One thing that I think has yet to be properly looked at from the Signal chain is if you hate the Europeans as much as they do, who is "our side of the ledger" to use Hegseth's turn of phrase. The administration should probably formulate an answer to that at some point/I have no idea what it will be.
Since it was just revealed that Pete Hegseth, US secretary of defense under Trump, has a burner Russian phone!! and a Russian email !! I think our side of the ledger means Russia now!!
I cannot make this bit out. "the formative memories of America an increasingly large number of adults are not the bulwark against Soviet aggression."
Can you explain? Or is it me?
Oh. That makes sense.
I got stuck on the formative memories of America, which is a phrase I really like. What memories, cultural memories, formed America at the start and at each point since?
The formative memory of America is the mythologizing of our independence & individualism, which we have done for so long that it's become toxic, poisoning us until tens of millions sneer at the idea of civic virtue & sacrificing for the common good.
well we did that for like six successive generations, long enough to reach a point where everyone you ever met never met anyone who wasn't similarly mythologized, and this didn't happen
it was a deliberate, conscious choice of the post-New Deal and especially post-civil rights conservatives
Let's not forget the most toxic myth, American exceptionalism. Based in WW2 manufacturing capability, many innovative tech advancements originated elsewhere. In my youth that was our German scientists beating the USSR's German scientists to the moon. As our education stds decline it will only worsen
i believe it's supposed to be "for an increasingly large number of adults, their formative memories of America are not as the bulwark against Soviet aggression"
i.e. we're far enough past the Cold War that our "global good guy" cred has elapsed irrespective of the two Trump regimes
I don't think I actually do follow? Like sure, Trump and GWOT were bad, but the previous generation had Vietnam, America's been doing irrationally violent things for a long time.
I think the different ingredient is a live war in Ukraine. the need for military spending isn't hypothetical.
Military spending for America has never *been* hypothetical, has it?
Combat in Iraq didn't end til 2021, and there's also like... whole genocides the US is funding? Most people born from the 80s on can remember America being at war with someone or other, or at least with US airstrikes being normal
It’s not that the US does violent unilateralism, is that it has been doing so for increasingly silly reasons. Now it is straight up threatening its allies instead of merely being displeased because it has fully drunk its own kool-aid about how the entire free world exists at its pleasure…
…and that anything short of unconditional reverence or vassalage are a grievous insult against the only reason good things exist and the pinnacle of civilization. If we’ve reached the stage where we threaten annexation of allies and materially supporting an invaded ally is too hard, what’s left?
It's that if you are the age of, oh most elected officials, you grew up in a world where the World was viewed as bipolar between the US and USSR, the american political parties may argue but they shared some base values that made compromise possible, and US politics was functional
Irrationally violent actions taken in an excess of zeal in defending the Free World ≠ irrationally violent actions taken in an effort to switch teams from the Free World to Autocracy, Inc. Like there's a qualitative difference there.
Vietnam was on the other side of the world and a good chunk of the euros had various colonial unpleasantness within a decade of the US's participation in SEA, and the most important point being none of that called the Atlantic Relationship into question
Biggest question either side had to worry about c. 1970 in terms of the Atlanticist relationship was whether the US was going to commit 10 divisions to Europe or only 8 and what was coming next in Paris after de Gaulle
Also everything until the USSR fell, including Vietnam, was very much painted within the context of containing the USSR, which meant that even horrible things like the Vietnam war didn't make Europe freakout much that containing the USSR was no longer a thing the US cared about
Like there have been all sorts of moments in the past 50 years where allies might reasonably think the US was /distracted/ or /overcommitted/ or acting in ways contrary to their shared values. But never a sense of "oh, wait, what if the US is totally uninterested in, or even hostile to, our defence"
Europe freaked out about Vietnam for the same reasons it did Korea, namely "We don't care if some *string of racial slurs* turn Commie as long as we don't and the ungrateful bastards threw us out anyway."
And to pull on that further, the fact that this possible decoupling is happening *right as the Bear decided to come out of the woods again* is, well, it's something
It won't happen overnight but a very real possibility is this has put us on a trajectory of the Atlantic Relationship reverting back to pre-1938, maybe more like pre-1917
I mean, the Europeans have a very good reason to believe the United States would betray them in a war on their continent against the Russians. Namely, that the United States is in fact doing that right now.
And expected us to arm them indefinitely and fund them to the Moon but giving us no say-so on the war that would have ground to a halt without our weapons and our money. And to compound it, they managed to add to their 20th Century losing streak in a more embarrassing way than 1940.
Charles De Gaulle led France out of NATO in 1967, refusing to accept a subservient role to the USA, while still being anti the USSR. Gaullism means European allies concentrating on Europe, while Atlanticism means Europe + America (where the USA tends to dominate). https://www.history.com/articles/france-nato-withdrawal-charles-de-gaulle
Ah, so what he's saying is that soon NATO will be a true equal footing ... is union the right word? collection of allies? instead of being led by and follow a superpower (the US)
De Gaulle thought France should not lose its freedom of action to the USA, he kept links with NATO & they probably would have fought alongside the USA if needed, but he didn't want to have to count on them or trust them. Merz & others are thinking the same. Maybe NATO won't include the USA one day.
This gets to the heart of my disgruntled view of many more educated and opinionated posts. I might agree with them if I knew what the hell they were talking about. I just don't have the lexacon (I know some fancy words).
Well to be fair their communication was hard to understand because of typos but also an attempt to be too brief. Seems like a point was also not fully written out
It is two rival ideologies about how Europe should organise their forgein policy.
Gaullism means that Europe should focus on Europe and especially its own capacity and is especially in connection with France and Charles de Gaulle.
Atlanticism is more the classical idea of the West. So Europe+ the US and the wider parts of the alliance. It also has some implications on free trade and economic policy.
Especially in Germany, it is one of the biggest divides on how to organise the countries' relations.
NATO leaders "speak" Atlanticism (supremacy of NATO/the US and Western Europe) as their first language but are starting to speak Gaullism (Charles de Gaulle did not want France to be subordinate to the US military political complex and pulled out of NATO)
This could be the gin talking but… if this makes the EU become more than a loose trade and finance collective, it all might, if you squint, and don’t look too hard, be almost worth it.
Eh, his tendencies were born from the moment he heard Renaud begging America to save France when Hitler was at the gates of Paris. Which we did not do.
Comments
Can you explain? Or is it me?
I got stuck on the formative memories of America, which is a phrase I really like. What memories, cultural memories, formed America at the start and at each point since?
it was a deliberate, conscious choice of the post-New Deal and especially post-civil rights conservatives
i.e. we're far enough past the Cold War that our "global good guy" cred has elapsed irrespective of the two Trump regimes
I think the different ingredient is a live war in Ukraine. the need for military spending isn't hypothetical.
Combat in Iraq didn't end til 2021, and there's also like... whole genocides the US is funding? Most people born from the 80s on can remember America being at war with someone or other, or at least with US airstrikes being normal
Although it wasn’t the grave for our Empire, it just felt that way. The grave would have to wait for the real Afghanistan of our Afghanistan.
Gaullism means that Europe should focus on Europe and especially its own capacity and is especially in connection with France and Charles de Gaulle.
Especially in Germany, it is one of the biggest divides on how to organise the countries' relations.
Atlanticism is the political and economic idea that North America and Western Europe should be allies, particularly NATO.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9qhDGv300&list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq&index=2&pp=iAQB