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Topic	Is anybody else sort of worried about US foreign relations post-Trump?
ParanoidObsessive 12/10/18 7:04:23 PM #12:	darkknight109 posted... The US hegemony has been slowly dying for ~20 years now. Bill Clinton was really the last president to use America's strengths - both hard and soft - effectively on the international stage. I'd argue that even he was part of the decline. Reagan was arguably the last real effective big-stick swinging President. Bush Sr has the success (for certain definitions of the term "success") in the Gulf War to his credit, but his administration is at least potentially responsible for the problem in the first place (ie, our ambassador refused to take a hardline position on Iraq's troop build-up before the invasion, which Iraq took as tacit approval - had we voiced our opposition in advance it's possible they would have had to preempt the invasion entirely). And he had at least a couple of other diplomatic gaffes that weakened the US politically and militarily. Clinton on the other hand was more or less directly responsible for the cutbacks in intelligence spending that helped turn 9/11 into a clusterfuck, and outright refused custody of Bin Laden when Saudi Arabia arrested him after the bombing of the USS Cole and offered him to us. Almost every foreign policy decision he made - especially in his second term - was wrong. He basically helped create a number of problems that the governments after him were never really able to cope with. People remember Clinton's term as being positive mainly because it paralleled the strong economic success of the 90s, but Clinton had almost nothing to do with that. Nearly everything worthwhile that happened during his Presidency were things he was smart enough to avoid interfering with, while most of the things he took active interest in had a net negative effect overall. Arguably the US was strongest on the world stage both economically and politically when we had a singular enemy to point at to bolster coalition support from our allies. But with the fall of the USSR we lost that bogeyman, and we've never really been able to successfully shift that focus, whether to China or against the more nebulous threat of terrorism or anyone else. And with the strengthening of European ties via the EU, the pushback against US hegemony was pretty much inevitable. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family <cite>ParanoidObsessive posted [p:913905435] in Is anybody... [t:77287265]...</cite> <quote><cite>darkknight109 posted...</cite> <quote>The US hegemony has been slowly dying for ~20 years now. Bill Clinton was really the last president to use America's strengths - both hard and soft - effectively on the international stage. </quote> I'd argue that even he was part of the decline. Reagan was arguably the last real effective big-stick swinging President. Bush Sr has the success (for certain definitions of the term "success") in the Gulf War to his credit, but his administration is at least potentially responsible for the problem in the first place (ie, our ambassador refused to take a hardline position on Iraq's troop build-up before the invasion, which Iraq took as tacit approval - had we voiced our opposition in advance it's possible they would have had to preempt the invasion entirely). And he had at least a couple of other diplomatic gaffes that weakened the US politically and militarily. Clinton on the other hand was more or less directly responsible for the cutbacks in intelligence spending that helped turn 9/11 into a clusterfuck, and outright refused custody of Bin Laden when Saudi Arabia arrested him after the bombing of the USS Cole and offered him to us. Almost every foreign policy decision he made - especially in his second term - was wrong. He basically helped create a number of problems that the governments after him were never really able to cope with. People remember Clinton's term as being positive mainly because it paralleled the strong economic success of the 90s, but Clinton had almost nothing to do with that. Nearly everything worthwhile that happened during his Presidency were things he was smart enough to avoid interfering with, while most of the things he took active interest in had a net negative effect overall. Arguably the US was strongest on the world stage both economically and politically when we had a singular enemy to point at to bolster coalition support from our allies. But with the fall of the USSR we lost that bogeyman, and we've never really been able to successfully shift that focus, whether to China or against the more nebulous threat of terrorism or anyone else. And with the strengthening of European ties via the EU, the pushback against US hegemony was pretty much inevitable. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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