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”.
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.
After thinking about it a bit, there’s more than just a word at stake.
As the term seems to be commonly understood IRL, imperialism is a specific (and common) historical phenomenon, where you take a foreign land’s wealth by force.
Meanwhile, people on here will happily tell you there’s no difference between Afghanistan, which has and had nothing, and was left largely the same as it came in, and what Spain did in the Caribbean. Using the same word is newspeak, and it’s historical revisionism.
Don’t give in to it. You can dislike American foreign policy without stripping all the context out, and should. All rewriting history accomplishes is better excuses for people that want to repeat it - even America.
Taking wealth through force is not necessarily an act of imperialism, and that is not how the term is commonly understood - the term for such an act is pillage.
Pillage is often a part of imperialist endeavors, but not necessarily so. Imperialism can take place without a single act of pillage.
I’m not “giving into” anything. I have been calling out and arguing against US imperialism for decades. Everyone else is catching up to me, finally, and thankfully.
If you want to continue to deny it, that is very much your prerogative, but again, I think you’ll find yourself on the losing side of that argument more and more as time goes on.
If there’s been no shift in how the US is acting, which seems to be what you’re saying, the rest of the world is just being sensitive, like America’s diplomats are fond of saying. You’re unwittingly advancing the same propaganda line.
People don’t catch up, at most a person can. Old idiots die and new idiots are born, and the total stays the same.
(If you’re trying to break this off, thanks for being pleasant to talk to)
There is definitely a shift in how the US is acting. Donald Trump is persuing imperialist ambitions in a brazen, vulgar way, which has exposed those ambitions far more undeniably than ever. It has been a real wake up call for many people around the world.
In the past, US leaders have acted with a veneer of plausible deniability, but that is now completely out of the window. The propaganda machine of the US empire is now on full display for everyone to see, and with the surge of independent media coinciding with all of this, suddenly, all of the cards are revealed.
If the US government and mainstream media are so clearly and obviously lying now, people are more willing to seriously consider that they may have lied in the past. All it takes is for people like myself to point it out to them, and they don’t even argue much anymore.
It’s over. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The US empire’s collapse is now inevitable. Sit back, and enjoy the show.