The problem with giving away the assets, and I’m just parroting Simon Whistler here, is that they have never been used this way while in war time. This would be essentially funding one side’s war machine and could come back to bite western countries if they opt to overthrow a bad actor in the future.
For example, what if Bashar Al-Assad decides on the heavy use of chlorine gas on the majority Sunni in his country. The West opts to overthrow. The West are then the aggressors. Does Euroclear then freeze US assets and give them to Assad according to the precedent set by Russia v Ukraine?
The judiciary likes to follow precedent and consistency, it fairs less well when there is nuance and subject to interpretation. From a geopolitical standpoint, do we really want the judiciary determining who the good guys and the bad guys are?
Hey, when the funds are stored in Russian banks, you are certainly welcome to freeze them all you want. But for some reason they typically aren’t. Huh, I wonder why?
You are walking on the street in the public square of your town. You encounter a child and someone who you perceive as a parent having a struggle. The struggle escalates and you see the parent start bludgeoning the child with their fists. Other than the absolute trauma of the experience, you fear the child is going to receive some long term injuries from this. How do you act?
Unfortunately at the geopolitical level, things are not always so morally easy, as I suspect you already understand.
Even in my brutish example, it depends on the lens in which we see things. In an orthodox culture, it may be the parent’s duty to harshly discipline a child. Perhaps meddling would be seen as a faux pas. Or perhaps leaving matters to authorities would be considered cowardly. Even still, maybe it just depends on the day and who’s tribe witnessed the event. The human experience is paradoxically wonderful, isn’t it?
I mean, I’m not a Musk fan in the least, but the article does say that the receivers are being sold through an intermediary in Dubai, perhaps unbeknownst to Musk and SpaceX.
You act like the Japanese didn’t want to lift their people out of poverty. That the people within SONY didn’t aspire to be one of the largest corporations in the world.
The Japanese owned a significant amount of real estate within the US at their zenith (kind of like China today). They faltered because it started to cost more to import certain materials then it did to improve those raw materials and export them. Econ 101, cheaper markets existed for that type of manufacturing. It took some time to transition to a service economy. They still excelled at heavy industry and still do. They’re still one of the predominant ship builders and car builders in the world.
Japan was also one of the first countries to be hit hard by an aging population, partly because of xenophobia, but I think mainly other cultural factors. It’s challenging to try to keep your economy going when the workforce is shrinking and more of a country’s wealth is going towards caring for the elderly. I think anyone with aging parents can attest to that.
It’s not always America ruined their lives, plenty more nuance than American geopolitics. Lest we not forget that America helped to build them up after the war in the first place. And not having to fund a military can do wonders for a country’s growth (you know, so long as they aren’t invaded).
Your hate for America and capitalism has distorted your world view. I’d prefer to live in a world of opportunity rather than a world of schadenfreude.
Keep in mind that most of the people in this instance of Lemmy that are going to reply to you are actively hoping for Biden (and for that matter, America) to lose.
While it’s absolutely your right to research and find a candidate that aligns with your beliefs, I hope you take most of the replies here with a grain of salt.
Are you saying that Hong Kong, which was the first city to be an economic juggernaut in the region and afford a higher quality of life to most of its citizens, as well as improve the entire Guangdong/Macau region for over 75 years, was on the verge of collapse before it was transferred to China?
Do you really believe the crap you are spoon fed or are you so jingoistic that facts and history have no relevance?
Please, tell me which of these airlines is the most “woke”? Hell, you can sit me next to a literal crying baby, so long as it’s not their crybaby asses.
Uh, because they are all within one nation. They identify as Ukrainians.
You could transmute your statement to any other nation and it would be the same. Why do the people in Archangelsk fight for Moscow? Why do the people in Wichita fight for Washington?
Tribalism is an innate feature of the human experience.
I never said that Ukrainians must only identify as Ukrainians, just that it is the reason why folks outside of Kyiv choose to fight. Do not put words into my mouth.
I read the article, it didn’t propose any solutions, just an opinion that the US should withdraw from their closest allies in the region.
That doesn’t sound like a tenable option, particularly when there’s real opportunity for these nations to have actual normalized relationships and be a counterbalance to Iran and China in the region.
A major world shipping lane goes through there, and of course, the area is also resource rich. I don’t foresee the US abdicating their stance as the guarantor of free trade; it would be geopolitically dangerous (and clueless) to do so.
What’s more, the author doesn’t address that the current foreign policy - up until recently, and may again still - worked pretty well for the west. Oil flowed and ships sailed. Incursions primarily stayed within the region. A perfectly ideal solution? Of course not, but utopias are exceptionally rare throughout history.
And yes, the headline is clickbait. It infers that the multi-decade US strategy is wrong, but then mentions in multiple instances, that the strategy hasn’t yet had a chance to play out due to foreign actors. Shouldn’t we fully test the experiment first before doing a 180 and snubbing our allies in the region?
I mean, like every tool, it serves a purpose. It’s just that in this case, they are using a really large hoe and pretending it’s the biggest and best shovel.
Petrostates and nations that are heavily reliant on one primary industry tend to have high PPP, look at Gabon, Brunei and Kuwait as oil examples or Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda and Syria for other examples.
Euroclear, which holds 191bn of 260bn in frozen Russian assets, warns against G7 plan to backstop Ukraine debt with Russian assets (www.ft.com)
U.S. Rejects Putin’s Latest Call for Ukraine Negotiations (www.nytimes.com)
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cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/1664606...
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