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No shit. I don't consider the US to be my ally either, and I live here (in the US).
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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I don't consider the US to be my ally either, and I'm a US citizen in the EU
I remember in the nineties and early 2000s everybody wanted to go to the U.S. on holiday: visit New York, the romantic city that never sleeps, where you can buy Levi's 501s and iPhones for cheap, because everyone wanted those back in the day.
Or California, the birthplace of surfing and skateboarding, where the weather was nice and the beaches and people are beautiful. It was spurred by what people saw in movies and on t.v. shows.
These days I don't hear many people speak positively about the US anymore. Lots of people think it's dangerous, with all the guns around and lots of violence in the streets and even in schools that are supposed to be safe places for children. Donald Trump getting elected is also a big part of it of course. It says something about the mindset of the American people and the course they want to follow.even as a tourist you don't feel safe or welcome anymore.
The culture of freedom and innovation many people admired has dwindled and is pretty much gone IMHO.
The feelgood movies about america seemed to have dried up. Any real news coming from across the pond is pretty dire, or at least negative.
Innovation is slowing. In my mind the iphone was the last really innovative physical good that was invented in the US which everyone was excited about.
I for one miss the old U.S. We need a better role model.
The signs were there though. Take for example the fact that the USA is the only first world country without some form of decent public healthcare. We'd always joke about it but it has always been a red flag signalling how many Americans felt about their fellow countrymen.
Same for guns etc. And now finally the chickens have come back to roost.
It's like black stains growing in the corners of the room that you didn't really notice. By the time you see them, look closer, realise it's mold and started pulling off the floorboards to check how deep it goes, the whole damn place is infested.
I miss that too.
I've described it as losing your big older brother that was always there for you to a crippling addiction. It's really sad for everyone involved.
That’s exactly what Russia and gang had planned (among other things); well played….sadly…
Yeah, really. It's all really going according to plan. We're completely fucked and everyone was fooled to play right into it.
It's sad to see how easy you can make the masses care for the wrong things, if you tackle their most basic fear instincts.
everyone was fooled
Nah mate, no one was fooled. One side tried to keep the country, the other side tried to tank the country because "trans migrants"
One side won, now theyre tanking the country
I agree.
Both, the trans & immigrant hate was fueled by the far right & russia most probably helped. It fits.
The fooled ones, were the ones like my father. He never even cared if someone was trans. He did not refrain from making some distasteful jokes, but they were naive and almost good hearted.
Now he bursts out at least once a day, about how trans are endangering society. What shocks me is the hate, like "kill them all" "drag 'em truth the streets" and all that shit. He never was like that before.
And this is just one example of things he started like obsessing about. Reading about right wing shit on Lemmy, just to hear the same views from my father later on the phone. But he was defending those views.
Social media echo chambers seem to have a much more extreme effect on everyone.
They fell hard for the "trans migrants", "migrants take your job" and " migrants lazy", because they were bombarded with mind blowing "facts".
But that's just my opinion, what i come up with in my head, trying to understand myself why things took the wrong turn.
I dont want to assume i understand them better than you do, but having family members that are going through the same thing, it seems much more likely that theyve always been of the "us vs. them" mentallity and now theyve simply been convinced that 1. "Them" is minorities and 2. Their hate is now socially acceptable because back in 2016 we elected the epitomy of hate as a joke
The thing is, he never was so involved with politics. Never obsessed over anything in life.
Yeah and? The US was never a friend of Europe, they just saw us as a colony and battleground, see shit like Operation Gladio.
Is it in our reciprocal interests to be allies against the other world powers? So far yes, but the way the US is going, that's changing, and it's definitely not our fault.
We’re just far-west Russia now
The EU would easily win a war against Russia if no nuclear is involved tho.
I am not so sure after seeing our response to the current conflict.
It has shown how divided and self centered nations are.
Russia has one tactic that we can't really match, their leaderships willingness to throw wave after wave of their own men at us.
I don't think we are prepared for that, our militaries are more focused on fighting a more rational enemy, it seems like we expect the other side to look at a powerpoint presentation with graphs and diagrams showing how superior we are and just give up.
That might have worked in the past but Russia spent decades infiltrating and undermining our countries, to the point that they are not scared of our paper tiger anymore.
They see how divided we are and have learned to play on those divisions.
This situation is very different than 15 or so years ago.
Nothing brings people together like a common enemy.
Very true, ans who knows, perhaps in 20 years, Trump will be seen as the US president that made Europe stand proud and defend ourselves.
If you don’t count NATO, EU doesn’t have an unified army. And NATO’s top 3 firepower are all non-EU armies (USA, UK and TR).
You forgot France in the mix. And excluding the UK here is anyway disingenuous
After Trump previously tried to sell Greenland, it wouldn't surprise me to hear him wanting to sell Alaska back to Russia in a backhand deal.
I mean, yeah? That seems like an obvious takeaway, at least for the remaining liberal democracies in the Union. The US is clearly not within that category, it aligns closer to Russia or Hungary.
The questions is whether the EU can stop sliding in that direction itself, not whether the US is "its most important ally". That ship has sailed.
MAGA/Trump winning in 2016 shocked us, to that point the US was seen as a weird but stable ally, we grew complacent since the US was run by predictable people, who's interest for their country mostly aligned with our interests.
Then a collected psychosis took over the US, MAGA, and with that came Trump, a president who is actively sabotaging their country for their own personal short term gains.
Now obviously those kinds of leaders are common, even in the West, but in general they do it quietly, while still appearing to care.
Trump came in and broke the rules, he pissed all over his country and it's allies (remember at the start of his presidency when there was this whole thing about him trying to establish dominance by squeezing the hands of other leaders when shaking their hands?), he pissed all over the environment, science and healthcare.
The unspoken rule was that, yeah idiots like that exists, but they never come to power.
Expect he did, and that showed the allies of the the US that the US is not as reliable as we thought.
The political ocean is storming, and the next guy to helm the U.S.S. USA. seems to think it is funny to cause wake and ride the most dangerous waves erratically.
I hope that the current administration manage to find a safe harbor before ending their shift despite that plenty of crew members are working on sabotaging the engine.
Around 49% believe Washington is no longer their most important ally, instead preferring other countries, such as the UK (13%) or China (10%).
UK okay but China? Lmao. Also it has shit like Brazil in there lol
I mean how big is the list of non-US EU allies anyway?
Good. Now issue sanctions plz
It only took like 400 years of cooperating on racist violence around the planet... Before USA became too shitty for even the other colonizers. This kind of "progress" is too slow to save the planet.
It's hard to miss Putin's smirk in his latest TV appearances.
Oh there are several EU nations just waiting to pounce on our inevitable tumble from the world stage. Spain, France, Portugal, and Italy are working behind the scenes to strengthen ties with their past colonies in Central and South America so when Trump actually starts bombing them because of "the war on drugs" and "migrant crisis" they'll offer direct and indirect support. (up to be including Nuclear weapons.) Other nations want nothing more to be the first one's in control of Nuclear weapons in Central and South America. This would weaken American control over two of the fastest growing and most profitable continents on the planet outside of Africa. Suddenly, Spain and Portugal for example would have access to Venezuelan oil without worrying about US sanctions and economic threats while having Venezuela as a pseudo colony again. (Trump already tried overthrowing Venezuela once with private military forces.)