The World Is on Fire. And Trump's About to Be President. Feel Better?

[Celerity]

The president-elect’s affection for the worst despots and dictators should worry us all.

https://newrepublic.com/article/189136/trump-assad-syria-second-term

https://archive.ph/8tQcu


France’s President Emmanuel Macron walks with President-elect Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after a meeting at the Élysée Presidential Palace in Paris on December 7.

It’s a fortunate thing that Bashar Al Assad’s regime collapsed before Tulsi Gabbard became our country’s director of national intelligence. A well-known Assad suck-up, Gabbard might have been able to feed this bloodthirsty tyrant—a man who killed 11,000 or so of his own people with bombs that, upon detonation, indiscriminately released thousands of pieces of metal shrapnel into the air to kill, maim, and disfigure anyone with the bad fortune to be nearby—with all the support he might have needed to stay in power for a few more years. Assad’s demise is obviously a development to be celebrated. It’s great to see this ruthless authoritarian gone and Iran and Hezbollah weakened, which they are, at least for now. No, we can’t know who or what might fill the vacuum. It’s not like Syria is going to become a peace-loving democracy overnight, but it is nevertheless hoped that the Syrian people, who’ve known nothing but hardship and impunity, might eke out something of a sane and dignified existence. They certainly deserve nothing less.

While we whisper our hopes, however, some caution is definitely in order. Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, or HTS, the group that toppled Assad, has been in control of most of Idlib province in recent years, and the 2020 State Department human rights report notes that the U.N. Commission for the Inquiry of Syria reported that year that HTS “routinely detained and tortured civilians” in territory it controlled. It’s a recurring lesson: One never knows if yesterday’s revolutionaries will round into tomorrow’s statesmen or tomorrow’s tyrants. The main question here for Americans concerns the fact that in six weeks, Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States. The surprising events in Syria serve as a harrowing reminder that there’s a big, complicated world out there and, pretty soon, Trump is going to be the single most powerful person in it—the “horse in a hospital” that comedian John Mulaney likened him to, though horses are far less corrupt. And the weird, and worrying, thing is that even though Trump was president before, we don’t really know all that much about his foreign policy instincts because he was never really tested on foreign policy in his first term.

Think about it. There were no major crises during Trump’s term. There were no 9/11 attacks, obviously, but even beyond that, there weren’t any major wars; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came after he lost reelection. There was no big uprising like the 2014 Maidan Revolution, or the Tahrir Square and Arab Spring revolts of 2011. The Middle East was comparatively quiet, especially to those of us who recall the fraught part of 2006 or the past year’s conflagration that followed in the wake of Hamas’s attacks in Israel. Assad’s butchery was an ongoing affair, but that’s not the same as a new broad regional conflict kicking off, which forces an American president to decide what moral face the United States is going to present to the world. Compared to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump had it pretty easy—it even fell to Biden to keep the commitments to wind down the war in Afghanistan and honor the hideous commitments Trump made to the Taliban, much to Biden’s detriment in public opinion polling.

Of course, to hear Trump tell it, all of these world events pivoted because of him. Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office. Hamas never would have done what it did last October 7 if he’d been around. Trump’s most ardent followers believe all that. Mystifyingly, a majority of Americans believed in 2022 that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been president. Did I say mystifyingly? Actually, it isn’t mystifying at all. If you read me regularly enough to know that the power of the right-wing media is one of my regular topics, then you’ll agree with me that a majority of Americans believed Trump’s outlandish claims simply because there exists in this country a multibillion-dollar propaganda network whose mission is to get Americans to believe every word Donald Trump utters.

snip

[Callie1979]

1. Trump did NOTHING to deter Putin from adding troops to UKR

He only sent arms when Congress FORCED him to do it.
Right now, Assad is gone, Putin is embarrassed & russia has lost a Middle Eastern port & airfield
We'll just have to see if this new "leader" keeps his word

[Initech]

2. Not doing anything about Putin when we knew the danger...

Is going to go down in history as the world's biggest intelligence failure.

[lame54]

5. Should have listened to Pussy Riot

[Magoo48]

3. Excuse me if I don't worry about anything that I cannot change. It's a waste of fucking time and a bad example for my f.

family and friends. What I can control is a consistent pursuit ways to resist and to adopt an attitude of optimism and good humor. Pissing, moaning, and whining this long after the horse has left the barn is not productive. Casting blame now, whether we hit the mark or not, is of no use at all.

[malaise]

4. No n/t

[Blue_Tires]

6. Don't look at me, everyone knew what was at stake

Yet they still stayed home or voted for the batshit insane Nazi who lives in a completely different reality.

I can only presume this is what white voters really really wanted. 😐