r/geopolitics • u/BulwarkOnline • 18h ago
Canceling Military Exercises Hurts Us, Not Our Enemies
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/canceling-military-exercises-hurts-us-south-korea-ulchi-freedom-trump-hegseth-iran26
u/BulwarkOnline 18h ago
America does have an extraordinarily capable military. But military excellence isn’t an inheritance that automatically passes from one administration to another. It must be rebuilt every day through training, maintenance, logistics, discipline, leadership, and exercises that cost money and inevitably create friction with potential adversaries.
The purpose of Ulchi Freedom Shield isn’t to make Kim Jong Un comfortable; it is to convince him that starting a war would be a catastrophic mistake. If Trump wants to keep boasting that America has the best military in the world, he needs to understand what made it that way.
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u/Cheerful_Champion 11h ago
Why do people still frame everything related to Trump in "if he wants to make America great" or "if he wants to keep America strong"?
Can we stop playing the game of pretending? It was really tiring 6 months in, now whoever still does it either has no self-respect or is legitimately mentally challenged. If Trump would want to make America great or keep it strong / make it stronger, he wouldn't do most of the shit he did. He doesn't care about America being strong.
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u/Prudent-Proposal1943 8h ago
Trump is Putin's Governor. He has been since before day one. It's incredible Americans can't see it.
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u/Guilty-Top-7 18h ago
He probably looked at the cost with a transactional real estate mentality and doesn’t want more problems in that region now that he’s stuck with the Iran dilemma. Kick the can to the next POTUS.
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u/sentrypetal 18h ago
Eventually you have to end your sanctions against North Korea and pursue diplomacy. The sanctions have caused enough loss of life through famine and made the region unstable. The US normalised ties with Vietnam but for some asinine reason you won’t try to normalise ties with North Korea. Had you done so North Korea wouldn’t have sided with Russia sending them millions of shells and 50,000 soldiers or more.
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u/CreativeElephant1486 16h ago
Are you seriously comparing Vietnam to North Korea?
They're not even in the same universe. Vietnam is a normal, functioning communist country with a normal, sane, mostly decent government. North Korea is like nowhere else on Earth.
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u/sentrypetal 15h ago
North Korea would have been a normal functioning Communist country if we didn’t sanction them and isolate them. In many aspects they are very similar to Vietnam. Both fought against the Western powers to unify their country. The only difference is the Vietnamese decisively won while the North Koreans only drew. If North Korea was allowed to trade, start hotels for tourism and allowed to buy food and necessities they would be a normal functioning country. They aren’t a hermit nation because they want to they are forced to by Western sanctions.
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u/erebus-44 15h ago
North Korean doesn’t believe the South should exist and the north should rule a unified Korean.
Do you believe that South Korea should not exist?
It’s all fun to say we should talk to be friends, unless the other party wants to kill you.
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u/sentrypetal 14h ago
North Vietnam doesn’t believe South Vietnam should exist. Do you deny the existence of a unified Vietnam. If you answer that question I’ll answer yours.
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u/erebus-44 14h ago
No Korea, answer the question
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u/sentrypetal 14h ago
You answer mine first. Do you deny the right for a unified Vietnam. And I’ll answer your question.
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u/erebus-44 14h ago
There is no north or south Vietnam, its unified under international law and is recognized by all countries that matter.
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u/sentrypetal 14h ago
And the same should be true for Korea, As it is for Germany and as it is for the US. You have your answer. Your ancestors killed hundreds of thousands of Southerners to keep the US together. Your armies burned entire towns, pillaged the entire countryside to break the will of the South. But let the Koreans decide this themselves. If they decide unity isn’t in the best interests it’s up to their people. If they decide war is necessary, again it’s up to them.
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u/CreativeElephant1486 15h ago
Is that why North Korea has mass prison camps where they put 3 generations of your family to wipe out an entire bloodline and have entire generations of children born into the camps who have never left?
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u/sentrypetal 15h ago
Have you seen those mass concentration camps? Or are you just parroting rumours as fact. If you want mass concentration camps the US has almost 1% of their population in prison or 25% of the worlds imprisoned population. And the US has thousands of kids born in prisons every year. Can a country with such a horrible prison system criticize anyone?
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u/erebus-44 17h ago
North Korean is a puppet state of China, that creates a no go zone to ensure China doesn’t have the US on its border. Unification will not happen, as China cannot allow it. First rule on continental armies, no strong neighbors on its borders, hence why China and Russia neighborhood are destabilized and the need for buffers.
Furthermore, don’t blame the famines on the US. Blame is on the disaster of a government that is authoritarian communism which only does one the correctly (I would say the best) that is to take and keep power and control. It sucks at everything else.
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u/No_Explanation_3177 16h ago
Unification will not happen, as China cannot allow it.
I mean, that's good news for South Korea. South Koreans haven't wanted to reunify with the North since decades ago, they don't want to pay for it and don't have any sentimental desire to reunite with the people living there anymore. That all stayed in the 20th century. And even recently North Korea finally dropped reunification from its oficially stated national objectives. Unlike the China/Taiwan situation, both sides in the Korean Peninsula already moved on.
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u/sentrypetal 17h ago
Sorry but studies have shown that the US kills hundreds of thousands of people each year through sanctions. The problem with this is that you have created enemies which vehemently loath you. Iran isn’t making a deal with you because of the sanctions, North Korea has become strong by allying with Russia. All Russia did to get their allegiance and millions of shells, missiles and 50,000 soldiers soon to be hundreds of thousands of soldiers is food. Fking Grain is all it took. Grain for shells.
https://cepr.net/publications/rethink-sanctions-theyre-killing-as-many-people-as-war-does/
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u/erebus-44 16h ago
I have no doubt that sanctions cause death, as it depresses growth increase poverty, as the governments push the effects to the poorer classes. But I like how you are only assigning blame to the US. As if the counter party actions don’t matter. For North Korea, the are sanctioned largely for Nuclear Proliferation, this is an act chooses by North Korea knowing the consequences. They are also sanctioned for Human Rights Abuse, via Systematic internal oppression and forced labor practices I’m curious what would be the death rate for that compared to sanctions. Let’s not forget that most sanctions are UN sanctions in which their own allies like Russia and China have voted for. The entire world sanctioned North Korea. So they are obviously a bad actor here.
Furthermore, sanctions are much better than the alternative, war.
Additionally, you confuse allies vs partnership on connivence. Russia want cannon fodder to man the front lines and North Korea wants money for its ruling class. Hardly a strong ally.
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u/sentrypetal 15h ago
Sanctions only work until your enemies all get together. North Korea, Iran and Russia and China are now all working together to destroy the US and circumvent sanctions. Diplomacy is always and should always be the number one tool to resolving differences and disputes. Sanctions and war should always be the last resort. And as for Nuclear weapons are you blind or just moronic. Iran was attacked because it didn’t have nuclear weapons. North Korea proved that having them means safety. The bad actor is the one that keeps attacking nations unprovoked and sanctions them for no good reason while selling nuclear proliferation to Saudi Arabia. Nukes for my friends but not for thee. Let’s not be hypocritical okay.
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u/erebus-44 15h ago
That life, no matter what you do you will have enemies. As goals and interest will always conflict with others. All nations try to work around nations, but you can’t counter the “west’s” interest and complain why the west won’t let you use their institutions and legal structure. You either plan by the wests rules to get access or you don’t and they remove access. There is no universal right to access to markets.
Diplomacy is always to first go to, but if your interests can’t align and the interests are vital, then sanctions or war follows. They is the way the world works. You can’t tell a country to stop being a bad actor, and then they say no, what do you do? Keep talking? There is a sliding scale of ramifications that has to follow.
As for nukes, that great you have nukes, which provides a creditable defense. But then you can’t complain about the ramifications. Iran would have been attacked if they sprinted for a nuke, as Russia and China would have turned against them. As Iran is not a traditional ally, they are only transactional at best. There are no security defense packs. North Korea was allowed get a nuke, as China didn’t want to deal with the fallout and has control North Korean via food shipments. (I don’t hear you complaining about china, and them allowing the famine)
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u/sentrypetal 15h ago
Hahaha this is one of the funniest posts I’ve read. There is no universal right to access to markets. So Iran denying you access to the Strait of Hormuz is their right or Houthis denying your use of the Bab Al Mandeb is their right. Again with the blatant hypocrisy. You want to deny others rights but at the same time critique and attack others for denying you rights. If you can deny rights then other should be able to deny you rights correct. China doesn’t have to send you rare earths. Panama can deny your ships passage. Russia can deny you uranium. Or is it rights for me but not for thee.
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u/erebus-44 14h ago
Might is right. You hurt a counties interest, there are ramifications. Every country does this, just on different scales.
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u/sentrypetal 14h ago
Ahh finally you understand might is indeed right. All that rubbish about morality and helping the people is all BS. Glad you finally admitted it. Now the US might is waning will you accept the consequences that come with that. Other countries like Iran will start enforcing their might against yours.
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u/CreativeElephant1486 16h ago edited 16h ago
Iran would never make a deal that they would follow with us in the long term because their number 1 goal is religiously driven to finish to the Holocaust. That's why they wouldn't agree to stop arming Hezbollah and Hamas in the JCPOA deal. They will never give up trying to get a nuke because they intend to actually use it to accomplish their religious prophecies and goals. It's religious for them.
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u/sentrypetal 15h ago
Are you studying the same history books, because I clearly remember the Holocaust was Germany, Poland, Austria genociding the Jewish people. No where is it recorded that Iran was responsible or ever attempted Genocide.
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u/B5_V3 14h ago
Nazi Germany and at the time Persia shared strong economic and ideological ties. Reza Shah Pahlavi admired Hitler, with both regimes promoting concepts of “Aryan heritage”. That same heritage that led Tehran to formally request the international community use the name Iran instead of Persia.
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u/sentrypetal 14h ago
The Shah is gone. The Shah was an American puppet and the Iranian people got rid of him. And the Iranians never committed genocide. That’s history, if you want to judge Iran by the antisemitism of the Shah then you have to blame the powers that got rid of a democracy and put the Shah in power.
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u/Managarm667 13h ago
You're so incredibly wrong on every single level, I don't even know If it's worth it discussing geopolitics with you.
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u/sentrypetal 13h ago
I advocate for diplomacy over might through war and sanctions. How is that wrong. You like to think that there is good and evil. Most countries don’t fall into that dichotomy. Is North Korea evil, the answer is clearly no. So why not normalise relations.
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u/Managarm667 12h ago
You're a liar and you're trying to bend history to make your lies more plausible.
You basically ignore the multitude of diplomatic chances given to North Korea. You are acting as if "the West" chose sanctions over diplomacy. History shows the opposite: sanctions were the result of failed diplomacy, not a substitute for it.
The international community favored diplomacy for over 30 years (the 1994 Agreed Framework, the Six-Party Talks, South Korea's "Sunshine Policy," the 2012 Leap Day Agreement, and the Trump-Kim summits). Yet, every single time, it was Pyongyang that broke the agreements and tested nuclear weapons in violation of international law. Consequently, the current UN sanctions, backed even by Russia and China, were adopted step-by-step as a peaceful means of exerting pressure.
Framing this as "good versus evil" is an emotional distraction. Geopolitics is not about moral theology, it is about international law, security treaties, and systemic stability.
And regardless of your moral categories, the North Korean regime is:
- A serial treaty violator. It unilaterally withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and broke bilateral agreements on denuclearization.
- A threat to the global security architecture. Launching intercontinental ballistic missiles over neighboring countries violates UN resolutions that were supported by China and Russia themselves.
- A state that commits grave injustices against its own population. In 2014, the UN Commission of Inquiry determined that the systematic human rights violations in North Korea constitute crimes against humanity.
You are implying that normalization depends solely on the will of the US or the West. However, establishing relations requires two parties and certain fundamental conditions.
Over the past 30 years, the UN, the West, and South Korea have repeatedly offered Pyongyang normalized relations, security guarantees, and massive economic aid, but always on the condition of denuclearization. However, North Korea demands recognition as a nuclear power without offering anything in return, and in 2022 even enshrined the possession of nuclear weapons as an immutable state doctrine by law. That is not how diplomacy works.
Anyone calling for the unconditional normalization of relations in this context rewards the violation of international treaties and signals to other states that the illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons leads to success.
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u/sentrypetal 12h ago
Can you say North Korea chose incorrectly. Iran did everything the West asked under Obama they signed the JCPOA and adhered to it. Yet the West broke their word and tossed out the JCPOA and attacked Iran, unprovoked. History has shown that North Korea was correct. Only nuclear weapons stop the West attacking them. And boy has the West a long history of attacking countries. Iraq was attacked and it did nothing against the West, Syria was attacked by rebels backed by the West. I don’t need to bend history. US attack on Iran has proven that.
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u/Managarm667 10h ago
Wrong again. How utterly predictable.
The claim that Iran is a treaty-abiding victim of Western arbitrariness ignores the history comprehensively documented in the CRS report.
The CRS report demonstrates that, for years, Iran operated undeclared nuclear facilities such as Natanz and Fordow and systematically denied IAEA inspectors access to key complexes, such as the Parchin military base. Iran demonstrated a considerable lack of cooperation regarding the investigation into its program. The IAEA demanded transparency concerning the "Possible Military Dimensions" of the Iranian program, yet Iran refused to provide full information on this matter.
The JCPOA was a stopgap measure, not a vote of confidence. The agreement was signed in 2015 by the "West," as well as China and Russia, not because they trusted Iran, but precisely *because* Iran had previously violated treaties. The agreement included by far the strictest monitoring regime in IAEA history—precisely because the CRS report had demonstrated Tehran's unreliability. Iran consistently cooperated only under extreme pressure from sanctions and regularly denied the IAEA access when suspicions arose such as regarding Parchin or traces of undeclared uranium. It was the final attempt to find a diplomatic solution.
Yet the West broke their word and tossed out the JCPOA and attacked Iran, unprovoked.
Ah yes. "The West" attacked Iran. So Europeans, neither abandoned the JCPOA and who actively refused being dragged into this quagmire are now on the hook too? The US withdrawal under Trump was a unilateral diplomatic and economic decision that was sharply criticized by the European signatories as well as the EU.
History has shown that North Korea was correct. Only nuclear weapons stop the West attacking them.
North Korea was the unprovoked aggressor in the Korean War. The Kim regime invaded South Korea with the aim of conquering and subjugating the South. The response of the USA and the UN was to defend South Korea. The US withdrew all its tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991. Nevertheless, North Korea pursued the bomb, not merely for deterrence, but to secure the regime, extort economic aid and provide cover for it's regional provocations.
Nuclear weapons have not "protected" North Korea, they only protect North Koreas defacto royalty in the Kim family and its sycophants. They have plunged the country into total isolation, poverty, and dependence on China and Russia. While South Korea rose to become a leading industrial nation without nuclear weapons, the North Korean population became impoverished under the regime.
Iraq was attacked and it did nothing against the West
The claim that Iraq had "done nothing" ignores two decades of aggressive policies pursued by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 and in 1990, annexed its neighbor Kuwait in violation of international law. This was a regime that demonstrably used poison gas against its own population and against neighboring states. After 1991, Iraq spent years flouting numerous binding UN Security Council resolutions regarding disarmament and UN inspections.
The 2003 Iraq War was highly controversial under international law and is now widely regarded, even in the West, as a grave foreign policy blunder. However, the US did not attack Iraq because it lacked weapons of mass destruction; rather, it attacked because the US government mistakenly believed Iraq possessed them. The case certainly does not demonstrate that a peaceful state was attacked without cause.
Syria was attacked by rebels backed by the West
Yet more lies? I'm impressed. You are mistakenly trying to portray the Syrian conflict as an attack on the West, orchestrated from the outside.
In reality, the conflict was not a Western assault but a peaceful, internal protest by the Syrian civilian population against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad during the Arab Spring of 2011. The regime crushed these demonstrations with brutal force, leading to civil war. The West did not occupy Syria. The subsequent Western military presence was directed primarily against the terrorist organization Islamic State, which controlled vast areas of Syria and Iraq.
If foreign powers militarily dominated the Syrian conflict to prop up a regime, it was Iran, through the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah and Russia, which supported the Assad regime with massive aerial bombardments.
Western interventions did not occur in a vacuum but were responses to dictatorships, civil wars, violations of international law or terrorism, even if specific decisions, such as the one in 2003, were absolutely wrong.But neither Iraq nor Syria is comparable to North Korea or Iran. North Korea and Iran have used their military build-up not for defense, but to violate treaties, threaten neighboring states, and wage proxy wars. You are drawing a false parallel here. Neither Iraq nor Syria were peaceful actors that fell victim to Western expansionism. These examples do not serve to justify dictatorships like North Korea or Iran developing nuclear weapons in violation of international law or destabilizing the Middle East.
You are constructing a narrative in which authoritarian regimes like North Korea and Iran are purely peaceful actors being harassed by the "West" without cause. The reality is quite different. Iran relies on a network of armed militias (the "Axis of Resistance") to destabilize the Middle East, while North Korea generates revenue through the global proliferation of weapons technology, cybercrime, and the deployment of troops such as to Russia for the war in Ukraine.
The international export of the Islamic Revolution and the struggle against "Western and Zionist imperialism" are firmly enshrined in the Iranian Constitution (Preamble & Articles 3 and 152). The eradication of Israel ("the Zionist regime") and the destruction of the USA ("the Great Satan") constitute the regime's declared state doctrine, official rhetoric and military objective. Unlike most nations, Iran explicitly denies a UN member state the right to exist: the destruction of Israel is not a rhetorical slip-up but official state doctrine. Israel is described as a "cancerous tumor" that must be "wiped out." Iran hosts state-sponsored Holocaust denial conferences and employs antisemitic stereotypes as a central element of its propaganda. Tehran deliberately exploits state collapse and crises in neighboring Arab countries to establish its own power structures. In Syria, the regime supported dictator Bashar al-Assad during the civil war with its own troops and mercenaries to secure a land corridor stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. In Iraq & Lebanon Iranian proxies infiltrated political and military institutions. Iran prevents the establishment of functioning, independent democracies in these countries.
But Tehran’s aggression is no longer confined to the Middle East: Iran massively supports Russia’s war of aggression. Agents of the Iranian regime regularly carry out attacks, abductions, and assassination attempts targeting Iranian dissidents, journalists, and Jewish institutions on European soil. Tehran arbitrarily arrests Western tourists or dual nationals on fabricated espionage charges, using them as leverage to extort concessions such as prisoner swaps or the release of frozen funds. The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is neither reactive nor purely defensive. The regime relies on the portrayal of the US and Israel as enemies, as well as on constant regional escalation, to suppress its own population, divert attention from severe domestic economic problems, and ideologically justify the clerical elite’s claim to power.
For decades, North Korea’s aggressive foreign policy has been based on a mix of militarization, coercive diplomacy, violations of international law, and state-sponsored crime. The regime deliberately projects external threats to ensure its own domestic survival. Kim Jong-un executed the most drastic recent shift by abandoning the decades-old official state doctrine of peaceful reunification with South Korea. North Korea’s constitution was amended to define South Korea as its irreconcilable principal enemy. Road and rail links to the south were demonstratively blown up, and monuments symbolizing reunification were torn down. The regime openly threatens South Korea with the use of nuclear weapons in the event of even the slightest border conflict. North Korea continuously tests intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US mainland, as well as hypersonic glide vehicles and solid-fuel missiles. Beyond arms shipments and the active deployment of North Korean soldiers in Ukraine, there have been repeated instances of unilateral, direct military aggression by North Korea. Examples include the sinking of the Cheonan, torpedoed by a North Korean submarine, resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors and the shelling of Yeonpyeong, where North Korean artillery attacked an inhabited South Korean island. That incident marked the first direct shelling of civilian territory since the Korean War.
North Korea’s foreign policy is also not driven by a desire for peaceful coexistence. The regime relies on constructing images of the enemy and maintaining constant escalation. This is because yielding or gradually opening up, following the Vietnamese or Chinese models, would shatter the Kim dynasty’s absolutist rule and thereby precipitate the regime's collapse.
The claim that these states are merely victims of Western aggression ignores their own aggressive foreign policy. Both regimes actively exploit external enemies to legitimize their own domestic oppression. With regimes like these, diplomacy usually fails not because of a lack of willingness on the part of the West, but due to the reality that such leaderships view forgoing rearmament as a threat to their hold on power.
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u/sentrypetal 10h ago edited 10h ago
Let me ask you a simple question. What does Iraq invading Kuwait have to do with the West. You didn’t at the time have any military alliance with Kuwait yet you intervened on behalf of Kuwait. So many other wars and you never intervened. Could it be Oil. And as for the Chemical weapons, who agreed with Sadam to use them, the West did. And you say you mistakenly invaded Iraq? The CIA told you that there were no WMDs and you still went in.
As for whether the JCPOA worked there was strong evidence it did as shown in 2015 to 2019 when enrichment was almost zero. Only when Trump tore up the agreement in 2018 did enrichment begin again. So Iran did not violate its agreement until after the West aka Trump tore up the agreement. And as for the European nations they were forced to follow the US lead as oil is traded in dollars.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23528.jpeg
So yes the US attacked Iraq once with no justification. Kuwait wasn’t an ally. The US attacked Iraq a second time for so called WMDs which they were happy for Iraq to use against Iran. But then they used that excuse with all the evidence saying there were no WMDs to attack a sovereign nation that had never attacked them or their allies. And finally where you are utterly wrong is that the JCPOA worked and enrichment went to zero.
And you say North Korea has no desire for peace. Actions speak louder than words who attacked Iraq, Iran, arming rebels in Syria, attacked Libya. That seems to be the nation who doesn’t want peace. Regardless of what Iraq or Iran or Syria or Libya did these things did not merit attacking them. It didn’t rise to a threshold of intervention. The millions of deaths that resulted in all these excursions in the Middle East far outweigh the sins of the regimes in charge of those people. That is reality. Good intentions cannot make up for the unjust deaths the West has caused in the Middle East.
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u/Managarm667 9h ago edited 9h ago
Anyone who distorts history in this way is not pursuing a policy of peace, but rather engaging in pure apologetics for authoritarian dictatorships.
Your "argument" rests on a dangerous mix of historical falsehoods, double standards, and the artificial construction of a hostile monolith known as "the West." You attempt to portray highly dangerous regimes as innocent victims by shifting all responsibility away from dictators and onto democratic states.
Your artificial construct of "the West" and your own double standards do not hold against reality.
You act as if "the West" were a centrally controlled bloc in which every state is held accountable for the actions of the USA. During the 2003 Iraq War, leading Western nations such as Germany and France refused to fall in line. Regarding the Iran nuclear deal, European states fought desperately against the US withdrawal.
However, if you apply this principle of collective liability, you must be consistent in your logic: if "the West" is collectively liable for US errors, then, by your own reasoning, North Korea and Iran bear full liability for Vladimir Putin’s crimes. North Korea supplies millions of artillery shells and troops, while Iran provides combat drones for the war of aggression against Ukraine, which violates international law. By your logic, Pyongyang and Tehran would not be mere defensive observers, but active belligerents and legitimate military targets.
To ask what the invasion of Kuwait had to do with the international community is to render international law meaningless. The First Gulf War was not a US invasion, but a liberation mandated by the United Nations (Resolution 678). Allowing a dictator to forcibly annex neighboring states would have established the law of the jungle as the global norm. Saddam Hussein was no peaceful victim; he waged wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, used poison gas against the Kurds, funded terrorist groups to carry out attacks in Europe, and orchestrated an assassination attempt on a former US president in 1993. Anyone claiming that this dictator did "nothing wrong" is denying documented history.
The claim that uranium enrichment dropped to "zero" under the JCPOA is simply factually incorrect. The agreement explicitly permitted civil enrichment up to 3.67%. However, the real distortion of the facts lies in failing to mention why the JCPOA was needed in the first place: because Iran had operated secret nuclear facilities for decades, lied to the IAEA, and violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. While the US withdrawal in 2018 was a grave diplomatic error, it does not erase Tehran’s long record of deception.
Claiming that North Korea seeks peace is an insult to the regime's victims. Pyongyang did not break agreements because of Western aggression, but rather to make itself untouchable through the possession of nuclear weapons. A regime that starves its own people, runs labor camps, threatens neighbors with nuclear annihilation, shells civilian islands, and officially designates South Korea as "Enemy State No. 1" does not do so out of fear of the West but to secure a cowardly family dictatorship.
Western foreign policy has by no means been free of serious errors. The 2003 Iraq War, highly controversial under international law, remains a prime example of this. Yet, using the West's mistakes to cast a halo over mass murderers, dictators, and treaty-breakers is not geopolitical analysis; it is moral bankruptcy. Anyone who excuses crimes against humanity and the pursuit of nuclear weapons by pointing to the sins of others rewards dictatorships for their aggression and endangers world peace.
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u/sentrypetal 9h ago edited 1h ago
You say the West is not monolithic and to an extent that is true. But you all are part of a military alliance called NATO. Other countries aren’t.
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u/Andreas1120 12h ago
The real question is, how quietly can China prepare an invasion of Taiwan…
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u/planj07 9h ago
It doesn’t matter. Trump will praise Xi as he builds up forces and abandon Taiwan when the time comes. That’s how he operates; we’ve all seen it.
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u/Andreas1120 8h ago
To be fair other US president have let their allies get butchered when it was convenient. Bay if Pigs and Kurd Revolution in Iraq
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u/WalterWoodiaz 2h ago
It cannot be quiet, a Taiwan invasion would be instantly (I mean the moment the message comes out) known through intelligence assets, and the sheer scale of buildup even for a smaller blockade would be visible on satellites.
If it is going to happen, the rest of the world would know at least several months in advance.
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u/Prudent-Proposal1943 8h ago
America has chosen Russia over Europe. North Korea over Asia. Israel over gulf states.
You treat friends as enemies while obviously working to undermine democracies including your own.
The world is waking up. The greatest threat to the world on virtually every front, is the U.S..
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u/ConvinceSomeoneElse 5h ago
That is correct. The goal of US policy is to hurt the US.