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9 days agoI think folks can lose sight of this. The US is not and has never been a democracy. And even insofar as the sham elections go, as the AP byline shows again, both relevant parties have essentially identical foreign policy. Even now, Trump and co just appear incapable of getting the job done—it’s not as though they want America’s imperial grasp to weaken.
I still can’t tell if the Trump admin have any positive policy positions (that is actually wanting something) as opposed to their negative policy position of undoing ‘liberal policy’ without any consideration of the consequences because lib policy is inherently harmful and any apparent benefit is actually just harm the Trump folks don’t know how to describe yet.
Bush’s war on terror was the attempt to convert Cold War soft power intro a traditional hard power empire and it was a complete catastrophe. That’s why all the former Bush guys, Bolton and his allies., were so intent on preventing Trump from doing this. Obama and co made it their mission to intensify soft power because that’s the best way to meet americas goals. I’m not convinced this isn’t just reactionaries undoing everything the non-white president did. There certainly isn’t a thoughtful reason to be doing this. Moving towards hard power is simply an objectively wrong move and this is doubly true from the perspective of an American populace that has no interest in joining the military let alone fighting and dying.
So it’s an ideological consideration certainly, combined with Elon having some issues with both agencies negatively impacting his businesses—for example, payments received by Elon’s starlink company were being investigated by USAID.