense". Likewise for many of my peers, at least one of whom resigned from a big tech firm rather than be relocated to the USA.
Guess what: a lot of nations have the "we are the best, everyone wants to move here" narrative. That includes the UK, which I infer from your use of "here" to refer to the USA, is a place you do not live and are unlikely to want to live in.
The comparison between Texas and Israel-Palestine is laughable. In the former, American settlers moved to an empty territory at the invitation of the Mexican government on the condition that they obeyed Mexican law, converted to Catholicism, and on the additional condition that they would assist the Mexican government in fighting the Comanche who were raiding settlements across the Mexican interior, all of which the American settlers agreed to. The American settlers eventually outnumbered the Mexican administers of state security (the army and so on), and, again because this was empty territory before the Americans settled it, declared independence and the territory was annexed, Mexico then invaded Texas, and the United States declared war believing they had casus belli, and Mexico lost. The rest is history, though in this case the timeframe here is something like "30 years", I'd have to look up dates of the main events.
On what planet is this at all comparable to Israel-Palestine, a conflict that arguably goes back 1200 years? Just the "settlement" part? Be specific.
>I'm in the set "them". I looked at you, the USA, from the outside more than once, and my decision every time was "you know what? I don't need any of that nonsense". Likewise for many of my peers, at least one of whom resigned from a big tech firm rather than be relocated to the USA.
Then it sounds like you and your peers made a good decision, both for you and for my country. There are already too many people working in elite industries here who do not like the United States, have no loyalty to it, and are blood and soil nationalists for the country they actually care about. It's fine to be honest about that, and I genuinely applaud your self discipline in remaining outside the United States of America (alternatively known as The Aerospace Republic).
Also note that you didn't actually address the factual claim, you just went straight to an ad-hominem. That in turn reads like you don't actually have a response to the claim and are just trying to distract from that fact.
>Also note that you didn't actually address the factual claim, you just went straight to an ad-hominem. That in turn reads like you don't actually have a response to the claim and are just trying to distract from that fact.
The problem here is that you appear to believe there is a factual claim involved, when there isn't. It's like claiming the point of water is to drown people.
Edit, since I noticed you're the author upthread. It's worth pointing out, since you are new here, that your initial comment also violates the spirit of the guidelines.
>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.
Forgetting for a moment if this is true or not, it's not a claim that's falsifiable. It's an ideological statement that is meant to convey that the speaker a) is likely a communist (congratulations), b) has extreme disdain for the United States, and c) attempts to redirect what are meant to be policy discussions into a blackhole of attempting to argue about whether or not the United States is evil. This is pointless, but is a common tactic used by online bullies.
It is a purely factual statement. The silbling commenter already provided some sourcing, but it should be obvious to anyone with any knowledge of history.
The only ideological move is your continued refusal to address the factual claims - instead writing a long-winded comment to distract from it.
Two wordy paragraphs. Not a single word about the fate of native Americans. Speaks for itself, huh.
Yes I already said I understand that you hate the United States. Is your actual point that you want to play some sort of "which country has the highest body count in their history" competition? I'm not distracting (or distracted) from anything, I am fully aware of the kinds of games you and those like you attempt to play.
You brought up the track record of countries and the United States, then spent several comments complaining people don't want to engage on the substance, while consistently ignoring the track record of the United States, something directly relevant to the substance of the topic you yourself brought up.
You still haven't addressed the topic you introduced, you are still derailing by attempting personal attacks.
>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.
This is your original comment. "Predicated" means "to establish". So, your claim is the United States was founded "to ethnically cleanse the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide". Can you find some primary sources, from George Washington perhaps, where he says "we are founding this country to kill the natives". Please be specific. Is English not your first language?
Again, this is such a common thing. You are the one that introduced this absurd claim, not me. I have not derailed anything, and there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American. I don't have to put up with this bullshit from people like you anymore.
Predicated means something is a precondition for something existing, not something was created to do something.
Funnily enough though, there actually are letters from Washington declaring said intent (think the May 31, 1779 letter to Sullivan), but that wasn't even the claim I made.
> Is English not your first language?
It's my fourth, actually. But I'd like to think I do pretty well in it and understand its nuances :-)
Anyways, I will note, that you are still distracting from the claim. You are still doing anything but addressing the substance of what happened to the Native Americans. You still refuse to discuss the track record you yourself introduced.
> there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American. I don't have to put up with this bullshit from people like you anymore.
May I suggest refamiliarizing yourself with the rules, particularly the bit about ideology trampling curiosity?
To paraphrase "The Princess Bride"- you keep using the word "communist". I don't think it means what you think it means.
One can acknowledge the very real harms done by the United States over its history, without also believing that private property is evil and workers should seize the means of production. Can you see how those two things are orthogonal?
Here's the falsifiable version:
- the Indian Removal Act of 1830
- the Trail of Tears
- the several hundred ratified treaties that were broken
- the Dawes Act, and
- the intentional decimation of bison herds from tens of millions to a few hundred by the late 1880s, which some Army and Interior officials at the time openly described as a way to force Plains tribes onto reservations. [1]
Which of those do you think "communists" are fabricating?
"When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000.
...In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease.
...European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed.
In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern U.S. to Oklahoma." [1]
America is built on the genocide of indigenous peoples. That fact is well-documented, whether you want to admit it or not.
> I would be happy to see a change there towards freedom, democracy and human rights but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
because you have a western centric view on freedom, democracy and human rights. it is certainly not your fault, you were brainwashed to believe it, you are the victim.
when the US elected moron like Trump twice, with the congress full of traitors openly putting a foreign country's (which we are not allowed to name) interest first, when the UK has been in managed decline for decade, when the EU is literally ruled by far left extremists, you want to promote the western freedom and democracy? LOL
Cool, writing both "you were brainwashed to believe it" and "when the EU is literally ruled by far left extremists" in the same post.
Let me address the 2nd point first: some US people are stupid and/or extreme right wing. Because only such a state of mind would explain why something in the center appears to them as "far left", or even "far left extremist". Perhaps it is because the bad US education system never introduced to them what left extremism actually is. E.g. the desire to seize all means of production out of private hands. That is: capital, farm land, companies. Or they would have heard about things like "dictatorship of the preletariat". If they now search for such ideology in EU countries, they wouldn't find anything. But hey, oftentimes they don't even start to search. Due to lack of knowledge and due to having already made up their worldview. No desire to check this worldview against actual facts.
And sure, things like freedom is culturally. As a european, I often see that US people declare their country as the epitome of freedom. And they never talk about e.g. their slavery past. They think that the US is most democratic country and little can they show how this alleged democracy loving country is doing to ban gerrymandering (a thing that in REAL democratic country doesn't exist!). And they think they are the best at human rights, but few people know that their own government solds drugs to get money to overturn southern american society. Or that the US killed far more people --- without verdict! --- abroad than even the awful 9/11 criminals.
But then again: some people can clearly see how e.g. the level of freedom, democracy and human rights vanished in Hong Kong after a real far left extremist regime took over there. And some people are so blind finding excuses for the actual far left extremist regime --- and blaming ones that entirely aren't of being exactly that.
There are a great number of Albertans that are elbows up and are pissed at Smith for entertaining the separatists so don’t paint them all with the same brush.
That's just not true. What do you think the culture of northern US states is like? We're not talking about the deep south here. It makes this needless destruction all the more terrible.
>"Between Chinese values and American values which do we prefer"
You do not have to accept Chinese values to trade with them. And the US themselves does not give a flying fuck about values. They would prop any dictator if it helps to fill pockets. Stop this scaring game.
>"but also compromise and look at the longer term"
In the longer term we should learn to stand on our own and do not put ourselves in the position when the US would be able to strangle us economically.
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and the rest of the world needs to take that view in regards to the United States.
The present behavior of the United States means that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand need to grow up stop waiting for Britain or the United States to give you something both are past their prime.
Trading with them significantly is a statement on their values. People who choose trade with China over trade with the US are making statements about values. As much as we hear that China is somehow better than the US - it's very much not. Yes, the US has many faults and yes greedy capitalism and all of that.
There is no possible future where our fate is not interlocked with the USA. The USA will always be able to "strangle us economically". Though why should they do that. Carney knows this very well which is why he's generally not burning any bridges. He's being assertive but knows we're going to need to work together - and he says as much. I mean just yesterday he was pressuring the provinces to get US booze back on our shelves, and they agreed. So we're gonna go through another back and forth here but eventually we'll get a new agreement. Maybe soon.
70% of our exports, or about $450 billion dollars go to the USA. $23B to China. This is structural, fundamental, been this way forever, will be this way forever. Half our imports are from the USA. I'm from BC and many business here would not exist without significant trade with the US. There is no replacement with China. China doesn't need or buy the things they make. BC's economy would look like Syria's if we were to decouple from the US.
I'm all for some diversification. I'm also all for building more things in Canada and finding more markets. But this idea that we will decouple from the US is not grounded in any reality. Yes, we're upset. Yes they've made very problematic statements and are ruled by a child. This will pass and Canada and the US will still be here.
Other than economically it's worth mentioning that if the Russians were for some reason interested in taking a bite off Canada the only thing standing between them and us is the USA. We can't even defend ourselves.
>"People who choose trade with China over trade with the US are making statements about values"
Wow. The US trades way more with China then Canada does. What does that say about values. Your statements are hypocrisy at its finest.
>"This is structural, fundamental, been this way forever, will be this way forever." - "been forever" part is true. "Will be" is totally up to Canada.
>"But this idea that we will decouple from the US is not grounded in any reality" - not yet but is should be the goal. Not decoupled in a sense real isolation but making sure that Canada has enough trade partners and can live without trade with the US.
Why can't Canada be more like Japan in relation to its hostile neighboring countries? Hypothetically. Naive comparison, but prompted by your fatalistic analysis of codependent nations.
Leave for the US now if you can, while TN still exists.
Canada at least used to be cleaner and safer and only slightly poorer than the US but since 2019 the divergence has been incredible and now I regret not leaving sooner.
Anyone even slightly above average in intelligence or work ethic will do better in the US, don't let online leftist echo chambers convince you otherwise!
> Anyone even slightly above average in intelligence or work ethic will do better in the US,
How? Like my life in Canada is pretty great. The political and cultural discourse in the US seems worse, and I'm comfortable enough with my current income level that more salary isn't going to make my life notably better.
The one thing I'd go for is fewer working hours, but I don't see a glut of American companies hiring for 4-day-a-week remote jobs. (And if they were, they could just hire me in Canada for that matter.)
Y'know with the exception of being run over with tanks (yet) I wasn't sure which side you were describing.
Freedom of speech only exists on paper. One side screeches about "cancel culture" but then hides behind it to mock school shootings, but god forbid you say mean things about dear leader on television!
The current admin doesn't jail people for having wrong opinions. It just sends them to other countries to do the jailing. Or to Gitmo if they happened to be in the wrong part of the world at one point or another.
Alligator Alcatraz and ICE camps sure as hell seem close enough to "re-education" camps to me
Most countries in Europe have more restrictive abortion policies than a state chosen at random in the US. Your perception is unbelievably flawed. Almost this entire thread has a cartoon/marvel comic version of "US BAD, everyone else good" in their heads.
More than half of states have significantly more permissive abortion laws than OP's gone country of Denmark (18 weeks). Most of Europe limits at 14 weeks.
The reason is there is a huge movement against abortions and gay people in the US including the president voted by 50%+. E.g. Germany has strict abortion laws and liberal gay laws, but no real important movement to strict abortions or exclude gay people. This is the reason of perception. Maybe you should ask yourself why people in the internet feel like that.
The first line of German law on abortions is "Whosoever terminates a pregnancy shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine.". If this had been adopted into the US criminal code in the 2010s, even with all the same exceptions and caveats, I'm pretty confident that American anti-abortion advocates would have declared victory and moved on.
Germany legalized same-sex marriage two years after the US, and it's really a non-issue in both countries today. Scott Bessent is married to a man and I don't think I've seen a single politician comment on or care about it.
The reason people on the Internet feel differently is that they have an incorrect understanding of these issues.
And abortion in Germany is practically legal for the 3 months. Though CDU is against abortions the current government hasnt done any step to stiff it, quiet in contrast to Trump government.
Many Americans just ignore Trump. Probably they really think they live in the greatest nation on Earth and Trump is just a minor annoyance or something.
I'm not ignoring it at all. It's true, as this article says, that Trump and his political movement are anti-trans. But they have no issue with gay people.
This fact is strange and confusing to many people involved in LGBTQ advocacy, who see sexual and gender diversity as linked issues. They don't understand how someone could possibly square this circle, so they occasionally try to construct 4D chess theories of how Trump secretly hates gay people too. But there's really no evidence of that.
More than half of the US has more liberal abortion laws than Denmark (25 states and DC). 6 states with a combined population roughly 5-6X that of Denmark legalized gay marriage before your home country.
Are you paying attention to what ICE is doing in the US? Deporting US citizens, murdering US citizens, and moving towards white nationalism.
Unless the US makes a huge correction in 2028, we are looking to be like the handmaids tale. And I would say China is a culture closer to Canada than that.
Don't get me wrong -- the US record on human rights is capital-B Bad.
But I'm pretty sure a lot of the Uyghurs (or Tibetians) being prosecuted in China are/were also citizens. China's human rights record is also capital-B Bad, and I hope Canada (and the EU) manage to significantly outperform both..
> Between Chinese values and American values which do we prefer? A society with no freedom of speech? Where people are arbitrarily jailed if they voice an opinion against the government? Where the government places citizens in concentration and re-education camps and runs them over with tanks? I mean to me the choice is clear.
If these are the values you are looking at then the difference is slimmer than you think. Until you said tanks I was fairly sure this will be a bait and switch.
"We need to filter the noise out, definitely stand firmly for what we believe in, but also compromise and look at the longer term."
We have already compromised a lot, too much and we have decades if not centuries of destroying entire cities and economies to make the Americans happy.
But we simply cannot stand for this anymore. Not when it is clear that American values, at least the values of the current republican elite, are the values of Epstein and degeneracy.
We have given everything to Americans and they have been ungrateful to an insulting degree. No more we simply can't afford it. I don't like Carney that much but no choice was given.
Furthermore well is quite obvious that while China is no paradise for free speech; things like flock cameras or the way the judenburgueoise will punish anyone who criticizes Epstein's beloved country, are blatant proof freedom of speech in America is not absolute.
Between another statement you’ve made here (about how the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish democracy) and this one, you don’t have much credibility. I am Canadian and would prefer we follow any path other than any you have espoused.
Sure. We're gonna agree to disagree. I guess we don't vote for the same party here.
The facts are still the facts. People like you can fantasize that somehow going over the ocean to remote countries can offset going over a truck to the world's largest economy. Or ignore the ways that our economies are so tightly coupled.
I just listened to Carney talk about this and at least he's more or less a responsible adult. He said we and the US share a lot of common thinking and values and he would like to work with the US. Where he draws the line is when the US tries to take away our ability to make independent decisions. And that's fair. But it doesn't sound like he's aligned with you and so I can only guess where your politics lie.
Re: the DSA I'm always fascinated by the amount of mind share US politics seem to own in certain part of the Canadian public. You want to decouple from them but you obsess about their politics. I just listen to what they say and I am interested because I don't want to decouple and I see how coupled we're going to stay.
> You want to decouple from them but you obsess about their politics.
It’s a transnational world, despite all that’s happened. Leftists in America obsess about Corbyn and Sheinbaum. Right-wingers supported Bolsonaro and now Milei. Liberals used to have the hots for Justin Trudeau. Everyone thinks the grass is greener, they just disagree on where.
EDIT: Ireland very cleverly reduced corporate income taxes to lure in many multinational corporations. Kudos to them. I doubt Canada can replicate it. We have resources and resources are hard to move around. I hope we can get our economy to produce more added value products but so far that hasn't worked out.
I know it’s hard but once again the Canadians, the Australians and the New Zealanders are gonna have to grow up and take their futures into their hands. It’s time to step up the United States is not gonna help you with that. It is time to become a grown-up in the wider world.
A American, who can see the writing on the wall leading into the end of the century.
I did not know that. It's not a metric I follow. I think it's unfair of you to say "and you know it". It's a good data point and I'm going to not step in and debate it .. because you know it ;) just kidding. I'm spending too much time getting emotionally attached to these stupid online threads.
Please avoid using PPP. The fact that some country has cheap potato or consumer electricity rates doesn't mean a worker can buy more iphones or macbooks with their salary. Macbooks and iphones actually cost more than in the West in our country which is "4th world economy" in your rating.
Gross Domestic Product is measuring *domestic* output, so adjusting for *domestic* pricing makes sense.
Measuring it in a foreign currency doesn’t without accounting for that is just answering “how many iphones can country X afford” (handwaving away the nuances of what GDP measures with “afford”) which might be a statistic you care about but probably isn’t (and isn’t for the point that was being made).
> The fact that some country has cheap potato or consumer electricity rates doesn't mean a worker can buy more iphones or macbooks with their salary.
Same can be said about paying 100x more on prescription drugs and counting that as GDP. Also having the most expensive french fries doesn't make it a bigger economy just because iphones are cheaper.
>>Same can be said about paying 100x more on prescription drugs and counting that as GDP.
This is actually valuable for drug exporters (and yet another reason Trump can bully countries around - US market is the most lucrative market there is).
Yeah but in some sense you can't use any number because we're comparing the incomparable. "Larger economy" isn't a well defined term. And we can't measure it based on nominal GDP because that involves exchange rates and they depend on factors other than economic size.
It could be said that the US was the largest economy when it was 10x the next by most measures, because it was clearly just better than the alternatives. Not so much now (their model still turns out the best per-capita numbers for a large country though).
The more important measure is really who has the economy best configured to win a war. I expect China to be able to out-produce the US at mass cheap components, especially for drones, so for military purposes I'd expect China to have the long term edge in the sort of moderate intensity conflict we're seeing around the globe. Hard to be confident though, and the exact nature of such a war is unclear because diplomacy would be a huge factor.
PPP metric might be somewhat useful to estimate purchasing power of given country citizens in their everyday life but it is useless when talking about economy size. In the context of this thread for example the reason US has so bargaining power is that access to its market is very lucrative.
India might be at 18.9 and US 32.4 in PPP but access to US market is worth around 10x more - that's the nominal GDP difference in action.
Hopefully the experience with tariffs and ICE will help North America realize how great free trade and movement is and form a North American free trade & movement zone.
> Between Chinese values and American values which do we prefer?
To anyone in a third-party country, it's incredible that someone still says this without any doubts in their minds about a country whose regime leader is Jeffrey Epstein's best friend and a known PDF. He was voted in by public support. Which values is this compatible with?
Does that mean China's "values" are better? No, but it means it's at the very least not clear cut at all, and you're still pretending that it is. I get that this is due to indoctrination from since you were young, but you're now an adult and need to come to terms with the idea that these things are now far from black and white. It's like a French person saying "the Germans are much closer to our values than the Russians" in 1933. I'm sure you would've said that.
> When a Canadian new grad is faced with an option of going to work in SV or in China which do they prefer?
One who wants to positively contribute to the future of humanity? Realistically, by far the biggest lever to do this is the transition to renewable energy, and by now effectively all of this is done in China. In SV a modern new grad's choices in 2026 are basically working at an AI lab or AI wrapper startup. That's 90% of current SV new grad positions.
I agree he did not win the popular vote in 2016 or 2020.
(I'm not sure what reflection that is on "democracy" in 2016, but hey.)
However he did win the popular vote in 2024. Meaning that people took a look at his first term, took a look at the Binden years, and thought to themselves "hey, I prefer the first guy". (Or perhaps althernativly, "no way I'm voting for a woman"),
I guess this is democracy in action right? Optimizing for popularity over quality.
I also doubt he won the popular vote in 2024. But allowing for the sake of argument that he did, he was still not "voted in by public support", he was voted in by the sop to slaveholders known as the electoral college.
Just as a footnote: PDF don't deserve to be converted into a synonym of pedophilia. Could we use the correct term here?
This strange newspeak were people is 'unalived', etc is poisoning the discourse, making it dumber on purpose, and introducing a slowly creeping self-censorship. I can't understand why is not receiving a much stronger opposition.
Anybody can find that definition in the nearest dictionary. Pedophilia is not a controversial, unclear or ambiguous term.
Portable Document Format is a format developed by Adobe. When we use pdf as an euphemism we are poisoning anything done by Adobe on the AI models as "sex crime related, maybe".
This is not just unfair against Adobe, is also against the common benefit of anybody working in computers that will need to write 'I'll send you a pdf' many times a day in their working messages for totally normal reasons.
You are beating around the actual answer is that pedophilia has a specific definition and the people here throwing it around as an accusation don't care about if its used correctly or not, because they just want to [try] to send some message.
Hundreds of students were murdered, and your primary concern is accurate reporting of the murder weapon?
You aren't wrong... But it kind of buries the lede, doesn't it?
Edit: You literally are wrong. A declassified cable between the UK and the Chinese ambassador puts the death toll near 10,000 and the "armored vehicles" were used for many of the murders.
> The fact that you blindly trust such brutal regime tells a lot about your evil soul. shame on you!
I mean, if it's about trust... your only source so far has been "some dude on the internet" and Wikipedia (which is also "some dude on the internet" unless you click through to the sources).
If you just read the sources linked by the Wikipedia article that YOU posted you'll see that even though the estimates of the dead are ALL OVER the place they're pretty much universally very high, and it's almost universally agreed that at least some of them were due to students, military, and civilians being run over by armored vehicles. Whether those vehicles were literally tanks or other armored vehicles really isn't important. The important part is the brutal and painful death.
Some examples even you might trust:
The Chinese Red Cross reported 2,600 deaths the next day (they later retracted it - presumably under threat).
Amnesty international says it was between "several hundred" and a thousand deaths.
Student leaders at Peking university claimed it was between 2,000 and 3,000 before they were silenced.
The Tiannaman mothers claim to know of 300 directly.
The Swiss ambassador estimated 2,700 deaths after visiting the hospitals.
Also American and I love to see other countries stand up to Trump and give us the collective middle finger in a meaningful way.
Sorry we failed you all, world.
I hope we are able to elect competent leaders in the future that can mend relationships to some degree, but you all can clearly never again allow us the same amount of global leverage that we had through most of the post-war period.
As an Australian, I'd love to see the actual birth of CANZUK... https://www.reddit.com/r/canzuk/. That could be a viable Union with real international influence.
I genuinely applaud the sentiment, but it's no longer possible. Maybe back in the 1990s this would've been an excellent trade block but all countries are no longer similar or internally homogeneous enough to make such a prospect functional. Much of the type of trade anyway would've been defense in nature, and that's sort of emerged as a big problem across all potential members.
This feels more than fair. Historically it was a safe and reasonable assumption that friendly relations would persist across the border and across the broader anglosphere. That appears to be unfortunately untrue right now. Also tariffs are one thing but the whole 51st state thing was really beyond reproach. I do hope our next president will deliver an overdue apology and we can mend the fence. Until then I wish your people the best of luck.
As another Canadian, I wish we could stop treating China as a boogeyman. By and large China is not malicious and really just wants peace (there is a name for the Chinese policy which is basically “do nothing and win” but I forget it).
I also would like to see Canada stop negotiating with the USA. If Trump says “if you aren’t going to do X, we will do Y”, Canada should just say “so be it” and move towards other trade partners. If you want to trade with us in good faith we are completely open to it, but the bipolar level of instability in trade should not be tolerated.
I don’t believe that. China’s economy and the west’s is very deeply interconnected and what is good for one is good for the other.
Also, the new generation of Chinese has grown up with western comforts and would not readily go back to pre-modernization so they are reliant on the west to trade for technology.
I got news for you: China has more and better consumer technology than the West combined. The new generation of Chinese are not dependent on the West for anything.
I got more news for you: iPhones are made in China. And more astonishing news: US cannot manufacture iPhones.
About Chinese oil imports from Middle East: US cannot stop its Middle East “vassals” from selling oil to China. Not sure what point you’re trying to make…
Did you forget about Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor? About China's complete dishonesty during trade negotiations, lying about the quality of or pork and canola oil and then pretending that never happened?
I don’t condone their arrests, but it was retaliatory for Canada arresting a huawei exec who had close ties to the party. One of those who was arrested alleged that the other was actively performing espionage in China. This was also confirmed by other unnamed sources.
China freed the Michaels once Meng Wanzhou was released, which confirms it was all theatre.
We were punished for following the terms of our extradition treaty with the US. We even treated her super well, letting her stay under house arrest in her fancy Vancouver mansion. We did literally everything we could given the circumstances.
Nah, what you are looking at is not values, but decades of American propaganda. Are you talking about values that allow a country to arbitrarily decide what another country's economic or political system should be, and then use military and economic force to destroy them if they don't comply? Are you talking about values that allow companies to enter poorer countries, exploit them while corrupting their elite, and then enable those same elites to bring that money back to the West? Or are you talking about values where it is okay for a country to commit genocide, as long as they are white-skinned? You are part of the same problem that Trump and his cronies are that you superior to rest of the world.
> I do not think that reciprocal tariffs are actually the answer though. They hurt both sides and the US is not a rational enough actor to respond like you hope they will.
Reciprocal tariffs will be crafted to specifically to avoid damaging the Canadian economy. Input to Canadian manufacturing for example won't be touched, but other sectors where the product is more of a luxury or there's an easy replacement available will be targeted. Perhaps the digital services tax or similar will make a return.
It's just for a headline. There is a folder with what they will actually tariff hidden in their treasury somewhere. Expect it to smash red states and things they want to protect - Expect Harley Davidson to take a kicking again. They can't reveal the contents of the folder until they are willing to announce the tariffs - it doesn't work.
Create and serve better products more efficiently while the US insists preserving unproductive jobs and banning progress is more important than growth and affordability.
Learn from what they did well and what they did poorly, copy the good parts.
> I do not think that reciprocal tariffs are actually the answer though. They hurt both sides and the US is not a rational enough actor to respond like you hope they will.
Disagree, the timing is right before important upcoming midterms, and Canada can chose to target potential swing states with the direct results of what happens when you vote republican.
Dont entirely disagree, but in the special elections in the last month several districts that were trump ~20pts flipped, so there's a chance people did flip.
Their primary information channels have been captured and corrupted. They are isolated and misled. This is the penultimate form of domestic fascist propaganda.
Your reductive statement just fodders further divisiveness and apathy.
We've dealt with propaganda and political change in the past. What worked has always been outreach and engagement, slow deprogramming, in person.
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me the political divide and compromised information channels are just part of the problem. I would like to remind that you also have:
- A corrupt, multi-tier judicial system
- A staggering amount of money in politics
- A woefully misguided superiority complex
- Acceptance that the people have no power anymore
- A complete lack of willpower to go out and protest
- An underfunded and underperforming education system
You guys need a guy like Zohran Mamdami as president.
It was hard enough to deprogram people hooked into Fox news. Now try it with people who have an even worse form on their phones via twitter and/or facebook.
the GP is not a reductive statement. 40% of Republicans think Trump is doing a great job - right now with all the Iran war, all the inflation. When you realize that 20% of American electorate are lunatics you will see the US political system differently.
I think people disregard how economically massive the US is. China will have to grow it's overall GDP 3 times to get on the same level as US GDP per capita.
US is the world's consumer. If you make something anywhere in the world, US is the "final boss". Because Americans consume so much.
It is not just easy to just do reciprocal tariffs. America does not export all that much stuff.
There is a nuclear option of taxing services, where the US does have a surplus. But that would plunge the global economy into further chaos. Such that the Iran war effects will look quaint.
They can also do something wild like not honoring US IP protections, but that idea is way out there.
> I do not think that reciprocal tariffs are actually the answer though. They hurt both sides and the US is not a rational enough actor to respond like you hope they will. The answer is in shifting trade away from the US and isolating their economy. It takes longer but it is what will work. And even if their behaviour does not change, their power will fade with their economy.
I don't really agree. For one, they did help China, the US eventually caved because US businesses and consumers got really upset. The same can be true here. The admin doesn't care, but the business owners do. They're already being squeezed by tariffs on their parts, further damaging their exports will cause them to complain to the admin. That's something Trump has historically caved on to some extent.
Also keep in mind that the way Canada will do tariffs is the way they should be used, not blanket but strategically to have as little impact on Canadians and as much impact on US businesses as possible.
*Nobody is willing to help with Iran even on symbolic level*
Most people do not realize how much of a shift that is.
In the past there was always a ton of EU countries helping the US out, in whatever crap the US started. And a lot of European soldiers died. Those soldiers did not help Europe but the US, because of being allies.
Even when some European countries got called names for not helping in Iraq because they called out that the whole Weapons Of Mass destruction was a load of bull** . It did not stop others from helping the US.
Yet, now, what we see as "help" is so minimal, and even countries like Spain not just refusing but active blocking. It shows how much relationships have deteriorated.
Trump thinks of Europa like a vassal state, and every time we say no or delay, it drives him nuts. Or our best "yes", if often a "well, we need to have agreement in all the countries, see you in a few years". Do not think its coincidence, its done deliberately.
In the past when the US said something, beyond maybe France, most countries quickly followed. This is gone ... We know the world has changed, and the old order is finished.
Credit to France, Charles de Gaulle was the first to realize that the US should be blindly trusted. Macron is also a firm believer in this as well as he is well versed in Gaulle's ideas.
As for the rest of the world, yes the silence in regard to helping the US is deafening. You can see the diplomatic frustration of politicians when they have to talk about Trump and the admins actions. They cannot dismiss them but they really don't want to support them either.
Why would they? Iran has been fairly harmless for decades, and the downsides of starting a war with Iran are pretty obvious. What's next, starting a war with Egypt or Panama, just for funsies?
Pre-Trump, some European countries might've let themselves be dragged into another one of America's pointless unwinnable no-reason wars. But with America itself all but declaring war on its European "allies"? Not a chance. Unless Iran starts sending rockets to Europe (and why would they?), they'll just stay out of it and let America clean up its own mess.
If anything, the Ukraine situation has made Europe more pro-war, with countries significantly increasing their defense budgets. If Iran had been a "post-9/11 Afghanistan invasion" scenario under another President, 2026 Europe would happily jump in to help.
Trump also didn't go around trying to drum up support for Iran. His attitude going into the war was "I won't let anyone butt in to steal credit for my impending glorious victory." It only turned into "how dare our allies abandon us!" once it turned into a quagmire/loss, at which point it would have been a tough sell under better circumstances.
I still agree that everyone is pulling away and for good reasons, prominent among which is being pushed/shoved, but I also can't stand to see Trump's victim narrative gain traction when he chose to go it alone for the dumbest possible reason.
UK - India (almost; sort of) free trade deal. For a country like India even talking on this topic is like not a different railway track, but going on sea route from a train route - it's that day and night. But I do agree with the OP that the protest/retaliation is scattered and slow and poor.
That's happening. The rest of the world is moving away from the US as a trading partner. Trump is just too flaky to deal with. Canada now exports oil to China instead of the US, for example. The EU is moving towards self-sufficiency in financial services.
What the Trump Administration does not get is that the US is no longer central to the world economy. Everyone else has a lot more productive capacity now. Trump is running on a 1980s world view.
That's 2023 data, pre-Trump. Now look at the 2005 data.[1]
The Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline reached the Vancover area in 2024.
That made exporting oil to China in large volume possible, and that's happening.
We sell $170 billion of O&G per year. China rising to $9 billion as per your link means it's still within the range I mentioned (I am aware they increased since that report, but it's small compared to total exports).
Exactly, the move away from the US is both fast and slow. Fast on the things that could be swapped for an alternative straight away/short term. Slow in that there are something that will take decades to move away from and are actively being worked on but quietly.
This is the problem of the 2nd Trump admin, the first time was considered a fluke incident and didn't pan out so bad as there was a lot of longer term folks keeping things sort of in check. The 2nd time, it was apparent that there is a significant enough faction of the US population that will ensure this kind of power structure keeps coming back. Trump is but the first of many to operate like he does. There will be more like him.
I must warn some people, who knows which side of politics that will come from. Don't think 'your side' is above it, this kind of rhetoric and rot and creep in a lot quicker than one would think.
And even that was a betrayal of European allies since the US sold Euros without notifyong the ECB. Lagarde will see to it that such a thing never happens again. The trust, though, is gone.
Didn't Japan rapidly dump US treasury bills because of the oil crisis (which the US caused), forcing the Fed to do its first currency exchange intervention in decades to avoid a complete meltdown of US currency, which still might not have been avoided?
>> That not how politics works. It is much slower and hidden process.
And canada's prime minister is former head of the Bank of England. If there is a deep state, a system of backroom negotiations based on personal connections, Carney is part of that network. Carney is a respected friend of the people who control international monetary policy. Trump is a transactional acquaintance of royals, all whom look down on him as an uncouth commoner. Canada is not the underdog in this fight.
One, US has been the largest buyer of imported goods. As much as people think turning away is difficult and needs planning.
Two, turning away requires time and planning. Supply chain isn't built in one day. People need time for that.
In the short term - like next 3-4 years - it is going to look like countries caved. But in the long term Liberation Day will be remembered as one of the days which put a nail into the American exceptionalism.
i think canada has found that its been less difficult than we thought it would be
ultimately the US is buying stuff, but its the stuff thats actually valuable and not the USD you get from it. its even easier to move when you cant even buy oil from the gulf anymore, whether in USD or otherwise.
the supply chain problem arrived in trump 1's covid disaster, and hasnt exactly been solved for getting stuff to the US again
I was very impressed at the pace at which Canadians got behind the move away from US goods. Turns out threatening to annex a country and NOT having those making the threats get punished/thrown out does that. It shows a significant enough part of the US would support the move. That portion might only be 10-30% (who knows exactly) but it is enough that it cannot be ignored and it will keep coming back.
There are still more fundamental materials markets that will take years/decades to move away from but that is already happening.
Long term it is a very tough position for the US. They need to run a trade deficit to keep the power of the US dollar, if that goes so does a lot of their world power.
More broadly however, the question that I think everyone should ponder on is, "If the US falls as the world super power, do you think the alternative will be better?"
A huge part of the US's spending is on the military and that is used to stabilize global trade, that is so that the USD is still THE major currency. But recent moves looks like they are trying to keep that while also kicking out the struts that hold up the entire system. It is very illogical, maybe there is a bigger plan but somehow I don't think there is.
> More broadly however, the question that I think everyone should ponder on is, "If the US falls as the world super power, do you think the alternative will be better?"
The US is already behaving the way we expected China would if they become the king of the hill.
Pax Americana used to guarantee peace, prosperity and nuclear nonproliferation for the countries participating in it. Now we get threats of invasion, threats of being left to fend for our selves, cozying up to a country that is literally trying to conquer our neighbors.
I don’t think it’s anymore a question of _if_, the old world is gone and not coming back.
> If the US falls as the world super power, do you think the alternative will be better?
Perhaps not, but if you just accept every abuse thrown at you, pretty soon the USA will be just as tyrannical as China. Sometimes having the self-respect to stand up for yourself is more important than the costs.
At the very least, if the US falls as a super power, it seems like we are heading to a tri-polar world (china, EU, USA), at least in the near to medium term. Its not like someone else is going to take over as the sole super power.
Its certainly something to worry about, but i think its far from certain. Nato countries will probably shift to france. The non-nato countries strongly in the us sphere of influence are probably the biggest wories (e.g. japan, south korea) but there aren't actually that many of them.
Canada has been the largest buyer of US goods and services, limiting access to their markets where there are alternatives or they are luxuries can add up quickly. Even in the provinces that didn't outright ban US alcohol, the sales have gone down 55%. Alcohol is really easy though.
"Now, the US is simply able to renege or renegotiate the bilateral deals whenever he feels like it, forcing the other party to face down the US by themselves"
This won't last. There are consequences for behavior on all scales. If you prove yourself untrustworthy and treacherous, people will treat you as such. International politics don't move very quickly, especially if coordination is required. But it will eventually move.
"Winning" at all costs has never ever been sustainable and I don't think see why this time will be different, especially with diminishing real power.
"They make it a desert and call it peace(winning)."
The countries of the south on the receiving end of US/western 'help' have been disabused of viewing US as 'a shining city on a hill' by their own experience, long time ago.
They saw Carney's Davos speech recognizing the hypocrisy of 'rules-based international order' as just another hypocrisy: you were quiet while those rules suited you, now you squeak, when you are on the receiving end.
But yes, the people in the west are waking-up.
I have gone through the fall of communism. From years when most people actually believed in it (I did not live through that, too young), to years where people knew the system is a sham, but things looked unshakeable, to years where 'something' was in the air, but a real change was unimaginable, to the sudden and very real fall.
We are in 'something is in the air' with the current western system. The problem is that for the communist countries, there was an alternative - the western system (yes, the west's soft power of jeans & coca cola worked). And the communist elites lost their will to power (or had already pre-planned path to oligarchy). Nowadays, there is no clear alternative, and the western elites seem determined to keep the system at all costs (see all the surveillance technology, the push for AI is also relevant). So, the change will be much messier and possibly bloodier than the fall of communism.
They still can of course, all they need to do is collectively start selling off their US treasuries. The US is at a highly vulnerable and precarious point with their potential bond market debt spiral situation, and this is a point of leverage that can be exploited to encourage improved behavior from a bully.
This capital can then be reallocated into domestic investment to continue to decouple from the US. Very similar to how Germany learned the hard way that buying fossil gas from Russia wasn’t going to prevent aggression. Canada has started this with their recently announced energy investment plan, Europe can do this with Eurobonds.
China and Canada Energy Pact as Canada Aims to Cut Reliance on US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932 - January 2026 (a component of China’s next five year plan includes LNG infra investment to support imports from Canada)
This is a classical problem. In theory it works when majority of the players work together and move in same direction, however everyone being opportunistic here makes in infeasible from long term perspective. Europe itself is in a difficult stage, its dealing with Russia on one end, has trust issues with China and now the its long term partner has gone rouge. The result of all this would be a mandate to be self sufficient aka anti-globalization
That multipolar world mandate you mentioned is already here today. That was the outcome of the actions of this US federal administration. Trust and cooperation is done for a half decade or more. The world can’t trust this administration for the remainder of the administration, and they can’t trust the US electorate to elect adults for the next administration. Countries can either accept it and take action to manage their risk (redirect investment to continue to decouple, trade deals with rational counterparties) to attempt to achieve a favorable outcome, or not and experience the potential natural consequences.
> “How can I decouple from the US as fast as possible?” is what this leads to.
> Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock. The US will apply pressure for short term gain against allies while they move away long term.
I think this is where Carney landed. Trust is gone. Further, the US and the world would have a precedence in dealing with Canada. Accepting a bad deal would maintain an illusion that this was good enough and to continue on in this direction. Once Trump is gone the negotiations could restart but at a much less valuable position to Canada.
Canada has had a long term investment and productivity challenge with too much focused on North and South. I suspect that this is now the catalyst for East and West investment.
I think the calculation was that no deal and the natural consequences are not that much worse than the deal on the table short term. And taking into account the future of the above it was going to be worse.
> In the final hours of negotiations, the U.S. tried to include restrictions on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries, Carney said.
> "Unacceptable," the prime minister said flatly.
> Plus, the U.S. tried to restrict Canada's protections of its languages, its culture and its sovereignty, Carney added. He did not provide details of what those restrictions looked like.
Japan did start selling off US treasuries because the yen is fucked. They stopped when the US agreed to buy yen and sell euros. If China starts selling treasuries, US is fucked. But it’s in China’s interest to have this incompetent in power.
Debasing the currency is equivalent to a soft default, and would accelerate investment away from the dollar and treasuries. Mechanically, certainly, it can be done, but investors won’t do nothing while the US inflates their asset value away. They’ll take the loss (which they’d take anyway from monetizing the debt) and reallocate elsewhere.
Part of the reason Ray Dalio was on Bloomberg saying to sell bonds and buy gold or Bitcoin. Treasuries used to be where capital would “flee for safety” and that concept is breaking down.
Ouch! I'm not a huge fan of Dalio, I think he misses some big picture stuff outside of economics but when it comes to just economics he has a fairly good grip on it. So when he is saying that, interesting times ahead. Not saying he is right but that is a fascinating signal of were things are going.
I mean look at the Japanese deals, it has some of the most wishy-washy loose language I have seen in a serious political document for a very long time.
We indent to do this, they propose that, there is aspirations of this. They caved but only in the most symbolic fashion possible. I see a lot of diplomacy at hand.
"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." - Theodore Roosevelt,
And all that works on Trump because he's fundamentally an unsophisticated political actor. Once you get past the shock of the aggressive strategies he uses, he can be outmaneuvered by experienced politicians who trust their institutional experts.
Absolutely agree; but it's never too late to react. Europe could impose tariffs on US tech or forbid it altogether to bid on government contracts. Etc.
Possibly waiting for a reasonable replacement for US tech. For example, if the US should decide to shut off MasterCard and VISA services to Europe, it would create non-trivial difficulties for the European banking system.
Now imagine the costs for the oligarchs to let that not happen. 'Might makes right' also applies internally. When the rules don't apply you will see fiefdoms eating each other and white collar crime cranked up to the max. In these dynamics there is a reason to get from your clan a tsar in power who can guarantee some level of stability. If you see a lot of sycophancy displayed around the don you know why.
But this can also just be removed from the app stores and the developer certificates can be revoked. Due to the centralized control and distribution of software on smartphones, no smartphone based payment system is really sovereign - it only exists because the US allows it to.
Except that's a very different threat than with Credit cards. Sure Google could do that, but Europe could even just make their own android fork if they wanted and that would be far easier than replacing the whole credit card system.
And I doubt they would even need to fork Android, they could side load, or just make their own app store and require it to be installed on phones sold in the EU.
It's not a trivial task, but yes, they could and should. They could also just officially start supporting existing android alternatives such as GrapheneOS by requiring banks and government ID apps to be independent of Play Integrity, which can be done today for very little money and effort.
Sideloading is not at option from 2027 since it will be made much much more difficult than it is today, requiring users to enable it via developer options and wait 24 hours.
Europe just needs to have its own clearing center. Russia did this, and cards work internally without any trouble. As a nice bonus, transaction information does not go to US.
the bilateral deals signed means we (the world, minus the US) is already divided. Got to scrap those deals first, which isn't going to happen. The shark has scattered the shoal and we're all going to get picked off - perpetually signing worse deals, then having to renegotiate again before signing ever worse terms.
Why does any country need a deal with the US? Canada is more integrated than anybody and they are walking away. Canada believes productive trade with the rest of the world is better than a bad deal with the US. China was prepared to do the same. The world should take notice.
Europe has the money, the tech, the manufacturing capacity and the know-how. There is a reason Europe conquered the world in just a few years; the lady is way too good at war. One of the reasons post WOII we were quite satisfied with the idea of paying the USA with all kinds of privileges and support to their defense industry and have our own defenses knee-capped. War is horrible, we know that all too well.
Reluctantly but surely the wheel has turned now. There are still gaps for intel gathering capabilities (think AWACS), but Saab is already working on alternatives. Also, Europe has to confront its inheritance of fragmentation (in which the USA has played a big role). Just look at all the various types of fighter jets being developed independently across Europe. That is very wasteful.
Also, European armies have to incorporate the lessons from Ukraine. The Germans make the world's best tanks, but the advent of drones on the battlefield has shaken up all old mil. doctrines.
Aside 1: there are quite some areas where European weapon systems are state of the art, but you won't hear about that unless you are more in the know. The US is hurting itself here in a big way. Going alone = $$$$$$$$$$$$
Aside 2: The European Union has been conceived as an 'ever closer union' from the beginning as to lower the likelihood of new wars on the continent; something the USA pushed us to btw post-WOII. Canada and Australia have raw materials, something which Europe doesn't have abundantly. Sharing development costs across the free world is mainly why you see Canada, Japan, Australia etc having a heightened interest in Europe. There is world-wide a lot of interest in the European defense sector, but South Korea and Israel have also interesting defense sectors.
> There is world-wide a lot of interest in the European defense sector, but South Korea and Israel have also interesting defense sectors.
I think Israel has become politically just as toxic as the USA (or moreso even). It seems incredibly unwise to make your defense industry dependent on a currently openly warmongering genocidal state.
How much you like a country is a privilege of peace time. The more realistic the threat, the more appealing arms that have proven themselves on the battlefield are.
I also think there is a huge difference between america's political toxicity, where the concern is directly about things the USA might do to the country in question vs Israel where unless you are in the middle east its more indirect concern for a third party. When times get tough, its easy to forget about third parties, you can't forget if you are the one who is the victim.
Which is probably why you see a lot of Israeli arms deals are with countries that are nervous about their neighbours. e.g. Greece just bought a 4 billion dollar missile defense system from Israel. Presumably because they are nervous about Turkey's increasingly aggressive stance.
You are getting downvoted, but yes, this is something which can be observed already. The Israelian state has become a world-wide pariah state and that has repercussions for its own industry. Not in the USA, but I think this will quickly change even there. Germany is the exception here.
Sure! On the other hand, after WO II the French secured a lot of designs from Germany. The know-how, the continuous improvements, the manufacturing base is still here in Europe, this hasn't been lost. It is mostly a matter of scaling up, which is happening now.
What is different for post-war Europe is that the USA forced Europe to stop developing their own complex central pieces, making Europe fully dependent on the USA. These pieces are critical and expensive and forces/limits the design parameters of connected systems. This handicapped a lot of Europe grown hardware. These critical dependencies are getting patched away atm, but that will take time because they are complex and expensive.
Yes, and thank god we Europeans got to be born in pax americana and not before, because there were wars nearly all the time for centuries, if not millenia.
They have everything but the will power. As annoying as I find Trump he is correct that everyone expects American boys and girls to be willing to die on their behalf while doing basically nothing to prevent war.
For example, Germany now expects America involvement in Ukraine despite Germany funding the war against Ukraine for years with their purchase of Russian oil
The world seems unhappy unless American kids are dying for them. Their own children are unwilling to do so, but little Jimmy from iowa is supposed to.
If you want to know why Americans support trump it's because Americans of my generation knew American kids who died fighting for foreign countries. Nothing radicalizes a population more.
The US couldn't be talked down from its Desert War follies, Gulf War (1990) was a 42-country coalition which runs counter to "Their own children are unwilling to do so, but little Jimmy from iowa is supposed to".
The follow up, post 9/11, was US led misplaced revenge stupidity with a weaker coalition of the essentially unwilling doing their insufficient best to talk an enraged bull on steroids down - the Afghanistan chapter was more pure "US way is the only way" own goal.
Now that you've elected Trump, he's the made a world less safe for all, US citizens included.
God forbid an American have a US-centric PoV. The use of these sorts of cliches to shut down debate is exactly the reason why even Americans who are not fans of Trump are just kind of 'meh' about the entire thing. If anything, Trump has revealed his initial accusations of the world taking America for granted to basically be true. -
> the Afghanistan chapter was more pure "US way is the only way" own goal.
Yes, the US way is the only way. If you don't want that to be the case, stop begging America to fight all your wars. As much as I dislike nations like China, Iran, Russia, and as much as I don't see eye-to-eye with nations like India, at least I can respect those nations for fighting their own battles. Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, etc are simply vassal states and ought to recognize that fact or figure it out.
> Now that you've elected Trump, he's the made a world less safe for all, US citizens included.
You're right all the crazy maniacs of the world are Trump's fault. I am very smart.
What are you joking Canada has nothing. Seriously look what they actually export they're a natural resource depot for the US. They don't even refine their own products.
Sure, they were the world's largest producer of raw uranium ores until 2009, since which they've run second.
But it's simply wrong to claim Canada doesn't engage in raw mineral refinement, still to this day the McClean Lake uranium mill remains one of the world’s largest uranium processing facilities producing refined Triuranium octoxide (U3O8).
Copyright is a very quick one to change though. Imagine if suddenly you would no longer be getting doorknocks from the police for downloading Movies/Music/Games/Software from American companies. Europe just gets GTA6, for free, one hour after it comes out (or a day if it takes that long to crack it). Huge amounts of American wealth rely on the rest of the world playing by their rules.
Russia did that years ago. Which is why "ok.ru" has American movies. Of course, who knows what else is embedded in the download.
But what might work would be if the EU dropped back to the minimum copyright term of the Berne Convention - 50 years. Preferably measured from first publication.
ok.ru ("classmates") is a social network with web UI and an app, so you do not need to download anything. Also, foreign movies are shown in cinemas (unofficially) regardless of copyright owner opinion.
But politicians seem to treat copyright law as a sacred cow. When Stop Killing Games reached the threshold to trigger a mandatory response from politicians, their response was unanimously "sorry but we can't do that because we'd have to change copyright law." Yes, I think that was the point.
I dont think this is true. I imagine the designers of the EU were fully aware that foreign govs might renege on deals and built mechanisms to deal with that.
For the most part, the rules based international order is built around the idea that following it is in everyone's best interest and going against it will have negative consequences. That is why it has lasted so long.
Yes, that is what people mean by a rules based international order.
Its not literally followed rigidly, but there are certain norms that are followed 90% of the time, and that makes things more predictable which is a good thing.
How often are diplomats executed to send a message to there home country? Basically never. That is the system. Its far from perfect, definitely not comprehensive, but does do some good every now and then.
So you think diplomats are executed to send a message, there is just the appearance of them not being?
Again, what is meant by a rule based order is not that there are solid rules upheld consistently as in criminal law, just that there are norms which are usually obeyed.
Certainly it is. But when the choice is between having the tariffs and Ukraine losing the war, the former is still preferable. Of course it’s not such a simple binary choice, but it is a weighing of options and their likely consequences. In that sense some choices are more worthwhile than others, even when they involve concessions to a bully.
The Ukraine is bleeding and getting destroyed, day by day. And things are getting worse, by Russian reciprocal responses, for every escalation success Ukraine has achieved.
Recent examples: Attack ships in Azov sea -> Odessa ports essentially blocked, attack Russian warehouses -> your warehouses are getting destroyed.
What path of victory do you see enabled by US (or EU, for that matter) actions? It is just prolonging the war, by giving the Ukraine (and gullible western audience) an illusion that Ukraine can win it.
> In that sense some choices are more worthwhile than others, even when they involve concessions to a bully.
So, despite recent Gallup poll showing that majority of Ukrainians are for negotiated end of the conflict a.s.a.p. https://news.gallup.com/poll/711992/ukrainians-sour-washingt..., it is worthwhile for European powers to give concessions to Trump, to achieve what? To bleed Russia more and hope that it somehow collapses (or suddenly decides to give up)? Despite the very real (bloody!) costs to Ukraine?
Responsible governance around something like when and how to retaliate (if at all) against tariffs comes down to one of the most fundamental forces of economics and trade: real leverage. Whether or not the US should exercise its leverage to attain outsized and favorable terms on the economic stage is the peanut gallery conversation that happens on social media. The two worlds couldn't be farther apart. What will actually happen in the end is just a math equation that has never changed and will never change.
If you want to have the peanut gallery conversation, then you’re more than welcome to have it. It’s just not interesting. Leverage is all that matters here.
Japanese here. Caved is not an accurate expression. After intense negotiations with Trump, Lutnick, and Bessent, Minister Akazawa managed to reduced the tariff from the proposed 25% to 15%. His story of flying weekly to the States on commercial aircraft became legendary.
PM's resignation stemmed from unpopularity not due to tariff negotiation, but diminished ability to pass laws after the ruling party lost significant number of seats in elections for upper and lower houses.
As for other countries around the world, the world-wide inflation caused many ruling parties to lose support.
I said it in another comment, not only did they negotiate that, the resulting negotiation held very little of substance for the US. It was very light on specifics and all for show.
It has been said that when the tariffs started that the Japanese delegates went to Washington to negotiate. The delegates asked them "Since you are trying to negotiate, what do you want of Japan?"
All they got back was "Well, what can you offer?"
Turns out they had started the tariff war with absolute no idea on what demands they wanted to make. Japan used that to their advantage because without any specifics, they were free to write the terms.
The worst part is, even now they are saying they will "match". That alone says they are not retaliating, they are registering a protest, maybe just not a meek protest.
India has stood up the most to the US even in the face of >50% sanctions for buying Russian energy. The fact that there is no trade deal between the India & US as we speak is testament to this.
Your characterization that India has caved is factually incorrect and seems to be driven either by ignorance or by mischievous intent.
The politics are about compromises. China “caved” as well but that’s just one battle “lost”.
In the long term the world will adjust to the new reality. As a simple example take the oil crisis from 1970s. The U.S adjusted and now is the world’s biggest producer.
It will take time but in 30 years I would be surprised if Europe would still buy U.S weapons, let U.S tech services rule EU digital markets and so on.
Everyone is banking on the current trade policy simply being temporary and whoever replaces Trump in the White House next will restore bilateral trade to normal. Why would you destroy your trade relation with the U.S. for decades to come when you can just ride out a bad deal for a few years?
Not saying I agree with it, because it sends the wrong signal, but I can understand the reasoning at least.
> Why would you destroy your trade relation with the U.S. for decades to come when you can just ride out a bad deal for a few years?
We aren't the ones who are destroying it, and we have a backbone strong enough to say this isn't good enough.
If what you say is true, then the next administration should understand how one sided the damage done to the relationship has been. No economic trade partner should have to tolerate attacks on their sovereignty and unreliable trade negotiators.
> Why would you destroy your trade relation with the U.S. for decades to come when you can just ride out a bad deal for a few years?
This was a common attitude 2017-2020, and they got disabused of that notion when Trump won in 2024. I would further argue the muted response during Trump I based on an idea that thing would "return to normal" emboldened Trump II - so that was not a winning strategy. The only country that seemed to have the correct read, and translated it into policy was China. Every other trading partner of the US seems to be floundering still.
because the next one might be vance? and vance again? and afterwards another similar rep?
EU should really have a plan to ditch US collective monopoly in all sectors, especially tech. Just like China we should have our own payment systems, mobile OS-es with mandatory bank support, own app stores, own cloud systems and so on... Call it gaulism or any other catchy phrase but US leverage should be reduced to minimum - EU should be able to threaten US with full ban on a subset of it's companies/trade. Now such thing is plain impossible to imagine
I am not sure how much of it is that, versus a mix of tariffs being paid by the recipient rather than the vendor, versus all his unpredictable behaviour being an inherent non-tariff barrier, versus it not mattering much what a deal with the USA even looks like if we all transition to other trade partners.
The UK's Neville Chamberlain is remembered for saying of an agreement with Hitler, "peace for our time"*, and by this agreement, appeasement; less well known was that he did pursue re-armament and mutual defence agreements while attempting to deescalate.
Hopefully we won't be here in 8 years wondering how the USA got carved up into a Canadian zone, a Chinese zone, a European zone, and an Aztec zone. That last one might be from a TV show I watched as a kid.
What I fear is Trump didn't break any promise done to their electors by starting this trade wars (he did when he failed to stop actual military wars and started more instead, but that's a different point). He was elected by stating that America was the greatest country in the world and that the others were freeriding on US wealth. I'm not sure his successor can entirely overturn this policy, if a majority of the US voters believe this - also because undoing the damage would require brokering deals less favourable than before to show good faith.
I live outside of the US so I might be misintepreting the situation, but I'm unconviced that a full u-turn will happen once he's out of the office.
A majority don't believe. A plurality voted for Trump in 2024 because of inflation and Biden not leaving Harris enough time to run a proper campaign. It's only the MAGA voters who don't understand how global trade is good for the US economy. But Trump's even losing some of their support with how badly the administration is running things for anyone but the very wealthy.
i dont think you can really move the blame from voters wanting trump's policies onto biden.
trump won the primary and then the election
republicans who didnt want his policies and could see that the inflation was in a large part the result of trump's handling of covid would have put somebody else up for president
I agree with you partially, although there’s some irony in the sense that a lot of what Trump’s voters want on paper is closer to the Democratic Party’s policy agenda.
Look into the policies and results the Biden administration had on American manufacturing versus the contraction in American manufacturing caused by tariff implementation. Biden even invested heavily in infrastructure in red states just because it was good positive ROI policy.
Now we see Democratic Socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani doing things like cutting permitting red tape on small businesses and it’s the exact kind of thing the Republican Party claims it stands for.
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act actually raised taxes for lower wage Americans and increased the budget deficit, the exact opposite of typical Republican talking points on those subjects.
We have to remember that in a lot of cases, policy is not the same as messaging. This is especially pertinent in personality cults. This something the US hasn’t really experienced in the US presidency in quite some time if at all, and that has made it a…unique…experience. The idea of consistent policy is currently meaningless, because it’s all about whatever is on the demagogue’s mind today.
> whoever replaces Trump in the White House next will restore bilateral trade to normal
Unlikely. Customers are not there anymore. Emotional boycotts triggered by disruptions last until another big disruption happens. The next president of USA, with all this power, does not have the power to force each Canadian citizen to buy Kentucky Bourbon again. Resent caused by insults and abusive behavior work is everlasting.
His re-election suggests we need to. Even if good times return, we can now never be sure the bad are more than one election cycle away, and given the USA's bicameral government and staggered elections, that means 2 years, not 4.
The size of the court is set by statute. It would be pretty wild, even for this batshit court, to find a law increasing its size to be unconstitutional.
trump is just a reflection of voters. He'll be out but another one will come, be it vance, be it rubio, be it even jo rogan. The overall direction of american society wishes is clear
As many have said, Trump is a symptom of a deeper issue.
Once is an accident, twice is a pattern. It isn't that Trump specifically is the problem it is that there is a sizable enough part of the US population that will actively vote in that kind of governance.
Trump will leave, either via election, being ousted or via the Grim reaper. But the things that got him to that position are still very much in place and potentially even stronger than ever.
I said it before he even got elected the first time, he is an echo of the future that is coming. A prototype of something that will be handled more competently in future for better or worse.
Terrance McKenna once said that the worst US President is the current one regardless of the time. That is because they always seem to just accept what has come before and just stack more things on top.
Biden didn't remove the Trump Tarrifs on China for instance. But this goes across party lines and back for decades. Neither side is interested in tearing down the surveillance state stuff is a good example.
Pretty revealing how you had to hand wave away the entirety of "Liberation Day" tariff policy (literally the topic of this thread) that Biden did not do in office to do the perennial low-info voter "uniparty" observation, just because of China hawkishness.
The uniparty foreign policy blob that always does identical stuff regardless of party like: signing the JCPOA with Iran / killing the JCPOA and starting War with Iran, or rejoining UNESCO and paying back due obligations / re-leaving UNESCO and WHO... etc.
It's like all the other nations were at fault. But maybe these nations "caved" because the strategy implemented by the US worked.
And China, based on my understanding, is looking for ways to reduce US influence anyway at least domestically. So, a worsen-yet-controllable US-China relationship maybe considered beneficial on that end. The tests (lockdown etc) done during COVID time has proven that Chinese people endures much more suffering before they begin to rise up, so the economic problems introduced by not caving to the US is just a small cake for the lead party to handle.
They were not prepared and at least had to mitigate immediate harm, while preparing their economies, security, etc. to be less entangled with the US.
But once they are 'prepared' as best they can, one approach is for other countries to decide / accept that the US is mostly a lost cause while Trump or most other Republicans are in power, which will happen at times. It will affect their economies but they cannot control that. Negotiating with the US only encourages more bad behavior.
The rest of the world could then recreate (or continue) the global trading system, including the WTO, simply excluding countries that violate its rules. This puts the ball in the US's court to participate or not, never slamming the door in the US's face, always welcoming and encouraging them rhetorically, by their rules, and genuinely ('we look forward to our friends in the US joining and enjoying the benefits of doing business with the rest of the world').
In the meantime, global trade rules would be created in the interests of the other countries, without the US having a voice - a great boon after decades of US domination of such rules. This incentivizes the US to join sooner rather than later.
(It seems to me - I have no expertise in this area.)
they carved because most of those places want access to the 'yuuuge' US market.
politics vs reality. they could correct though by selling US treasuries - but that would make the world economy sneeze which might result in pneumonia.
India has no trade deal. Trump announced they did without signing anything. He just makes shit up and people believe him. India still buys oil from Russia
After WW2, the US largely designed the new world order for its own benefit. It became the world's arms dealer, the US dollar became the world's reserve currency and it had effective control of the world's financial system. And the US got very rich from all of this and wielded a lot of power.
The US has done more to destroy the system it designed and benefits from in the last 1.5 years than at any time since 1945.
What this entire fiasco is about is China. China is the new superpower. It threatens the American global hegemony because it can't be bullied. Why is China the new Big Bad? To sell weapons. Pretty much the entire of American foreign policy is about selling weapons.
So Liberation Day was a ham-fisted way to try and isolate and bring to heel China. It has failed spectacularly because the dumbest sychophants imaginable are in charge of this administration. Because while doing all this, we're witnessing a lootocracy on the largest scale ever seen. When Trump took office in 2017, the national debt was ~$16T and it had taken ~200 years to get there. It just got over $40T. That's like $2T in interest payments every year just to service the debt.
Long ter bond yields keep going higher. That's going to be a really big problem, particularly because there's a political desire to lower interest rates. That's ismply not going to happen and record-high inflation is going to continue, if not get worse, all while real wages stagnate or decline.
So the US can't economically compete with China. Well, it can't militarily compete either. The US has been deceisively been totally defeated by Iran, an absolutely pointless war of choice. And they think they can bully China? Get the hell out of there. Part of the problem is the (now) $1t+ in annual military budget is just more looting from government coffers.
Empires don't die slowly or quietly. That's really what's happening here. The seeds of destruction for the Gulf security architecture have been sown. While Europe is still an American vassal state, realization is growing that the status quo cannot continue. Unfortunately I suspect a fascist takeover will happen long before Europe divests itself from the US protection racket.
I believe that the late 2020s will be written about in history books as the beginning of the end of American empire.
The U.S. also has a huge amount of trade barriers that are indirect against the rest of the world. Don't act like the U.S. is the victim here.
One example: In Canada, there's a vibrant french language film industry, meaning films in french that originate and are made in Canada and then marketed abroad. The english language equivalent is anemic because decades ago, as part of trade negotiations, the Canadian gov't gutted subsidies for english language film production as a trade barrier against Hollywood.
Not only USA products. Most countries with low safety standards and known for dangerous products are barred from trading with the EU, or at least many of their products. Recently, even big Chinese on-line shops are being targeted for selling dangerous products and lying on the description on that products.
I understand that quality and safety is a diminishing goal for the USA. But I hope that other countries keep the care for their citizens as a achievable goal.
> is not entirely incorrect
With enough re-interpretation nothing is not entirely incorrect. Agree on the part that it is misleading.
But it's not really a trade barrier if it applies equally for everyone, including domestic products, is it? Then it's just a safety regulation barrier, which also the US has plenty of.
It's something else entirely to point to a specific country and say that "anyone who imports from there is going to get taxed an extra 15%". That's a specific barrier to a specific trade.
It is still a barrier even just by being different. The British drive on the left side of the road, all domestic manufacturers make cars which are left side drive. If you are from the majority of the world which is right hand drive, you can't just directly export your default car in bulk to the UK and expect it to sell. This makes it a barrier to imports into the UK, and also exports from the UK. It is a non-tariff barrier to trade.
EU and US egg safety rules are mutually incompatible.
It goes both ways. You can’t buy an Iberian ham that’s fully compliant with EU standards and take it back to the US because it’s not USDA certified. It’s arguably the same flavor of backdoor protectionism involved.
In the softwood lumber dispute that's been going on for decades, the US raised (legitimately) the point that in Canada, land is granted by permit to loggers for only nominal fees; in the U.S. loggers have to pay significant amounts for rights to log. This is effectively a gov't subsidy to Canadian loggers by comparison with American loggers, allowing Canadian loggers to sell softwoods at a lower price.
This is the difficulty with discussing "trade barriers": things that are simply handled differently in different countries can be (arguably) economic factors that discriminate against one side or the other, hence they're trade barriers. Complicating it further, one can create barriers that have plausible deniability, or point to unrelated factors and scream "TRADE BARRIER".
I know someone who was involved for a while in the softwood lumber discussions. Just an absolute snake pit trying to suss out what are real barriers, intended barriers, relevant inputs... and all of this in the context of negotiations over the same, so everything is also "does he mean this or is he distracting us from something else or just building up a talking point to surrender later?"
trade courts did not find the US complaints legitimate, and repeatedly rule in canada's favour. the end root of the difference in cost is that canada is really big with a lot of forest and doesnt have better things to do with forested land.
the logs in canada are just worth less than the ones in the US. Differential advantage is a real thing that exists.
If the US government really beleives it to be a canadian government subsidy to loggers, it should be more than happy to give the tariff money to the canadian government, making canada's taxes and fees exactly what the US thinks they should be.
Agreed, but my point was that these things are hideously complicated and there's an endless source of details to hold up and say "NOT FAIR!" and it's ultimately about finding an agreement, not about the course of natural justice.
BTW, I'm Canadian. IIRC, the trade courts didn't find that the complaint about fees wasn't legitimate, it was that American logging companies had other, offsetting economic benefits, so the bottom line was that they weren't disadvantaged. So the U.S. simply refused to abide by the ruling and didn't pay the fine it was supposed to, so that receiving the fine or some portion thereof, became another thing to negotiate in the next round. Unbelievably hairy stuff.
Unless you can explain why the American stumpage fees are inherently "correct", this is simply a case of one country having a bigger supply of something and therefore being able to offer it much cheaper. You know... Capitalism working exactly as intended.
Isn't that kind of America's thing?
"No, not like that!"
All the rest of this is designed to distract from the real issue: Americans love Capitalism, except in the rare cases where they don't come out on top. Then everyone else is being mean and unfair.
It's funny. When European governments charge high fees, Americans deride them as socialist and anti-capitalist. When the American government does it (as it does here)? Why, it's the natural order of things! Our fees are the "correct" fees. It's everyone else that's wrong!
I mean, yes. An easy one that is omnipresent is that Canada mandates Canadian radio stations to play a certain amount of Canadian content giving advantage to Canadian artists
Of course this is fine... Countries should protect their industries..just don't get on your moral high horse when America does it
To be clear, I am against Trump's approach, but all the pearl clutching is exhausting.
Trump just went directly after Canada's sovereignty. Nobody else has done anything even remotely similar since I don't know China's occupation of Tibet.
America has just unmasked itself and shown what they really think of Canadians.
Trump is nuts, but he is broadly correct that the world expects the benefits of American statehood without the responsibilities and reduction in autonomy. Yes, I realize this arrangement benefits the United States, but on the other hand, these other countries have gotten too used to it. People made fun of Vance and Trump for the Zelensky interaction, but I think a lot of Americans felt heard for the first time in a long time.
Canada can do what it likes, but people shouldn't expect America to come to their rescue. Trump explicitly warned Germany about Russian oil, and the Germans quite literally laughed at the UN because of their hubris.
> Canada can do what it likes, but people shouldn't expect America to come to their rescue.
What specifically are you referring to here?
NATO Article 5 has been invoked once, and that resulted in soldiers from Canada (and other allies) losing their lives responding to an attack on America. Not the other way round.
I'm responding to the general expectation that America will deploy resources . You cite article 5. America is expected to intervene whether article 5 is involved or not
This is also a problem for trade between EU member states.
There's other examples of course, e.g. the Cybertruck is not road legal in the EU. Though I can hardly say that's "in the room" given how unpopular the vehicle is even in the USA.
Unfair? I didn't say unfair, I said it was "in the room" with us. Most NTBs aren't unfair, but also most don't fit in a room and unlike language are abstract in ways most people don't engage with.
The local jobs market is currently demanding a lot of C1 German. This does not seem unfair to me. Does make it challenging to sell services to Germany if you can't provide it at that level.
Or, to put it another way, imagine my response had been:
Hör mal, Kumpel, wenn du glaubst, du kannst deine Dienstleistungen in einem Land verkaufen, dessen Landessprache du nicht sprichst, dann glaub mir als jemandem, der es gerade versucht: Das ist verdammt schwer.
You can only get so far with Google Translate in a business setting; I know, 'cause that's where I started, and it took me a long time to work up to "eh, you'll do".
Unfortunately, systematically and illegally dismantling the organization responsible for protecting us against diarrhea lettuce is a setback to that goal.
Yes sure. Add it to the pile of contradictory goals:
1. Bring back manufacturing jobs
2. Remove trade barriers
3. Make US rich by collecting huge amount of tariffs
If 1 is true then there is no benefit for countries to remove trade barriers or pay tariffs because now there is no leverage (manufacturing jobs to protect).
If 2 is true then there is no leverage for other things to happen - countries aren't going to voluntary remove trade barriers without keeping the jobs or paying tariffs.
AI's impact on employment is less directly replacing a human worker one to one, but suppressing hiring demand by providing potential employers with a plausible alternative to increasing headcount. This is disproportionately impacting early entry hiring as the ramp up time to productivity for inexperienced workers is today too long for companies to willingly invest for.
Never depend on a megacorp shit job for stability.
The way out is unionizing and workers coming together to form a worker-owned co-op business with other good people, a very low turnover rate, and a civilized environment. They don't need a megacorp and can find markets themselves.
I’m not making an argument, I’m offering a thought experiment: “what if workers are no longer needed at all, so that they have nothing to threaten to withhold?” It’s a bleak possibility.
Then you have masses of idle, desperate, poor, purposeless people who either find coping hobbies to fill their time while some inevitably revolt.
Unlike the fallacy of the "lump of labor fallacy", there is always a limited number of job vacancies and limited number of employees rather than infinite open jobs just waiting around to hire everyone. (The pie is always a countable, finite number but never static, it can only grow or shrink within the means of finite-sized, finite businesses affording finite workers; the fallacy is believing in an infinite, unbounded pie that just magically grows because people exist.) Demand will/is rapidly shrink(ing) in many fields for certain roles, and the remaining ones maybe paid less and be more competitive to the point of extreme desperation. There are too many people left without a means to achieve fulfilling or a comfortable life because a few have reordered society to give them far more than they need and have taken away their livelihoods; history shows this rarely ends well without constructive intervention.
salaciousness of this story should not detract from the main theme of how the privileged few have access to privacy, whilst everyone else has to submit to surveillance
We hear a lot about what is or isn't a democracy but the reality is that very few countries today would ever be above the bar set. Even Athenian democracy wouldn't, as it was a demos of the male citizens only, supported by a large slave class.
What is more important is: is it working? And if not, why not?
Which is why, instead of "democracy", it's more useful to quantify democratic. One traditional measure of such is the degree to which political power can be gained through free elections. But the research in TFA instead uses a novel measure: the weight a population has in its country's policymaking. Which yields fascinating results.
Because, per the linked research, in present-time USA that weight is ~zero.
Which is especially interesting considering the USA's narratives about itself. And how, it seems to me, its population is so invested in said narratives that it will defend those even in the face of contrary research. You'd think a culture so invested in its self-determination would be angry about this result and endeavor to do something about it.
Isn't this partly a question of sheer size of countries like the US and India?
In Slovenia or Denmark, there may be two degrees of separation fewer between the regular voter and, say, an ordinary MP, because the parliaments and government are about the same size, but the population is in single millions. Even here in Czechia quite a lot of people actually know personally some high-ranking politician.
How many Americans are on friendly terms with their Rep or Senator?
This works in smaller countries as well, though. I would expect that our local tycoons know half of the Parliament and most of the ministers. And given that there is fewer very rich people here, they may individually have bigger impact on the legislation.
I don't think it is obvious that measure is meaningful though. The US has always been explicit that it doesn't trust the majority of the population to make decisions and has built intentional systems to keep them out. That is still democratic, the people could change those systems if they really put their mind to it, because the power does technically flow from the people if they really put their foot down.
It is pretty safe to say that the US could be more democratic. It is probably reasonable to compare it to other countries in terms of how democratic it is. But saying it is "not a democracy" is a fairly trivial observation. Republics aren't technically democracies if democracy means that the people make the decisions and win on all the disagreements. Republics are modelled on places like Rome that had a very visible and powerful oligarchy.
> That is still democratic, the people could change those systems if they really put their mind to it, because the power does technically flow from the people if they really put their foot down.
This statement applies to absolute monarchies as well; we have many examples from history where the people have "really put their foot down" and won concessions from that form of government. I don't see how this is enough to call the system democratic.
The key thing is whether it is legal though. If we allow that people abandon the rules and do what is possible then any system can be anything. But in an undemocratic system the people forcing a change requires arm twisting beyond the formal channels.
In the US the people can, formally and legally, do pretty much whatever they like if they vote for it consistently over the course of about a decade.
agree, but do you think are there any working examples? is it working somewhere someway? could we learn and take example from it? or is all chaos and corruption?
EU regulatory apparatus is maybe only part of the EU which is operates without obsequiousness to the US; on the one hand, this is necessary assertion of sovereignty, on the other you fear for the wider collateral damage which will inevitably ensue. Trump gonna respond to this with an escalation for sure
This is the fine after it got influenced by the political branch. It is a sign towards the companies that the law still bites and has to be adhered but reduced in this case to a level where it can be accepted by Google without major escalation in trade politics.
to be fair to Trump, he does respond to corporate lobby - Pichai just got to make a phone call and an EO will be rolling out in short order. This is not because Gogole controls Trump, it is simply that Trump is a nationalist and will defend US companies, he just needs to be reminded to do so
The current government has defied the supreme court many times. It can do this because the police force is controlled by the government, not by the supreme court, so it won't arrest the government.
The private sector often complies in advance. Large logistics companies collected obviously illegal taxes long before they were challenged in court. It's not easy and the cost of doing business is already high, and not only in the US.
You think all those deranged nuclear threats from Dmytry Medvedev and all those "Russki Mir from Lisbon to Vladivostok" imperial phantasies are some "good tsar, bad boyars" bullshit? Russia won't stop unless they are stopped or at least incapacitated for the next few decades.
Actually you know that giving Putin Crimea won't stop him bombing Kiev, seeing as they gave him Crimea, and then he bombed Kiev to get Donetsk. He also suicided politicians while we were buying his gas.
"Once you pay the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane."
How many revolutions, terrorists, genocides, dictators has usa supported? I can easily say that the Iran regime should not exist, what I can't stand is people pretending USA has not done similar shit for the last 100 years. They're even the reason why the current Iranian regime is in power.
That's one read. For me it feels like practically (ASML, ARM, SAP not withstanding) their only "contribution" to tech is fines and exporting regulation. Sometimes this works out well (usb-c on iPhone), but most of the time it feels like if they want software, hardware, or the web to operate the way they want, perhaps they should try to actually produce some of it instead of being wholly reliant on others while also trying to dictate the terms. I also don't really feel like Trump will do anything, mainly because neither he, nor anyone else before him has any track record of attempting to block or slow EU overreach into US tech interests. Or maybe I'm just cranky and pessimistic.
Google, Apple and co are free not to do business in the EU. There is no "overreach". It's a 450M pop market with a high median per-capita income. There are many reasons why the EU has a rather small tech industry of its own, high up among them that the EU does comparatively little to protect its market compared to China where most US tech companies don't even bother to enter anymore. In China, if a fine like this hits you, you are not allowed to do business anymore until it's either paid or revoked in court. So yeah, the EU is very lenient on all accounts.
Isn't the median income per capita higher in the US. European companies are likewise free to pay tariffs or not do business.
EU does much more to protect its market compared to US.
EU was never a developing country like China. Most countries in EU benefited from centuries of exploitation of Asia, Africa and the Americas. They don't need protectionism.
Yes, it's only one company out of the whole market. If ASML makes EU count as a good tech market then everywhere is a good tech market because it has at least one important tech company.
What is unique about Trump's corruption is that there is a) it is actually innovative and b) there is no end to it. I guess this is what happens when the people choose a reality TY show host to be their democratically elected leader.
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