I’ve been having a number of conversations on Hexchan recently trying to make sense of their politics. The most common instance of their hateful hypocrisy I’ve encountered is this constant assurance that they support trans people while immediately attacking and dog piling and trans people who point out that the situation would be much worse under Trump.
The hexchanners who aren’t actively Russian trolls seem to be little more than useful idiots for conservatives, minimizing the damage they do to vulnerable populations and engaging in high school level pettiness and hate.
Trump is not good and definitely hawkish is every way, but at this point it is no longer deniable that Biden has crossed the line that perhaps most American presidents wouldn’t dare to cross.
Trump liked to pretend to be a master businessman by persuading the Europeans to spend 4% of their GDP into defense, only to be laughed at. Biden literally started a war and forced Europe into austerity to pay for their defense spending (while killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians at the same time).
Trump tried to persuade Merkel to build LNG terminals to get rid of Europe’s Russian gas dependency. The project eventually went nowhere because nobody took him seriously. Biden literally bombed their gas pipeline and ended European prosperity for the century (yes, the European economy is a dead zone now. It is not going to come back for a long time).
Trump started petty trade wars with China, which were reciprocated proportionally by the Chinese. Biden literally started a tech sanction against China that has no proportional response, and ended the friendly relationship between US and China. There is no reconciliation between the two at this point.
Biden raised the interest rates to 5% in one year and plunged many countries into famine and energy shortage, exacerbating debt crisis across the developing world. Hundreds of millions of people (if not billions) in the Global South are literally suffering to slow the decline of the US Empire.
These are the lines that I doubt even Obama would dare to cross. Whether you like it or not, Biden seems very keen on setting the world on fire and starting fights with the entire world. And he might very well win, that’s the scariest part.
None of this will get better after the next election, regardless of who wins. The ratchet effect works both ways, there is no way to elect yourself out of imperialism.
That’s literally what I said. Biden has crossed the line that nobody else has dared to cross. Everyone is going to try to be as ghoulish as possible now because Biden has proved that it is the way to go.
That’s what you think! I voted for the other guy
The American plot to drive Ukraine away from Russia goes back at least 10 years. Our plot to stoke fascism there goes back probably 70. Biden was in office when the war popped off, but using Ukraine to antagonize Russia is one of the clearest examples of a bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Had Trump won in 2020 we’d be about where we are now on the war.
Contrast this with Trump much more literally committing an act of war against Iran by assassinating Qasem Soleimani. This is after he tore up the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal for no reason.
I am not disputing that, Trump resumed arming the Azov during his presidency. His hands are far from clean. The war in Ukraine was going to happen one way or another.
However, it is also true that Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric came after his meeting with the newly elected Biden in early 2021, which set off the alarm for the Russians to begin with - also why you saw Russia scrambling for diplomatic talks all of 2021 that culminated in the failed US-Russia Summit in June 2021.
Zelensky was elected as the peace president to bridge the divide between Russia and Ukraine. We don’t know what Biden said to him, but it is clear that the Biden administration took on a much more aggressive stance re: Ukraine compared to Trump’s.
And I am not disputing that Trump is hawkish. I am saying that Biden is much more willing to escalate against near-peer nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China.
I can see Biden taking a different stance in Ukraine, but I can also see his meeting with Zelensky as being the natural development of the situation. I definitely see Biden’s rhetoric towards China as a continuation of Trump’s, which was a lot more hostile than Obama’s (although that progression I’m guessing was also determined largely by the evolving situation/long-term interests in the area).
That’s my point. Our criticism of Biden is not that he is better or worse than Trump, it is that he had crossed a line and set a precedent that will define the US foreign policy forward.
If before US presidents were still more averse to provoking nuclear armed states and performing economic terrorism on their own allies, now all bets are off. Without punishment, every future presidential candidate is going to be defined by how ghoulish they can get. This process is irreversible.
That’s why Biden’s tech sanction is so much more worse than Trump’s trade wars, because it has no proportional responses. To understand how China views Biden’s tech sanctions, you need to read the Chinese sci fi novel Three Body Problem. This is how many people in China are looking at it.
With Trump’s petty trade wars, reconciliation was still possible. There is no more reconciliation between the two powers after the tech sanction, which only drives the world closer to the brink of a nuclear war. This is what is at stake here.
Provoking nuclear powers was standard operating procedure for the U.S. until detente. After a short break it again became central U.S. policy with our funding of anti-Soviet terrorists in Afghanistan. In the 90s we openly meddled in Soviet/Russian internal politics and poked the Taiwan bear.
This is bad, but hardly new.
Could you elaborate a little? I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and am not really getting the connection, but maybe it’s something you can only understand from actually reading.