America: Gone Forever

There is no return from what's happening

Photo by tom coe on Unsplash

I didn't write this. But it was too good not to share.

It explains why the concept of America is almost, if not already, dead. Assuming there's a 2028 election, there's no fixing the damage to America's internal capabilities and international standing.

Here's the full commentary by Reddit user r/Some-band2225:

Things really are bad. It's different from last time. The damage being done here is permanent for a few reasons.

* Loss of institutional capabilities. When you completely close down a thing then there's a knock-on effect down the road, you can't simply change your mind and reopen it in four years. Take something like foreign policy analysts at the CIA, junior analysts spend a decade working within an existing structure, learning skills, making contacts in their area, integrating with the wider intelligence ecosystem. If you shut a division down because you find what they're saying to be politically inconvenient then the next administration can't simply reopen it, the staff have moved on, the relationships no longer exist, the skill base has been lost. They're doing this with water management, disease control, disaster response, agricultural planning, FDA enforcement, CPFB, the weather service, NASA, cyber security, intelligence, basically all the things that we take for granted that the gov does.

* Loss of economic/social infrastructure. Basically the same as above but from an economic/social lens. If you cut off government benefits, or just close an air base, from an area then the Walmart serving that community closes. The next administration may restore benefits but the Walmart isn't going to reopen, not when they might find themselves closing again two years later. And the employees will likely have left the area anyway, there's only so long people can stay in areas without jobs. Same with health clinics, community centers, schools, veterans services etc. Infrastructure grows organically over time in a stable environment, if you rip it out by the roots then you can't simply replant it, the environment has been damaged.

* Loss of international economic partnerships/integration. More or less the exact same problem. The US has demonstrated that it is completely unwilling to abide by its agreements, even those written by the current president such as USMCA. Long term investments in infrastructure and strategic partnerships were built on the premise of stability, that what the government commits to doing is what it will do. You build a pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast because the relationship is stable. You specialize into your local economic strengths because your partners want what you can do and you want what they can do. That's all fucked. It doesn't matter whether Trump keeps deferring the Canada tariffs every 30 days for the next four years, it matters that America is unstable, that the administration won't keep its word and won't honor its agreements. People here who work in industry can tell you about the work they've had to do on supply chain crisis analysis. If you're a Canadian company and you're looking to buy something then you're not going to accept the lowest cost bid if it's from an American company because there's no guarantee that they can actually provide the service in the future. If you're an American processing company you're not going to invest capital in expanding to process Canadian raw materials because your own government may interfere at random with zero notice and zero recourse to prevent you from purchasing them.

* Loss of international alliances. More or less the exact same problem. The US has demonstrated that it is completely unwilling to abide by its agreements. NATO is dead, the ironclad guarantee that the US is willing to intervene if a meter of NATO soil is invaded is gone. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, but if you're planning for the survival of your nation as the Baltic states are then you can't rely on a maybe. You have to assume the worst case scenario. And again, this is about long term planning, the next president can't undo this and declare that everything is normal again now because the next president can't speak for the one after them. When the US asks Denmark if they can build a base in Greenland for arctic operations then Denmark has to wonder if a subsequent president will use that base for operations against them. When an allied military plans their air defense strategy they have to consider if using patriot will allow a future administration to leverage the supply of air defense missiles to hurt them.

* Loss of international credibility. The US has historically kept deals made by former administrations, even if they don't like them. Biden's pullout of Afghanistan after Trump surrendered to the Taliban is an example of this. Trump may have undone 20 years of work and $2T of accumulated spending when he agreed to stop supporting the American backed Afghan government against the Taliban in exchange for also releasing thousands of Taliban fighters but the deal was signed. When you make a deal with the US then the US keeps that deal, there aren't huge geopolitical reversals on a weekly basis. The next time a US president tells an aspiring nuclear pariah state that they'll take off the sanctions if the nuclear pariah agrees to abandon their ambitions with inspections etc. then that pariah state knows that the sanctions may just come back on at random, whether they comply with the treaty or not. The US is simply unreliable.

* Loss of soft power/prestige. Canadians, the people who routinely show up for firefighting in US fires etc., are booing the US national anthem. Europe is viewing the US with a competing mixture of pity and naked contempt. The idea that the UK would follow the US into Iraq, as Blair followed Bush, is laughable today. A huge part of the American global hegemony was built on soft power, that if you turned against the US led world order then you wouldn't just lose access to US tech/markets/financing, you'd lose access to Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Australian, European, Canadian ones too. There's a network effect there that is a huge force multiplier. America's allies can't follow where America is leading, not when it's random threats of invasion against Canada and surrendering to Putin. They certainly can't cooperate on things like intelligence and security with Gabbard as NSA. The US has openly taken an adversarial stance against its own alliance structure and the next president can't simply say "sorry" and undo that because they can't speak for the one who comes after them.

* Loss of the rules based international order. The thing that has basically kept WW3 at bay is the general agreement that we don't land grab anymore and so we don't all need nukes. If a country tries to land grab then the response from the US and allies will smack them down in a way that makes that country lose and all other countries learn the lesson. Russia, which is still operating on a 19th C imperialist spheres of influence great power model, challenged the US and the US is now surrendering both Ukraine and the entire rules based international order. The taboo is broken. China can attack Taiwan. Russia can attack Estonia. Turkey can seize Greek Cyprus. Every nation that doesn't have nukes is looking at their distance from a hostile imperialist power, which somehow now includes Canada looking at the US, and trying to decide if they need to get them. The odds of an uncontrollably escalating crisis descending into general war are higher than they've been since 1962 and there is absolutely no way to put the brakes on it. If you have young kids then the chance of them dying as young adults in a war has gone through the roof.

* Loss of social contract and values. As we're discovering on a daily basis the main guardrail against doing things like simply ignoring Congress's laws or openly taking money from undisclosed foreign sources as a government official is a culture of just not doing that. There's nothing that actually stops you from doing it, you can absolutely threaten election officials personal consequences if they don't fabricate the votes you need, but traditionally we've all agreed to just not do that. That's built over generations, people in countries with high corruption aren't somehow worse as people, they're operating within a culture in which that's the normal way of operating. If your boss is taking bribes then you take bribes, taking bribes is how he got enough money to make the appropriate bribes to become your boss, it's the natural state of affairs. One of the great strengths of the US is that, by and large, Americans believe in the system they have built. They accept a judge's verdict that they don't like because they believe in the idea of nonpartisan justice. They accept laws they don't agree with because those laws were created by a process that they believe in. That belief is intangible but it's what keeps the whole thing from crashing down. And without wanting to sound too much like an internal auditor, tone at the top really matters for institutional culture. And once an institutional culture is broken it's incredibly hard to repair it because the people who profit most under the broken system are those who keep abusing the system. If there is no punishment for bribery then the government contractors making the appropriate payments will absolutely outcompete the government contractors with the most efficient production line and the best product. This isn't partisan either, we're seeing it everywhere in America. Leftists cheering on the execution of a healthcare CEO is just as much a symptom of the damage that has been done to the belief in values underpinning America.

Even if you ignore the fact that senior DOGE staffers like Marko Elez are declaring on social media that "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.. You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity." Even if you ignore that all of our data is being handed over to unaccountable oligarchs. Even if you ignore the Nazi salutes. Even if you ignore the fact that the president is openly backing Russia over their own allies. Even if you refuse to accept the unapologetic pivot to a fascist Russian modeled mob kleptocracy, the US is fucked. For decades.