US President Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally-funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being “anti-Trump” and “radical”.
A White House statement said the order would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”, and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the “leftist”, “partisan” VOA.
I don’t understand the naysayers here.
This is hilarious. Trump wants to simultaneously expand the American empire, while he dismantles the tools of it that he’s too stupid to understand the importance of.
No matter their mission statement, or any tangible benefits they might have provided, both USAID and VOA, were tools of empire. These aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.
See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.
This isn’t fundamentally changing anything. It’s about using different tools for the same goal.
America cannot dominate the world militarily, nor could that even serve the goals of its contemporary brand of neoimperialism.
Soft power i.e. culture, propaganda, and diplomatic/idealogical relationships, are the foundation upon which it’s built.
Yes, military hard power plays a critical role, but it cannot replace soft power.
This isn’t empire for the sake of raw nationalism, and nothing would accelerate the American collapse faster than dismantling the state’s soft power tools. The end result will be attempts to maintain power by spending its military resources on peer, or near peer conflicts.
In Trump’s brain, soft power isn’t properly deferential to him personally. That’s what it amounts to.
It all comes down to his raging narcissism; soft power is done with tact and diplomacy in whispers. For Trump, that’s weakness. It’s not true power unless people/countries/organizations proclaim his power with effusive thank-yous and obsequious shows of capitulation.
It’s not enough to lead the free world; the rest of the world needs to be properly thankful for it in a way that he himself finds acceptable. (namely by making a big show of bending the knee)
It’s not really about changing it for cold hard power, but changing how their soft power will be projected. I’ve seen some theories that the rethoric is going to change from being about freedom of expression and LGBT rights and similar to ideas about traditional family values or something, and I think it’s very plausible.
…and how will that be disseminated? That’s what organizations like VOA and USAID were for.
Trump has the capacity to destroy organizations, but I find it doubtful he could recreate them out of whole cloth.
That’s my point.
He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.
Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)
We’re talking about a guy whose business accumen is so poor he managed to run multiple casinos into the ground. His “successful businessman” schtick has always been propped up by a mountain of debt and crime. If he had so much as two brain cells to rub together, he would have stuck with Ivana because she was the only member of the Trump family to have even a shred of sense.
Not sure he could have kept Ivana anyway given she said at the time he raped her.
Trump’s mission is to weaken the US, NATO, and the EU. Eliminating VoA helps do that. Notice how he isn’t threatening China with invasion, but Canada and Denmark instead.
Because Trump knows that China can and will fight back.
Canada and Denmark are friends of ours that Trump is now throwing salt in their eyes and saying “neener neener” while showing them his ass.
Because of our history, they aren’t fighting back.
If they do, Russia wins.
In what world isn’t Canada fighting back?
Which isn’t to say they shouldn’t, but they are pushing back to all the shit Trump is throwing at them. Just because they’re not launching missiles doesn’t mean they’re not fighting back.
China has nukes, a gargantuan military with no other purpose than to fight back, and the internal cohesion to resist the pressure. Canada has a much smaller military spread out much further, a much higher dependence on US specific trade simply by nature of physical infrastructure, and an unfortunately not insignificant percent of the population in the central provinces who would probably side with the US. It’s not anbout fighting back, it’s all about who is easier to bully, where friends mean nothing because everyone’s worth is determined by how much he can exploit them and the leverage the us has over them.
As someone from the prairies (Saskatchewan), I can assure you that while, yes, we do have our fair share of pretty hard-right leaning individuals, most of even THEM are anti-trump because of the sovereignty issue. Even the ones who agree with what he is doing and would like to see Poppinfresh in power to do similar up here, would never side them militarily in an annexation attempt for the same reason that American MAGA flies the US flag…sovereignty is their identity; CANADIAN sovereignty.
There is a TINY number (some dipshits in Alberta) who actually want Alberta to join the US. But they are fractionally insignificant.
Canada needs a plan in case launching missiles becomes necessary.
Trump doesn’t want to expand the American empire though. He makes noises about it, but words are cheap. Judging by his actions he wants to create chaos so oligarchs can profit.
The ultrawealthy have no national allegience.
I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.
Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.
Trump may be narcissistic and senile but he still obeys his oligarch masters, probably from the usual motives of greed and fear.
I don’t know what your local children will learn at school but he’s fast earning himself a footnote in the international history books as the epoch that marks the tipping point into waning US power.
I may be wrong but I think the problem with the US cult of presidents/“great man of history” theory is that people like Trump keep the US populace speculating what he “wants” or “thinks” instead of on what his function is and what is actually happening.
The kleptocrats run every nation, afaict. There may be a few small exceptions, we will see, and see if they can keep it that way.
The difference is the kind of kleptocrat. For a long time most of the west has had Establishment capitalists, people who have organized the status quo to benefit themselves and protect their wealth.
What we are witnessing now is the displacement of the old Establishment by a new breed, Disaster capitalists, who don’t care about the status quo and thrive on social and regulatory chaos.
Russia has had this breed ever since the fall of the USSR. America is getting a taste of it now.
Everything Trump does – everything – suddenly makes sense when viewed through the lens of “how does Putin benefit?”
How does Netanyahu benefit as well.
That’s an incredibly myopic take that confuses correlation with causation.
These moves may benefit Putin, but Russia isn’t the only county to benefit. Infact, Russia is in a historically weak position to fill gaps left by a receding American empire.
I’d wager that China is likely to see much more geopolitical gains because they have the resources and capacity to take advantage of the situation.
I’m not saying Putin won’t benefit, just pointing out how limiting it is to view Trump through a singular lens.
Trump has had close business and personal ties with Russia since the 1980s. He very clearly admires dictators in general but Putin in particular, and has praised him on numerous occasions. In Trump’s infamous public call for election interference, it was “Russia, if you’re listening.” Not China, not some other country, Russia.
If you can’t see the obvious signs of causation – not just correlation – you’re the one who needs some coke-bottle specs!
It’s the explanation – and the only one, to boot – that fits all the pieces. It may be a “singular lens,” bit it is singularly useful!
That’s why we call him JDPON Don - this dumbass is going to dismantle the empire and usher in global proletarian revolution.
Accelerationist fascists simping for oligarchs under the belief that THIS time it will work out for them. How surprising.
If we’re lucky, we might avoid the World Wars which made many other revolutions possible.