Who cares about all the people he'll hurt along the way amiright? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Imperialism is the use of one's power to exert unilateral control over other countries. Funding and defunding are both ways to unilaterally exert control over other countries. Defunding countries which are defending themselves from imperialism in the hopes of the imperialist aggressor achieving their aims is absolutely imperialism or support for imperialism.
The surge this year, then, being...?
... do you have any idea how many genocidal states are in existence right now?
You talk about "The Global South", but your focus on developed countries is... significant.
And Trump is already making an enemy of the EU. It's been three fucking months and our almost century-long alliance with Western Europe is in tatters.
Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia? Really? You could've at least picked Libya.
In any case, you can pick any decade of the Cold War you like and I can name half a dozen US-sponsored unjustified wars and coups which led to far greater death tolls than the entire ~15 year duration of the 'War on Terror'. As I said, any individual decade of the Cold War alone is worse than our conduct post-Cold War - and that, I may emphasize, is a low bar for the Cold War to limbo under. But it manages.
"The Imperial Power(tm) is more desperate and isolated" does not have the effect you think it does.
We've already got Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, and Turkiye there, with the Netherlands, Italy, and Austria looking to radicalize, and the UK, France, Sweden, Belgium, and Germany all at risk.
The dominos are set, and cheering on the one falling isn't going to lead to the rest standing firm, in all likelihood.
This is the case for Ukraine and is imperialism because of the mineral deal stuff, but other foreign aid Trump cut seems to be more of a case of "fuck you I got mine" rather than trying to get exert control over anyone.
What surge? The article you linked doesn't list an out of the ordinary increase this year.
Plenty, but AFAIK America has little interest in most of them.
He's antagonizing them, but so far he hasn't done anything that would cause, say, EU sanctions on America.
The military intervention in Libya was separate from the war on terror to my knowledge, while the one in Somalia had the textbook war on terror motivation of "counterterrorism". It also, in typical war on terror fashion, restarted the civil war and destroyed any hope Somalia had for stability for a generation.
Okay bet. Do 1980-1989.
I wouldn't count Turkey there since their government isn't exactly far-right, but yeah fair enough
Rather than cheering I simply have very little faith in Americans' or Europeans' ability to resist the rise of the far-right, because, well, gestures broadly.
His administration is quite nakedly making demands of other countries as part of 'negotiating' tariffs.
I can think of very few countries that America has 'little interest' in, and much of our 'lack' of interest in genocidal states is because that was, in the post-Cold War environment, bad PR.
We now have a regime that doesn't care about PR. In fact, bad PR is a good thing to their power base, because it 'owns the libs'.
Certainly, the fact that I pointed out "can offer genocidal states" necessarily, for that matter, implies that the states I'm talking about do not currently receive full US support. Do you think there's anyone Trump wouldn't support to have another country's leader slobbering on his limp knob and calling him "Sir, Mr. Trump", with tears in his eyes?
And you think the War on Terror in Somalia compares to how bad the Cold War was... how? Morality or intensity, I'll accept either justification?
Since that is the context in which your list was made and which I expressed incredulity at Somalia's inclusion?
Are we talking about tariffs or foreign aid right now? The tariff-based negotiations are pretty nakedly imperialist, I'll concede that. Cutting non-Ukraine foreign aid is not.
That's... fair enough??? Part of me doesn't want to believe it'll go quite that easily, but you never know with these people.
I mean Ethiopia, backed by the US, went in and restarted an almost 20 years old civil war, causing the death of about a hundred thousand people and displacing a million (between 2006 and 2009, I can't find numbers for post-2009 but it can't be good). It doesn't obviously measure up to the cold war on its own, but it's another horrible thing caused by the war on terror.
Considering that the intention in both cases is to get other actors to lick Trump's boots, what's the difference?
Fighting had never stopped. The idea that Ethiopia restarted the civil war is not even vaguely close to what happened.