Not to mention that the same Chinese govt that is getting kissy-kissy with Taiwan’s KMT President Ma is still pointing some 900 missiles at the island, and apparently generously offered to reduce that number to only 600.
Meanwhile the NZ and Oz governments blame Taiwan and China equally for the “dollar diplomacy” in the Pacific. I’d call that idiotic, except those govts have already decided that they don’t want to openly cross China, anymore than they would openly cross the US.

They’ll do it… they have the dollars. The real problem for them is that the tech and training that makes the things work isn’t that easy to get. Carrier landings in the dark? Pilot training and capabilities would take a long time to develop.

I’m sure my former CO is not happy about it.

respectfully
BJ

The US is where it is in part because the Europeans (European bankers and businessmen) and others prefer THEIR corrupt cop to someone else’s. The propping up of the dollar is not an accident. How anything so thoroughly wrecked can remain standing as a reserve currency is astonishing to people… as long as they look ONLY at the economic logic. The realpolitik involved puts a lot more of the OECD countries into line behind it… even if they wish they weren’t they have very little choice.

respectfully
BJ

Shunda Barunda is correct in that IF America was not playing policeman, others WOULD be. Power abhors a vacuum.

Can’t help wondering WHO would be doing the ‘policing’. China wants nothing but resources - it doesn’t really seem to want ANY level of moral engagement beyond ‘mind your own business’, and Russia quite similar. No one else has anything close to the ability of the US to project hard (military) power, so I wonder if the statement above would really ring true?

Relating to the Anti-Americanism… I represent those remarks… in several ways.

Lets preface this by pointing out that I am a former US Naval Officer and an American citizen who chose to come to New Zealand because I, somewhat far in advance of the realization by my fellow citizens, realized that “the USA is headed in the wrong direction”. It still is, but now 80% of my peers agree with me and yet the country keeps going in that same wrong direction. I also knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq well before the invasion.

The facade of democracy in the USA is a bit less convincing to me than to most… the first-past-the-post balloting and the amounts of money required just to get beaten in the elections, guarantee that money rather than any other thing, controls the country. The two branches of the wealth party that have held power since Eisenhower first warned us, are not ENTIRELY interchangeable, but the “Coke or Pepsi” jibe fits.

Which leads to a second and different question. Shunda Barunda is correct in that IF America was not playing policeman, others WOULD be. Power abhors a vacuum. There is no comfort in the observation that this is a corrupt cop, a bought and paid for cop. The fact is that this is the cop on the beat and for reasons that have a lot to do with history, a lot of the big money people in the world want things to stay that way… and it works exactly as well as Icehawk observes in that other thread, that vigilante justice works, which is to say, not well at all.

We’ve been around the idiocy of declaring war on a method of warfare a fair few times. We’ve observed the abject failure of the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on pornography and the war on terror. War is where you fight with other nations, not words or behaviors… or social demographics.

You don’t negotiate with terrorists, but doesn’t that make it a bit more important not to create terrorists in the first place? Having created the conditions that support the spread of plague, should we be surprised if a lot of people get sick and die?

That leaves me here. Contemplating the rather large $$$ cost of a citizenship application.

respectfully
BJ

“NZ went to Afganistan again giving approval for everything going on there.”

Like what? A UN/NATO force went in, and we help out with ‘mopping up’…

What made torture ‘legal’ for the Americans was that their government removed a lot of the legal restrictions on torture, rather than telling them that they should do it. NZ has not done so, so I really don’t believe NZ could have done any torture.