No Stupid Questions

I'm not a Republican, but I'll bite.

The U.S. is kinda in a bad spot right now. Not just politically but economically as well. Our National Debt is the highest it's ever been. While I'm 100% for taxing Billionaires and their Trillion dollars companies more, by like, a lot, the Billionaires of course don't want that. So they're trying to cut what they can and wheel and deal. Why support Climate Change (French EU thing, I don't remember) acts when you can [pocket the money] use that to pay down debt? The War in Ukraine has unfortunately been drawn out too long for us to stay financially invested in it. Our allies across the sea won't be able to help our country balance our debt when they have Ukraine to worry about as well. So they've decided to put pressure on every external source of revenue while cutting what they can without getting lynched.

Let's talk about Canada and Mexico, but first, a bit of H I S T O R Y. Back in the 90s or 00s the Clinton Administration implemented NAFTA. The agreement sounded good on paper: Strength our border countries. Lifts us all up by giving all the countries jobs, more opportunity, more demand. While outsourcing our manual labor we can focus on the future: Technology! Hindsight is 20/20 though. Why not move our business to a country where we pay lower wages and will end up with higher profits for future investments (like yachts)? Why not get cheaper parts instead of paying the U.S. prices? A ton of manual labor jobs were lost, and many cities (car manufacturing cities, steel cities, etc.) simply never recovered. NAFTA stayed in place more or less until Trump Trumped it into the USMCA in 2020. That gets renegotiated in 2026 with all 3 countries either coming to an agreement or dissolving the agreement.

From all accounts, NAFTA certainly seemed harmful to the American industry at the time, but can that industry recover, and should it? Personally, I don't think so, but they seem to think so. So, from my point of view, the reason they're alienating allies is to extort them for money to help pay down the National Debt and hopefully grow back American industries lost over 2 decades ago.

they have brain damage.

You won't get logical answers to this because there isn't one. Maybe they're just that dumb. Maybe they just want to tank the economy a bit so the rich and gobble up more during the dip. Maybe they just actually live Russia. Maybe they're being secretly black mailed by Russia.

Easy answer. The entire Government of Putin is working for shit Kremlin.

fascism must always create more outsiders, must always create more enemies to keep control, to keep things directed.

remember, fascism appropriates genuine upset and the fact that to the privileged, equality feels like persecution. it steers itself by creating enemies to hate. remember: people's lives are genuinely fucking miserable. there is dystopian shit happening. and all of that is really complicated, and if people stopped to think about it for five minutes, they would pull a 1789.

so they just keep adding more enemies, and more derangements like what the qanons call 'baking' but hitler just said was the way everyone should read books, until they live in a totally unhinged fantasy world, and any method of social control must engage with the fantasy.

tl;dr: sacrificing external allies to fuel a persecution complex, keep control, entrench the madness, keep attention off the american elites that were at least rhetorically some of the initial targets.

Isolating the US and breaking US hegemony. Trump is a Putin puppet, and what’s best for Russia is crippling the US economically and diplomatically. Alienating the EU cuts off the EU from the US who would otherwise help the Europeans against the Russians as they try to reclaim their former territories.

This also helps China who is trying to replace the US as the world superpower. BRICS is doing a good job of creating a competing economic alliance, and the US falling apart helps make it more attractive.

Not a conservative, by the way. Just someone who follows the news.

I'm not a conservative but there's a logic to it beyond this, "because Putin!" circlejerk nonsense. Tariffs are a reaction against Neoliberalism and the economic intelligencia that has fucked everyone over. Many of them blame NAFTA and the offshoring of union jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer protections, and they think they can bring them back through tariffs.

Many of these people understand well that they have been fucked, but can't really name capitalism directly because it's a sacred cow. Still they're going to react poorly to "the establishment" telling them they're dumb and wrong, and that includes libs screaming at them that they're "serving Putin" without even understanding what they're actually trying to do.

Tariffs aren't going to bring those jobs back, at least not without significant subsidies that the government will never do. Also, for the record, those jobs have raised the living conditions of the people they went to, and are one of the reasons China was able to lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, but the pitch of, "You might not be able to find a decent job, but hey, at least a poor Chinese rice farmer can afford a washing machine now," doesn't exactly go over well with the right. We should be focusing on the super-rich who have enough hoarded wealth to make everyone rich, regardless of national borders and whatnot, but they see that as communism, because it is communism.

Ultimately, tariffs are a way of rebelling against an economic orthodoxy that isn't working for a growing number of people and they fit into the nationalist narratives about why things are so bad (because of foreigners) without having to name capitalism itself as the problem.

This follows a long historical trend in America where people don't want the government to do anything ever but also need the government to do things to address crises and allow society to function so we have to come up with convoluted approaches that "don't count" as government interference, for whatever reason. For example, the New Deal was too restrained to actually end the Depression, but once WWII happened we could take the gloves off with government spending (on the military) which was economically necessary, and since then, military bases have served as an inefficient and corrupt way for the government to infuse cash into local communities by paying people to just walk around with guns in like Nebraska. This goes all the way back to people like Jefferson, who absolutely hated the idea of big government but also casually doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. There's also the classic psychology of, "Keep your damn, government hands off my social security!" A big reason American politics are insane is because there is a battle in everyone's mind between ideology and material interests, and the way in which material interests are persued is roundabout, convoluted, and ineffective, because everyone's trying to avoid being/sounding like a communist.

because there's a war coming soon that will destroy most global trade. trump wants the US in a better position in that near future by having more factories and such inside of the US.

in a peaceful world, you allow free trade and specialization to do its thing and everybody gets richer. you farm bananas, i farm apples, and we trade. we create value out of thin air, it's an amazing thing.

but in a world where superpowers are at war and the world splinters into factions, half of the global economy will be cut off from the other half. therefore it'll be a huge liability if we for example depend on Taiwan for 90% of our computer chips when China can blockade Taiwan and we cannot reliably break that blockade. that's one industry.. now imagine the thousands of other products we need for a modern economy. it would cause massive economic shockwaves.

so this tariff thing is accepting that this will happen in the near future and preparing for it, slowly weaning off the economy from that connection to the rest of the world. so when it does come, it doesn't hurt as bad.

it doesn't really matter if you piss off your allies. since you're the biggest military power they are going to have to rely on you anyway. you have leverage over them. the difference is that Trump is a reality TV star and so he is loudly exploiting this leverage whereas most past leaders would be more subtle and diplomatic about it.

Canada, Mexico, Germany, Japan, etc aren't really allies. Being someone's ally implies there's a sort of equal footing. When someone has no choice but to bend to your will, is that a voluntary relationship? the US essentially wrote Japan's constitution and they told the Germans what to write down for theirs. Canada and Mexico are heavily dependent on US trade- US growth might slow a half percent or two whereas Mexico and Canada are liable to fall into a recession because of these tariffs.

it isn't equal footing. it's a david v goliath situation

to give a recent example, Ukraine. Ukraine in 2014 had the Euromaidan coup and the president had to flee the country. The new government that was quickly appointed without an election realized one thing very quickly- Russia was about to invade them. they had only one option in terms of getting military aid and that was the US. so immediately, the same day that the government was appointed, they started cooperating with the US. a few days after that, little green men showed up in Donbas and the Russian army waltzed into Crimea

so you can say they "allied" with the US but a more honest way to say it is that they were desperately pushed into America's orbit. and the US ultimately doesn't care about a country like Ukraine. people are starting to see it more clearly today because of Trump, but I honestly don't think the situation would have been meaningfully different with Biden or Kamala. The primary difference would have been rhetoric. Instead of calling Zelensky a dictator, we would have just dragged our feet with military aid instead, like what has been happening the last year or so

tldr: the US is a imperialist superpower and this is what they do.

While I have no issue with Republicans being shunned for their unashamed fascism, it does mean threads like this are essentially pointless because almost none will actually participate and the ones who do will be downvoted into oblivion.

I'm pretty sure the only Republicans here are people who believe in Republicanism (the political ideology)

They need the talking heads on Fox News to tell them how to answer that question first.

I think they would say something like “our allies have been getting more from their alliances with us than we have been getting from those alliances, and we’re tired of being the donor in all these relationships.”

Of course, they are ignoring the fact that our alliances add up to American world domination, which has uniquely tremendous economic benefits for the US. They take that for granted though, feel entitled to it, don’t want to pay for it anymore because they don’t think it can ever change.

It’s just like their attitude on vaccines. They take herd immunity utterly for granted now and only see the minute risks of getting the shot themselves.

I was just watching a panel discussion about Trump and the tariffs and had a thought. He's started adding exemptions. He just added one for the automotive industry following discussions with the big three auto makers. What if the tariffs were a grift all along? What if he put the tariffs on to generate tax dollars that he can use to give billions of dollars to the wealthy but what if he's double dipping and selling exemptions? Like, what if when he talked to the big three auto makers he said, "I'll make an exemption to the tariffs for the auto industry if you give me $100 million"?