Any country that keeps gold in US or dollar reserves may end up looking very foolish. Sanctions and asset (financial and real) forfeitures coming soon to a country near you.
The simplest and easiest geopolitical strategy that is available to any country: switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels. Keep out of oil and natural gas. Keep out of dollar system. Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama, dollar shenanigans. Remember China has export restrictions on oil. When things get tough, most of the oil countries (with refining capacity to export) are going to have export restrictions. Thats the only way to deal with the mobs in their own country.
Richard Campbell: Politicians aren’t going to do things that aren’t popular, so we have to make these solutions popular for there to be a chance to build political will.
Richard Campbell: Corporations are inherently conservative, and power companies doubly so. Until there is a public groundswell demanding these changes, they won’t act. It’s up to us to make enough noise and show that these are good solutions worth pushing forward.
> switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels
You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale. Maybe just your house or some districts. You still need coal/gas/nuclear to maintain the power grid.
Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned. Oil is a must in military. If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
Look at any recent data, and you'll find that renewables scale fantastically well, are super cheap, and even today as they are the cheapest source of energy, they continue to get cheaper.
Meanwhile nuclear, even in France, is an example of "negative learning by doing," where it gets more expensive as time goes on.
Even China, the best builder out there, is only doing a token amount of nuclear compared to renewables and batteries. And no advanced economy is going to be able to build nuclear as cheap as China; our labor costs are too high and construction logistics are not good enough.
> You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
This is of course very wrong, there are very highly diversified sources for all these things, more and more are coming online.
Nuclear is in far more dire straits along those lines than renewables, there's more constrained supplies, a shrinking number of people building the supplies. The US didn't stop importing uranium from Russia until a 2024 ban...
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well.
China is scaling, so is Australia, quite possibly other countries. We'll know when they hit the limits and stop deploying more solar.
Solar is dirt cheap (1200x cheaper), batteries are getting cheaper by the minute.
If you are rational thinking person, would you bet on technology that increases in costs over time or gets cheaper over time?
> invest in nuclear.
There was a time many decades ago to deploy nuclear at scale. Fossil fuel shills used 'environmentalists' to shut down all progress of nuclear. Now, they use nuclear again to slow down solar and wind. Just wait 30 - 50 years, we'll have a proper solution.
I do agree with you on nuclear though, countries should invest in nukes for security. All countries should invest in nuclear, it provides both energy security and real security from mischievous actors.
it takes at least 20 years to build a nuclear power plant and it takes another 20 to build it back. it costs a multitude of resources and money to build, maintain and tear down compared to renewables.
nuclear has its role currently but it's not the future.
Long long ago people planted trees where a windmill was to be build. Construction would start 20-30 years later and also took quite a bit of time.
If it took (I dunno) say a year to build one you could pick a new location and plant trees each year.
Seems almost an alien concept but I guess it is a bit like a construction company has to wait for the new powerplant to expire before they get to build a new one.
Yes, switching energy sources takes a while, but the energy system is being completely rebuilt anyway as equipment ages out, so you need to be continually doing this anyway.
None of the actions that countries are taking to decouple from the US happen over night.
The US has destroyed its privileged position among nations, but the effects won't be visible for a couple more years.
There’s a huge difference in relying on others for daily fuel/fertiliser supplies for your survival, and relying on them for parts for vehicles/infrastructure that can run for decades.
There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.
You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.
> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.
No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).
> Oil is a must in military.
I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?
I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.
The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.
I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)
> You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
Eh, once you have built your grid in solar and wind, you don't really depend on the countries that sold solar panels and wind turbines for you. Those last for a long time, long enjoy that you can even spin up manufacturing yourself; it's not really something inscrutable.
There may be an argument that depending on the state of the world that raw materials to manufacture some of those things may become more complicated to access, but that is true even for countries that currently make those.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
How is it hard? It's difficult to build electrical generation these days and not go renewables because they're so cheap and fast to deploy.
It's not a total solution, but market forces wise everything says "build solar and batteries with your money". Governments practically don't need to do anything for this to be the default.
I am a non-hater of renewables. I add this because in plenty of _your_ circles, you are either all in on renewables or you are a coal thumper, basically. I am neither. We need to add nuance by complicating this conversation.
The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved. I want this solved or at least improved because it is the bottleneck. In fact, it is such a bottleneck that its energy generation factor is noted as 1:10, i.e.: a power plant rated at 100MW, registers as 10MW in comparison to nuclear and hydro (and obviously coal and gas.) So this means that to add a 1MW worth of energy generation to the grid, 10MW must be built.
Another problem that hits wind farms is that when there's wind blowing somewhere, it tends to blow everywhere, or some large area. So suddenly there is too much energy want to flow in to the grid which hits the core of the problem with grids at this point because energy that is inserted into it, must be extracted to the exact same magnitude at the same time. So a 100GW demand must be met by 100.0GW production. Now if 110GW is produced, something _MUST_ consume it, so there are two choices:
1. make someone consume it, i.e., sell it to them. They have to buy it so the price will drop until there are enough buyers and this does not stop at 0, prices will go in to the negative. So the market will pay you to use electricity. The market. Or:
2. shut off the power plants until we are back at 100GW (or whatever can be met by consumption.)
3. there is also a catastrophic third option. If you have a situation where too much energy (read power if you want to) is inserted into the grid, then its frequency will rise, this damages the infrastructure and connected consumers, so they will get disconnected. Read large and broad power outages. These situations are also non-trivial to recover from. I.e.: to "restart the grid" afterwards. See what happened in Spain last(?) year.
How do you run a power plant in a market that demands payment to accept the energy you want to sell? You cannot. So this is the windfarm paradox, feel free to compare to Russel's paradox. It goes something like this:
A windfarm makes money whenever the wind blows because only then does it have energy to sell.
A windfarm cannot make money whenefer the wind blows because then the market price goes to zero.
So a windfarm makes money when the wind blows and does not blow at the same time.
To solve this problem, energy consumption must be made capable of also being intermittent. Either run "factories" intermittently, which might very well be part of the solution. And/ or, have huge accumulation capacity in the grid that can swallow the over generation.
TLDR: renewables is the easy answer but very hard thing to do. The hard answer is the one I have given, together with getting more nuclear going which is difficult and expensive. But.. what can we do?
If you have overproduction of wind, you feather the blades to prevent overproduction. When production exceeds load, the voltage and/or frequency rises as the current drops. Blade angle is under constant control, and those are inputs.
And that's an oversimplification of what happened in Spain. Grid-following systems shut down for safety reasons when there was no grid to follow.
Wind and solar systems can be configured in a grid-forming capacity, but the ones in Spain weren't.
Wind farms make money whenever the marginal producer of electricity is a higher cost producer. AKA basically all the time.
No it is not solved. Grid-scale batteries are absolutely not being mass-produced today. Let's stick to the truth here.
I would LOVE for this to be the case, however. Adding this again so that I am not lumped together with the coal thumpers.
What exists, TO BE BUILT that is, is battery farms, sure, but they are nowhere nere big enough. They are nowhere nere close enough to compensate the factor applied to wind farm energy generation. But let's hope good progress can be made in the accumulation aspect of intermittent energy production.
Intermittent production is currently being solved by natural gas and coal production. With very rare exceptions these are not being shut down. Therefore, the immense amounts of wind, solar and batteries that are being added to the grid are purely additive. They are making the grid cleaner & cheaper, they're not impeding in any way the ability of other generation sources to cover the gaps.
Once wind/solar/batteries reaches about 90-95% of production, it'll become harder economically and technically to increase that number. I'd love to have that problem, we're far from 90% today.
This sounds like my friend Mick who developed a gambling habit, but assured me that his method was flawless. If you lose, double your bet next time to cover the loss. If you lose that one, double it again. You can't keep on losing.
Sorry I’m not quite following what point you’re trying to make.
Throughout my life the cost of renewable energy generation and storage has been dropping exponentially whilst growing in capability.
That’s been happening for decades now.
The cost of fossil fuels just keeps rising with spikes every time someone starts a war.
Fossil fuels are already far more expensive. In 10 years no one will consider them seriously and in 20 years they’ll be a specialist novelty used by museums to run classic cars.
Mick thought he could give up his job and live off winnings. No steady state earnings. Just wins and losses. On the bad days he lose, and hope his winnings on other days would see him right.
Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.
If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"
Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?
Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.
You don't seem to understand how renewables actually work.
The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)
The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.
It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.
And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)
* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".
It sounds like your issue is with capitalism, not with renewable energy. Luckily, we have plenty of examples of aspects of society that have been deemed too important to leave purely to market forces. In fact, electricity generation is already (mostly) one of them.
As solar and batteries become even cheaper (we're already at the point where they're cheaper than anything else) we can just choose to overbuild capacity and turn down/off whatever other generation isn't necessary at any given time. Utilities already have to predict grid usage based on weather and all sorts of other factors, so it's not like this isn't something that isn't already happening.
What? Absolutely not, I love capitalism. The problem is that it is suspended when it comes to the wind farms, they are pretty much always heavily subsidized and on a socialized loss scheme at that.
And no, I have no problem with renewables either.
If your conclusion from reading what you said is this, then you did not read because I said the exact opposite.
Batteries don't solve the storage problem, but surely you know this.
China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
Solar and wind can be part of that strategy but it's not so simple, otherwise people would do it
Bateries do solve storage problems. And yes, china energy strategy is based on wind and solar - their portion of China energy production is massively growing.
Batteries can solve short term (days to a week at most) storage problems, they don't solve seasonal storage problems - making sure you have enough energy all the way through a cold, not very sunny, and not consistently windy winter.
If you don't believe me, run the numbers of how many kg of lithium batteries China would need to supply an entire week of energy in the middle of winter (all energy, not just current electricity demand, because in this scenario we're assuming everything is 100% electrified).
Also if you're potentially going to be fighting a war, you need more energy, not less, and it's even more important for it to be reliable year-round.
This is why China is doing what they're doing, they're not idiots and they know that wishful thinking is not a strategy
You dont need "very sunny" for solar to work. If you need to invent dark windless winter to make a non existent issue maybe you are just too deep in bullshit.
> China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
This opinion is rather simplistic. China is reported to have 60% of it's energy needs already supplied by renewable sources, but this transition creates different types of challenges such as preserving the power grid's inertia. Otherwise you might see yourself in a scenario such as the Spanish blackout. This means having in place strategies for fast response (gas) and baseline (hydro storage, nuclear) to prevent the scenario.
> batteries are the fastest response power. gas is high maintenance, & bad capex as an intermittent source.
Batteries have a limited capacity and have a higher investment cost. Gas is the standard option for fast response. Pumped-storage hydro has by far the highest capex and has a heavy environment impact.
It's baffling how people show up in this sort of discussions arguing that standard tried-and-true strategies somehow don't work. Quite odd.
Batteries and solar have been beating lifetime cost of fast response gas turbines for five years or more. Now with uncontrolled fossil fuel cost spikes the operating costs of gas are highly variable compared to the pretty much flat investment and operating cost on battery + solar. if one were comparing battery plus renewables for full seasonal offsets are tighter, but the costs are so much lower, you can provision more and plan to dump power in the summer (or maybe not as this last long hot fossil fueled climate change summer will drive new demand for a/c)
It was a strategic decision during the cold war. Presumably if the USSR invaded Europe would be occupied. The gold would be used to fund the resistance.
You forget about trade. Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama if they don't depend on others for energy or finances, or food, or steel, or electronics, or...
To be immune, a country needs to be self-sufficient in everything it can't do without: food, energy, raw materials, manufactured stuff, military hardware, financial services. Plus it needs to have a strong enough military to defend it all. That's non-trivial to achieve. It's far more than just energy self-sufficiency.
and it's going to be like that for decades unless november there's a broad sweep of offices and the other party actually exercises power for once and prosecutes politicians criminal behavior instead of that infuriating clemency nonsense they always do.
I'm betting they'll get elected and then sit on their hands as hard as possible calling it a "return to normalcy", fight their constituency, insist on doing absolutely nothing, and then get kicked right back out 2 years later and whine about people not voting for them.
The change has to be sweeping. The current people in power doing crypto pump and dumps: Internet trolls posting rage-baiting AI slop as official government communications as like the FDA and the CDC, then betting on polymarket about who they're going to bomb, teenaged 4chan trolls ctrl+f'ing for keywords to cancel things like cancer research because it has a "woke word" like "diversity" in published medical literature, these should be structurally impossible from getting near power again. Don't ever forget this happened. There's no undo. Decades down the drain.
I suspect the people of Greenland won't ever trust Americans again.
This isn't just going to go away. You can't just undo what Orange Mussolini is doing, and it'll take far longer than a decade before anything like a trusting relationship can be reestablished.
As someone in Blighty just add it to the pile of existing issues with the US and its current government.
Unless the US gives significant military aid (or outright joins them) the Argentinians can't take the Falklands, They are much more heavily defended than they were in the 80's (in fairness it would be hard for them to be less defended than that).
This is just the usual "Things are fucked at home, Distract them with the Malvinas Again" they pull periodically, it's to appeal to his domestic base - about all we (the UK) should do is state it's not a matter for debate and dust off the "If they do the stupid thing again" plans we already have and then carry on.
Bigger problems in the world for us than the Malvinas.
As a European, that would change nothing for me. The issue is systemic disinformation, fundamental lack of empathy and all those echo chambers. As long as this exists, the current situation will repeat or get worse.
Edit: look, see? About the barbarity of sniping (the counterargument to the at least two hitters at time of edit is not the post from lyu07282). My post is obvious and direct - friend of mine met only days ago a minor intellectual stating that voting the current administration in the usa was "right" given the opponents, and it is one of a long series of encounters. That the acquaintances of the friend were insulted or not in response is irrelevant. That a regime gave power to another out of evident faults is a fact, and if the reaction of some is ventral - "oooh! boo!" - the highway downwards remains paved.
There needs to be some set of adults who take this lawless criminal hijacking of the government seriously for what it is.
This is clear as day, not a matter of politics. It's just clear crime. The material evidence is irrefutable and indefensible and it happens multiple times a day.
Sorry but no "unless" left IMO. China has been and is still gaining momentum in every strategic matter, and they are very probably going to lead from now on.
What I am curious about is how that global leadership is going to change them, from citizens to government.
I don't think it's going to be paper-thin. Paper-thin would be a move of five to ten seats. This doesn't feel like that. This feels more like 30.
All that's going to do, though, is mean that Trump can't get anything through the legislature. The legislature can't get anything passed, either, because Trump can veto it. So he's going to rule even more by executive order, because he won't be able to get cover from Congress.
Any real change will have to be after 2028. The Democrats are likely to hold both houses and the presidency, unless they absolutely blow it (which they could). That's the one chance. If they don't enact concrete change by 2030, then this will be normalized, and the next time it happens will destroy any remains of actual democracy in the US.
Why 2030 instead of 2032? Because there's likely to be a backlash in the election of 2030. There always is. The Democrats may not have the power to do what needs done after 2030.
Mitch McConnell holding the seat then railroading in a judge is bad faith cheating and we can't be constrained by procedure and let bad faith actors get away with cheating.
Revoke the appointments and change the rules. SCOTUS isn't some unquestionable papal position with divine right.
The wild corruption of accepting gifts from groups arguing on the court and then using Galaxy brain weasel language to claim it doesn't count. No. Every person in prison has a reason why the law shouldn't have applied to them.
Are we a nation of rules or aren't we?
You follow the rules and maintain integrity of your oath or you're kicked to the curb.
And calling this a both sides political thing is the most tired dodge I've seen. I'm tired of the bullshit excuses why someone with a Trump has can rob bank
it's not about legislation and veto, it's about exercising congress's prosecutorial power. I don't want to hear any weak kneed bullshit about "well they'll do it to us".
Don't ever take that bullshit. Nobody else is doing anywhere near the wild level of criminality. Seriously, all this procedure stuff around groups that are breaking the law is insane.
It'd be like if a policeman saw someone rob a place, put the things in the car, and then the thief says "oh but there's a no looking in car rule" and then just drives away.
This is all complete insanity. Charge these people with the dozens of crimes they are committing every day.
It's cute that you think power is going to change hands in November. It'll be his reischtags fire. He's already planning to send ice to police the elections and only in places he's bound to win will people be voting.
> and it's going to be like that for decades unless in like november or so there's a broad sweep of offices and the other party actually exercises power for once and prosecutes politicians criminal behavior instead of that infuriating clemency nonsense they always do.
European here. I've written about that on Reddit but can't find it because the search there is dogshit so I'll have to write from memory...
We will not trust the US again any time soon, and so is our position regarding the UK. What both of you did, and especially how you got there, is an appalling history, a tale of a completely subverted democracy, and most importantly of a system that never got forced to be updated to centuries of learnings, unlike virtually all developed countries who underwent sometimes multiple wars, revolutions or the occasional peaceful democratisation.
Before we trust you again, you must undergo what we Germans had to post-1945. You have to update your constitutions, yeet out the fossil crap that in no small part led to the situation (FPTP voting, media regulations, in the case of the US making voting either a holiday or move it to Sunday like everyone else), prosecute not just the corrupt politicians but also the oligarchs that backed them, introduce an educational system that is actually worth the name to prevent the youth being corrupted, and demonstrate for many years that you can be trusted again.
Trust is easy to tear apart. All you need is a buffoon shitting in his own diapers [1] or a bus littered with propaganda [2] and a dumbass uneducated populace. But it takes decades and/or immense suffering to (re)build. And for both the US and the UK we gave you not just one chance to show you're better, but multiple. The US first had Bush wo tried to rope us into the Iraq war with his WMD lies, then after Obama came Trump 1, and after Biden came Trump 2, and the final straw regarding the UK and its ever more braindead PM choices was Lettuce Liz [3].
The AfD, which became Germany's top-polling political party for the first time last year, is now the clear leader in polls. It may soon win an absolute majority in a German state election.
The far-right is also widely projected to win the 2027 French presidential election:
And Switzerland seriously considered immigration restrictions much harsher than anything contemplated by the US.
It's interesting to see how leftism changes as you cross the Atlantic. In the US it's usually baseless moral self-flagellation; in Europe it's usually baseless moral preening. In neither case do the facts seem to be particularly important.
"we gave you not just one chance to show you're better" is such a fascinating thing for you to say. For years our leaders told you to be less dependent on us. Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us. It's mind-blowing how out-of-touch you guys can be.
Please elaborate, whats so strict about Switzerlands restrictions? Why shouldnt a country be allowed to limit the people they want to have from immigration?
(Exercise for you: Try to get a passport from Liechtenstein, even if you work there permanently for a Liechtenstein company, its unlikely that you can even rent an appartment there!)
>Please elaborate, whats so strict about Switzerlands restrictions? Why shouldnt a country be allowed to limit the people they want to have from immigration?
Precisely. Why is it that people only clutch their pearls with horror when this principle is applied to the US?
I suspect because we don't regularly hear of masked armed thugs in Switzerland beating up, sometimes killing or throwing into concentration camps innocent people who were looking to immigrate.
Nothing wrong with making immigration laws strict, if that's what a country wants.
That is totall fine.
But there is no justification to beat people up, kill them or throw them into concentration camps. Just tell them no in a professional manner and politely send them back to their own country (also, not some random contry they haver never been in).
As an American, I don't necessarily want the US to be trusted. I want foreign governments to put pressure on us to stop developing omnicidal AI. The sooner the "rogue AI agents" conversation links up with the "USA is untrustworthy" conversation, the better.
I'm not as optimistic as you are, because a component of the rightward shift is the international collaboration of the respective movements' leaders. For example, US republicans closely worked together with Orbans party and Germanys AfD, exchanging strategies and such. This is also reflected across the media landscape in these countries - when new fabricated talking points pop up across US conservative spaces, it usually takes 2-4 weeks until the same talking points are repeated by many German right-wing media outlets.
Of course these alliances won't survive forever, as these movements have to continually expand their definitions of "out-groups" to keep their core "in-groups" satisfied, since they keep making their countries' issues worse by attempting fixes that are easy, simple, and wrong. But when a movement is built around the rejection of any uncomfortable history or research mixed with a huge dose of anti-intellectualism, it is fundamentally incapable of ever reflecting and learning beyond what the personal gain of their leaders.
Why do you think so? The US funding won't suddenly stop, especially given how much the GOP hates the EU. Plenty of other rich people too.
Unless there are objectively good reasons to expect this we must stay vigilant, since if we gamble on infighting and it goes poorly, the consequences could become horrifying.
yup, but the utter majority of foreign funding that was found in the AfD and the other far-right parties' scandals came from Russia. The propaganda they spout comes straight from Russia. The bot farms amplifying their propaganda are mostly Russian.
Sure, the US MAGA network, the super riches (Musk, Thiel, ...) aren't to be underestimated. But they are breaking apart already and without a cohesive force connecting them, they will be much less powerful.
Sure, so far the funds came from Russia, but the US government has openly talked about increasing their funding.
I don't think that their propaganda is fully dependent on Russia. IMO their strategy was really easy to observe during/after the 2020 election: they do contentious things with barely any justification, then watch conservative social media spaces for explanations/justifications that users naturally share & amplify. From these options, they select ones advantageous to them, and then turn them into talking points. This machine doesn't need to get talking points from Russia! They just need a halfway charismatic leader to keep it going, especially due to my next point.
The bot farms are no longer needed thanks to AI! I guarantee you, they are already running plenty of bots themselves. And since these days most social media & news media companies are aligned with/owned by them, they can easily optimize their approach well enough to become dangerously effective.
I just don't see a reason to feel so safe about them breaking apart before major damage is done. Just look at how genuinely friendly Trump acts towards most highly authoritarian leaders, compared to the way he acts towards most other leaders. I assume they'll definitely break apart after e.g. the EU is broken up, because then the US will squeeze everyone else. But under Trump they're going to keep it up, as far as I can see.
Feel like there’s an opportunity for a faulty towers reversal where we apologise for Brexit, Boris and Truss. If it helps any, 48% of us wanted to stay. This Brit has a profound sense of wehmut. Seems like the whole continent is struggling with nationalism though, no? Hearing AFD is on the rise
> Feel like there’s an opportunity for a faulty towers reversal where we apologise for Brexit, Boris and Truss.
There certainly is, and I for one would certainly appreciate it. The problem is, with Reform polling as high as it does... there is a pretty high chance that they torpedo any negotiations :(
Trust and trustworthiness. Trust is very hard to win back, once its gone. Trustworthiness makes you willing to rely on a partner. Trustworthiness only builds very slowly over prolonged periods of time, by consistently not betraying ones trust.
You write as if you have confabulated yourself into being Europe's official spokesperson. This is all a bit high-handed.
I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
> I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
The Brexit shitshow took years to resolve from the Brexit vote to the actual Brexit event and absolutely hogged attention all over the EU apparatus. We could have used the energy we had to expend on that crap (including trying to prevent a restart of the Ireland-related violence) to instead make the EU itself better, react to the multitude of crises happening during the time, or furthen the EU integration. But no, we had the constant noise of Brexit all the time.
> Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
Which is even worse from EU perspective. PMs/Presidents changing every 4-ish years, okay, that's pretty standard. But it's hard to negotiate anything, knowing that your negotiation partner can get booted at any time.
Well, the only thing the Trump admin did that really hurt us was the tariff trade war and the Iran war. The rest sucked for those affected, but had little consequence for Europe, and so the prevailing attitude here is "we can't do anything anyway, why should it matter for us"...
When your nation voted poorly last time you picked a homicidal maniac who killed people in death factories. Americans helped you then, at extreme cost.
Trump pumps-and-dumps the world economy, but his approval rating is also below 1/3. Most Americans clearly don't approve, so why should we not trust them?
If all it takes for democratic nations to stop working together is that they elect a crook once, we're all doomed. Many european nations are very close to picking their own "Trumps" in the next elections.
In a democracy, any one crook's influence should be short-lived. That's the whole point of a democracy.
We need to help each other remain democracies, as the alternatives are so much worse.
That said, sometimes help comes in the form of removing the gold to say "you're out of line buddy".
> We need to help each other remain democracies, as the alternatives are so much worse.
Trump and his cronies are openly attempting to break the EU apart via funding and amplifying right-wing movements across the EU. These movements are collaborating, sharing strategies and spreading the same talking points, while they're using their control over social media platforms etc. to suffocate our democracies.
I would love to be able to trust the US. But the guy currently pissing against everyone's legs was re-elected after an attempted Putsch. How could they ever remove all MAGA influence from all of society and government?
Even if the US proves me wrong and manages to turn the wheel around, I won't see the US as an ally again until 1-2 decades pass without republicans taking any control over the government.
Except they did. Votes for Grump in 2016 were completely understandable, sympathizable even. Responsibility for the train wreck of a first term didn't fall at the feet of the voters - it's explainable by one politician being an utter shitbag once in office. And for the most part our institutions did function to contain most of the (direct) damage.
But Grump 2024 was a known quantity. The votes in 2024 demonstrate that the average American is either proudly ignorant of the actual policies they're choosing (ie fully steeped in propaganda that hides/downplays the destruction), or actively malicious towards the rest of the world (while benefiting from a privileged international position). Neither one bodes well for future decisions, even if there is some political will to pull up from the current autocratic destruction.
And no, the "we didn't know how bad he was going to be" of a 33% approval rating doesn't make up for that. Grump was a known quantity for this election, and the only way someone could have "not known" is by actively rejecting listening to their fellow citizens. Which goes right back to willful ignorance.
>The votes in 2024 demonstrate that the average American is either proudly ignorant of the actual policies they're choosing
That's a simplistic take.
Trump had less than 50% of the popular vote even though his opponent was clearly showing signs of dementia. The last-minute replacement had spent too much time being the "defund the police/eat the rich" sidekick to Biden and was clearly not representative of the views of the average American. She still got almost as many votes as Trump, from Americans who wanted to vote "Not Trump".
Seems to me the average American had little choice. All the Democrats had to do was field a candidate that could finish a coherent sentence mirroring the average American sentiment and they'd have landslide victory. But they didn't.
> Trump pumps-and-dumps the world economy, but his approval rating is also below 1/3. Most Americans clearly don't approve, so why should we not trust them?
because all it takes is for someone not as toddler-y as Trump to run for the job, the "moderates" in the GOP are mostly gone.
> In a democracy, any one crook's influence should be short-lived. That's the whole point of a democracy.
The problem is, Trump's influence will last for much much longer because y'all appoint your Supreme Court judges for lifetime.
> If all it takes for democratic nations to stop working together is that they elect a crook once, we're all doomed. Many european nations are very close to picking their own "Trumps" in the next elections.
The thing is, the US keeps electing warmongering crooks (Bush 1, Bush 2 and Trump all engaged in definitely illegal wars), and Trump was reelected by the populace despite literally attempting a putsch. In any decent democracy, this would have yielded him and the ringleaders a lifetime in prison, if not capital punishment.
To me it never made any sense. The buffalo hat guys clearly had no greater plan, and the BBC actually had to apologize for faking a clip to make it seem Trump ordered it.
The BBC spreads to all of the EU's other news outlets, so Europeans "know" there was a putsch attempt based on a fake clip. Literally fake news, which plays directly into Trumps narrative and adding to the teflon layer he seems covered in.
Exaggerations, bad faith reporting, assumptions of guilt based on hunches - that's counterproductive if you really want to hold power accountable.
It's very important that the accuser of a crook is not a known liar. Because then even the true accusations won't stick and the crook gets away.
> China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
This can change quickly, as current management is less about comerce and more about "being the new Mao". If Russia can get Ukraine, USA can get Venezuela resources and threat Greenland, why wouldn't I get Taiwan?
At the rate Taiwan's superpower ally is declining, China just needs a little patience and a beneficent long term strategy & Taiwan will decide to switch ally's from self interest
Switch allies, to whom? The PRC? Do you realize PRC (Mainland China) and Taiwan are in a civil war? Taiwan switching allies to the PRC literally means admitting defeat.
Recall that Taiwan only exists because during the Chinese civil war, the United States provided the KMT with billions of dollars of military and financial aid. The KMT lost the mainland to the CCP (supported by the Soviets) and fled to Taiwan. The U.S. provided $4 billion dollars of aid, worth approximately $50 billion today.
The PRC would have retaken Taiwan decades ago if not for the U.S. guaranteeing Taiwan.
So continue in this line of reasoning - what happens as a currency strapped US turns inward and is more globally eschewed while making more common outright projections of regional power in the hemisphere of the Americas (while showing logistical failures in demonstrating cross globe power projection). Meanwhile China climbs the semi-fab ladder and Intel and even TSMC (re)builds its fabs in the US. KMT seems to maintain an intentionally ambiguous one-China policy. What are possible outcomes in the new state of geopolitics?
It's not changing the goalposts to recognize that the deterrents to China just stepping in to Taiwan are being undermined by US actions (some nothing to do with Taiwan). The value of Taiwan to the US as a counter to China's advancement seems in the latter stages of it's practical utility.
To answer your question perhaps one way could be for China to put forward a long term map to recognize the KMT as a party and unify as one China may years in the future. I would guess it would take a generation or even two to pass before that might happen and China would have to make the case that the people of Taiwan would be better off with the mainland rather than independent of it.
Specifically because China has now opportunity to gain international trust. Also, their own advancements in semiconductor manufacturing make Taiwan less attractive of an asset.
Why do people comment when they understand so little about the China/Taiwan issue? It has never been about semiconductors, that topic only exists as a post-rationalization of why the U.S. should continue to protect Taiwan against PRC takeover.
It has always been a legitimacy issue over who is the legitimate heir of the Chinese empire. China is still in a civil war. The communists (CCP) conquered the mainland and the former ruling party of China (KMT) fled to Taiwan. Taiwan is more successful than mainland China per capita on almost every standard economic and human development metric. It exists as a thorn in Beijing's side.
From the PRC perspective, reunification is a matter of national pride, and has nothing to do with semiconductors.
What's hyperbolic? The trust thing is borne out by repeated polling of which countries people trust. The current US administration is openly profiteering from governing.
I do think it'll take a few years before Americans wake up to how badly their reputation has tanked around the world across successive governments of either party in the recent decade.
Greenland, Iran, Falklands, Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan, all these things probably feel like minor missteps in the US news cycle but they have had a major impact.
I suppose it could turn very bearish in the next few years?
Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...
Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).
Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)
When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.
We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.
I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.
But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?
Also to note, why was the US trusted before? I think it's a heritage from the Marshall plan: The US saved us twice from Germany, therefore we owe them our nations and storing our gold there won't change much. A century later, it does.
I'd rephrase the question as: Would you trust your parents? In childhood years probably, because you owe them your education anyway.
Trust was never absolute. What we trusted was that the US would act rationally to further their interests. The US benefited tremendously from economic development across the world (industrialisation, free trade, rebuilding after the wars, etc). Sometimes the US government miscalculated (like in Iraq), but there was nothing really destructive like what Trump is doing.
Even when we disagreed we could still talk things through and agree on other things. Now, you have Trump insulting allies and praising ennemies every day. Of course there is no trust.
In this context "trust" is something of a euphemism. The US had a big enough military relatively speaking that if they came for your gold then it wasn't feasible to stop them unless you were part of a competing bloc. So, you know. Keep the gold somewhere the US is happy with. Best shot of getting to a good outcome, and the US was pretty reasonable in the 1900s.
That all appears to have changed. They may already have lost the ability to physically coerce even medium powers and at any rate look like they have to retreat the boundaries of their global Not-An-Empire. So it makes sense to start rethinking the gold's physical location.
I think you should look up the Morgenthau plan and look at the state of Germany today. Of course people will say that it's all because of Germany's own decisions. To which I would counter that Germany doesn't any sovereign decisions and the last time it did that was in 2011.
There is a very awkward episode in Belgium national history, at the eve of WWII, the then minister of finance Camille Gutt, had the foresight to move tonnes of gold from the national bank to America and France but for some reason our king did not manage to pack his bags in time and was captured by the Nazis.
"On 24 May 1940, Leopold, having assumed command of the Belgian Army, met with his ministers for the final time. The ministers urged the king to leave the country with the government. Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot reminded him that capitulation was a decision for the Belgian government, not for the king, to make. The king indicated that he had decided to remain in Belgium with his troops, whatever the outcome. The ministers took this to mean that he would establish a new government under the direction of Hitler, potentially a treasonous act. Leopold thought that he might be seen as a deserter if he were to leave the country: "He was resolved to remain with his army and amidst his people so as to share their fate."[6] Leopold had long had a difficult and contentious relationship with his ministers, acting independently of government influence whenever possible, and seeking to circumvent and even limit the ministers' powers, while expanding his own."
This isnt the first time European powers repatriated gold from the US. In 1971 France sent their navy to take their gold back because of another conservative US leader who decided to try and leverage our power at the expense of international trust and lost us a portion of said power[1].
I am an American. I preferred when we were stronger because we sweetened the deal enough with everyone else that they let us be world financier/police/anti piracy force/etc.
This fucking machismo theory taking over the older conservatives and the "The Torment Nexus was actually an awesome idea" taking over the tech bros and younger conservatives is fucking destroying us. Both groups seem incapable of believing in a win/win deal. Its also zero sum game to these fuckers and thus our soft power, and eventually our hard power, is being lost.
> Iran has exposed many limitations and weaknesses in America's defense capabilities
I'm far from a fan of current US policy nor an apologist, but this is a flawed analysis.
The war with Iran has exposed the stupidity of entering into that particular conflict, where:
* the goal (if there was one?) was something like regime change at arm's length
* 'arm's length' means using expensive long distance precision weapons, as there was/is very little taste for an invasion
* the target (Iran) is situated next to US allies which also happen to be hugely important as oil producers/exporters
* the target can also threaten a hugely important global shipping channel - the Strait of Hormuz
* the target has prepared for this action for years if not decades, and has good-enough drone technology to hand to threaten its neighbours and the Strait of Hormuz
This is an almost unique case in the world, and as such, its lessons of "US weakness" of "US failure" simply can't be assumed to translate more broadly. Iran is/was far more a strategic blunder which could/should have been foreseen, than a sign of America's weakness.
Yes, America currently has low stocks of long-range precision munitions and Patriots, but it still has the most powerful conventional military by far, and a globally-unrivalled ability to project that power around the world, if it chooses to.
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"But what about Ukraine? What about drone warfare? America is far behind there." This may have changed the game. The heavy usage of drones in Ukraine evolved, noting Russia didn't initially invade with swarms of drones. If the US had had a strong reason to support Ukraine (imagine Russia had instead invaded Florida) they could likely have used conventional means (air superiority, tanks, men) and ended the war within a few weeks. Admittedly, now it's far less certain how those tanks and men would fare in current drone battlefield.
> and it's a fraction of the threat China is
It depends entirely on the nature of the war envisaged (see the points about Iran being a unique situation.). In particular, China does not have anything like the US Navy to project power in the way that the US still can.
> * 'arm's length' means using expensive long distance precision weapons, as there was/is very little taste for an invasion
Do you think Americans have a taste for invading China?
> * the target (Iran) is situated next to US allies which also happen to be hugely important as oil producers/exporters
China itself is the factory of the world, the world's second largest economy and America's third largest trading partner. It doesn't even have to strike surrounding countries to take aim at the US economy. Yes, that would hurt China too, but China has been preparing for this and the COVID supply chain shock in the US was just a small taste of what life could be like for Americans who are used to being able to buy everything under the sun for cheap at Walmart or on Amazon.
> * the target can also threaten a hugely important global shipping channel - the Strait of Hormuz
About a fifth of maritime trade goes through the Taiwan Strait. It's also one of the world's most important global shipping channels.
> * the target has prepared for this action for years if not decades, and has good-enough drone technology to hand to threaten its neighbours and the Strait of Hormuz
China has been preparing for a Taiwan contingency in earnest for well over two decades, with a particular focus on the A2/AD capabilities needed to keep the US from establishing superiority in a relatively small area.
The US on the other hand, spent 20 years chasing goat herders and insurgents and is now trying to reorient itself back to preparation for major power conflict. Which is a huge challenge when China is, for example, has an estimated shipbuilding capacity that's 100+ times greater than America's.
Don't get me wrong. The US still obvious has a very powerful military, but it has been trying to be be all things for all conflicts in all places. China has been laser-focused on a military that can accomplish just a few things.
> Iran is/was far more a strategic blunder which could/should have been foreseen, than a sign of America's weakness.
You're treating an inability to strategize as a strategic blunder and not weakness. You should reconsider that. Because it's the very thing that has caused the US to fail at achieving its long-term strategic aims in basically all but one of the significant conflicts it has been involved in since the end of WW2.
> In particular, China does not have anything like the US Navy to project power in the way that the US still can.
In a Taiwan contingency, China doesn't have to. China is just ~100-150 miles away from its target. Again, it has spent more than 2 decades investing in A2/AD capabilities for that specific contingency.
The US lost these wars politically. This has always been the US weakness rather than pure military power.
The US was better at getting what they wanted through either soft power or threat of military action than as a result of actual intervention. Which is why it’s really counterproductive when the government does not believe in soft power anymore. It’s the one thing you did well and that allowed you to get your way most of the time.
> The US lost these wars (>... Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran) politically...
These were not wars! These were American offensive aggressions against sovereign countries that lasted years if not decades for the people in power to suck resources into and out of the military complex andfor their own agenda. Interest peters out after a while when people realize the true nature of the offensive.
A war has two or more participating countries and a dialect between the two to resolve the conflict. A war has casualties and losses on both sides of the border (preferably not from local flight equipment but actual military hardware).
> These were not wars! These were American offensive aggressions against sovereign countries that lasted years if not decades for the people in power to suck resources into and out of the military complex andfor their own agenda.
I don’t entirely disagree. But they were large scale military operations, however one-sided. They were expeditionary wars for all intents and purposes, just like Russia’s occupation in Ukraine is, even though no war was formally declared.
> A war has two or more participating countries and a dialect between the two to resolve the conflict.
That was how it worked historically between peer countries, a kind of gentlemen’s agreements. Asymmetric warfare is not so clear cut. Colonial wars were messier. So can be civil wars, which can spread across borders (just look at the Balkans).
> A war has casualties and losses on both sides of the border
Coalition soldiers died in Afghanistan. Many American died in Viet Nam as well, which contributed to the US finally losing in both cases.
>But they were large scale military operations, however one-sided
No matter the size, they remain manufactured conflict. Those conflicts were created in order to make money and change policies to make money, terrorism at its core to those who have to live through it.
> Coalition soldiers died in Afghanistan.
You didn't get my comment.
Casualties on both sides of the border°1.°2. Anyone going to bomb mainland America will signal the end of the American "expeditionary" one-sided conflict causing ways that have been going on since its inception.
°1 A one-off event a la 9/11 is an outlier and should be considered an attack by terrorists, (causing terror in the middle East and around the world for decades), and not an attack by a sovereign nation that another nation should retaliate against. Refer to policy change comment above, the war on drugs, the war on terror.. manufactured conflict.
°2 Coalition learned this time around, were not duped into joining the latest manufactured middle east conflict.
You go to war because you want an strategic outcome you can't get with other means. I doubt the strategic outcome of the USA in Irak or Afghanistan was "kill a lot, lose not that many, leave the country in shambles, achieve nothing in return".
The strategic outcome in both wars was to replace the goverment for a friendlier one, and in both cases the USA didn't get it, not even close.
But if you view wars as an sport where people kills other people and the winner is the one who kills better/more, then war is declared over and "teams" look for another war to "play", indeed USA won both wars in a walk.
Bit lost here, to be honest - What exactly did the US win in these engagements?
You might make a case for increased control of and importance in the middle east for Iraq, sure - that declined somewhat after a forced fumbling backwards out of Afghanistan and tanked on contact with Iran, so if that was the take home stuffed panda prize to write home about it's been well and truly run over by a road train and left in a ditch.
Clearly big wins for the USofA PMCs, but that's a little more narrow than "America".
What the fuck are you talking about? Afghanistan was handed back over to the Taliban. That's a victory? Kill them and chase them for decades and then release a bunch of their prisoners and return control of the country to them and declare victory?
I think its eventually in that if we put our might behind it we could take probably any 2-3 major military powers on the planet at the current moment, but that's with the caveat that putting our might behind it means tens to hundreds of thousands of dead military members which we as a nation have lost the stomach for.
I am saying eventually in that I think we will not even be able to do that if we found our grit again in the coming years as long as we are prioritizing raising testosterone in individual soldiers and removing qualified women and minorities from our military over having competent leaders and prioritizing logistics.
1. In Iran alone, the US has depleted stocks of some of its most advanced and important weapons systems.
2. The US does not have the manufacturing capacity for an extended conflict (China does) and the US is in fact dependent on Chinese components and raw materials.
3. As it relates to a China contingency in the Taiwan Strait: the Strait is ~140 miles at its widest point, and the Chinese have spent 20+ years investing in A2/AD capabilities. Given the state of the US military right now, it's hard to see how the US could overcome China's geographic advantage.
4. Our most important allies don't trust us (and we're even threatening some of them) so don't expect them to help.
5. Some of the most experienced and competent military leaders have been pushed out by an unqualified alcoholic who is more interested in how many pushups the cannon fodder can do than he is in how many ships America can build.
Russia had assets in Europe, look what happened to those. We got so naive and relaxed in the abscense of big wars within the "western hemisphere" that some people geniunly forgot what will happen to all of their "assets" when shit hit the fan.
I put my gold in the safe of my best friend, he has a good safe. Then I rapped and killed his wife and children, and destroyed his house. But he doesn’t want to give me the gold back.
ok, but russia and the west were never best friends, just some russians have major crushes on western europe and would still trust the europeans to hold their gold more than their own russian compatriots :))
You are doing the complexity of history, and the due diligence of objective assessment and focus, a great disservice with those gross similes.
Let us stick to a fitting analysis for the point of the limited trust entities can give each other, and let us stick to actual events for what the crimes committed are concerned (for the respect due).
Putin is under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Rapes and killings are widely documented as part of the war he started. I don't think the parent comment was overstating the crimes in question in its simile.
The biggest thing wrong is Russia's gold isn't in the EU. It's actually the other way round - Russia has kind of stolen Spain's gold, at least has it and won't return it.
> I don't think the parent comment was overstating the crimes
Said comment was understating the crimes, but also misrepresenting them in context.
Those crimes are exceptional in ferality, not exceptional as abstracted within the difficulties of trust building. (Which is also gained diplomatically, and diplomacy has clearly failed - bilaterally).
And: it is relevant. You gave away the relevancy yourself. It is called game theory. Games have rules. Break rules see what happens. Or instead be prepared.
Seems like someone broke rules but wasn't thinking through consequences or didn't care about them
Ok, so you meant, with «I really wonder why - something must have happened», that what happened is that they did not calculate it through properly. But that is suggested for a large number of the players in that game. All losers, or going trough a very suboptimal path.
It would be realistic if administrations went through a path in decision making guided by the awareness of their own weakness in decision making abilities.
Case in point: a naive belief in "high moral". Bad guy (Ru) attacks good guy - bad, punish, cancel. When good guy (US) attacks bad guy - that's different, whataboutism etc. Such POV falls apart when good guy (US) attacks another good guy (EU), and while you may chose to ignore such possibility, European leaders don't (a rare case of competence on their side).
Possibility? Didn't the US sabotage Nordstream 2 a few years ago? It's pretty clear that the US isn't friendly towards Europe unless Europe behaves like a vassal.
Well. Not sure. Untrustable system, maybe. (The whole chain that brought to this stage is improper - and the damaging factors are still active.)
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Edit: Again. First, that the current regime in the usa would be unstable is an idea to be justified. Especially given the efforts made before the 2024 elections already to plan its stabilization.
Then, from a system engineering perspective, the political system in the usa remains broken by design. See the 2000 elections as a strong demonstration.
Then, if there have been progress to fix the issues, show it.
Oh I see. Well these do seem like end times for US democracy, very similar to the fall of Rome. So yes the problems are broader than Trump and probably won’t end with him, but he is the most dangerous character so far and I’m entirely unsurprised that other countries are disengaging
As we’ve seen from the violated norms so far and the attack on the capital building, it would not be a big step to dictatorship disguised as firm leadership in time of war or civil disturbance.
Does anyone in power anywhere actually think China has finally overtaken the US hegemony? Or are we pretending someone else might somehow hold that position?
Nobody appointed the US leader of the world, what are you talking about? It's just a matter of "whoever is most powerful and influential". There's no war needed, and the US never conquered the planet.
I'm not doubting that China is the likely eventual successor, I'm doubting that they can succeed anything at this particular point in time. Nobody wants China in charge. It would make any issues experienced with the US in charge like a joke. Maybe once their dictator dies?
China is making trade deals and integration left and right and even Canada and Mexico are looking in other directions and cooperate more closely with china and eu. Maybe not a single power has to hold power
China has historically been the most powerful nation in the world multiple times, but always remained relatively inward looking, while acting as more of a merchant towards the rest of the world. I don't see any reason to think that will substantially change. So the most likely scenario is we end up, and arguably are already in, a truly multipolar world where no individual nation is the hegemon.
China is currently trying to take control of the whole South China Sea. They’re in a cold war with the Philippines and Vietnam.
Next it will go for Taiwan.
Then either Siberian or Indian territory with the same “these used to be ours” justifications.
At the same time I think will use shadow fleets to take as much fish stocks from around the world as it can.
Not acting yet is not the same as not being expansionist. With all that “we’ll smash your head on the concrete” rhetoric China’s wolf warriors are very clear on where they’re headed.
Everyone is just gonna stop trying to acquire influence for some reason...? Or do you just think that, for some reason, this would now magically balance itself out any time any world leader thinks "wow that's a huge vacuum that needs filling!"
Empires expand when the benefit exceeds the cost. The US is currently doing quite poorly against Iran. The US military is not incompetent, nor is the Iranian army supercompetent, so why? It's technology. The traditional way the US invaded countries was by assassinating the leadership, gaining air superiority, and then basically playing shoot fish in a barrel.
Iran, and likely all major US adversaries now, were/are fully prepared for the US assassinations. And gaining full air superiority is no longer possible in the era of drones, because you're no longer shooting down a small number of high value targets (like planes), but instead a practically infinite amount of low value targets that can be readily replenished.
Spending interceptors that cost millions of dollars to shoot down drones that cost thousands of dollars just doesn't work. We might be able to obtain air superiority in terms of e.g. Iran being unable to fly fighter jets over their own country, but that says nothing about their ability to launch endless drones and otherwise inflict a severe toll on any invading army.
So it's likely that modern war has mostly gone back to times long since past where the bottleneck is no longer cost in $$, but cost in lives. And that makes militarism far less attractive for every single country, even moreso in the era of plummeting fertility rates when the people who are going to be killed are precisely those who are supposed to be birthing and raising your next generation.
So there will certainly be wars when nations see the benefit as being especially high, but I think the idea of trying to casually 'project strength' half way around the globe is probably already dead. The cost is too high, and the benefit too low.
The dangerous situation we are in is that entities outside of the USA hold significantly more US assets than US entities own assets outside the USA.
So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
Or in simpler terms: The USA has been giving out IOUs for real goods for decades. It is now tempting to default on those IOUs. The USA did this before. Up until 1971, a dollar certified a claim to gold. Then the USA simply canceled that promise.
The current ramp up to AI dominance might be what holds the USA back from breaking more ties with the world. It is a race that must be won. And investments from abroad help. But when the whole world is operated by US AI factories things might look different. When every task around the world is performed by intelligence generated in the USA, just like every computer is run by US software now - there might be little incentive left to "pay the rent" for the rest of the world that now sits around idle, fiddling their thumbs.
> The dangerous situation we are in is that entities outside of the USA hold way more US assets than US entities own assets outside the USA.
The dangerous situation we are in is that the US is berating and betraying its closest historical allies, eroding its credibility and soft power, and weakening its leverage at a time when threats to the Western order that has existed since the end of WW2 are growing rapidly.
Incidentally, the orange man in charge loves to tout "deals" in which foreign countries agree to invest substantial sums in the US, so any actions that lead foreign countries to believe their investments might be nationalized banana republic-style won't help the administration's efforts to attract investment and onshoring.
I would guess that most of those announced deals will never come to fruition. He loves to pat himself on the back, and everybody seems willing to go along with it, until they actually have to spend money.
Given the last 19 months of tariff chaos while Republicans control all branches of government, I don't see any reason to think they're concerned about that.
Plus the whole "assassinate the Iranian president in the middle of negotiations to start a war across a major global trade-route" thing.
It's not going to be a net win for anyone. A country that needs to keep borrowing to stay afloat is not going to improve its position by effectively defaulting on its debt, regardless of the exact method or type of assets involved.
The USA might hold a majority of the worlds value generation in a few decades. If AI generated in the USA powers everything. Then the USA does not need to borrow anymore.
That outcome seems unlikely. Both that AI will remain dominated by USA for a few decades, and that they will use newfound profits to eliminate budget deficit.
And why would they want to default on their debts in this hypothetical future where they've "made it", raking in AI profits from everyone. They would work hard to preserve that world order and not shake things up unnecessarily.
The USA has managed to dominate software for decades now. Why would it change? Take a look at the current datacenter investments in the USA vs other countries. It looks very much like the USA will even extend its lead.
> why would they want to default on their debts
So they don't have to share the AI profits with foreigners who hold shares in the AI companies.
> So they don't have to share the AI profits with foreigners who hold shares in the AI companies.
They can do it now. They don't, because it's not worth it. It won't be worth it in the future either. They'll have yet more to lose. Especially in this hypothetical scenario where their massive AI exports are what's paying for their economy – good luck getting your counter-parties to pay for your exports after you have decimated their economies and soured relationships over a one-time boost that will cover what, a couple years of US government spending at best?
> The USA has managed to dominate software for decades now. Why would it change? Take a look at the current datacenter investments in the USA vs other countries. It looks very much like the USA will even extend its lead.
- Because USA managed to dominate other industries for decades as well, only to lose them for one reason or another?
- Because China has shown its ability to dominate in other complex modern industries like EVs and drones... and software is not special, and they're already starting to out-compete US with cheaper open-weight AI models?
- Because trust in America has already shaken, and work to get off US software in other countries has already started, even if it's slow and will take a long time?
- Because the contents of datacenters have a useful life of only a few years, and over-spending hundreds of billions on first-generation inefficient datacenters may sooner result in a financial crash wiping out most of the industry, than build a meaningful long term moat?
- Because US doesn't even produce the chips that power said datacenters, whereas China, their main geopolitical competitor, is working full time to develop their own chips, while militarily posturing against the island next door where all America-bound chips are made, at a time when US ability and will to do anything about that seem to be at an all-time low?
- Because after enough iterations, the AI race may eventually boil down to in large part to competition on the cost of electricity, in which US is at a disadvantage?
US is not going to willingly default on its debt or violate investors' property rights. That's just a fantasy that got nothing going for it.
> good luck getting your counter-parties to pay for your exports
It's not a matter of choice. Once a country runs on US artificial intelligence, it can't just say "Well, let's do things manually again". People won't know how to do it anymore. There will be no more keyboards, steering wheels or cash registers to operate.
It's true that China might offer an alternative. But changing a country from being run by US AI to being run by Chinese AI is not a small feat and comes with its own issues.
> US doesn't even produce the chips
TSMC is running and expanding a factory in Arizona. Budget: $265 billion. Intel, Samsung and Miron are also building capacity in the USA.
> So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
This opinion is very naive. The moment the US declares "ownership be damned", the US dolar stops being the currency used in things like the oil market and it's value tanks. The world will scramble to use an alternative currency, which will end up being either the euro or the yuan. This effectively marks the end of US as a world power.
> Or Bitcoin. Of which almost half is already under US control.
This sort of opinion is laughably out of touch. Listen to yourself: oil markets will move away from the US dolar due to how the US governments destroying its value, and instead will move to bitcoin because... The US controls it?
Are you aware you are posting these outlandish opinions on how the world trusts the US with it's currency in a discussion where literally European countries are pulling their gold reserves out of the US because they no longer trust the US?
yes. but most of it is not to other countries. Most government debt (over 80% globally) is privately owned through sovereign debt instruments like bonds.
> If there is ever a conflict, US will seize assets of whatever country..
Canadians, and the rest of the world is finding out that you don't even need a conflict for US to lay claim over your stuff. "We want it", is perfectly legitimate and legal reason for the taking.
Sure, and you can replace US with almost any country in that sentence. The problem right now is there's a feeling that even decades-old alliances are no longer something you can count on when you're talking about the US.
Plus even on a less-than-wartime level, nobody wants wants their own national assets to be held-hostage or used for extortion, whenever this Republican administration next demands a "favor" for domestic bragging or kowtowing-humiliation for a perceived personal slight.
it gets easier to understand if you adopt the anti-imperialist position, these are vassal states, the us hold incredible influence over them. Gold reserves are just one of thousands of levers at their disposal, if some european nation has a revolution and seeks to assert their sovereignty then the US has a lever to pull. The point to question is the existence of the lever in the first place, the US doesnt have gold in any other country, china or iran doesn't put gold in the US because it gives the US this lever. Thats one of the mechanisms of imperialism, it means if some "western-aligned" (people dont like the word vassal) nation acts in their own interests against the US the US can pull that lever. Why would any nation ever place such a lever in the hand of the US? It's the same exact mechanism why many african nations have the french CFA currency, it gives french the lever to pull its a remanent of colonialism in the case of france.
I'm more interested in why was it centralized (there) in the first place? So it's easier to trade where when you make a sell/buy IOU is exchanged and a sticker on the bar is put or a bar changes pallet? I'd kind of understand that except these are central banks - how often do they even trade gold? Since we're in 2026, I actually googled that last question and it turns out central banks trade or adjust their gold reserve on a monthly basis. Somehow the thought of that seemed to me as too much of a high frequency trading for a central bank :)
Simple. No one trusts the current administration and no one should. The long term damage being done is astronomical. They are a magical combination of malicious and incompetent. The only thing that could make it worse is if they were more competent at being malicious.
This feels a little bit outdated. When he was elected for the first time a decade ago it was a "current administration" problem. When he came back it became clear it was not a fluke, America failed to generate any compelling alternatives, and entire new sectors of the US Economy (tech billionaires) now see his political project as their best option.
I think people constantly underestimate how destructive he is. They think Trump can be a pawn for their interests, but he is irrational, volatile, and stupid. The democrats and the Biden administration paved the way for Trump 2 by not having a primary.
That's step 1 done. Steps to follow are: move off the US dollar, cancel trade agreements with the US and restore your own laws in your country, evict US military bases from your country.
Even animals have a stability pact. Humans, especially politics need stability, when you mess it up, fear takes over and among other things, defensive stuff happens. So this is a simple reactive defensive act.
Mainly because the US Dollar debt at some 39 to 40 trillion is now unserviceable and the US is going to default the debt payment. So countries are preparing for that eventuality - the US ship is on the event horizon but being slowly but surely sucked into the Black hole. The last govt was ensuring spending all the unspent budget - even if they knew it was bad for the country . The current govt will be left holding the baby when the crash comes. The only question is how long can you hold - 1 year 2 years before the ship crosses the edge of the event horizon
He’s just one part of the explanation, it’s also all the people who are behind him. He’s mostly a front nowadays. If Trump is gone, things wouldn’t be better with Vance taking his place
It’s the voters that put him back. You could say it was an aberration the first time but the second? Americans are too stupid and selfish to be trusted with the immense power they were given.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Education, healthy media environment, healthy culture of understanding and respect. Exactly everything the conservatives have been pushing against since decades
He's the center of gravity who's enabling the decline at the moment. It's a rare case where doing the thing would probably result in less instability instead of more.
Consider that trust still declined so much more under the current government. How do you explain that?
No matter who did Nordstream and why, there are rational reasons that explain why the different parties might have done it. Even when you've been negatively affected, you can still somewhat understand it.
This is no longer the case under Trump 2. Since this term started, every day begins by checking what random decisions the US made to screw you over today. Treaties and agreements are torn up on a whim, and they can't even come up with halfway sensible explanations hold up to any scrutiny.
The only common denominator the world can see is the senseless cruelty being gleefully inflicted by the senile pedophile leader and his deeply brainwashed followers. The hatred spread by the US is taking root, and they will be reaping it for an entire generation if things go on.
Yes, but that data is dumb in itself without an analyst explaining what caused that trend and what is happening now and which new forces will apply to that trend.
I assume there's a financial cost for doing this? I assume gold reserves in others coffers act as collateral so having them at home makes them a lot less useful financially useful?
The Democratic party needs to call the Netherlands and Europe and say "Give us please until November to fix this. If we fail to do that, trust your instincts!"
It's one thing for the Democrats to convince themselves Trump was a fluke ten years and 2 elections later. But it's not gonna convince other nations who aren't getting paid to tell the party establishment what they want to hear.
We are all in this together. As goes the US, so does the rest of the world. You can pretend otherwise, but wait until he takes Greenland, then Canada, and then god knows what else. He's going to bring it all down around us if we don't stop it.
Most of the major Bitcoin spikes and leveling-up of the price since 2012 have preceded or corresponded with governments tightening controls, and people using BTC they owned or buying it to evacuate capital to more lightly regulated countries. That's also why there hasn't been a Bitcoin rush for awhile, imho... it's no longer very useful for that, now that all the entrance and exit nodes are monitored. Gold is a bit hard to move, but this article may be underselling to what extent the recent spike in gold prices is attributable to demand for that kind of liquidity. The cross-border, anonymous kind.
The demise of Localbitcoins actual local meetups and trading for cash was the end of a significant way to move money out of regimes that people suspected were going to take it from them.
There are a few platforms that facilitate personal transactions using stuff like Venmo and Zelle but I suspect most of the people who are continuously selling lots of coins are probably silk road type vendors so I have to imagine it's just a great way to get your Venmo account on the feds radar.
Using Venmo or Zelle obviates the reason for using Bitcoin to move money from one country to another, which is that you don't want the transfer to be traced, and you may or may not have access to the banking system where you're going (eg the enormous flood of Bitcoin out of China and Hong Kong during the crackdown). Venmo and Zelle are American banks that just add a new type of KYC endpoint. From there, it's easy to see the whole blockchain back to where you acquired it.
Localbitcoins facilitated a cash exchange that was extremely useful for people seeking to move money out of repressive regimes and convert it into local currency they could live on.
To your point, that money didn't have to be acquired on Silk Road or something... I used to get paid for work in BTC, and used it to pay rent for a couple years in Argentina by selling it to a dude I'd meet once a month at a Starbucks.
You don't have to be a silk road vendor. You just have to be selling and buying both, then you can make money on the spread, which can be several percent in P2P markets.
When I lived in Argentina, the maximum amount of USD you could pull from an ATM was $200 per day, dispensed as 600 pesos. That was at a government-enforced 3 to 1 USD to Pesos. The price on the open street market was at least 9 pesos to the dollar.
So, say my rent was 3600 pesos a month. Technically USD$1200 at the official rate, but only USD$400 at the blue rate. It was better for me to take a boat to Uruguay for $100 round trip, plus a hotel room for the night, to get dollars out of a bank there and trade them on the street in Argentina.
Okay, that's the setup of what I was doing. But with Localbitcoins I found this kid who would prefer to hand me a stack of USD$1000 than Argentine Pesos, for BTC traded private wallet to private wallet. He was in his first year of college and he'd just opened a money exchange office in a shopping center.
One day I asked him "where do you get all those dollars, and what are you doing with the Bitcoin?" He told me, most of the service goes the other way. You see, they needed my Bitcoin, because in Argentina, government employees at that time were allowed to take 20% of their income in greenback US dollar cash.... at that amazing government exchange rate of $0.33!!! So naturally they wanted to get it out of the country, not keep it in cash. But Argentina also would not allow you to take more than $500 out of the country. My friendly high school Bitcoin entrepreneur had a solution: Take their dollars and exchange it for Bitcoin, then send the Bitcoin to a friend in the US who would change it back and depost it into a US bank account (for a 5-10% fee). This avoided the export controls and allowed them to offshore their cash without trusting the Argentine banks, which were well known for defaulting on their customers.
The only question for my friend was what to do with all this USD and how to get more Bitcoin with it, which was where expatriates like me fit into the picture.
This is why I believe that the real and only value of BTC is in avoiding currency controls, and it'll continue to have value as long as those controls exist in places, but the closing of the open markets and the end-to-end tracking of ingress and egress points makes it a lot less viable than it was.
Even in stable economies without capital controls you should be able to earn several percent spread, because supply of physical money changers (you) in any particular region is limited, it's risky for you (they may rob you), and you're providing a valuable service (exchanging without any paper trail).
Right, but the risk isn't really worth the reward in an economy that could've slotted this kid into a college job as a loan officer or something. I'm sure having large stacks of Benjamins at his disposal probably had something to do with it for him.
I wrote a paper around 2010 that tried to evaluate the potential value of Bitcoin as purely a method of exchange that bypassed traditional intermediaries, and came up with some ridiculously large figure that everyone dismissed. But one central point of the paper was that it should never be misunderstood as a store of value because its only inherent value was to bypass currency controls.
It's a remnant of the cold war and the two preceding hot wars. The plan was to ship big parts of the gold overseas, just in case Europe gets nuked and occupied in a ground invasion from the east. But lately there have been more threats for an invasion from the west, so gold goes back.
Gosh, have we in the West forgotten so much of our history already?
Much of the gold was moved out of Europe prior to and during WWI. Partly out of fears of German aggression b ut also because throughout the war, European countries bought massive amounts of materiel from America, which increased the flow of money out of European and into American coffers.
But gold itself is very heavy and thus cumbersome to transport. It doesn't make sense to run transatlantic gold shipments every time a few bars change hands. So central banks tended to keep the gold more or less in one big vault and just sort of move the bricks between one country's pile and another. So there would be, in essence, a large stack of gold in the US Federal Reserve, and that gold belonged to France, or whomever. When the war ended, European countries were devastated and needed goods from somewhere that didn't have depleted industrial capacity and whose farmlands weren't littered with UXO.
This situation more or less cemented America's position as the world's creditor, and so it simply was more convenient to keep a large portion of one's gold reserves in the country with whom you were doing a lot of business. For some countries, repatriating gold is a matter of sovereignty, and e.g. France started repatriating its gold reserves in the 1960s.
Now that Americans have decided they like being a military, economic, and cultural superpower less than they like electing a dementia-ridden child rapist, other countries have correctly realized that America's decline cannot be stopped, only slowed. After all, it's Americans themselves who are the root of the problem, and Trump is but a symptom. This instability is not going to stop when he leaves office. Better get your gold off the sinking ship, but do it slowly so as to not accelerate the sinking before you can get it all out.
Re: the gold situation after WWI, if you're interested I encourage you to read Liaquat Ahamed's excellent Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer, IIRC.
I’d be really interested to see all European countries & Canada dump their US bonds en mass if trump does anything untoward in Greenland, Canada or elsewhere.
As an American trying to retain my sanity in this country, I have to tell myself that such things are just trollish nonsense from the ultimate reality television troll. It is comforting to me that 50% of what he says is bluster and the other 50% is pure fabrication. I think we have developed some resistance to it where, like, a few years ago we would say "OH MY GOD! HE CAN'T POSSIBLY BE THREATENING CANADA!" and now we're just like, "there goes crazy old man again, don't worry, he just shit his pants on the golf course".
Not saying it's right or sound that he's the elected leader of the country or that our politics is so warped... I mean, I blame it on being on the losing end of the most rigorously fought information war in history.
But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
FWIW, the American people can't even support a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been blowing up our soldiers for decades. Hard to imagine they'd show much support for invading an ally.
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
Sorry, but no.
Even if there are no kinetic attacks towards allies right now, the "crazy old man" is causing real harm. Harm to global stability and the world order, economies, to businesses and individuals, to long term initiatives such as research and healthcare.
But most importantly, real harm to the trust between ourselves. Western allies can no longer trust the USA, it is broken, we no longer have the same values.
The first time in 2016 we forgave, everyone makes mistakes and Europe is certainly not free of them. But the American people chose to elect him twice with full knowledge, now everyone suffers.
So the rest of the world forges its own path now.
America's military, economic and cultural hegemony will decline. Not tomorrow, maybe not even quickly, but inevitably. Godspeed !
Which is it... Godspeed the decline, or you hope it doesn't?
I think it's a tragedy that America elected him twice, and it has already led to chaos among our allies and irreparable harm to the postwar order in which America was the seat of empire after Britain. I think that [the populist brain virus which took hold of America, in 2016 and particularly after covid] was done intentionally by Russia and China who are enemies of America. Is the loss of that order what you are bemoaning?
We are also a country that established itself from European colonies. Every time Argentina or Brazil or Chile or Venezuela or Colombia go through spasms of communist or fascist takeover, Europe takes that as an unsurprising fact, and the bankers keep doing business with them. There is something much more frightening about America reaching some polar political extreme, and it's not simply nuclear weapons (because several very extreme dictatorships have those).
What is scary about it is the same thing that's scary about the AfD in Germany... the idea that we are losing the generational knowledge we built to safeguard some of the world against savagery. In order to believe this, you must also believe that Germany and the US are not already, inherently savage and that some of the order brought by NATO and the postwar order has been a good thing, even up to and including the Cold War.
Then, we can define what is worth saving about America and why it matters.
While I personally believe a lot of America is worth saving, it is not up to us, and the arcs of history take many decades to play out.
As Brexit has shown, even when sanity returns, the previous reality does not.
So it is not that we wish the USA ill, or harm, quite the contrary - we did not ask for this. We have clearly understood the message and we are focused on our own future now.
Previous reality probably won't return... although you never know. I think a lot of the world would breathe a sigh of relief and get back to normal under a more rational American leadership. Unlike Brexit, we haven't literally burned our bridges.
I think it's important to understand that there's a difference between American right wing populism and the British form. Brexit was a self inflicted wound whose harm was almost entirely limited to Britain. If anything, it shored up some European resolve against the anti-EU parties for a time.
On the contrary, if the isolationist wing of Trump's party had its way, American withdrawal from the world would have a far worse impact on the stability of European politics and concrete strategic defense.
I'm a 2nd generation American ... my family is Polish and Ukrainian. I had / have the option to reclaim citizenship elsewhere, both in and out of the EU. I've lived in France and Spain, Czechia and Argentina, and in 15 countries in total since 2004. I didn't choose to be born in America but I also can't imagine a world where it doesn't retain military and financial supremacy. The vacuum would be immense and the only powers which could fill it are, for lack of a better word, evil. I believe the only option is to resuscitate and improve America, because without it exercising political power, the whole world will instantly be on fire.
> What is scary about it is the same thing that's scary about the AfD in Germany...
Without downplaying or excusing the US' problems, I hope everyone in other countries thinking "that can't happen here" realize that's what most Americans thought just a decade ago too.
Turn that disgust with the disease into preventative treatment.
Frankly, the government that America has right now is nowhere near as extreme as AfD. I wouldn't be surprised or sorry if the next President of the US sanctioned goods out of Saxony. But we have both types of populism here. Both of them incredibly stupid. Our true war is against the foreign social/mainstream media saturation which is pushing our population away from reading and away from analytical thought, manipulating them into the arms of either type of extremism, for the benefit of the autocracies who want to cause us to fight amongst ourselves. Trump is just one manifestation of that. "It can't happen here" relates to a particular sort of fascist or authoritarian takeover of society, and I still think it can't in America. Trump's approval rating is under 35%. I live in Oregon, the most progressive state in the country, and spent 2 hours on the phone today buying insurance from a guy in Georgia who got excited talking about what guns I owned (and what he owned). I think the idea of a hard takeover in America by the far right is ...bullshit. And I even wrote a novel about it happening 20 years ago. But the rest of the world can't keep going through the vicissitudes of America's increasing whiplash at being manipulated and dumbed down this way. What has to change is something in the American mind before it allows its empire to collapse.
I bought that initially, but Trump is causing real harm. The abandonment of WHO and USAid programs, stepping out of the paris accords etc. etc.
But the real issue is that he has been elected twice, it is not some one-off freak accident, a lot of americans just care more about transphobia or pizzagate than climate change or geopolitics and thats why its now clear to the rest of the world that we can’t trust the US any more.
Except that “crazy old man” (I’d have gone with corrupt criminal malignant narcissist to be honest) isn’t just shouting at pigeons in the park he already screwed up the world economy by starting a war he can’t figure out how to exit and dozens of other things.
When the pigeon shouter threatens to annex Canada/Greenland you can shrug it off, when the leader of the largest economy and military says it, you can’t.
Words matter.
I’m British, We are often regarded as one of the US’s closest allies, I’m fucking furious with Trump and the people who support him, I’ve been boycotting everything US made that I can and I essentially see the current US as a globally destabilising force.
Are there decent Americans appalled by what they’ve become, sure, doesn’t make a difference to the outcome though.
Trump isn’t the main problem, he’s a symptom of the disease that is the main problem, the US elected him twice, that rot goes to the core.
> the American people can't even support a war against Iran
The American people can't even support a war against their own government. A government that they ruminate, "may be" or "may not be" a team of Russia/Israel assets with the goal to grab every dollar and to turn USA into a dystopia.
At this moment nobody can even assure with full certainty that there is not a bomb buried yet somewhere in the WH.
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
We're at the point where the two countries, with most wars between them in history, stood side by side, ready to defend Greenland against a U.S. invasion.
The monkey has a hand grenade. You lot gave it to him. Twice. You might find that it's a bit late for "relax, he's only kidding".
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
Tell that to Iran. Or Canada. Nobody in Europe is certain that he won’t do anything stupid in Greenland, either. We’re already in a trade war (mostly one-sided but still).
Typically they move gold to allies when it’s safer to keep the reserves away (e.g., it’s really hard to imagine the US getting invaded, but that happened to almost all European countries in the last century or so) or when politics become unstable. They take the gold back when the calculus changes. Famously, France got a chunk of its gold back from the US in the 1979s (and finished that process this year).
oh thanks! wasn't lazyness but looking for exactly this type of context from somebody else.
based on that and the link, we can say that it's a process started long time ago and now simply accelerating and escalating after Ukrainian conflict and confiscation of a european partner assets?
shouldn't the risk of confiscation ,when having resources held abroad and in other jurosdiction always be considered?
I was pretty much surprised when Bank of England said Venezuelan gold was not Venezuelan gold anymore and took it hostage, then what is the sense of having it abroad if the abroad partner can switch idea of ownership anytime?
> we can say that it's a process started long time ago and now simply accelerating and escalating after Ukrainian conflict and confiscation of a european partner assets?
For France, not really. It was De Gaulle and his successors wanting to remove levers that the America government could use against France. It was a sovereignty issue, not really fear that the gold would be seized or frozen. It took decades because it was not really a top priority either.
For the Netherlands (which is why the BBC is talking about this), it’s directly a consequence of Trump using underhanded tactics against allies. In the words of the Dutch government, "geopolitical lawlessness". It has more of a sense of urgency, as well.
> what is the sense of having it abroad if the abroad partner can switch idea of ownership anytime?
There are practical reasons to have some gold abroad. The stuff is heavy and cumbersome, and vulnerable in transit. So, when transactions can be managed by just moving a bunch of ingots from one pile to another in the same facility, it makes transactions easier.
Other than that, countries do not do that if they don’t trust the reserves won’t be seized. In practical terms, either they are close allies, or they have some leverage so stealing the gold has a cost. In the end, it’s a risk/reward analysis on both sides.
Okay so possibly dumb question, but...what do you do with the gold when you "need" it? How is a bunch of shiny, admittedly "desirable", metal going to fix whatever class of crisis the article is hand waving?
Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!"
...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to make the numbers not say society is over, here everyone...do something with gold!" type situations?
In the former case, this all makes a lot of sense given that the US has both demonstrated a reluctance to assist other countries (sans Israel?) and a lack of capacity to do much if they did care.
I can't help but feel like in a lot of cases you're just going to suddenly crash the gold market and create a bunch of inflation because currency itself is not a "means of production" that you can make things with, it's an old IOU.
You just hold onto it until you want to trade it for something else. Right now there are liquid international gold markets. Like bitcoin, people who are trying to get rich quick by day trading are much of the liquidity.
Multiple reasons, not just the US. Might be that 2027-2028 are shaping up to be the riskiest time in living memory including such factors as ENSO heat, floods, droughts, and food insecurity.
Russia is invading Europe. They started years ago.
The US is enabling Russia.
In fact, the USA is supporting Russia. This might not be entirely intentional, and a lot of ways of trying to excuse it, but it’s what the reality on the ground adds up to.
You are as wrong as your parent comment. Not only Russia is invading US, but US is less of the supporter of Russia than EU. EU literally funds Russia and doesn't plan stopping completely.
Well, who knows? The trajectory has been set in and it is downwards. After Nero and the year of the four emperors the Roman Empire still had ways to go. So, I would say also the US can potentially recover. On the other hand the saying 'it cannot possibly get worse than this' has also been disproven may times in history. In any case, I like to sum it all up by saying "The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country".
Impressed they write 1000+ words without saying Trump.
I mean he's attacking Canada, threatening European territory in Greenland, rolling out the red carpet for the guy Europe's at war with. What do you expect?
I used to wonder how Rome could fall without anyone knowing exactly why. Surely an empire that lasted five centuries, and conquered all of Europe, must have been brought down by some great event, some unmistakable rupture.
Watching the American Empire fray in real time, I think I understand now.
Empires do not always fall with a crash. Sometimes they simply lose the will to continue.
Apparently, empires can collapse out of something almost like boredom. Maybe "boredom" is the wrong word. But collapse may begin when a civilization can no longer summon enough belief, energy, or attention to sustain itself.
lol, we(america) were the ones who fucked with the gold standard and had the system collapse due to lack of trust in the first place[1]
Please explain your logic behind the idea that European countries needed to have adopted the gold standard that the US unilaterally changed the rules on, to be independent from the US.
I guess he means the Bretton Woods system, where the US dollar was backed by gold and everything else was backed by the US dollar, wouldn't have existed. Everything would have been backed by gold, instead.
If America had not forced the gold standard we might have gotten an international currency as proposed by Keynes.
The idea was soundly rejected because it would have led to rapid post war reconstruction with a loss of American power (they wanted to play at empire).
Any country that keeps gold in US or dollar reserves may end up looking very foolish. Sanctions and asset (financial and real) forfeitures coming soon to a country near you.
The simplest and easiest geopolitical strategy that is available to any country: switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels. Keep out of oil and natural gas. Keep out of dollar system. Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama, dollar shenanigans. Remember China has export restrictions on oil. When things get tough, most of the oil countries (with refining capacity to export) are going to have export restrictions. Thats the only way to deal with the mobs in their own country.
From: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KPq7jyQcemA
Richard Campbell: Politicians aren’t going to do things that aren’t popular, so we have to make these solutions popular for there to be a chance to build political will.
Richard Campbell: Corporations are inherently conservative, and power companies doubly so. Until there is a public groundswell demanding these changes, they won’t act. It’s up to us to make enough noise and show that these are good solutions worth pushing forward.
> switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels
You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale. Maybe just your house or some districts. You still need coal/gas/nuclear to maintain the power grid.
Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned. Oil is a must in military. If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
Everything has tradeoffs. Diversify it.
This is a very out of date option.
Look at any recent data, and you'll find that renewables scale fantastically well, are super cheap, and even today as they are the cheapest source of energy, they continue to get cheaper.
Meanwhile nuclear, even in France, is an example of "negative learning by doing," where it gets more expensive as time goes on.
Even China, the best builder out there, is only doing a token amount of nuclear compared to renewables and batteries. And no advanced economy is going to be able to build nuclear as cheap as China; our labor costs are too high and construction logistics are not good enough.
> You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
This is of course very wrong, there are very highly diversified sources for all these things, more and more are coming online.
Nuclear is in far more dire straits along those lines than renewables, there's more constrained supplies, a shrinking number of people building the supplies. The US didn't stop importing uranium from Russia until a 2024 ban...
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well.
China is scaling, so is Australia, quite possibly other countries. We'll know when they hit the limits and stop deploying more solar.
Solar is dirt cheap (1200x cheaper), batteries are getting cheaper by the minute.
If you are rational thinking person, would you bet on technology that increases in costs over time or gets cheaper over time?
> invest in nuclear.
There was a time many decades ago to deploy nuclear at scale. Fossil fuel shills used 'environmentalists' to shut down all progress of nuclear. Now, they use nuclear again to slow down solar and wind. Just wait 30 - 50 years, we'll have a proper solution.
I do agree with you on nuclear though, countries should invest in nukes for security. All countries should invest in nuclear, it provides both energy security and real security from mischievous actors.
This is suppose to be a tech forum.
With enough solar panels, wind turbines and batteries it's completely possible to run an countries grid off renewables.
Right now the costs for doing so are around the same as the costs of running an oil / gas / coal power grid.
For the average country, not slowly switching over is basically madness.
There aren't enough batteries and wind turbines, though, and it will take many years for them to be built
it takes at least 20 years to build a nuclear power plant and it takes another 20 to build it back. it costs a multitude of resources and money to build, maintain and tear down compared to renewables.
nuclear has its role currently but it's not the future.
Long long ago people planted trees where a windmill was to be build. Construction would start 20-30 years later and also took quite a bit of time.
If it took (I dunno) say a year to build one you could pick a new location and plant trees each year.
Seems almost an alien concept but I guess it is a bit like a construction company has to wait for the new powerplant to expire before they get to build a new one.
Yes, switching energy sources takes a while, but the energy system is being completely rebuilt anyway as equipment ages out, so you need to be continually doing this anyway.
None of the actions that countries are taking to decouple from the US happen over night.
The US has destroyed its privileged position among nations, but the effects won't be visible for a couple more years.
There’s a huge difference in relying on others for daily fuel/fertiliser supplies for your survival, and relying on them for parts for vehicles/infrastructure that can run for decades.
There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.
You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.
> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.
No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).
> Oil is a must in military.
I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?
I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.
The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.
I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)
> You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
Eh, once you have built your grid in solar and wind, you don't really depend on the countries that sold solar panels and wind turbines for you. Those last for a long time, long enjoy that you can even spin up manufacturing yourself; it's not really something inscrutable.
There may be an argument that depending on the state of the world that raw materials to manufacture some of those things may become more complicated to access, but that is true even for countries that currently make those.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
Absolutely, yes.
Energy should be abundant and diversified.
Easiest. If that is the easiest way you see I am afraid to ask what the harder alternatives would be.
How is it hard? It's difficult to build electrical generation these days and not go renewables because they're so cheap and fast to deploy.
It's not a total solution, but market forces wise everything says "build solar and batteries with your money". Governments practically don't need to do anything for this to be the default.
I am a non-hater of renewables. I add this because in plenty of _your_ circles, you are either all in on renewables or you are a coal thumper, basically. I am neither. We need to add nuance by complicating this conversation.
The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved. I want this solved or at least improved because it is the bottleneck. In fact, it is such a bottleneck that its energy generation factor is noted as 1:10, i.e.: a power plant rated at 100MW, registers as 10MW in comparison to nuclear and hydro (and obviously coal and gas.) So this means that to add a 1MW worth of energy generation to the grid, 10MW must be built.
Another problem that hits wind farms is that when there's wind blowing somewhere, it tends to blow everywhere, or some large area. So suddenly there is too much energy want to flow in to the grid which hits the core of the problem with grids at this point because energy that is inserted into it, must be extracted to the exact same magnitude at the same time. So a 100GW demand must be met by 100.0GW production. Now if 110GW is produced, something _MUST_ consume it, so there are two choices:
1. make someone consume it, i.e., sell it to them. They have to buy it so the price will drop until there are enough buyers and this does not stop at 0, prices will go in to the negative. So the market will pay you to use electricity. The market. Or:
2. shut off the power plants until we are back at 100GW (or whatever can be met by consumption.)
3. there is also a catastrophic third option. If you have a situation where too much energy (read power if you want to) is inserted into the grid, then its frequency will rise, this damages the infrastructure and connected consumers, so they will get disconnected. Read large and broad power outages. These situations are also non-trivial to recover from. I.e.: to "restart the grid" afterwards. See what happened in Spain last(?) year.
How do you run a power plant in a market that demands payment to accept the energy you want to sell? You cannot. So this is the windfarm paradox, feel free to compare to Russel's paradox. It goes something like this:
A windfarm makes money whenever the wind blows because only then does it have energy to sell.
A windfarm cannot make money whenefer the wind blows because then the market price goes to zero.
So a windfarm makes money when the wind blows and does not blow at the same time.
To solve this problem, energy consumption must be made capable of also being intermittent. Either run "factories" intermittently, which might very well be part of the solution. And/ or, have huge accumulation capacity in the grid that can swallow the over generation.
TLDR: renewables is the easy answer but very hard thing to do. The hard answer is the one I have given, together with getting more nuclear going which is difficult and expensive. But.. what can we do?
If you have overproduction of wind, you feather the blades to prevent overproduction. When production exceeds load, the voltage and/or frequency rises as the current drops. Blade angle is under constant control, and those are inputs.
And that's an oversimplification of what happened in Spain. Grid-following systems shut down for safety reasons when there was no grid to follow.
Wind and solar systems can be configured in a grid-forming capacity, but the ones in Spain weren't.
Wind farms make money whenever the marginal producer of electricity is a higher cost producer. AKA basically all the time.
> The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved.
It is solved.
Grid-scale batteries are being mass-produced today.
It will continue to get even better, but it is reasonably well solved even now.
No it is not solved. Grid-scale batteries are absolutely not being mass-produced today. Let's stick to the truth here.
I would LOVE for this to be the case, however. Adding this again so that I am not lumped together with the coal thumpers.
What exists, TO BE BUILT that is, is battery farms, sure, but they are nowhere nere big enough. They are nowhere nere close enough to compensate the factor applied to wind farm energy generation. But let's hope good progress can be made in the accumulation aspect of intermittent energy production.
Intermittent production is currently being solved by natural gas and coal production. With very rare exceptions these are not being shut down. Therefore, the immense amounts of wind, solar and batteries that are being added to the grid are purely additive. They are making the grid cleaner & cheaper, they're not impeding in any way the ability of other generation sources to cover the gaps.
Once wind/solar/batteries reaches about 90-95% of production, it'll become harder economically and technically to increase that number. I'd love to have that problem, we're far from 90% today.
This sounds like my friend Mick who developed a gambling habit, but assured me that his method was flawless. If you lose, double your bet next time to cover the loss. If you lose that one, double it again. You can't keep on losing.
Sorry I’m not quite following what point you’re trying to make.
Throughout my life the cost of renewable energy generation and storage has been dropping exponentially whilst growing in capability.
That’s been happening for decades now.
The cost of fossil fuels just keeps rising with spikes every time someone starts a war.
Fossil fuels are already far more expensive. In 10 years no one will consider them seriously and in 20 years they’ll be a specialist novelty used by museums to run classic cars.
Mick thought he could give up his job and live off winnings. No steady state earnings. Just wins and losses. On the bad days he lose, and hope his winnings on other days would see him right.
Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.
If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"
Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?
Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.
You don't seem to understand how renewables actually work.
The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)
The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.
It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.
And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)
* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".
We've replaced fuel sources and all related technology many times. You can't reasonably argue we are now at the end of that process.
It sounds like your issue is with capitalism, not with renewable energy. Luckily, we have plenty of examples of aspects of society that have been deemed too important to leave purely to market forces. In fact, electricity generation is already (mostly) one of them.
As solar and batteries become even cheaper (we're already at the point where they're cheaper than anything else) we can just choose to overbuild capacity and turn down/off whatever other generation isn't necessary at any given time. Utilities already have to predict grid usage based on weather and all sorts of other factors, so it's not like this isn't something that isn't already happening.
What? Absolutely not, I love capitalism. The problem is that it is suspended when it comes to the wind farms, they are pretty much always heavily subsidized and on a socialized loss scheme at that.
And no, I have no problem with renewables either.
If your conclusion from reading what you said is this, then you did not read because I said the exact opposite.
Batteries don't solve the storage problem, but surely you know this.
China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
Solar and wind can be part of that strategy but it's not so simple, otherwise people would do it
Bateries do solve storage problems. And yes, china energy strategy is based on wind and solar - their portion of China energy production is massively growing.
Batteries can solve short term (days to a week at most) storage problems, they don't solve seasonal storage problems - making sure you have enough energy all the way through a cold, not very sunny, and not consistently windy winter.
If you don't believe me, run the numbers of how many kg of lithium batteries China would need to supply an entire week of energy in the middle of winter (all energy, not just current electricity demand, because in this scenario we're assuming everything is 100% electrified).
Also if you're potentially going to be fighting a war, you need more energy, not less, and it's even more important for it to be reliable year-round.
This is why China is doing what they're doing, they're not idiots and they know that wishful thinking is not a strategy
You dont need "very sunny" for solar to work. If you need to invent dark windless winter to make a non existent issue maybe you are just too deep in bullshit.
Again just run the numbers - full sun in summer vs cloudy day in the middle of winter even at only 40 degree latitude.
Output in the latter case will be under 10% of full power and probably under 5%.
It’s not bullshit it’s just physics, which is why the world looks like it does and not like the world you’re describing
> China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
This opinion is rather simplistic. China is reported to have 60% of it's energy needs already supplied by renewable sources, but this transition creates different types of challenges such as preserving the power grid's inertia. Otherwise you might see yourself in a scenario such as the Spanish blackout. This means having in place strategies for fast response (gas) and baseline (hydro storage, nuclear) to prevent the scenario.
batteries are the fastest response power. gas is high maintenance, & bad capex as an intermittent source.
> batteries are the fastest response power. gas is high maintenance, & bad capex as an intermittent source.
Batteries have a limited capacity and have a higher investment cost. Gas is the standard option for fast response. Pumped-storage hydro has by far the highest capex and has a heavy environment impact.
It's baffling how people show up in this sort of discussions arguing that standard tried-and-true strategies somehow don't work. Quite odd.
Batteries and solar have been beating lifetime cost of fast response gas turbines for five years or more. Now with uncontrolled fossil fuel cost spikes the operating costs of gas are highly variable compared to the pretty much flat investment and operating cost on battery + solar. if one were comparing battery plus renewables for full seasonal offsets are tighter, but the costs are so much lower, you can provision more and plan to dump power in the summer (or maybe not as this last long hot fossil fueled climate change summer will drive new demand for a/c)
> The simplest and easiest geopolitical strategy that is available to any country: switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind)
This lessens the impact of attacks on transformers too. A serious point of vulnerability.
It was a strategic decision during the cold war. Presumably if the USSR invaded Europe would be occupied. The gold would be used to fund the resistance.
> Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama
that is sadly not true, if you have a powerful or determined neighbor they can invade you which definitely qualifies as geopolitical drama
and moving country to get far away from say China or Russia is far from trivial
You forget about trade. Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama if they don't depend on others for energy or finances, or food, or steel, or electronics, or...
To be immune, a country needs to be self-sufficient in everything it can't do without: food, energy, raw materials, manufactured stuff, military hardware, financial services. Plus it needs to have a strong enough military to defend it all. That's non-trivial to achieve. It's far more than just energy self-sufficiency.
Because keeping your national gold reserves in a Mafia state run by a arbitrary kleptocratic elite is a very bad idea.
At this point international trust in the USA is at around the same level as trust in Iran and Russia .
China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
and it's going to be like that for decades unless november there's a broad sweep of offices and the other party actually exercises power for once and prosecutes politicians criminal behavior instead of that infuriating clemency nonsense they always do.
I'm betting they'll get elected and then sit on their hands as hard as possible calling it a "return to normalcy", fight their constituency, insist on doing absolutely nothing, and then get kicked right back out 2 years later and whine about people not voting for them.
The change has to be sweeping. The current people in power doing crypto pump and dumps: Internet trolls posting rage-baiting AI slop as official government communications as like the FDA and the CDC, then betting on polymarket about who they're going to bomb, teenaged 4chan trolls ctrl+f'ing for keywords to cancel things like cancer research because it has a "woke word" like "diversity" in published medical literature, these should be structurally impossible from getting near power again. Don't ever forget this happened. There's no undo. Decades down the drain.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/halted-nih-clinic...
And the Wild threats to invade neighboring countries. Someone needs to do to America what America did to Venezuela.
But instead, these criminals get to keep their jobs and it goes completely unpunished. Seriously, felony is not the right term. It's way beyond that.
I suspect the people of Greenland won't ever trust Americans again.
This isn't just going to go away. You can't just undo what Orange Mussolini is doing, and it'll take far longer than a decade before anything like a trusting relationship can be reestablished.
Not only Greenland but Canadians won't either.
I promise you, no amount of change in US policies or election results is going to fix it.
Canada has realized that it's a national security issue. The issue is not "Republicans" or "TRUMP" , it's bigger than this.
At least a generation and that's if they truly clean house and out right apologise.
Not just Greenland. I imagine a lot of people here in Blighty will not take well to the US meddling in the sovereignty of the Falklands.
I do wonder if the sudden noise is due in part due to to Peter Thiel's move to Buenos Aries.
As someone in Blighty just add it to the pile of existing issues with the US and its current government.
Unless the US gives significant military aid (or outright joins them) the Argentinians can't take the Falklands, They are much more heavily defended than they were in the 80's (in fairness it would be hard for them to be less defended than that).
This is just the usual "Things are fucked at home, Distract them with the Malvinas Again" they pull periodically, it's to appeal to his domestic base - about all we (the UK) should do is state it's not a matter for debate and dust off the "If they do the stupid thing again" plans we already have and then carry on.
Bigger problems in the world for us than the Malvinas.
Milei is flailing.
Typical criminal politician move when they’re about to lose power.
As a European, that would change nothing for me. The issue is systemic disinformation, fundamental lack of empathy and all those echo chambers. As long as this exists, the current situation will repeat or get worse.
> november
Have the Dem restored "appealing" and leadership?
--
Edit: look, see? About the barbarity of sniping (the counterargument to the at least two hitters at time of edit is not the post from lyu07282). My post is obvious and direct - friend of mine met only days ago a minor intellectual stating that voting the current administration in the usa was "right" given the opponents, and it is one of a long series of encounters. That the acquaintances of the friend were insulted or not in response is irrelevant. That a regime gave power to another out of evident faults is a fact, and if the reaction of some is ventral - "oooh! boo!" - the highway downwards remains paved.
no, i have no trust in them.
There needs to be some set of adults who take this lawless criminal hijacking of the government seriously for what it is.
This is clear as day, not a matter of politics. It's just clear crime. The material evidence is irrefutable and indefensible and it happens multiple times a day.
The DSA is pretty much the only hope democrats have left to restore any amount of credibility and they are fought by pretty much everybody right now.
Sorry but no "unless" left IMO. China has been and is still gaining momentum in every strategic matter, and they are very probably going to lead from now on.
What I am curious about is how that global leadership is going to change them, from citizens to government.
The democrats will gain a paper-thin majority, but one politician from Bumshart, Nebrahoma will block every important vote and nothing will change.
Feels like I’ve seen this movie before
I don't think it's going to be paper-thin. Paper-thin would be a move of five to ten seats. This doesn't feel like that. This feels more like 30.
All that's going to do, though, is mean that Trump can't get anything through the legislature. The legislature can't get anything passed, either, because Trump can veto it. So he's going to rule even more by executive order, because he won't be able to get cover from Congress.
Any real change will have to be after 2028. The Democrats are likely to hold both houses and the presidency, unless they absolutely blow it (which they could). That's the one chance. If they don't enact concrete change by 2030, then this will be normalized, and the next time it happens will destroy any remains of actual democracy in the US.
Why 2030 instead of 2032? Because there's likely to be a backlash in the election of 2030. There always is. The Democrats may not have the power to do what needs done after 2030.
You are forgetting the trump card of Supreme Court. They will block any change or effort by Democrats no matter how many seats dems win.
Mitch McConnell holding the seat then railroading in a judge is bad faith cheating and we can't be constrained by procedure and let bad faith actors get away with cheating.
Revoke the appointments and change the rules. SCOTUS isn't some unquestionable papal position with divine right.
The wild corruption of accepting gifts from groups arguing on the court and then using Galaxy brain weasel language to claim it doesn't count. No. Every person in prison has a reason why the law shouldn't have applied to them.
Are we a nation of rules or aren't we?
You follow the rules and maintain integrity of your oath or you're kicked to the curb.
And calling this a both sides political thing is the most tired dodge I've seen. I'm tired of the bullshit excuses why someone with a Trump has can rob bank
it's not about legislation and veto, it's about exercising congress's prosecutorial power. I don't want to hear any weak kneed bullshit about "well they'll do it to us".
Don't ever take that bullshit. Nobody else is doing anywhere near the wild level of criminality. Seriously, all this procedure stuff around groups that are breaking the law is insane.
It'd be like if a policeman saw someone rob a place, put the things in the car, and then the thief says "oh but there's a no looking in car rule" and then just drives away.
This is all complete insanity. Charge these people with the dozens of crimes they are committing every day.
It's cute that you think power is going to change hands in November. It'll be his reischtags fire. He's already planning to send ice to police the elections and only in places he's bound to win will people be voting.
Don't fall for his scare tactics on this one. They do not have resources to pull off having ice interfere in elections at scale.
There will be fuckery, and the election will not be fair, but any sort of steal will happen after votes happen.
> and it's going to be like that for decades unless in like november or so there's a broad sweep of offices and the other party actually exercises power for once and prosecutes politicians criminal behavior instead of that infuriating clemency nonsense they always do.
European here. I've written about that on Reddit but can't find it because the search there is dogshit so I'll have to write from memory...
We will not trust the US again any time soon, and so is our position regarding the UK. What both of you did, and especially how you got there, is an appalling history, a tale of a completely subverted democracy, and most importantly of a system that never got forced to be updated to centuries of learnings, unlike virtually all developed countries who underwent sometimes multiple wars, revolutions or the occasional peaceful democratisation.
Before we trust you again, you must undergo what we Germans had to post-1945. You have to update your constitutions, yeet out the fossil crap that in no small part led to the situation (FPTP voting, media regulations, in the case of the US making voting either a holiday or move it to Sunday like everyone else), prosecute not just the corrupt politicians but also the oligarchs that backed them, introduce an educational system that is actually worth the name to prevent the youth being corrupted, and demonstrate for many years that you can be trusted again.
Trust is easy to tear apart. All you need is a buffoon shitting in his own diapers [1] or a bus littered with propaganda [2] and a dumbass uneducated populace. But it takes decades and/or immense suffering to (re)build. And for both the US and the UK we gave you not just one chance to show you're better, but multiple. The US first had Bush wo tried to rope us into the Iraq war with his WMD lies, then after Obama came Trump 1, and after Biden came Trump 2, and the final straw regarding the UK and its ever more braindead PM choices was Lettuce Liz [3].
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
>Before we trust you again, you must undergo what we Germans had to post-1945.
Literally just yesterday, Germany's public broadcaster released a 26-minute documentary. "The far right's rise: Is Germany at a breaking point?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOk01r2eoc0
The AfD, which became Germany's top-polling political party for the first time last year, is now the clear leader in polls. It may soon win an absolute majority in a German state election.
The far-right is also widely projected to win the 2027 French presidential election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...
And Switzerland seriously considered immigration restrictions much harsher than anything contemplated by the US.
It's interesting to see how leftism changes as you cross the Atlantic. In the US it's usually baseless moral self-flagellation; in Europe it's usually baseless moral preening. In neither case do the facts seem to be particularly important.
"we gave you not just one chance to show you're better" is such a fascinating thing for you to say. For years our leaders told you to be less dependent on us. Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us. It's mind-blowing how out-of-touch you guys can be.
Please elaborate, whats so strict about Switzerlands restrictions? Why shouldnt a country be allowed to limit the people they want to have from immigration?
(Exercise for you: Try to get a passport from Liechtenstein, even if you work there permanently for a Liechtenstein company, its unlikely that you can even rent an appartment there!)
>Please elaborate, whats so strict about Switzerlands restrictions? Why shouldnt a country be allowed to limit the people they want to have from immigration?
Precisely. Why is it that people only clutch their pearls with horror when this principle is applied to the US?
I suspect because we don't regularly hear of masked armed thugs in Switzerland beating up, sometimes killing or throwing into concentration camps innocent people who were looking to immigrate.
Nothing wrong with making immigration laws strict, if that's what a country wants. That is totall fine.
But there is no justification to beat people up, kill them or throw them into concentration camps. Just tell them no in a professional manner and politely send them back to their own country (also, not some random contry they haver never been in).
ICE has killed US citizens too, they don’t limit themselves to immigrants
Yes you are absolutely correct.
How many Swiss citizens have they detained in concentration camps and deported to places they've never been and have no connections?
You haven't really the addressed the point of the US not being trusted.
Even if the EU becomes far right, far right governments don't work or trust each other. What you are saying is moot.
As an American, I don't necessarily want the US to be trusted. I want foreign governments to put pressure on us to stop developing omnicidal AI. The sooner the "rogue AI agents" conversation links up with the "USA is untrustworthy" conversation, the better.
As long as ASML is helping to supply OpenAI with AI chips, Europe still trusts the US too much. https://pauseai.info/amsterdam-protest-2025-december
I'm not as optimistic as you are, because a component of the rightward shift is the international collaboration of the respective movements' leaders. For example, US republicans closely worked together with Orbans party and Germanys AfD, exchanging strategies and such. This is also reflected across the media landscape in these countries - when new fabricated talking points pop up across US conservative spaces, it usually takes 2-4 weeks until the same talking points are repeated by many German right-wing media outlets.
Of course these alliances won't survive forever, as these movements have to continually expand their definitions of "out-groups" to keep their core "in-groups" satisfied, since they keep making their countries' issues worse by attempting fixes that are easy, simple, and wrong. But when a movement is built around the rejection of any uncomfortable history or research mixed with a huge dose of anti-intellectualism, it is fundamentally incapable of ever reflecting and learning beyond what the personal gain of their leaders.
Most of these alliances are held together by Russia though. When Putin falls, they all fall.
Why do you think so? The US funding won't suddenly stop, especially given how much the GOP hates the EU. Plenty of other rich people too.
Unless there are objectively good reasons to expect this we must stay vigilant, since if we gamble on infighting and it goes poorly, the consequences could become horrifying.
> The US funding won't suddenly stop
yup, but the utter majority of foreign funding that was found in the AfD and the other far-right parties' scandals came from Russia. The propaganda they spout comes straight from Russia. The bot farms amplifying their propaganda are mostly Russian.
Sure, the US MAGA network, the super riches (Musk, Thiel, ...) aren't to be underestimated. But they are breaking apart already and without a cohesive force connecting them, they will be much less powerful.
Sure, so far the funds came from Russia, but the US government has openly talked about increasing their funding.
I don't think that their propaganda is fully dependent on Russia. IMO their strategy was really easy to observe during/after the 2020 election: they do contentious things with barely any justification, then watch conservative social media spaces for explanations/justifications that users naturally share & amplify. From these options, they select ones advantageous to them, and then turn them into talking points. This machine doesn't need to get talking points from Russia! They just need a halfway charismatic leader to keep it going, especially due to my next point.
The bot farms are no longer needed thanks to AI! I guarantee you, they are already running plenty of bots themselves. And since these days most social media & news media companies are aligned with/owned by them, they can easily optimize their approach well enough to become dangerously effective.
I just don't see a reason to feel so safe about them breaking apart before major damage is done. Just look at how genuinely friendly Trump acts towards most highly authoritarian leaders, compared to the way he acts towards most other leaders. I assume they'll definitely break apart after e.g. the EU is broken up, because then the US will squeeze everyone else. But under Trump they're going to keep it up, as far as I can see.
Feel like there’s an opportunity for a faulty towers reversal where we apologise for Brexit, Boris and Truss. If it helps any, 48% of us wanted to stay. This Brit has a profound sense of wehmut. Seems like the whole continent is struggling with nationalism though, no? Hearing AFD is on the rise
> Feel like there’s an opportunity for a faulty towers reversal where we apologise for Brexit, Boris and Truss.
There certainly is, and I for one would certainly appreciate it. The problem is, with Reform polling as high as it does... there is a pretty high chance that they torpedo any negotiations :(
Trust and trustworthiness. Trust is very hard to win back, once its gone. Trustworthiness makes you willing to rely on a partner. Trustworthiness only builds very slowly over prolonged periods of time, by consistently not betraying ones trust.
You write as if you have confabulated yourself into being Europe's official spokesperson. This is all a bit high-handed.
I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
> I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
The Brexit shitshow took years to resolve from the Brexit vote to the actual Brexit event and absolutely hogged attention all over the EU apparatus. We could have used the energy we had to expend on that crap (including trying to prevent a restart of the Ireland-related violence) to instead make the EU itself better, react to the multitude of crises happening during the time, or furthen the EU integration. But no, we had the constant noise of Brexit all the time.
> Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
Which is even worse from EU perspective. PMs/Presidents changing every 4-ish years, okay, that's pretty standard. But it's hard to negotiate anything, knowing that your negotiation partner can get booted at any time.
OK, fair enough, Brexit generated a lot of political noise and was a bureaucratic headache. Not really the same thing as Trump's America though.
Well, the only thing the Trump admin did that really hurt us was the tariff trade war and the Iran war. The rest sucked for those affected, but had little consequence for Europe, and so the prevailing attitude here is "we can't do anything anyway, why should it matter for us"...
>We will not trust the US again any time soon
That's a high horse you're sitting on there!
When your nation voted poorly last time you picked a homicidal maniac who killed people in death factories. Americans helped you then, at extreme cost.
Trump pumps-and-dumps the world economy, but his approval rating is also below 1/3. Most Americans clearly don't approve, so why should we not trust them?
If all it takes for democratic nations to stop working together is that they elect a crook once, we're all doomed. Many european nations are very close to picking their own "Trumps" in the next elections.
In a democracy, any one crook's influence should be short-lived. That's the whole point of a democracy.
We need to help each other remain democracies, as the alternatives are so much worse.
That said, sometimes help comes in the form of removing the gold to say "you're out of line buddy".
> We need to help each other remain democracies, as the alternatives are so much worse.
Trump and his cronies are openly attempting to break the EU apart via funding and amplifying right-wing movements across the EU. These movements are collaborating, sharing strategies and spreading the same talking points, while they're using their control over social media platforms etc. to suffocate our democracies.
I would love to be able to trust the US. But the guy currently pissing against everyone's legs was re-elected after an attempted Putsch. How could they ever remove all MAGA influence from all of society and government?
Even if the US proves me wrong and manages to turn the wheel around, I won't see the US as an ally again until 1-2 decades pass without republicans taking any control over the government.
> Most Americans clearly don't approve
Except they did. Votes for Grump in 2016 were completely understandable, sympathizable even. Responsibility for the train wreck of a first term didn't fall at the feet of the voters - it's explainable by one politician being an utter shitbag once in office. And for the most part our institutions did function to contain most of the (direct) damage.
But Grump 2024 was a known quantity. The votes in 2024 demonstrate that the average American is either proudly ignorant of the actual policies they're choosing (ie fully steeped in propaganda that hides/downplays the destruction), or actively malicious towards the rest of the world (while benefiting from a privileged international position). Neither one bodes well for future decisions, even if there is some political will to pull up from the current autocratic destruction.
And no, the "we didn't know how bad he was going to be" of a 33% approval rating doesn't make up for that. Grump was a known quantity for this election, and the only way someone could have "not known" is by actively rejecting listening to their fellow citizens. Which goes right back to willful ignorance.
>The votes in 2024 demonstrate that the average American is either proudly ignorant of the actual policies they're choosing
That's a simplistic take.
Trump had less than 50% of the popular vote even though his opponent was clearly showing signs of dementia. The last-minute replacement had spent too much time being the "defund the police/eat the rich" sidekick to Biden and was clearly not representative of the views of the average American. She still got almost as many votes as Trump, from Americans who wanted to vote "Not Trump".
Seems to me the average American had little choice. All the Democrats had to do was field a candidate that could finish a coherent sentence mirroring the average American sentiment and they'd have landslide victory. But they didn't.
> Trump pumps-and-dumps the world economy, but his approval rating is also below 1/3. Most Americans clearly don't approve, so why should we not trust them?
because all it takes is for someone not as toddler-y as Trump to run for the job, the "moderates" in the GOP are mostly gone.
> In a democracy, any one crook's influence should be short-lived. That's the whole point of a democracy.
The problem is, Trump's influence will last for much much longer because y'all appoint your Supreme Court judges for lifetime.
> If all it takes for democratic nations to stop working together is that they elect a crook once, we're all doomed. Many european nations are very close to picking their own "Trumps" in the next elections.
The thing is, the US keeps electing warmongering crooks (Bush 1, Bush 2 and Trump all engaged in definitely illegal wars), and Trump was reelected by the populace despite literally attempting a putsch. In any decent democracy, this would have yielded him and the ringleaders a lifetime in prison, if not capital punishment.
>despite literally attempting a putsch
To me it never made any sense. The buffalo hat guys clearly had no greater plan, and the BBC actually had to apologize for faking a clip to make it seem Trump ordered it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/13/bbc-doctored-tru...
The BBC spreads to all of the EU's other news outlets, so Europeans "know" there was a putsch attempt based on a fake clip. Literally fake news, which plays directly into Trumps narrative and adding to the teflon layer he seems covered in.
Exaggerations, bad faith reporting, assumptions of guilt based on hunches - that's counterproductive if you really want to hold power accountable.
It's very important that the accuser of a crook is not a known liar. Because then even the true accusations won't stick and the crook gets away.
More accurately, nothing was "faked", the footage shown was of things Trump actually said, with a lot of "weave" (aka Trump waffle) removed.
The "apology" (BBC regrets the cut was not obvious to all) included:
which is hardly the hallmark of an apology.> China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
Is anyone storing their gold reserves in China except Cambodia?
China has the opposite monetary policy to the US. They do not want to export their currency as a global reserve, they have intense currency controls.
Probably not, but that may show how low trust in the US has dropped?
> China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
This can change quickly, as current management is less about comerce and more about "being the new Mao". If Russia can get Ukraine, USA can get Venezuela resources and threat Greenland, why wouldn't I get Taiwan?
At the rate Taiwan's superpower ally is declining, China just needs a little patience and a beneficent long term strategy & Taiwan will decide to switch ally's from self interest
Switch allies, to whom? The PRC? Do you realize PRC (Mainland China) and Taiwan are in a civil war? Taiwan switching allies to the PRC literally means admitting defeat.
Recall that Taiwan only exists because during the Chinese civil war, the United States provided the KMT with billions of dollars of military and financial aid. The KMT lost the mainland to the CCP (supported by the Soviets) and fled to Taiwan. The U.S. provided $4 billion dollars of aid, worth approximately $50 billion today.
The PRC would have retaken Taiwan decades ago if not for the U.S. guaranteeing Taiwan.
So continue in this line of reasoning - what happens as a currency strapped US turns inward and is more globally eschewed while making more common outright projections of regional power in the hemisphere of the Americas (while showing logistical failures in demonstrating cross globe power projection). Meanwhile China climbs the semi-fab ladder and Intel and even TSMC (re)builds its fabs in the US. KMT seems to maintain an intentionally ambiguous one-China policy. What are possible outcomes in the new state of geopolitics?
Moving the goalposts to a generic U.S.-decline narrative does not answer the question:
How does Taiwan "switch allies" to the adversary that's trying to annex them?
It's not changing the goalposts to recognize that the deterrents to China just stepping in to Taiwan are being undermined by US actions (some nothing to do with Taiwan). The value of Taiwan to the US as a counter to China's advancement seems in the latter stages of it's practical utility.
To answer your question perhaps one way could be for China to put forward a long term map to recognize the KMT as a party and unify as one China may years in the future. I would guess it would take a generation or even two to pass before that might happen and China would have to make the case that the people of Taiwan would be better off with the mainland rather than independent of it.
Specifically because China has now opportunity to gain international trust. Also, their own advancements in semiconductor manufacturing make Taiwan less attractive of an asset.
Why do people comment when they understand so little about the China/Taiwan issue? It has never been about semiconductors, that topic only exists as a post-rationalization of why the U.S. should continue to protect Taiwan against PRC takeover.
It has always been a legitimacy issue over who is the legitimate heir of the Chinese empire. China is still in a civil war. The communists (CCP) conquered the mainland and the former ruling party of China (KMT) fled to Taiwan. Taiwan is more successful than mainland China per capita on almost every standard economic and human development metric. It exists as a thorn in Beijing's side.
From the PRC perspective, reunification is a matter of national pride, and has nothing to do with semiconductors.
Like Russia had a hard time seeing Ukraine be successful.
Russia killed hundreds of EU citizens. The US has not sank to that level.
PS: We are still doing trade with Russia regardless of how many of us they killed. Will happen with the US as well.
What are you referring to?
Russia shooting down MH17. And the several British assassinations back when they were still in the EU. Those events killed hundreds of EU citizens.
It’s hard to take comments like this serious with all the hyperbole.
But regardless. Polls of your average citizen aren’t worth a whole lot considering most people get their information from social media.
What's hyperbolic? The trust thing is borne out by repeated polling of which countries people trust. The current US administration is openly profiteering from governing.
I do think it'll take a few years before Americans wake up to how badly their reputation has tanked around the world across successive governments of either party in the recent decade.
Greenland, Iran, Falklands, Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan, all these things probably feel like minor missteps in the US news cycle but they have had a major impact.
It's not quite a mafia state yet. We've yet to see Trump opponents fall out of windows.
I think Americans are unwilling or unable to see just how much foreign attitudes towards the US have shifted.
That comment was 100% correct. There was no hyperbole there.
I suppose it could turn very bearish in the next few years?
Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...
Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).
Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)
When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.
We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.
I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.
But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?
Because America can’t be trusted.
Yes.
Also to note, why was the US trusted before? I think it's a heritage from the Marshall plan: The US saved us twice from Germany, therefore we owe them our nations and storing our gold there won't change much. A century later, it does.
I'd rephrase the question as: Would you trust your parents? In childhood years probably, because you owe them your education anyway.
And because of the very convenient geographical location USA is unlikely to be invaded. You'd want your gold to be safe.
> Also to note, why was the US trusted before?
Trust was never absolute. What we trusted was that the US would act rationally to further their interests. The US benefited tremendously from economic development across the world (industrialisation, free trade, rebuilding after the wars, etc). Sometimes the US government miscalculated (like in Iraq), but there was nothing really destructive like what Trump is doing.
Even when we disagreed we could still talk things through and agree on other things. Now, you have Trump insulting allies and praising ennemies every day. Of course there is no trust.
In this context "trust" is something of a euphemism. The US had a big enough military relatively speaking that if they came for your gold then it wasn't feasible to stop them unless you were part of a competing bloc. So, you know. Keep the gold somewhere the US is happy with. Best shot of getting to a good outcome, and the US was pretty reasonable in the 1900s.
That all appears to have changed. They may already have lost the ability to physically coerce even medium powers and at any rate look like they have to retreat the boundaries of their global Not-An-Empire. So it makes sense to start rethinking the gold's physical location.
I think you should look up the Morgenthau plan and look at the state of Germany today. Of course people will say that it's all because of Germany's own decisions. To which I would counter that Germany doesn't any sovereign decisions and the last time it did that was in 2011.
What happened in 2011 and why were there no sovereign decisions afterwards?
> I think you should look up the Morgenthau plan and look at the state of Germany today.
That plan never got implemented.
There is a very awkward episode in Belgium national history, at the eve of WWII, the then minister of finance Camille Gutt, had the foresight to move tonnes of gold from the national bank to America and France but for some reason our king did not manage to pack his bags in time and was captured by the Nazis.
Do you have any reference to your story? Because this is not the historically accepted one. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_III_of_Belgium#World_W...):
"On 24 May 1940, Leopold, having assumed command of the Belgian Army, met with his ministers for the final time. The ministers urged the king to leave the country with the government. Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot reminded him that capitulation was a decision for the Belgian government, not for the king, to make. The king indicated that he had decided to remain in Belgium with his troops, whatever the outcome. The ministers took this to mean that he would establish a new government under the direction of Hitler, potentially a treasonous act. Leopold thought that he might be seen as a deserter if he were to leave the country: "He was resolved to remain with his army and amidst his people so as to share their fate."[6] Leopold had long had a difficult and contentious relationship with his ministers, acting independently of government influence whenever possible, and seeking to circumvent and even limit the ministers' powers, while expanding his own."
Yes sorry I forgot to mention the king would have been like 70kg max so easier to transport then tonnes of gold.
> why was the US trusted before?
because risk of US stealing gold was lower and potential usefulness in case of being invaded by Russia et all was higher?
I mean, we were trusted but also not fully.
This isnt the first time European powers repatriated gold from the US. In 1971 France sent their navy to take their gold back because of another conservative US leader who decided to try and leverage our power at the expense of international trust and lost us a portion of said power[1].
I am an American. I preferred when we were stronger because we sweetened the deal enough with everyone else that they let us be world financier/police/anti piracy force/etc.
This fucking machismo theory taking over the older conservatives and the "The Torment Nexus was actually an awesome idea" taking over the tech bros and younger conservatives is fucking destroying us. Both groups seem incapable of believing in a win/win deal. Its also zero sum game to these fuckers and thus our soft power, and eventually our hard power, is being lost.
[1]https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/07/31/august-1971-the-day-...
It's not really "eventually" for our hard power.
Iran has exposed many limitations and weaknesses in America's defense capabilities, and it's a fraction of the threat China is.
We have 0 carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific right now.
> Iran has exposed many limitations and weaknesses in America's defense capabilities
I'm far from a fan of current US policy nor an apologist, but this is a flawed analysis.
The war with Iran has exposed the stupidity of entering into that particular conflict, where:
* the goal (if there was one?) was something like regime change at arm's length
* 'arm's length' means using expensive long distance precision weapons, as there was/is very little taste for an invasion
* the target (Iran) is situated next to US allies which also happen to be hugely important as oil producers/exporters
* the target can also threaten a hugely important global shipping channel - the Strait of Hormuz
* the target has prepared for this action for years if not decades, and has good-enough drone technology to hand to threaten its neighbours and the Strait of Hormuz
This is an almost unique case in the world, and as such, its lessons of "US weakness" of "US failure" simply can't be assumed to translate more broadly. Iran is/was far more a strategic blunder which could/should have been foreseen, than a sign of America's weakness.
Yes, America currently has low stocks of long-range precision munitions and Patriots, but it still has the most powerful conventional military by far, and a globally-unrivalled ability to project that power around the world, if it chooses to.
---
"But what about Ukraine? What about drone warfare? America is far behind there." This may have changed the game. The heavy usage of drones in Ukraine evolved, noting Russia didn't initially invade with swarms of drones. If the US had had a strong reason to support Ukraine (imagine Russia had instead invaded Florida) they could likely have used conventional means (air superiority, tanks, men) and ended the war within a few weeks. Admittedly, now it's far less certain how those tanks and men would fare in current drone battlefield.
> and it's a fraction of the threat China is
It depends entirely on the nature of the war envisaged (see the points about Iran being a unique situation.). In particular, China does not have anything like the US Navy to project power in the way that the US still can.
> * 'arm's length' means using expensive long distance precision weapons, as there was/is very little taste for an invasion
Do you think Americans have a taste for invading China?
> * the target (Iran) is situated next to US allies which also happen to be hugely important as oil producers/exporters
China itself is the factory of the world, the world's second largest economy and America's third largest trading partner. It doesn't even have to strike surrounding countries to take aim at the US economy. Yes, that would hurt China too, but China has been preparing for this and the COVID supply chain shock in the US was just a small taste of what life could be like for Americans who are used to being able to buy everything under the sun for cheap at Walmart or on Amazon.
> * the target can also threaten a hugely important global shipping channel - the Strait of Hormuz
About a fifth of maritime trade goes through the Taiwan Strait. It's also one of the world's most important global shipping channels.
> * the target has prepared for this action for years if not decades, and has good-enough drone technology to hand to threaten its neighbours and the Strait of Hormuz
China has been preparing for a Taiwan contingency in earnest for well over two decades, with a particular focus on the A2/AD capabilities needed to keep the US from establishing superiority in a relatively small area.
The US on the other hand, spent 20 years chasing goat herders and insurgents and is now trying to reorient itself back to preparation for major power conflict. Which is a huge challenge when China is, for example, has an estimated shipbuilding capacity that's 100+ times greater than America's.
Don't get me wrong. The US still obvious has a very powerful military, but it has been trying to be be all things for all conflicts in all places. China has been laser-focused on a military that can accomplish just a few things.
> Iran is/was far more a strategic blunder which could/should have been foreseen, than a sign of America's weakness.
You're treating an inability to strategize as a strategic blunder and not weakness. You should reconsider that. Because it's the very thing that has caused the US to fail at achieving its long-term strategic aims in basically all but one of the significant conflicts it has been involved in since the end of WW2.
> In particular, China does not have anything like the US Navy to project power in the way that the US still can.
In a Taiwan contingency, China doesn't have to. China is just ~100-150 miles away from its target. Again, it has spent more than 2 decades investing in A2/AD capabilities for that specific contingency.
Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all also exposed the weakness of American might? Was the last big war that the US won WW2?
The US lost these wars politically. This has always been the US weakness rather than pure military power.
The US was better at getting what they wanted through either soft power or threat of military action than as a result of actual intervention. Which is why it’s really counterproductive when the government does not believe in soft power anymore. It’s the one thing you did well and that allowed you to get your way most of the time.
> The US lost these wars (>... Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran) politically...
These were not wars! These were American offensive aggressions against sovereign countries that lasted years if not decades for the people in power to suck resources into and out of the military complex andfor their own agenda. Interest peters out after a while when people realize the true nature of the offensive.
A war has two or more participating countries and a dialect between the two to resolve the conflict. A war has casualties and losses on both sides of the border (preferably not from local flight equipment but actual military hardware).
> These were not wars! These were American offensive aggressions against sovereign countries that lasted years if not decades for the people in power to suck resources into and out of the military complex andfor their own agenda.
I don’t entirely disagree. But they were large scale military operations, however one-sided. They were expeditionary wars for all intents and purposes, just like Russia’s occupation in Ukraine is, even though no war was formally declared.
> A war has two or more participating countries and a dialect between the two to resolve the conflict.
That was how it worked historically between peer countries, a kind of gentlemen’s agreements. Asymmetric warfare is not so clear cut. Colonial wars were messier. So can be civil wars, which can spread across borders (just look at the Balkans).
> A war has casualties and losses on both sides of the border
Coalition soldiers died in Afghanistan. Many American died in Viet Nam as well, which contributed to the US finally losing in both cases.
>But they were large scale military operations, however one-sided
No matter the size, they remain manufactured conflict. Those conflicts were created in order to make money and change policies to make money, terrorism at its core to those who have to live through it.
> Coalition soldiers died in Afghanistan.
You didn't get my comment.
Casualties on both sides of the border°1.°2. Anyone going to bomb mainland America will signal the end of the American "expeditionary" one-sided conflict causing ways that have been going on since its inception.
°1 A one-off event a la 9/11 is an outlier and should be considered an attack by terrorists, (causing terror in the middle East and around the world for decades), and not an attack by a sovereign nation that another nation should retaliate against. Refer to policy change comment above, the war on drugs, the war on terror.. manufactured conflict.
°2 Coalition learned this time around, were not duped into joining the latest manufactured middle east conflict.
America won Iraq and Afghanistan in a walk.
They didn't do a great job of nation building afterwards, but the actual war part was very successful.
You go to war because you want an strategic outcome you can't get with other means. I doubt the strategic outcome of the USA in Irak or Afghanistan was "kill a lot, lose not that many, leave the country in shambles, achieve nothing in return".
The strategic outcome in both wars was to replace the goverment for a friendlier one, and in both cases the USA didn't get it, not even close.
But if you view wars as an sport where people kills other people and the winner is the one who kills better/more, then war is declared over and "teams" look for another war to "play", indeed USA won both wars in a walk.
"The strategic outcome in both wars was to replace the goverment for a friendlier one, and in both cases the USA didn't get it, not even close."
The current Iraqi government is considerably more friendly to the US.
Yes it showed in the ongoing US Iran conflict. /S
We achieved "get the Iraqis out of Kuwait" back in the day.
Not alone
Bit lost here, to be honest - What exactly did the US win in these engagements?
You might make a case for increased control of and importance in the middle east for Iraq, sure - that declined somewhat after a forced fumbling backwards out of Afghanistan and tanked on contact with Iran, so if that was the take home stuffed panda prize to write home about it's been well and truly run over by a road train and left in a ditch.
Clearly big wins for the USofA PMCs, but that's a little more narrow than "America".
What the fuck are you talking about? Afghanistan was handed back over to the Taliban. That's a victory? Kill them and chase them for decades and then release a bunch of their prisoners and return control of the country to them and declare victory?
I think its eventually in that if we put our might behind it we could take probably any 2-3 major military powers on the planet at the current moment, but that's with the caveat that putting our might behind it means tens to hundreds of thousands of dead military members which we as a nation have lost the stomach for.
I am saying eventually in that I think we will not even be able to do that if we found our grit again in the coming years as long as we are prioritizing raising testosterone in individual soldiers and removing qualified women and minorities from our military over having competent leaders and prioritizing logistics.
Sorry, the ship has already sailed.
1. In Iran alone, the US has depleted stocks of some of its most advanced and important weapons systems.
2. The US does not have the manufacturing capacity for an extended conflict (China does) and the US is in fact dependent on Chinese components and raw materials.
3. As it relates to a China contingency in the Taiwan Strait: the Strait is ~140 miles at its widest point, and the Chinese have spent 20+ years investing in A2/AD capabilities. Given the state of the US military right now, it's hard to see how the US could overcome China's geographic advantage.
4. Our most important allies don't trust us (and we're even threatening some of them) so don't expect them to help.
5. Some of the most experienced and competent military leaders have been pushed out by an unqualified alcoholic who is more interested in how many pushups the cannon fodder can do than he is in how many ships America can build.
The US constitution is strong against despots and pro law. It's being tested now but I think maga too will pass.
The US is largely immune to being invaded due to having a lot of guns and a lot of ocean.
This long predates Marshall.
Russia had assets in Europe, look what happened to those. We got so naive and relaxed in the abscense of big wars within the "western hemisphere" that some people geniunly forgot what will happen to all of their "assets" when shit hit the fan.
I really wonder why. Something must have happened
Not relevant to the point - "I gave my item to my former friend Paul". For some reason or for some other, it happens.
And miscalculations in game theory happen ("he wouldn't, given...").
I put my gold in the safe of my best friend, he has a good safe. Then I rapped and killed his wife and children, and destroyed his house. But he doesn’t want to give me the gold back.
ok, but russia and the west were never best friends, just some russians have major crushes on western europe and would still trust the europeans to hold their gold more than their own russian compatriots :))
You are doing the complexity of history, and the due diligence of objective assessment and focus, a great disservice with those gross similes.
Let us stick to a fitting analysis for the point of the limited trust entities can give each other, and let us stick to actual events for what the crimes committed are concerned (for the respect due).
Putin is under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Rapes and killings are widely documented as part of the war he started. I don't think the parent comment was overstating the crimes in question in its simile.
The biggest thing wrong is Russia's gold isn't in the EU. It's actually the other way round - Russia has kind of stolen Spain's gold, at least has it and won't return it.
>Russia has kind of stolen Spain's gold…
For historical reasons, this is kind of amusing.
> I don't think the parent comment was overstating the crimes
Said comment was understating the crimes, but also misrepresenting them in context.
Those crimes are exceptional in ferality, not exceptional as abstracted within the difficulties of trust building. (Which is also gained diplomatically, and diplomacy has clearly failed - bilaterally).
Miscalculation is the right word.
And: it is relevant. You gave away the relevancy yourself. It is called game theory. Games have rules. Break rules see what happens. Or instead be prepared.
Seems like someone broke rules but wasn't thinking through consequences or didn't care about them
Ok, so you meant, with «I really wonder why - something must have happened», that what happened is that they did not calculate it through properly. But that is suggested for a large number of the players in that game. All losers, or going trough a very suboptimal path.
It would be realistic if administrations went through a path in decision making guided by the awareness of their own weakness in decision making abilities.
The something was the collapse of the USSR, right? "The end of history" etc.
Case in point: a naive belief in "high moral". Bad guy (Ru) attacks good guy - bad, punish, cancel. When good guy (US) attacks bad guy - that's different, whataboutism etc. Such POV falls apart when good guy (US) attacks another good guy (EU), and while you may chose to ignore such possibility, European leaders don't (a rare case of competence on their side).
Possibility? Didn't the US sabotage Nordstream 2 a few years ago? It's pretty clear that the US isn't friendly towards Europe unless Europe behaves like a vassal.
It's unclear who blew up the pipeline, but evidence appears to point to Ukraine, not the US.
I don't think it has anything to do with morality.
It is just leverage.
The assets are still there and frozen for the most part (in Euroclear).
Some people would like to see them put to use in guaranteeing reconstruction and defence for Ukraine.
The end of the US hegemony and the unstable regime in the US makes decoupling the best strategy.
> unstable
Well. Not sure. Untrustable system, maybe. (The whole chain that brought to this stage is improper - and the damaging factors are still active.)
--
Edit: Again. First, that the current regime in the usa would be unstable is an idea to be justified. Especially given the efforts made before the 2024 elections already to plan its stabilization.
Then, from a system engineering perspective, the political system in the usa remains broken by design. See the 2000 elections as a strong demonstration.
Then, if there have been progress to fix the issues, show it.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573845
You’re not sure that Trump is unstable?
I take it that you are joking ;)
I am not sure that the regime they have created will disappear with their fronter.
Oh I see. Well these do seem like end times for US democracy, very similar to the fall of Rome. So yes the problems are broader than Trump and probably won’t end with him, but he is the most dangerous character so far and I’m entirely unsurprised that other countries are disengaging
As we’ve seen from the violated norms so far and the attack on the capital building, it would not be a big step to dictatorship disguised as firm leadership in time of war or civil disturbance.
Does anyone in power anywhere actually think China has finally overtaken the US hegemony? Or are we pretending someone else might somehow hold that position?
The end of hegemony isn’t usually immediately followed by the appointment of a new leader, usually it means fragmented power and war.
Yes, China is a likely eventual successor and in some parts is the world has replaced the US in being the influential superpower.
Nobody appointed the US leader of the world, what are you talking about? It's just a matter of "whoever is most powerful and influential". There's no war needed, and the US never conquered the planet.
I'm not doubting that China is the likely eventual successor, I'm doubting that they can succeed anything at this particular point in time. Nobody wants China in charge. It would make any issues experienced with the US in charge like a joke. Maybe once their dictator dies?
China is making trade deals and integration left and right and even Canada and Mexico are looking in other directions and cooperate more closely with china and eu. Maybe not a single power has to hold power
China has historically been the most powerful nation in the world multiple times, but always remained relatively inward looking, while acting as more of a merchant towards the rest of the world. I don't see any reason to think that will substantially change. So the most likely scenario is we end up, and arguably are already in, a truly multipolar world where no individual nation is the hegemon.
I think it will change.
China is currently trying to take control of the whole South China Sea. They’re in a cold war with the Philippines and Vietnam.
Next it will go for Taiwan.
Then either Siberian or Indian territory with the same “these used to be ours” justifications.
At the same time I think will use shadow fleets to take as much fish stocks from around the world as it can.
Not acting yet is not the same as not being expansionist. With all that “we’ll smash your head on the concrete” rhetoric China’s wolf warriors are very clear on where they’re headed.
Everyone is just gonna stop trying to acquire influence for some reason...? Or do you just think that, for some reason, this would now magically balance itself out any time any world leader thinks "wow that's a huge vacuum that needs filling!"
Empires expand when the benefit exceeds the cost. The US is currently doing quite poorly against Iran. The US military is not incompetent, nor is the Iranian army supercompetent, so why? It's technology. The traditional way the US invaded countries was by assassinating the leadership, gaining air superiority, and then basically playing shoot fish in a barrel.
Iran, and likely all major US adversaries now, were/are fully prepared for the US assassinations. And gaining full air superiority is no longer possible in the era of drones, because you're no longer shooting down a small number of high value targets (like planes), but instead a practically infinite amount of low value targets that can be readily replenished.
Spending interceptors that cost millions of dollars to shoot down drones that cost thousands of dollars just doesn't work. We might be able to obtain air superiority in terms of e.g. Iran being unable to fly fighter jets over their own country, but that says nothing about their ability to launch endless drones and otherwise inflict a severe toll on any invading army.
So it's likely that modern war has mostly gone back to times long since past where the bottleneck is no longer cost in $$, but cost in lives. And that makes militarism far less attractive for every single country, even moreso in the era of plummeting fertility rates when the people who are going to be killed are precisely those who are supposed to be birthing and raising your next generation.
So there will certainly be wars when nations see the benefit as being especially high, but I think the idea of trying to casually 'project strength' half way around the globe is probably already dead. The cost is too high, and the benefit too low.
> Does anyone in power anywhere actually think China has finally overtaken the US hegemony?
No, not really. For now we are headed towards a multipolar world rather than a hegemony.
Europe-China trade has already overtaken the US. If only you knew how bad things really are...
As for hegemony? Well the Chinese actually don't want to be world police.
Good opportunity to post Periodic Videos tour of a Bank of England vault:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTtf5s2HFkA
Visit of the underground vault in Paris, narrated by Stefan Zweig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txyKenOq5Pw
The dangerous situation we are in is that entities outside of the USA hold significantly more US assets than US entities own assets outside the USA.
So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
Or in simpler terms: The USA has been giving out IOUs for real goods for decades. It is now tempting to default on those IOUs. The USA did this before. Up until 1971, a dollar certified a claim to gold. Then the USA simply canceled that promise.
The current ramp up to AI dominance might be what holds the USA back from breaking more ties with the world. It is a race that must be won. And investments from abroad help. But when the whole world is operated by US AI factories things might look different. When every task around the world is performed by intelligence generated in the USA, just like every computer is run by US software now - there might be little incentive left to "pay the rent" for the rest of the world that now sits around idle, fiddling their thumbs.
> The dangerous situation we are in is that entities outside of the USA hold way more US assets than US entities own assets outside the USA.
The dangerous situation we are in is that the US is berating and betraying its closest historical allies, eroding its credibility and soft power, and weakening its leverage at a time when threats to the Western order that has existed since the end of WW2 are growing rapidly.
Incidentally, the orange man in charge loves to tout "deals" in which foreign countries agree to invest substantial sums in the US, so any actions that lead foreign countries to believe their investments might be nationalized banana republic-style won't help the administration's efforts to attract investment and onshoring.
I would guess that most of those announced deals will never come to fruition. He loves to pat himself on the back, and everybody seems willing to go along with it, until they actually have to spend money.
If the US did something so economically hostile it would tank its own stock market just from the world cutting off a bunch of trade.
> cutting off a bunch of trade
Given the last 19 months of tariff chaos while Republicans control all branches of government, I don't see any reason to think they're concerned about that.
Plus the whole "assassinate the Iranian president in the middle of negotiations to start a war across a major global trade-route" thing.
I dont know. Stock market claps and absorb everything these do happily.
It's not going to be a net win for anyone. A country that needs to keep borrowing to stay afloat is not going to improve its position by effectively defaulting on its debt, regardless of the exact method or type of assets involved.
The USA might hold a majority of the worlds value generation in a few decades. If AI generated in the USA powers everything. Then the USA does not need to borrow anymore.
That outcome seems unlikely. Both that AI will remain dominated by USA for a few decades, and that they will use newfound profits to eliminate budget deficit.
And why would they want to default on their debts in this hypothetical future where they've "made it", raking in AI profits from everyone. They would work hard to preserve that world order and not shake things up unnecessarily.
> that AI will remain dominated by USA
The USA has managed to dominate software for decades now. Why would it change? Take a look at the current datacenter investments in the USA vs other countries. It looks very much like the USA will even extend its lead.
> why would they want to default on their debts
So they don't have to share the AI profits with foreigners who hold shares in the AI companies.
> > why would they want to default on their debts
> So they don't have to share the AI profits with foreigners who hold shares in the AI companies.
They can do it now. They don't, because it's not worth it. It won't be worth it in the future either. They'll have yet more to lose. Especially in this hypothetical scenario where their massive AI exports are what's paying for their economy – good luck getting your counter-parties to pay for your exports after you have decimated their economies and soured relationships over a one-time boost that will cover what, a couple years of US government spending at best?
> The USA has managed to dominate software for decades now. Why would it change? Take a look at the current datacenter investments in the USA vs other countries. It looks very much like the USA will even extend its lead.
- Because USA managed to dominate other industries for decades as well, only to lose them for one reason or another?
- Because China has shown its ability to dominate in other complex modern industries like EVs and drones... and software is not special, and they're already starting to out-compete US with cheaper open-weight AI models?
- Because trust in America has already shaken, and work to get off US software in other countries has already started, even if it's slow and will take a long time?
- Because the contents of datacenters have a useful life of only a few years, and over-spending hundreds of billions on first-generation inefficient datacenters may sooner result in a financial crash wiping out most of the industry, than build a meaningful long term moat?
- Because US doesn't even produce the chips that power said datacenters, whereas China, their main geopolitical competitor, is working full time to develop their own chips, while militarily posturing against the island next door where all America-bound chips are made, at a time when US ability and will to do anything about that seem to be at an all-time low?
- Because after enough iterations, the AI race may eventually boil down to in large part to competition on the cost of electricity, in which US is at a disadvantage?
US is not going to willingly default on its debt or violate investors' property rights. That's just a fantasy that got nothing going for it.
> good luck getting your counter-parties to pay for your exports
It's not a matter of choice. Once a country runs on US artificial intelligence, it can't just say "Well, let's do things manually again". People won't know how to do it anymore. There will be no more keyboards, steering wheels or cash registers to operate.
It's true that China might offer an alternative. But changing a country from being run by US AI to being run by Chinese AI is not a small feat and comes with its own issues.
> US doesn't even produce the chips
TSMC is running and expanding a factory in Arizona. Budget: $265 billion. Intel, Samsung and Miron are also building capacity in the USA.
Well, they could, but the moment Donald defaults on those bonds, he can say goodbye to those stock market highs and watch new unprecedented lows.
> So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
This opinion is very naive. The moment the US declares "ownership be damned", the US dolar stops being the currency used in things like the oil market and it's value tanks. The world will scramble to use an alternative currency, which will end up being either the euro or the yuan. This effectively marks the end of US as a world power.
Or Bitcoin. Of which almost half is already under US control.
Anyhow, much of the new currency will flow to the USA if the USA becomes the worlds source of (artificial) intelligence.
> Or Bitcoin. Of which almost half is already under US control.
This sort of opinion is laughably out of touch. Listen to yourself: oil markets will move away from the US dolar due to how the US governments destroying its value, and instead will move to bitcoin because... The US controls it?
Are you aware you are posting these outlandish opinions on how the world trusts the US with it's currency in a discussion where literally European countries are pulling their gold reserves out of the US because they no longer trust the US?
"If you owe the bank a million, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion..." etc.
And the US owes trillions.
That cuts both ways. US entities own huge amounts of overseas assets including debt.
A more appropriate saying would be cutting off your foot to spite your leg.
Thankfully no one has done that yet.
yes. but most of it is not to other countries. Most government debt (over 80% globally) is privately owned through sovereign debt instruments like bonds.
And who owns the bonds?
Private citizens and companies, as the gp said.
If there is ever a conflict, US will seize assets of whatever country it is fighting with.
> If there is ever a conflict, US will seize assets of whatever country..
Canadians, and the rest of the world is finding out that you don't even need a conflict for US to lay claim over your stuff. "We want it", is perfectly legitimate and legal reason for the taking.
Sure, and you can replace US with almost any country in that sentence. The problem right now is there's a feeling that even decades-old alliances are no longer something you can count on when you're talking about the US.
Plus even on a less-than-wartime level, nobody wants wants their own national assets to be held-hostage or used for extortion, whenever this Republican administration next demands a "favor" for domestic bragging or kowtowing-humiliation for a perceived personal slight.
As Boston would sing, "More than a Feeling"
it gets easier to understand if you adopt the anti-imperialist position, these are vassal states, the us hold incredible influence over them. Gold reserves are just one of thousands of levers at their disposal, if some european nation has a revolution and seeks to assert their sovereignty then the US has a lever to pull. The point to question is the existence of the lever in the first place, the US doesnt have gold in any other country, china or iran doesn't put gold in the US because it gives the US this lever. Thats one of the mechanisms of imperialism, it means if some "western-aligned" (people dont like the word vassal) nation acts in their own interests against the US the US can pull that lever. Why would any nation ever place such a lever in the hand of the US? It's the same exact mechanism why many african nations have the french CFA currency, it gives french the lever to pull its a remanent of colonialism in the case of france.
I'm more interested in why was it centralized (there) in the first place? So it's easier to trade where when you make a sell/buy IOU is exchanged and a sticker on the bar is put or a bar changes pallet? I'd kind of understand that except these are central banks - how often do they even trade gold? Since we're in 2026, I actually googled that last question and it turns out central banks trade or adjust their gold reserve on a monthly basis. Somehow the thought of that seemed to me as too much of a high frequency trading for a central bank :)
- Because USD is the main trading currency, much more liquid than anything else
- Also for physical resources, you want geographical diversification, and America is far enough that to be orthogonal to e.g. European conflicts
Simple. No one trusts the current administration and no one should. The long term damage being done is astronomical. They are a magical combination of malicious and incompetent. The only thing that could make it worse is if they were more competent at being malicious.
This feels a little bit outdated. When he was elected for the first time a decade ago it was a "current administration" problem. When he came back it became clear it was not a fluke, America failed to generate any compelling alternatives, and entire new sectors of the US Economy (tech billionaires) now see his political project as their best option.
I think people constantly underestimate how destructive he is. They think Trump can be a pawn for their interests, but he is irrational, volatile, and stupid. The democrats and the Biden administration paved the way for Trump 2 by not having a primary.
Dedollarisation next
That's step 1 done. Steps to follow are: move off the US dollar, cancel trade agreements with the US and restore your own laws in your country, evict US military bases from your country.
Even animals have a stability pact. Humans, especially politics need stability, when you mess it up, fear takes over and among other things, defensive stuff happens. So this is a simple reactive defensive act.
Mainly because the US Dollar debt at some 39 to 40 trillion is now unserviceable and the US is going to default the debt payment. So countries are preparing for that eventuality - the US ship is on the event horizon but being slowly but surely sucked into the Black hole. The last govt was ensuring spending all the unspent budget - even if they knew it was bad for the country . The current govt will be left holding the baby when the crash comes. The only question is how long can you hold - 1 year 2 years before the ship crosses the edge of the event horizon
You say that like the current government is spending less.
Republicans only talk about spending less, they don't actually do it. They do cut taxes though, so the debt grows even faster.
You mean to tell me the army of school shooters deporting millions of manual laborers didn't pay for itself?
The orange one. Duh.
He’s just one part of the explanation, it’s also all the people who are behind him. He’s mostly a front nowadays. If Trump is gone, things wouldn’t be better with Vance taking his place
It’s the voters that put him back. You could say it was an aberration the first time but the second? Americans are too stupid and selfish to be trusted with the immense power they were given.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
This is brilliant. How do we reconcile it with democracy though?
Education, healthy media environment, healthy culture of understanding and respect. Exactly everything the conservatives have been pushing against since decades
> the second
The second was very clearly a systemic failure out of many factors. Those systemic failures are the point.
I mean that is the biggest factor now, but also because most of the rest of our federal politicians are also worthless and corrupt.
He's the center of gravity who's enabling the decline at the moment. It's a rare case where doing the thing would probably result in less instability instead of more.
If you blame the loss of trust in America on a single person you live in a delusion.
Don't forget that Biden and not the orange one blew up the most important gas pipeline of the most important European ally^H vassal.
How can you trust USA after that?
I'm not the one asking the question, I'm providing an answer.
That you don't like the answer speaks more to your state of mind than my own.
Consider that trust still declined so much more under the current government. How do you explain that?
No matter who did Nordstream and why, there are rational reasons that explain why the different parties might have done it. Even when you've been negatively affected, you can still somewhat understand it.
This is no longer the case under Trump 2. Since this term started, every day begins by checking what random decisions the US made to screw you over today. Treaties and agreements are torn up on a whim, and they can't even come up with halfway sensible explanations hold up to any scrutiny.
The only common denominator the world can see is the senseless cruelty being gleefully inflicted by the senile pedophile leader and his deeply brainwashed followers. The hatred spread by the US is taking root, and they will be reaping it for an entire generation if things go on.
Evidence points to Ukraine doing it, not the US.
For those seeking a more level-headed view, the Fed reports on foreign-owned gold monthly. Going back a couple of decades:
Yes, but that data is dumb in itself without an analyst explaining what caused that trend and what is happening now and which new forces will apply to that trend.
I assume there's a financial cost for doing this? I assume gold reserves in others coffers act as collateral so having them at home makes them a lot less useful financially useful?
The Democratic party needs to call the Netherlands and Europe and say "Give us please until November to fix this. If we fail to do that, trust your instincts!"
It's one thing for the Democrats to convince themselves Trump was a fluke ten years and 2 elections later. But it's not gonna convince other nations who aren't getting paid to tell the party establishment what they want to hear.
We are all in this together. As goes the US, so does the rest of the world. You can pretend otherwise, but wait until he takes Greenland, then Canada, and then god knows what else. He's going to bring it all down around us if we don't stop it.
The Democrats won't take the presidency in November. The fundamental trust issue is with the presidency, not Congress.
They're too afraid to be seen as "leftist" and of alienating moderates to do anything of the sort.
Most of the major Bitcoin spikes and leveling-up of the price since 2012 have preceded or corresponded with governments tightening controls, and people using BTC they owned or buying it to evacuate capital to more lightly regulated countries. That's also why there hasn't been a Bitcoin rush for awhile, imho... it's no longer very useful for that, now that all the entrance and exit nodes are monitored. Gold is a bit hard to move, but this article may be underselling to what extent the recent spike in gold prices is attributable to demand for that kind of liquidity. The cross-border, anonymous kind.
The demise of Localbitcoins actual local meetups and trading for cash was the end of a significant way to move money out of regimes that people suspected were going to take it from them.
Localbitcoin is dead but there are still venues to trade bitcoin/crypto for cash. They have mostly moved to p2p on facebook and discord.
There are a few platforms that facilitate personal transactions using stuff like Venmo and Zelle but I suspect most of the people who are continuously selling lots of coins are probably silk road type vendors so I have to imagine it's just a great way to get your Venmo account on the feds radar.
Using Venmo or Zelle obviates the reason for using Bitcoin to move money from one country to another, which is that you don't want the transfer to be traced, and you may or may not have access to the banking system where you're going (eg the enormous flood of Bitcoin out of China and Hong Kong during the crackdown). Venmo and Zelle are American banks that just add a new type of KYC endpoint. From there, it's easy to see the whole blockchain back to where you acquired it.
Localbitcoins facilitated a cash exchange that was extremely useful for people seeking to move money out of repressive regimes and convert it into local currency they could live on.
To your point, that money didn't have to be acquired on Silk Road or something... I used to get paid for work in BTC, and used it to pay rent for a couple years in Argentina by selling it to a dude I'd meet once a month at a Starbucks.
You don't have to be a silk road vendor. You just have to be selling and buying both, then you can make money on the spread, which can be several percent in P2P markets.
This.
When I lived in Argentina, the maximum amount of USD you could pull from an ATM was $200 per day, dispensed as 600 pesos. That was at a government-enforced 3 to 1 USD to Pesos. The price on the open street market was at least 9 pesos to the dollar.
So, say my rent was 3600 pesos a month. Technically USD$1200 at the official rate, but only USD$400 at the blue rate. It was better for me to take a boat to Uruguay for $100 round trip, plus a hotel room for the night, to get dollars out of a bank there and trade them on the street in Argentina.
Okay, that's the setup of what I was doing. But with Localbitcoins I found this kid who would prefer to hand me a stack of USD$1000 than Argentine Pesos, for BTC traded private wallet to private wallet. He was in his first year of college and he'd just opened a money exchange office in a shopping center.
One day I asked him "where do you get all those dollars, and what are you doing with the Bitcoin?" He told me, most of the service goes the other way. You see, they needed my Bitcoin, because in Argentina, government employees at that time were allowed to take 20% of their income in greenback US dollar cash.... at that amazing government exchange rate of $0.33!!! So naturally they wanted to get it out of the country, not keep it in cash. But Argentina also would not allow you to take more than $500 out of the country. My friendly high school Bitcoin entrepreneur had a solution: Take their dollars and exchange it for Bitcoin, then send the Bitcoin to a friend in the US who would change it back and depost it into a US bank account (for a 5-10% fee). This avoided the export controls and allowed them to offshore their cash without trusting the Argentine banks, which were well known for defaulting on their customers.
The only question for my friend was what to do with all this USD and how to get more Bitcoin with it, which was where expatriates like me fit into the picture.
This is why I believe that the real and only value of BTC is in avoiding currency controls, and it'll continue to have value as long as those controls exist in places, but the closing of the open markets and the end-to-end tracking of ingress and egress points makes it a lot less viable than it was.
Even in stable economies without capital controls you should be able to earn several percent spread, because supply of physical money changers (you) in any particular region is limited, it's risky for you (they may rob you), and you're providing a valuable service (exchanging without any paper trail).
Right, but the risk isn't really worth the reward in an economy that could've slotted this kid into a college job as a loan officer or something. I'm sure having large stacks of Benjamins at his disposal probably had something to do with it for him.
I wrote a paper around 2010 that tried to evaluate the potential value of Bitcoin as purely a method of exchange that bypassed traditional intermediaries, and came up with some ridiculously large figure that everyone dismissed. But one central point of the paper was that it should never be misunderstood as a store of value because its only inherent value was to bypass currency controls.
Well, why would European gold be stored in America in the first place?
It's a remnant of the cold war and the two preceding hot wars. The plan was to ship big parts of the gold overseas, just in case Europe gets nuked and occupied in a ground invasion from the east. But lately there have been more threats for an invasion from the west, so gold goes back.
It's probably a matter of liquidity, storing it where it can be exchanged when needed. Transport is quite expensive
So they could get access to US dollars? To participate in the oil economy of the 80's, the dotcom bubble of the 90's, etc. etc.
Security: European have been taken over multiple times by Germany. Keeping the gold in the usa keeps the money a safe distance from the fight.
Gosh, have we in the West forgotten so much of our history already?
Much of the gold was moved out of Europe prior to and during WWI. Partly out of fears of German aggression b ut also because throughout the war, European countries bought massive amounts of materiel from America, which increased the flow of money out of European and into American coffers.
But gold itself is very heavy and thus cumbersome to transport. It doesn't make sense to run transatlantic gold shipments every time a few bars change hands. So central banks tended to keep the gold more or less in one big vault and just sort of move the bricks between one country's pile and another. So there would be, in essence, a large stack of gold in the US Federal Reserve, and that gold belonged to France, or whomever. When the war ended, European countries were devastated and needed goods from somewhere that didn't have depleted industrial capacity and whose farmlands weren't littered with UXO.
This situation more or less cemented America's position as the world's creditor, and so it simply was more convenient to keep a large portion of one's gold reserves in the country with whom you were doing a lot of business. For some countries, repatriating gold is a matter of sovereignty, and e.g. France started repatriating its gold reserves in the 1960s.
Now that Americans have decided they like being a military, economic, and cultural superpower less than they like electing a dementia-ridden child rapist, other countries have correctly realized that America's decline cannot be stopped, only slowed. After all, it's Americans themselves who are the root of the problem, and Trump is but a symptom. This instability is not going to stop when he leaves office. Better get your gold off the sinking ship, but do it slowly so as to not accelerate the sinking before you can get it all out.
Re: the gold situation after WWI, if you're interested I encourage you to read Liaquat Ahamed's excellent Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer, IIRC.
Related:
Norway's Oil Fund Proposes Selling Roughly $80B in U.S. Treasurys
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49564189
Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535526
Lack of trust.
Individuals can do the same. Sell gold ETF and buy coin/bullion. The cost of holding physical is lessened if held for +10 years.
I’d be really interested to see all European countries & Canada dump their US bonds en mass if trump does anything untoward in Greenland, Canada or elsewhere.
As an American trying to retain my sanity in this country, I have to tell myself that such things are just trollish nonsense from the ultimate reality television troll. It is comforting to me that 50% of what he says is bluster and the other 50% is pure fabrication. I think we have developed some resistance to it where, like, a few years ago we would say "OH MY GOD! HE CAN'T POSSIBLY BE THREATENING CANADA!" and now we're just like, "there goes crazy old man again, don't worry, he just shit his pants on the golf course".
Not saying it's right or sound that he's the elected leader of the country or that our politics is so warped... I mean, I blame it on being on the losing end of the most rigorously fought information war in history.
But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
FWIW, the American people can't even support a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been blowing up our soldiers for decades. Hard to imagine they'd show much support for invading an ally.
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
Sorry, but no.
Even if there are no kinetic attacks towards allies right now, the "crazy old man" is causing real harm. Harm to global stability and the world order, economies, to businesses and individuals, to long term initiatives such as research and healthcare. But most importantly, real harm to the trust between ourselves. Western allies can no longer trust the USA, it is broken, we no longer have the same values.
The first time in 2016 we forgave, everyone makes mistakes and Europe is certainly not free of them. But the American people chose to elect him twice with full knowledge, now everyone suffers.
So the rest of the world forges its own path now. America's military, economic and cultural hegemony will decline. Not tomorrow, maybe not even quickly, but inevitably. Godspeed !
Which is it... Godspeed the decline, or you hope it doesn't?
I think it's a tragedy that America elected him twice, and it has already led to chaos among our allies and irreparable harm to the postwar order in which America was the seat of empire after Britain. I think that [the populist brain virus which took hold of America, in 2016 and particularly after covid] was done intentionally by Russia and China who are enemies of America. Is the loss of that order what you are bemoaning?
We are also a country that established itself from European colonies. Every time Argentina or Brazil or Chile or Venezuela or Colombia go through spasms of communist or fascist takeover, Europe takes that as an unsurprising fact, and the bankers keep doing business with them. There is something much more frightening about America reaching some polar political extreme, and it's not simply nuclear weapons (because several very extreme dictatorships have those).
What is scary about it is the same thing that's scary about the AfD in Germany... the idea that we are losing the generational knowledge we built to safeguard some of the world against savagery. In order to believe this, you must also believe that Germany and the US are not already, inherently savage and that some of the order brought by NATO and the postwar order has been a good thing, even up to and including the Cold War.
Then, we can define what is worth saving about America and why it matters.
While I personally believe a lot of America is worth saving, it is not up to us, and the arcs of history take many decades to play out.
As Brexit has shown, even when sanity returns, the previous reality does not.
So it is not that we wish the USA ill, or harm, quite the contrary - we did not ask for this. We have clearly understood the message and we are focused on our own future now.
Previous reality probably won't return... although you never know. I think a lot of the world would breathe a sigh of relief and get back to normal under a more rational American leadership. Unlike Brexit, we haven't literally burned our bridges.
I think it's important to understand that there's a difference between American right wing populism and the British form. Brexit was a self inflicted wound whose harm was almost entirely limited to Britain. If anything, it shored up some European resolve against the anti-EU parties for a time.
On the contrary, if the isolationist wing of Trump's party had its way, American withdrawal from the world would have a far worse impact on the stability of European politics and concrete strategic defense.
I'm a 2nd generation American ... my family is Polish and Ukrainian. I had / have the option to reclaim citizenship elsewhere, both in and out of the EU. I've lived in France and Spain, Czechia and Argentina, and in 15 countries in total since 2004. I didn't choose to be born in America but I also can't imagine a world where it doesn't retain military and financial supremacy. The vacuum would be immense and the only powers which could fill it are, for lack of a better word, evil. I believe the only option is to resuscitate and improve America, because without it exercising political power, the whole world will instantly be on fire.
> What is scary about it is the same thing that's scary about the AfD in Germany...
Without downplaying or excusing the US' problems, I hope everyone in other countries thinking "that can't happen here" realize that's what most Americans thought just a decade ago too.
Turn that disgust with the disease into preventative treatment.
Frankly, the government that America has right now is nowhere near as extreme as AfD. I wouldn't be surprised or sorry if the next President of the US sanctioned goods out of Saxony. But we have both types of populism here. Both of them incredibly stupid. Our true war is against the foreign social/mainstream media saturation which is pushing our population away from reading and away from analytical thought, manipulating them into the arms of either type of extremism, for the benefit of the autocracies who want to cause us to fight amongst ourselves. Trump is just one manifestation of that. "It can't happen here" relates to a particular sort of fascist or authoritarian takeover of society, and I still think it can't in America. Trump's approval rating is under 35%. I live in Oregon, the most progressive state in the country, and spent 2 hours on the phone today buying insurance from a guy in Georgia who got excited talking about what guns I owned (and what he owned). I think the idea of a hard takeover in America by the far right is ...bullshit. And I even wrote a novel about it happening 20 years ago. But the rest of the world can't keep going through the vicissitudes of America's increasing whiplash at being manipulated and dumbed down this way. What has to change is something in the American mind before it allows its empire to collapse.
I bought that initially, but Trump is causing real harm. The abandonment of WHO and USAid programs, stepping out of the paris accords etc. etc.
But the real issue is that he has been elected twice, it is not some one-off freak accident, a lot of americans just care more about transphobia or pizzagate than climate change or geopolitics and thats why its now clear to the rest of the world that we can’t trust the US any more.
Except that “crazy old man” (I’d have gone with corrupt criminal malignant narcissist to be honest) isn’t just shouting at pigeons in the park he already screwed up the world economy by starting a war he can’t figure out how to exit and dozens of other things.
When the pigeon shouter threatens to annex Canada/Greenland you can shrug it off, when the leader of the largest economy and military says it, you can’t.
Words matter.
I’m British, We are often regarded as one of the US’s closest allies, I’m fucking furious with Trump and the people who support him, I’ve been boycotting everything US made that I can and I essentially see the current US as a globally destabilising force.
Are there decent Americans appalled by what they’ve become, sure, doesn’t make a difference to the outcome though.
Trump isn’t the main problem, he’s a symptom of the disease that is the main problem, the US elected him twice, that rot goes to the core.
> the American people can't even support a war against Iran
The American people can't even support a war against their own government. A government that they ruminate, "may be" or "may not be" a team of Russia/Israel assets with the goal to grab every dollar and to turn USA into a dystopia.
At this moment nobody can even assure with full certainty that there is not a bomb buried yet somewhere in the WH.
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
We're at the point where the two countries, with most wars between them in history, stood side by side, ready to defend Greenland against a U.S. invasion.
The monkey has a hand grenade. You lot gave it to him. Twice. You might find that it's a bit late for "relax, he's only kidding".
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
Tell that to Iran. Or Canada. Nobody in Europe is certain that he won’t do anything stupid in Greenland, either. We’re already in a trade war (mostly one-sided but still).
>But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
Wow you guys really don't get it, do you? It's not nonsense to us.
more interesting question: When do countries change gold reserves locations and for which reasons? past examples?
Typically they move gold to allies when it’s safer to keep the reserves away (e.g., it’s really hard to imagine the US getting invaded, but that happened to almost all European countries in the last century or so) or when politics become unstable. They take the gold back when the calculus changes. Famously, France got a chunk of its gold back from the US in the 1979s (and finished that process this year).
The rabbit hole goes quite deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation .
oh thanks! wasn't lazyness but looking for exactly this type of context from somebody else.
based on that and the link, we can say that it's a process started long time ago and now simply accelerating and escalating after Ukrainian conflict and confiscation of a european partner assets?
shouldn't the risk of confiscation ,when having resources held abroad and in other jurosdiction always be considered?
I was pretty much surprised when Bank of England said Venezuelan gold was not Venezuelan gold anymore and took it hostage, then what is the sense of having it abroad if the abroad partner can switch idea of ownership anytime?
> we can say that it's a process started long time ago and now simply accelerating and escalating after Ukrainian conflict and confiscation of a european partner assets?
For France, not really. It was De Gaulle and his successors wanting to remove levers that the America government could use against France. It was a sovereignty issue, not really fear that the gold would be seized or frozen. It took decades because it was not really a top priority either.
For the Netherlands (which is why the BBC is talking about this), it’s directly a consequence of Trump using underhanded tactics against allies. In the words of the Dutch government, "geopolitical lawlessness". It has more of a sense of urgency, as well.
> what is the sense of having it abroad if the abroad partner can switch idea of ownership anytime?
There are practical reasons to have some gold abroad. The stuff is heavy and cumbersome, and vulnerable in transit. So, when transactions can be managed by just moving a bunch of ingots from one pile to another in the same facility, it makes transactions easier.
Other than that, countries do not do that if they don’t trust the reserves won’t be seized. In practical terms, either they are close allies, or they have some leverage so stealing the gold has a cost. In the end, it’s a risk/reward analysis on both sides.
Okay so possibly dumb question, but...what do you do with the gold when you "need" it? How is a bunch of shiny, admittedly "desirable", metal going to fix whatever class of crisis the article is hand waving?
Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!"
...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to make the numbers not say society is over, here everyone...do something with gold!" type situations?
In the former case, this all makes a lot of sense given that the US has both demonstrated a reluctance to assist other countries (sans Israel?) and a lack of capacity to do much if they did care.
I can't help but feel like in a lot of cases you're just going to suddenly crash the gold market and create a bunch of inflation because currency itself is not a "means of production" that you can make things with, it's an old IOU.
You just hold onto it until you want to trade it for something else. Right now there are liquid international gold markets. Like bitcoin, people who are trying to get rich quick by day trading are much of the liquidity.
Because it is theirs?
Would you keep your food or car in someone else's garage?
Everyone here keeps their money in bank or brokerage accounts, because we trust the law to protect us if the banks try to steal our stuff.
We are seeing that foreign countries no longer believe the USA is still a nation of laws.
Multiple reasons, not just the US. Might be that 2027-2028 are shaping up to be the riskiest time in living memory including such factors as ENSO heat, floods, droughts, and food insecurity.
Before asking "why", ask "if".
That doesn't make sense to me. It's already happening.
So far for "Russia will invade Europe". The USA seems a bigger threat.
Russia is invading Europe. They started years ago.
The US is enabling Russia.
In fact, the USA is supporting Russia. This might not be entirely intentional, and a lot of ways of trying to excuse it, but it’s what the reality on the ground adds up to.
You are as wrong as your parent comment. Not only Russia is invading US, but US is less of the supporter of Russia than EU. EU literally funds Russia and doesn't plan stopping completely.
Because Trump is tasked with ending American hegemony and Europe is getting ahead of that.
The article truly looks like an AI slop, instead of getting to the point it just keeps on rambling and jumps back and forth.
Also it says about Germany moving gold 10 years ago (2016), but no financial crisis happened back then.
https://archive.ph/NsOz0
Same reason they moved it out of Germany in 1930-1931?
the pull out then was an reaction to the black friday.
Please don’t tell me this is just the beginning…..
Well, who knows? The trajectory has been set in and it is downwards. After Nero and the year of the four emperors the Roman Empire still had ways to go. So, I would say also the US can potentially recover. On the other hand the saying 'it cannot possibly get worse than this' has also been disproven may times in history. In any case, I like to sum it all up by saying "The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country".
Impressed they write 1000+ words without saying Trump.
I mean he's attacking Canada, threatening European territory in Greenland, rolling out the red carpet for the guy Europe's at war with. What do you expect?
The US empire is ending.
Probably when the Chinese burst the AI bubble the whole fake web economy will come crashing down and close this 30 years of inflated money.
After Bernie’s Bros have run out of other’s money, they’ll run out of other country’s gold.
I used to wonder how Rome could fall without anyone knowing exactly why. Surely an empire that lasted five centuries, and conquered all of Europe, must have been brought down by some great event, some unmistakable rupture.
Watching the American Empire fray in real time, I think I understand now.
Empires do not always fall with a crash. Sometimes they simply lose the will to continue.
Apparently, empires can collapse out of something almost like boredom. Maybe "boredom" is the wrong word. But collapse may begin when a civilization can no longer summon enough belief, energy, or attention to sustain itself.
What is moving the gold reserves to the UK, whose entire political "class" are pathetic US lapdogs, going to solve?
Easier to trade in London.
If the European countries had wanted to be independent from the US, they would have adopted the gold standard for their currency
lol, we(america) were the ones who fucked with the gold standard and had the system collapse due to lack of trust in the first place[1]
Please explain your logic behind the idea that European countries needed to have adopted the gold standard that the US unilaterally changed the rules on, to be independent from the US.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
I guess he means the Bretton Woods system, where the US dollar was backed by gold and everything else was backed by the US dollar, wouldn't have existed. Everything would have been backed by gold, instead.
If America had not forced the gold standard we might have gotten an international currency as proposed by Keynes.
The idea was soundly rejected because it would have led to rapid post war reconstruction with a loss of American power (they wanted to play at empire).
http://www.sofer.com/blog/keynes-on-the-balance-of-trade.htm...
edit: some links from the world economic forum (in favor of it)
https://www.weforum.org/stories/economic-growth/yanis-varouf...
Why? Honestly, how it will help?