Czech president Petr Pavel warned that Donald Trump’s recent comments questioning the role of Nato have damaged the alliance’s credibility more than the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has done in several years.
Pavel, a retired Nato general and former chair of the Nato military committee, also said that Trump’s criticism of the alliance over the Iran war was “to put it mildly, unfair”.
“The moment we begin to question the alliance as a single, united entity, ready to act together and very decisively then, of course, its role is lost,” he warned.
He said that Trump ‘s criticism appeared to miss the fact that Nato is a defence alliance, and “not an alliance that will automatically help in wars waged outside its territory”.
Obviously Europe is not immune to imperialist sentiment, but at the moment, America is a great, terrible evil, perhaps the worst the world has ever seen. Even if our own societies aren’t perfect, we are far better apart from fascist America than we would be with them.
They are dangerous now, that’s true, although it doesn’t seem like imperialism is the right word.
What would you call it?
You said fascist too, and that fits really well.
Imperialism is a very specific system, and while the US has started dabbling in it again, they’re still largely producing their own wealth, and have also dabbled in isolationism which is one possible opposite. In the other direction, the nth British lord of Whatevershire (or whatever Chinese or Sumerian noble) didn’t really meet the populist part of the definition of fascism, but was definitely imperialist.
It’s really a detail, so I’m kind of sheepish for bringing it up, but on Lemmy I think it’s an important one.
From Wikipedia’s article on Imperialism:
I feel like that perfectly fits the behavior of the American Empire, not just in recent years, but going back decades. Hegemony is absolutely what they’ve always been trying to build. Don’t you feel like the Munroe doctrine is an imperialist endeavor? The US invasion of Vietnam? Venezuela? The Philippines? Hawaii? Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? The ongoing blockade and years of terrorist attacks against Cuba?
The idea that America is heavily invested in being a “world police” has been a meme going back decades. What is that, if not the maintenance and extension of power over foreign nations?
Someone is still in denial, I think. For what it’s worth, I don’t judge you for that, I totally understand it, but I think you’re doing yourself a disservice here.
Yup. They grabbed a few islands and puppeted a few Latin American countries.
If we’re talking about history, Europe blows them out of the water. If we’re talking about now, refer to last reply.
It’s not just about land acquisitions and colonialism, but also about hegemony. Again, you’ll get no argument from me that Europe hasn’t had a terrible history (and even present) of imperialism. The British Empire was unbelievably terrible, and France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, et al. all have (or had) their own imperialist interests. No argument from me there at all. I am anti-imperialist, not anti-American.
This all just feels like pure whataboutism because you’re uncomfortable confronting the fact that the United States has a long and sordid history of imperialism.
I’m Canadian, and boycott all their shit. No, that’s not it.
I had guessed as much from your username! You don’t need to be American to struggle to come to terms with this stuff, I have conversations like these with people from all over the world, from Australia to Canada.
But you know yourself better than I know you, so of course I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. I’m guessing you have a very specific definition of imperialism which I don’t share, and I’m guessing most others don’t share. That’s okay, at the end of the day, you’re entitled to that, but I think it’ll probably lead you into some rather unproductive conversations.