One thing they have noticed and will keep noticing is the inflation and fuel prices.

they may not want to do it because perception shifting to them being the more stable and trustworthy superpower especially in the eyes of developing countries while they’re actively doing the work of building relationships the USA has now abandoned benefits them immensely and their own special military operation would speak directly against that.

You obviously know it but worth still saying this current admin and the Republican party certainly isn’t… Trump’s friendly with the dictators more than the traditional allies most of which are democracies USA used to have and he’s actively trying to end democracy at home.

It’s not that it can’t be true they’ve expended a significant part of the stockpiles, it’s more that the implication isn’t that they won’t be able to prosecute the ongoing or another war, just that they’ll be somewhat limited by it and that if shit really hit the fan in the form of China for example they want to have a stab at it too then they could be in more trouble.

Reminds me a lot of the similar stockpile counting with regards to Russia in Ukraine.

it certainly doesn’t and attempts to resolve this have been happening under the international framework where both things are recognized for many decades now… If we had a system that was able to enforce the ideas uniformly instead of the current deeply flawed one where great powers still hold veto over any issue they want it could be that Israel would be prevented from doing that.

We shouldn’t really look towards the “might is right” geopolitics of the past for how things should be anymore. After WW2 there has been the ideal of a rules based international order under which the people have a right of self-determination and the country has sovereignty which together pretty much means recognizing that the state of Israel does have a right to exist.

I doubt the first poster who mentioned was talking about that. It’s a pretty common misconception about the Budapest memorandum.

they’re not really breaking Budapest memorandum (not that they wouldn’t break any treaty in a heartbeat) because it did not say the other signatories would have to defend Ukraine from anyone else. It’s still a bad precedent for nuclear disarmament of course but then again the Trump administration has done every fucking thing they can to make literally every country in the world want nuclear weapons now because they’ve completely broken the old order where countries had at least some faith in USA mostly upholding and abiding by international law and supporting their supposed allies.

As I said. “Analysis” only based on a theoretical framework with zero supporting facts is not analysis, it’s dogma.

Sorry but colonialism being to blame here seems like an a priori assumption with you and not anything that you’ve actually factually established.

I certainly don’t have a problem with the idea of colonialism or other parts of history having very long lasting and diverse effects but it’s just not the case that we can say it is the root cause of any given issue absent of any real evidence for such a claim.

No doubt it and many other historical events will affect many things later on but it’s still not really a reasonable position to assume that has to be it even with lots of evidence that makes it seem unlikely in a particular case. Colonialism did not introduce anti-homosexual attitudes to the African continent. Islam, which arrived before the western colonialists also has them but wasn’t the first appearance of that there either.

Even assuming that this has anything directly to do with religion which is already a big leap it is a Muslim majority country that had no laws against homosexuality prior to or right after independence from France… Sorry but this sounds like a pretty difficult one to pin on western colonialism.

not really a solution when most of the news media engages in it and it’s not abour reliability per se, just about ambigous titles designed to make people click.

not a great rule considering how much clickbait even reputable news outlets engage in these days… can see it a bit even in this one…

Reminds me of the Bellingcat system where they crowdsource an effort to help identify locations and other helpful information in images related to child sexual abuse. I imagine AI will be really helpful for this kind of work in the future if it isn’t already being utilized.

I don’t care to continue this discussion, but it’s clear you shouldn’t make any allusions to someone looking uneducated when your own portrayal of what Trump is doing makes you look like you understand geopolitics at the level of a five-year-old.

So let’s be clear: your only example of what was happening under Biden is the thing that Trump has turned up to eleven while also doing all the other things I listed.

We’re talking Iran, Venezuela, Iran again, Cuba next, threats against Greenland and Canada within a few months. You really have to be clueless to pretend this is just the same thing that was happening the previous four years under Biden.

Ah, but it’s not just those who voted this way. It’s more those who actively supported this idea and were pushing for people not to vote because of it. We’ll never have certainty about how much of an impact it made on the actual vote but I think any reasonable person would concede by this point that the consequences of the result they were advocating for have been much, much worse than just picking the lesser evil even if you believe that lesser evil allowed an unrestrained Israel to conduct genocide. I do think the facts contradict that claim anyway since we’ve seen Israel’s actions rise to a whole another level after Trump has truly let the Netanyahu government loose but even if that wasn’t the case there’s a lot more harm being done both domestically and abroad in addition to that all continuing.

It’s also not just the presidential election by the way, in a world where the House had been under Democratic control we’d probably have seen Trump limited in meaningful ways over the past year.

NATO has no duty to support the US anyway unless we’re talking about an attack on the US which this isn’t looking like any way you slice it.