Ah, Trump is not happy because he wanted the Europeans to spend all that money to buy American weapons, not to revive European heavy industries. From the European point of view, they should have done so a long time ago, and they should have kept defense industries running even if it means great "inefficiencies".
I read a story that explains why Russians ramped up weapons and ammo production far faster than the Western planners expected. The Russians kept some of their weapon plants in operation at a minimal capacity to modernize obsolete equipment. This keeps some experienced technicians and trained new ones. The rest of the plants are carefully mothballed. When Russia got a little bit richer and the government ordered more weapons, or when a foreign sale was signed, these old plants were able to modernize and revitalize slowly. Furthermore, Russian basic education has more attention to vocational education. When a situation shows up, they gear up the older production lines. Since Russians also pay attention to backward compatibility, called-up reservists have fewer problems adapting to newer equipment. Had Russians dismantled these plants and sold/trashed the machinery, the Ukraine War may still have the same outcome, but the path to conclusion would be a whole lot more circuitous.
Currently the EU government is a death cult. Their foreign policy appears to be based upon the needs and desires of the weapons manufacturers and central bankers who bet on both sides of any conflict and always win. These agents of death will continue to profit from the deaths of millions of young men. If a country such as Russia or the US expresses goals of peace, those goals will be ignored or memory-holed, and replaced with aggressive warlike goals. This justifies the EU's insatiable appetite for spending on weapons systems as well as their threatening, hostile behavior towards countries that do not even want war.
I am 72. I never would have thought that in my lifetime I would see a return to totalitarianism in Europe. Yet the EU was supposedly formed so that another WWII WOULDN'T HAPPEN.
It appears that the UK, the EU, and NATO, as well as all their various associated NGOs like the Atlantic Council, etc., are one giant war making machine grinding up a generation of men leading to depopulation, the ultimate globalist goal.
The only bright side to this is Trump's commitment to end the War in Ukraine. He does have the full array of globalist predators against him, but we shall see who finally comes out on top.
Aside the fight between to EU and US for the globalist totalitarian crown, there is little difference between the two orders. Only the countries that have suffered communism in their past are sure they are not going back to it come what may, and are willing to fight to the death to prevent it. So, with the contempt the West has for Asian economic progress, a massive fight is inevitable, and one that we in the west are sure to lose.
Carlo, you do not distinguish between the US and EU, implying they are both globalist powers. That was true under Biden. Trump is doing everything in his power to confront the globalist predators and to reset the American economy so that it can thrive. Without manufacturing no economy can thrive, and it becomes dependent upon other countries for necessities. Trump is undoing the globalist order that was started with George Bush Sr. as President. The EU is currently controlled by globalists.
I agree with you that anyone at all who has suffered under Communism will be willing to fight to the death to prevent their country from becoming Communist. But the EU is currently behaving as a totalitarian, unelected government. Trump sees this and thinks this is very bad for the people of Europe. He sees the EU government as becoming focused on making war, and he wants to prevent war from continuing. The West (at least in America) doesn't have contempt for Asian economic progress.
The problem for the US is that globalist forces within the US and outside the US have given the CCP in China an unfair advantage over the US. We are not at all against any country thriving economically. What the US wants is a level playing field. We do not want to be dependent upon the CCP. This is not about the Chinese people, who have been long suffering. This is about the CCP and their intention to dominate the US in a long war without firing a shot. Thus it isn't contempt for their desire to thrive, but we do have hostility towards their efforts to send fentanyl from their labs into our country and have it kill 100,000 Americans a year. We do have hostility to their role in supporting Iran, for instance.
I hope there will not be any kind of war with China because war achieves only destructive goals. It is only globalists who profit from war who are on the side of starting wars. They also want to depopulate the earth.
Eve, I agree with some of your comments, but Trump has already stated he wants to destroy the BRICS and I am confident this tariff bomb he issued on the 2nd April is designed to that end. Even Bessent said in his interview with Tucker that the tariffs hurt exporters and favours indebted importers, implying it was their purpose in issuing them.
Having said that, I have no problem for Trump taking down the soviet minded European bureaucracy. On China however, he feels as he did about Japan in the 80s when Japan got ahead of the US on pure merit. There are a lot of videos of Trump's early views about Japan. He is an exceptionalist - like all POTUSs.
Second point is that western people have very short memories because that's how the media like it. Did anyone forget how the whole China outsourcing thing started? Nixon and Kissinger, in their obsession with the USSR, befriended China and opened the doors to their participation in global trade in an effort to ensure Russia and China didn't team up as a dual superpower. American corporations willingly opened factories in China to improve their margins and by doing so ensuring the American wage earner's paycheck was capped against China's cheap labour that , let's face it, US corporations were exploitating. Even now Apple is doing the same thing...with Foxconn.
None of this had anything to do with China itself. The fact that we in the West assumed China has human beings that somehow don't aspire to the same things that we aspire to, is arrogant and misplaced. The Chinese do have aspirations like anyone else, and now they manufacture goods with the accuracy of the Swiss, they build faster, better and cheaper than anyone on the planet and nobody can put that genie back in the bottle. The argument about subsidies offering China an unfair advantag is also false. We too have a favoured system that results in monopolies and oligopolies. Different systems with the same objectives: how to win!
Having filled their pockets with fat margins for thirty years, US corporations are now pumping the media to blame China for US problems their are wholy responsible for. At the same time they are spicing up the stories to make sure the public acquites a negative view of the Chinese; the human rights issue, for instance...totally false and besides... who are we to criticise anyone on human rights?
Fentanyl is only one of hundreds of drugs that China makes for the world. It just doesn't suit the American press to suggest that it is the Mexican drug lords that are responsible for how the drug is used in the US.
I'm not expecting to persuade you, Eve, but jist writing all this to suggest there are many ways to look at things and not everyone sees it the way the western media frames it.
The war against China is on, in my opinion, because China's unbelievable rate of progress in so many fields of industry now threatens US hegemony. It's a repeat of history going back millennia.
Carlo, I agree with most of what you wrote. There are many who view Trump as just another globalist and I have read their reasons for viewing Trump this way. At this point I am keeping this an open question, awaiting further data. One historian who has been most helpful to me in understanding the role of the CIA in world history has been Francisco Gil-White who has a substack page called the Management of Reality, which is what intelligence services do.
I agree that US corporations are responsible for the stagnant economy in the US, because they went along or even drove the globalist out-sourcing of jobs. They extracted the wealth of our middle class in doing so, and they did it again during Covid, in which there was a massive wealth transfer from the middle class to the billionaire class.
I have a great deal of pain about the role of the CIA since its inception in causing so much of the world's destabilization. However, Americans were told nothing of this and have only been finding out about the full story recently, whereas the rest of the world has known it all along.
I agree China has accomplished a great deal, however I do not idealize their government. China stole a great deal of intellectual property from the US, and they require that all corporations that do business with them give them access to their IP. What I feel is dangerous is that the CCP is just another globalist power. Their workers get the equivalent of 1$ a day, which is pretty close to slave labor. If the CCP gains domination over the world, that system will be used everywhere. So while the CCP accomplished a lot, they (Mao) also have killed more millions of their own people than Hitler and Stalin did. They are ruthless and I would rather live in the US with all the bad history of the CIA than have my children and grandchildren earning 1$ a day.
If Trump is just another globalist and if he seeks war with China over hegemony, that will be very destructive to many people.
If it turns out he is not another globalist, and wants to mostly put his energy into making America a great country, stopping forever wars, and making Americans healthy again, he will turn out to have been very constructive.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Eve. I will look up Francisco Gil-White.
On "What I feel is dangerous is that the CCP is just another globalist power." you may be right, no one knows the future and this is indeed a possible outcome. But i am willing to support a change in how we do things based on the way the present system has evolved. Donald Trump is not my president and i never voted for the EU commissioner who is his opposite number in Europe. But the EU has followed the US's lead since Obama's first term and everyone is poorer today in Europe, not withstanding the lousy management at the sovereign level, and the poor economic decisions of European commission. So from where I'm sitting it is not difficult to project the future of said system, and IMO it is not going to end well. Though the US has the independence to fix its problems without needing 50 different states to agree on policy, success is not a given, but if Trump IS different rather than pretending to be different, there is no harm in trying another way. However, no country can do well in isolation, not even the USA, that today is totally dependent on China to get the basics of what it needs. Getting aggressive against everyone to elevate ones own position is not the right recipe for true wealth creation, IMO.
Regarding the CCP workers wages, if you use purchasing power parity to compare what one unit of currency buys versus what another country's unit of currency can buy, you will come to the conclusion that China's wages go a lot further than any of ours. Compare train ticket prices for a similar distance of travel, and compare the relative state of the art of various countries transportation systems. Look at the cost of drugs, medical care and insurance; take a basket of costs you have to pay and see what it costs an average chinese family to buy a similar basket. I am sure you will note that chinese citizens are really not as poor as you imagine. Above all, note that China's workforce has tremendous saving rates; money left over after having bought what they need to run their lives. Despite their property crisis, they are still relatively well off, though pissed off at the way COVID was handled, and the fact that the property crisis came from the CCP deliberately switching support of the property market for full self sufficiency; that was in 2018. What we see in China is more of a buyer's strike than the alleged depression western commentators love to rant on about. In 2024, amid the calls of imminent collapse, China's trade surpluses were almost a trillion dollars - and they are collapsing? It's nonsense!
Anyway I want to thank you for giving me your views and found the conversation very interesting. All the best.
It is a sad commentary on the power of globalist parasites that gradually have taken over the EU and have thoroughly embedded themselves internally in every agency of our federal government. This has been going on for a long time, for there to be so many embedded agents of the various billionaires, central bankers, and agents of mass destruction inside our government and secretly so. That you and millions of other Europeans have suffered as a result and that you recognize the US as a vector of that suffering is extremely sad and painful. All I can say is the American people NEVER VOTED FOR ANY OF IT! The American people had no idea that Obama was a globalist agent, or that all our Presidents except for Trump found a way to get us involved in forever wars that led to destruction of many, many innocent lives. It is all so disgusting to patriots like myself what horrible things have been done in the name of our country. You have every right to be suspicious of the US under these conditions.
I can't vouch for the truth about Donald Trump at this point. There are some worrying signs and some very exciting and inspiring signs as well. I am not going to lose sight of the worrying signs and I am keeping my mind open. Very open.
You made good points about China except for one thing: what happens to a person who gets a bad social score. This can happen to anyone, not just deviant people or criminals, but completely innocent people who disagree with certain government decisions. I saw a video of one man who can no longer travel anywhere in his country, his phones are bugged, he is more or less imprisoned in his apartment. This is totalitarianism and this is what I am trying to say about the CCP. For all the wonderful accomplishments, they want to keep an iron grip on people and tolerate not one iota of dissent. I cannot imagine ever living under those conditions, although we came close to it here under Biden. But the CCP takes it to levels similar to Stalinism and to Hitler's fascism.
So I am not inspired by all the stories of their great success. I had an uncle who once talked to me about how wonderful Mao was, and the wonderful things he was doing for the people. Now I know he murdered more people than Hitler or Stalin.
I will never see the CCP as a force for good no matter how much they have built up their factories or what not. I also read a memoir of a man who started out with nothing in China but with his wife they became extremely succcessful, I mean extremely successful, around the year 2000 when China was open to businessmen growing the economy. But what the CCP opens they can close, and the end result for this family is that this man barely got himself and his son out of the country, and his wife is missing and may never be found. (He and his son live in the UK).
So I cannot be convinced about the marvels of the CCP. I cannot be convinced about the philanthropy of globalists like Bill Gates or George Soros or the Rothschilds either. They are parasites first, middle and last. They have sucked the life blood economically out of the middle class in the US and Europe and the UK, destroying or attempting to destroy our culture which may never recover fully.
I will leave it there. You are extremely bright and you have a wonderful grasp of many issues, especially economic ones. Thank you for sharing your perspective with me and giving me a chance to share mine with you.
Trumps foreign policy and economic changes are slowly causing a giant a tectonic shift worldwide but they are not irreversible yet. However, if he keeps on the pressure to the end of his term they will be. The whole of the situation strongly reminds of Boris Yeltsin standing on the top of a Russian tank and relentlessly cutting the Soviet Empire into pieces in order to incapacitate his communist opponents. Indications are that we will see tens of millions of unhappy people demonstrating in American cities for cheap, substandard Chinese consumer goods but Trump will simply tell them to go home and produce better. The same goes for Europe. They will be separated from U.S. micromanagement and will be forced to grow up again. They will be and should be able to follow their own geopolitical interests, as long as they do not endanger Western functionality and coexistence. They will have to find their own balance with Russia, overcome their fears and yes, NATO will be most likely restructured or even dissolved one day.
The cheap, substandard Chinese products are such because that is what was ordered. I am pretty convinced the Chinese have the ability to crank out better goods, that might be a bit more expensive (better materials, etc., which are costlier).
It took almost 50 years for Poland to say goodbye to the Russian forces on its territory in order to immediately start begging for NATO, stationing of the American troops and nuclear sharing to top it up. And for what? To be a Troyan donkey in Eastern Europe. Poland's history is abundant with lost opportunities and this sad rule is unlikely to change. "Fur coat and no knickers" as a historian summed up Poland's megalomaniac pretensions. We look with envy on Bielarus which preserved its economy, culture and sovereignty, the country the Poles used to have in low esteem as not pro-Western enough.
Without USA doing the actual fighting and rearming, EU military adventures vs Russia don't make much sense. Particularly in view of the coming US tariffs. They need the Russian market and they need a reliable land rail connection to China independent of the sea lanes.
USA's foreign policy strategy follows where the $$$'s are! It is not down to the Executive - it is determined by the military industrial complex and its hedge fund supporters. Putin knows this.
This is the globalists vs. US.aka Trump. Trump knows Europe is broke it’s why he’s playing chicken with the tariffs. Europe goes even deeper in debt plus it’ll take decades to build up the military Europe would need to take on Russia. The US has all the cards here and is just waiting to see the EU’s next move.
If Putin really dreams of restoring the Soviet Empire, he has some work ahead. Here is a to-do-list of countries to be conquered after he will have dealt with Ukraine:
-Kazakhstan
-Turkmenistan
-Kyrgyzstan
-Uzbekistan
-Tajikistan
-Azerbaijan
-Georgia
-Armenia
-Moldavia
-Lithuania
-Latvia
-Estonia
Then he can start to submit the former Warsaw Pact countries:
-Poland
-Romania
-East Germany
-Slovakia
-the Czech Republic
-Bulgaria
-Hungary
-Albania
I doubt that Putin will live long enough to see his dream coming true.
These countries are not useless, but I agree that Putin is not interested at all in conquering them. Of course not. That's what I tried to convey, but I should have added some emoji...
You are right, I should have been more explicit. But rest assured, I'm neither Kaja Kallas, nor her husband. I'm just a European who is worried about the warmongering of people like Kallas and about the gullibility of those Europeans who believe those stories about Putin's presumed intention to restore the SU.
I agree that the manipulative lying politicians and a combination of gullible citizens and a lack of truly representative Democracy (in most European States) are the problem.
US occupation since WW2 and growing social safety nets have created increasing dependent citizens who have easily accepted controlled media, hate mongering and increasing negative consequences for dissent that have prompted Europe to embrace self-defeating policies.
Ah, Trump is not happy because he wanted the Europeans to spend all that money to buy American weapons, not to revive European heavy industries. From the European point of view, they should have done so a long time ago, and they should have kept defense industries running even if it means great "inefficiencies".
I read a story that explains why Russians ramped up weapons and ammo production far faster than the Western planners expected. The Russians kept some of their weapon plants in operation at a minimal capacity to modernize obsolete equipment. This keeps some experienced technicians and trained new ones. The rest of the plants are carefully mothballed. When Russia got a little bit richer and the government ordered more weapons, or when a foreign sale was signed, these old plants were able to modernize and revitalize slowly. Furthermore, Russian basic education has more attention to vocational education. When a situation shows up, they gear up the older production lines. Since Russians also pay attention to backward compatibility, called-up reservists have fewer problems adapting to newer equipment. Had Russians dismantled these plants and sold/trashed the machinery, the Ukraine War may still have the same outcome, but the path to conclusion would be a whole lot more circuitous.
The industry is state owned and doesn't rely on contractors like in the US. much easier to navigate and weapons are also much cheaper that way.
Russian leadership has long been aware of USA duplicity. Therefore it has Mase sure to keep combat ready as far as feasible.
Thank you for this analysis.
Currently the EU government is a death cult. Their foreign policy appears to be based upon the needs and desires of the weapons manufacturers and central bankers who bet on both sides of any conflict and always win. These agents of death will continue to profit from the deaths of millions of young men. If a country such as Russia or the US expresses goals of peace, those goals will be ignored or memory-holed, and replaced with aggressive warlike goals. This justifies the EU's insatiable appetite for spending on weapons systems as well as their threatening, hostile behavior towards countries that do not even want war.
I am 72. I never would have thought that in my lifetime I would see a return to totalitarianism in Europe. Yet the EU was supposedly formed so that another WWII WOULDN'T HAPPEN.
It appears that the UK, the EU, and NATO, as well as all their various associated NGOs like the Atlantic Council, etc., are one giant war making machine grinding up a generation of men leading to depopulation, the ultimate globalist goal.
The only bright side to this is Trump's commitment to end the War in Ukraine. He does have the full array of globalist predators against him, but we shall see who finally comes out on top.
Aside the fight between to EU and US for the globalist totalitarian crown, there is little difference between the two orders. Only the countries that have suffered communism in their past are sure they are not going back to it come what may, and are willing to fight to the death to prevent it. So, with the contempt the West has for Asian economic progress, a massive fight is inevitable, and one that we in the west are sure to lose.
Carlo, you do not distinguish between the US and EU, implying they are both globalist powers. That was true under Biden. Trump is doing everything in his power to confront the globalist predators and to reset the American economy so that it can thrive. Without manufacturing no economy can thrive, and it becomes dependent upon other countries for necessities. Trump is undoing the globalist order that was started with George Bush Sr. as President. The EU is currently controlled by globalists.
I agree with you that anyone at all who has suffered under Communism will be willing to fight to the death to prevent their country from becoming Communist. But the EU is currently behaving as a totalitarian, unelected government. Trump sees this and thinks this is very bad for the people of Europe. He sees the EU government as becoming focused on making war, and he wants to prevent war from continuing. The West (at least in America) doesn't have contempt for Asian economic progress.
The problem for the US is that globalist forces within the US and outside the US have given the CCP in China an unfair advantage over the US. We are not at all against any country thriving economically. What the US wants is a level playing field. We do not want to be dependent upon the CCP. This is not about the Chinese people, who have been long suffering. This is about the CCP and their intention to dominate the US in a long war without firing a shot. Thus it isn't contempt for their desire to thrive, but we do have hostility towards their efforts to send fentanyl from their labs into our country and have it kill 100,000 Americans a year. We do have hostility to their role in supporting Iran, for instance.
I hope there will not be any kind of war with China because war achieves only destructive goals. It is only globalists who profit from war who are on the side of starting wars. They also want to depopulate the earth.
Eve, I agree with some of your comments, but Trump has already stated he wants to destroy the BRICS and I am confident this tariff bomb he issued on the 2nd April is designed to that end. Even Bessent said in his interview with Tucker that the tariffs hurt exporters and favours indebted importers, implying it was their purpose in issuing them.
Having said that, I have no problem for Trump taking down the soviet minded European bureaucracy. On China however, he feels as he did about Japan in the 80s when Japan got ahead of the US on pure merit. There are a lot of videos of Trump's early views about Japan. He is an exceptionalist - like all POTUSs.
Second point is that western people have very short memories because that's how the media like it. Did anyone forget how the whole China outsourcing thing started? Nixon and Kissinger, in their obsession with the USSR, befriended China and opened the doors to their participation in global trade in an effort to ensure Russia and China didn't team up as a dual superpower. American corporations willingly opened factories in China to improve their margins and by doing so ensuring the American wage earner's paycheck was capped against China's cheap labour that , let's face it, US corporations were exploitating. Even now Apple is doing the same thing...with Foxconn.
None of this had anything to do with China itself. The fact that we in the West assumed China has human beings that somehow don't aspire to the same things that we aspire to, is arrogant and misplaced. The Chinese do have aspirations like anyone else, and now they manufacture goods with the accuracy of the Swiss, they build faster, better and cheaper than anyone on the planet and nobody can put that genie back in the bottle. The argument about subsidies offering China an unfair advantag is also false. We too have a favoured system that results in monopolies and oligopolies. Different systems with the same objectives: how to win!
Having filled their pockets with fat margins for thirty years, US corporations are now pumping the media to blame China for US problems their are wholy responsible for. At the same time they are spicing up the stories to make sure the public acquites a negative view of the Chinese; the human rights issue, for instance...totally false and besides... who are we to criticise anyone on human rights?
Fentanyl is only one of hundreds of drugs that China makes for the world. It just doesn't suit the American press to suggest that it is the Mexican drug lords that are responsible for how the drug is used in the US.
I'm not expecting to persuade you, Eve, but jist writing all this to suggest there are many ways to look at things and not everyone sees it the way the western media frames it.
The war against China is on, in my opinion, because China's unbelievable rate of progress in so many fields of industry now threatens US hegemony. It's a repeat of history going back millennia.
Carlo, I agree with most of what you wrote. There are many who view Trump as just another globalist and I have read their reasons for viewing Trump this way. At this point I am keeping this an open question, awaiting further data. One historian who has been most helpful to me in understanding the role of the CIA in world history has been Francisco Gil-White who has a substack page called the Management of Reality, which is what intelligence services do.
I agree that US corporations are responsible for the stagnant economy in the US, because they went along or even drove the globalist out-sourcing of jobs. They extracted the wealth of our middle class in doing so, and they did it again during Covid, in which there was a massive wealth transfer from the middle class to the billionaire class.
I have a great deal of pain about the role of the CIA since its inception in causing so much of the world's destabilization. However, Americans were told nothing of this and have only been finding out about the full story recently, whereas the rest of the world has known it all along.
I agree China has accomplished a great deal, however I do not idealize their government. China stole a great deal of intellectual property from the US, and they require that all corporations that do business with them give them access to their IP. What I feel is dangerous is that the CCP is just another globalist power. Their workers get the equivalent of 1$ a day, which is pretty close to slave labor. If the CCP gains domination over the world, that system will be used everywhere. So while the CCP accomplished a lot, they (Mao) also have killed more millions of their own people than Hitler and Stalin did. They are ruthless and I would rather live in the US with all the bad history of the CIA than have my children and grandchildren earning 1$ a day.
If Trump is just another globalist and if he seeks war with China over hegemony, that will be very destructive to many people.
If it turns out he is not another globalist, and wants to mostly put his energy into making America a great country, stopping forever wars, and making Americans healthy again, he will turn out to have been very constructive.
I await further data with an open mind.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Eve. I will look up Francisco Gil-White.
On "What I feel is dangerous is that the CCP is just another globalist power." you may be right, no one knows the future and this is indeed a possible outcome. But i am willing to support a change in how we do things based on the way the present system has evolved. Donald Trump is not my president and i never voted for the EU commissioner who is his opposite number in Europe. But the EU has followed the US's lead since Obama's first term and everyone is poorer today in Europe, not withstanding the lousy management at the sovereign level, and the poor economic decisions of European commission. So from where I'm sitting it is not difficult to project the future of said system, and IMO it is not going to end well. Though the US has the independence to fix its problems without needing 50 different states to agree on policy, success is not a given, but if Trump IS different rather than pretending to be different, there is no harm in trying another way. However, no country can do well in isolation, not even the USA, that today is totally dependent on China to get the basics of what it needs. Getting aggressive against everyone to elevate ones own position is not the right recipe for true wealth creation, IMO.
Regarding the CCP workers wages, if you use purchasing power parity to compare what one unit of currency buys versus what another country's unit of currency can buy, you will come to the conclusion that China's wages go a lot further than any of ours. Compare train ticket prices for a similar distance of travel, and compare the relative state of the art of various countries transportation systems. Look at the cost of drugs, medical care and insurance; take a basket of costs you have to pay and see what it costs an average chinese family to buy a similar basket. I am sure you will note that chinese citizens are really not as poor as you imagine. Above all, note that China's workforce has tremendous saving rates; money left over after having bought what they need to run their lives. Despite their property crisis, they are still relatively well off, though pissed off at the way COVID was handled, and the fact that the property crisis came from the CCP deliberately switching support of the property market for full self sufficiency; that was in 2018. What we see in China is more of a buyer's strike than the alleged depression western commentators love to rant on about. In 2024, amid the calls of imminent collapse, China's trade surpluses were almost a trillion dollars - and they are collapsing? It's nonsense!
Anyway I want to thank you for giving me your views and found the conversation very interesting. All the best.
Good points all, Carlo.
It is a sad commentary on the power of globalist parasites that gradually have taken over the EU and have thoroughly embedded themselves internally in every agency of our federal government. This has been going on for a long time, for there to be so many embedded agents of the various billionaires, central bankers, and agents of mass destruction inside our government and secretly so. That you and millions of other Europeans have suffered as a result and that you recognize the US as a vector of that suffering is extremely sad and painful. All I can say is the American people NEVER VOTED FOR ANY OF IT! The American people had no idea that Obama was a globalist agent, or that all our Presidents except for Trump found a way to get us involved in forever wars that led to destruction of many, many innocent lives. It is all so disgusting to patriots like myself what horrible things have been done in the name of our country. You have every right to be suspicious of the US under these conditions.
I can't vouch for the truth about Donald Trump at this point. There are some worrying signs and some very exciting and inspiring signs as well. I am not going to lose sight of the worrying signs and I am keeping my mind open. Very open.
You made good points about China except for one thing: what happens to a person who gets a bad social score. This can happen to anyone, not just deviant people or criminals, but completely innocent people who disagree with certain government decisions. I saw a video of one man who can no longer travel anywhere in his country, his phones are bugged, he is more or less imprisoned in his apartment. This is totalitarianism and this is what I am trying to say about the CCP. For all the wonderful accomplishments, they want to keep an iron grip on people and tolerate not one iota of dissent. I cannot imagine ever living under those conditions, although we came close to it here under Biden. But the CCP takes it to levels similar to Stalinism and to Hitler's fascism.
So I am not inspired by all the stories of their great success. I had an uncle who once talked to me about how wonderful Mao was, and the wonderful things he was doing for the people. Now I know he murdered more people than Hitler or Stalin.
I will never see the CCP as a force for good no matter how much they have built up their factories or what not. I also read a memoir of a man who started out with nothing in China but with his wife they became extremely succcessful, I mean extremely successful, around the year 2000 when China was open to businessmen growing the economy. But what the CCP opens they can close, and the end result for this family is that this man barely got himself and his son out of the country, and his wife is missing and may never be found. (He and his son live in the UK).
So I cannot be convinced about the marvels of the CCP. I cannot be convinced about the philanthropy of globalists like Bill Gates or George Soros or the Rothschilds either. They are parasites first, middle and last. They have sucked the life blood economically out of the middle class in the US and Europe and the UK, destroying or attempting to destroy our culture which may never recover fully.
I will leave it there. You are extremely bright and you have a wonderful grasp of many issues, especially economic ones. Thank you for sharing your perspective with me and giving me a chance to share mine with you.
Your China/CCP phobia leads you to false beliefs.
Can you describe my false beliefs?
Right-on. Carlo!
Trumps foreign policy and economic changes are slowly causing a giant a tectonic shift worldwide but they are not irreversible yet. However, if he keeps on the pressure to the end of his term they will be. The whole of the situation strongly reminds of Boris Yeltsin standing on the top of a Russian tank and relentlessly cutting the Soviet Empire into pieces in order to incapacitate his communist opponents. Indications are that we will see tens of millions of unhappy people demonstrating in American cities for cheap, substandard Chinese consumer goods but Trump will simply tell them to go home and produce better. The same goes for Europe. They will be separated from U.S. micromanagement and will be forced to grow up again. They will be and should be able to follow their own geopolitical interests, as long as they do not endanger Western functionality and coexistence. They will have to find their own balance with Russia, overcome their fears and yes, NATO will be most likely restructured or even dissolved one day.
The cheap, substandard Chinese products are such because that is what was ordered. I am pretty convinced the Chinese have the ability to crank out better goods, that might be a bit more expensive (better materials, etc., which are costlier).
They can crank-out products 2nd-to-none in many classes/segments now & in the short-term..
It took almost 50 years for Poland to say goodbye to the Russian forces on its territory in order to immediately start begging for NATO, stationing of the American troops and nuclear sharing to top it up. And for what? To be a Troyan donkey in Eastern Europe. Poland's history is abundant with lost opportunities and this sad rule is unlikely to change. "Fur coat and no knickers" as a historian summed up Poland's megalomaniac pretensions. We look with envy on Bielarus which preserved its economy, culture and sovereignty, the country the Poles used to have in low esteem as not pro-Western enough.
All the Polski jokes drove them nuttier & more vain than Polska-baseline - truly a vicious downward spiral/"doom-loop".
Thanks for the laugh.
"Interoperability issues could make the US think twice about intervening in the EU’s support against Russia."
Should be
"Interoperability issues could make the US think twice about intervening in the EU’s support of the US's war against Russia."
The EU's plans are just words and proposed money printing. Not worth paying attention to.
Without USA doing the actual fighting and rearming, EU military adventures vs Russia don't make much sense. Particularly in view of the coming US tariffs. They need the Russian market and they need a reliable land rail connection to China independent of the sea lanes.
USA's foreign policy strategy follows where the $$$'s are! It is not down to the Executive - it is determined by the military industrial complex and its hedge fund supporters. Putin knows this.
This is the globalists vs. US.aka Trump. Trump knows Europe is broke it’s why he’s playing chicken with the tariffs. Europe goes even deeper in debt plus it’ll take decades to build up the military Europe would need to take on Russia. The US has all the cards here and is just waiting to see the EU’s next move.
US is also broke, one of the reason for trying to wind down the war in Ukraine (without giving much or anything to Russia if possible)...
The US has lost the war. Russia will therefore get what it wants.
If Putin really dreams of restoring the Soviet Empire, he has some work ahead. Here is a to-do-list of countries to be conquered after he will have dealt with Ukraine:
-Kazakhstan
-Turkmenistan
-Kyrgyzstan
-Uzbekistan
-Tajikistan
-Azerbaijan
-Georgia
-Armenia
-Moldavia
-Lithuania
-Latvia
-Estonia
Then he can start to submit the former Warsaw Pact countries:
-Poland
-Romania
-East Germany
-Slovakia
-the Czech Republic
-Bulgaria
-Hungary
-Albania
I doubt that Putin will live long enough to see his dream coming true.
I doubt that Putin is even dreaming to go back to most of those countries.
Of course he isn't. I didn't mean to be serious.
Why would he want these useless countries?
These countries are not useless, but I agree that Putin is not interested at all in conquering them. Of course not. That's what I tried to convey, but I should have added some emoji...
They are absolutely useless except some of the 'stans. Places like Estonia, for example. Would anyone really notice if Estonia ceased to exist?
Very important strategic geographic location.
laughable.
Of course it is. That is what I meant to convey.
One never knows without something more explicit. Emojis would be useful on these threads.
After all, "Herman" could be a Kaja Kallas alias... or her husband that was reputably making a fortune trading with Russia.
You are right, I should have been more explicit. But rest assured, I'm neither Kaja Kallas, nor her husband. I'm just a European who is worried about the warmongering of people like Kallas and about the gullibility of those Europeans who believe those stories about Putin's presumed intention to restore the SU.
I agree that the manipulative lying politicians and a combination of gullible citizens and a lack of truly representative Democracy (in most European States) are the problem.
US occupation since WW2 and growing social safety nets have created increasing dependent citizens who have easily accepted controlled media, hate mongering and increasing negative consequences for dissent that have prompted Europe to embrace self-defeating policies.