With fewer friends the super power ends up simply being a power. A more volatile world.
Brilliant minds thought up the Marshall plan. It secured the world. Nothing less! The world.
Did it come with a price? Yes. But what the protectionist do not get today as they dismantle the system is that is might actually have been cheaper than the alternative while remaining the leader.
Those who think that governments should be run as a business are delusional. They think we buy F35 because they are the best. The sales proves it! They will never realize that SAAB had better and more fitting options for us. They will never understand that we did pay some protection money. It is not a simple Luca Brasi situation. It is more subtle.
Ou friend is gone so we will try to do that. We have to. Now you understand that might not actually be to your advantage.
The Marshall Plan was brilliant, but it's pretty terrible that it was ever necessary in the first place. Americans don't really want to be the world's bodyguard. Don't get me wrong, we like to be #1, but our original default position was neutrality when it comes to foreign conflicts. We hesitated to even enter World War II. It wasn't our war, it wasn't Europe's first conflict and it was unlikely to be its last.
The arrangements made after WWII came at a time when U.S. was over 40% of the global GDP. That's no longer the case. Now, globalism has gutted our own labor market, and many formerly proud manufacturing hubs in the U.S. are saddled with methamphetamine and fentanyl problems. Our veterans have a very high incidence of suicide, and we have a lot of them, because we have had to maintain a large military for a century. Unchecked immigration has diluted national cohesion and inflamed tensions domestically (and from what I understand, Europe's got its own internal tensions with this problem). The world as it existed in 1948 no longer exists.
Sorry you think the SAAB is better than the F35. It's really not, and lacks the same thrust, payload, stealth, etc but it's a perfectly good jet. That being said, I don't think fighter jets are going to win 21st century warfare. Drone tech is likely to be the deciding factor.
You realize that if relations really broke down to that level, then most likely NATO would simply exclude the USA, it wouldn't be all of the other NATO members leaving it, right? Also, if it gets to the level that the EU / Europe would feel they no longer want a military alliance with the USA, then it's likely that they wouldn't want to counter just Russian and Chinese influence, but US influence as well - there's nothing inherently better about US influence than the other two (Chinese influence so far has been the least bad outside of China itself, out of the three, by far - though I have no delusion that this will continue as China's power grows).
"Danish broadcaster DR reported that at least three U.S. citizens linked to the U.S. government were involved in activities that, reportedly, authorities fear could be used covertly to support Trump’s desire to make Greenland part of the United States."
I don't know where to start with this, there is so much space here you could drive a country through it. So citizens (not government officials) "linked", what does that mean? What activities exactly? "Fear could be" again, what does this mean, people are fearful, over what? People are afraid all the time.
