Changed the deal.
A deal is between 2 parties in agreement.
When both parties agree to terms that are written out, the one party (Europe) is given a document with modified terms, the provider (US) broke convention. The receiver of the modified document stopped the negotiation. Suspended is sufficient to describe the situation. This isnt complicated, sheesh.
So I don't really follow the news
1) A rapidly growing economic crisis due to aggressive and inchorent foreign policy decisions
2) The new force of Gestapo murdering and harming citizens in cities all across the nation
A real privilege.
If history is any guide, ICE may be better compared to the SA. Their job is to make it safe for the future Gestapo to operate unmasked... at which point the unprofessional street thugs in ICE will find that they've become a liability to the regime.
As I understand it, the right to record police has never actually been tried definitively at the SCOTUS level. The Republicans certainly have the tools on the SCOTUS bench to prohibit it now, so look for a case to be brought at some point.
1: https://reason.com/2026/01/08/you-have-the-right-to-record-i...
2: https://www.kqed.org/news/12070260/what-you-need-to-know-abo...
"Nearly all Epstein files still unreleased a month after Congress deadline" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/19/jeffrey-epst...
I wish I could ignore all of this because I am tired man.
You can only threaten your friends so many times before they cut you out, and Trump is going on a year straight of threatening us (Canada, but also Greenland) with annexation, and the EU with sanctions and tariffs.
It doesn’t matter if the US government are serious or are posturing, the message is clear: prepare for existential warfare (economic or militarily) or be faced with it.
I think Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech yesterday captures the shared sentiment outside of the US very well. It’s worth listening to and lays bare the cracks in international diplomacy the last 80 years.
I personally find the argument that it’s about masking something clever weak. There are two things going on: repeatedly admitting US manufacturing can’t keep up with China and desperately trying to bring it home, and “Donroe Doctrine” colonialism where the US wants to lean on the weak to extract money out of them.
Maybe next year Trump is going to say “look how strong I made NATOs military, no more freeloaders here, this was all a ruse”, but I doubt it.
And my personal raw take, as a Canadian: we’ve shown we will take a punch to the nose for the US, it’s going to be impossible to look at our relationship the same for a generation. I’ve worked for US companies (as do most of our best and brightest), we have tight security integrations, this all feels incredibly unnecessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Reciprocal%2C_Fai...
China's claimed the South China Sea as its sovereign waters and has been using force against fishermen from the nations that actually have control over the water. They're continuing to threaten Taiwan in a purely ideological push. Chinese secret police have set up stations abroad to kidnap dissidents. Border skirmishes with India are not uncommon. The agreement for a democratic Hong Kong was torn up and now they're under the thumb of the CCP, same as the mainland.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and of course Eastern Ukraine in 2022. They haven't had a "real" election in decades. Dissidents die suspiciously with regularity.
Both nations have supported the efforts of North Korea to further its nuclear arsenal in blatant violation of UN resolutions.
With the exception of the invasion of Ukraine, there have been zero negative consequences for any of this behavior.
Both nations have hosted at least one major international sporting event in the last 20 years. China is signing trade deals with Canada and the EU nations because, for some reason, those parties see a totalitarian single-party state as a viable alternative to the US that will never produce a "mad king", when in fact, it's almost tailor-made to do so. Construction on Nordstream 2 started after the invasion of Georgia, specifically because Europeans wanted Russian natural gas. Russian oligarchs continue to hold major interests in European nations and are free to move about the continent. Sanctions against the Russian economy over the invasion of Ukraine are dodged by dealing with intermediate parties so that many nations, including those in Europe, can do business as usual.
If you're a narcissistic psychopath - like the majority of world politicians and Donald Trump are - and you see this sort of thing happening, you're going to ask, "Why can't America play by those rules too?"
Such a person (or the people willing to trust them) would be seen as naïve, though, because any sane person would tell you that's exactly what's been happening since you were born.
This is in response to new US tariffs and threats, not the other way around. Our previous diplomacy was cold with China.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
I like to spend a lot of time at the World Happiness Report because it gives me a better sense of economic well-being. You can't just look at GDP, you need a sense of which countries are burning human capital to fuel GDP and generate billionaires. That's a very common short-term tactic, so the WHR gives you a better sense of long-term political stability. Unhappy populations tend to vote for strongmen.
It's basically impossible to get to Finland-levels without bringing everyone along, not just internally like getting rid of 996, but also including neighbors like Taiwan/Ukraine cause corruption tends to leak back in. Imagine if Bush had spent the Iraq war trillions on high speed rail/free college/ housing. Instead we got ICE.
upstreamutopia•1h ago
Herring•1h ago