Don't forget the Saudis! They'd love to entice Trump with a tacky golf resort in the middle of the desert in exchange for some more environmental deregulation and looking the other way on human rights violations
I feel like that’s the case for all the far-right populists around the world. Viktor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, the AfD party in Germany, etc. AfD members of the European parliament literally got caught taking money from the Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies, and in exchange doing some stuff in the parliament.
He's obviously a right wing stooge that uses religious extremism to his advantage, and I hope his reign ends soon, but he's only been blocking stuff temporarily to advance his position (to get EU membership for example, or to advance at the borders), but he has been an important ally to Ukraine and NATO during the war.
I haven't seen him repeat Russian propaganda at all.
Correct me if my feeling is wrong though. I didn't look deeper into it.
This really shows how clueless this "businessman" is about business. Imagine China invades in Taiwan. About any business in the electronic sector will go down hard. Really hard. All over the world.
I posted a similar comment on some of the news around the US Republican's withholding aid to Ukraine for 6 months but this is insane.
Sure in the case of Taiwan specifically, the semiconductors is an obvious and immediate issue. But it's also worth noting that the US has spent countless trillions of dollars and worked through consecutive administrations for decades to establish itself as a reliable, irreplaceable and necessary defence partner.
This isn't just about Taiwan or Ukraine, but the geopolitical status of the US as a whole. It seems insane to me to jeopardize that. I'm no political scientist or anything so if this is actually in some way good for the US I'd be very interested to hear that perspective.
I think there's definitely merit to that. There are multiple avenues to achieving that end though and the US suddenly leaving its allies unprotected is probably the worst possible one imo. I am biased though living in Taiwan and having my home country also dependent on our alliance with the US for defence.
Think about it. Who loses if the US becomes anything other than a reliable, irreplaceable and necessary defense partner? Who gains?
Putin is waging war against the rest of the world on multiple fronts and our definitions and rules of engagement when it comes to hybrid warfare aren't up to date.