I watched a bit of the meeting, not the whole thing, but the bit where Trump and Vance started lashing out at Zelenskyy. There’s been a lot of talk about it on here, and I agree Trump and Vance are big man babies trying to bully Ukraine into an unfavorable deal, but I’m still not clear on how this affects, well, everything I guess. Can someone ELI5?

  • aramis87@fedia.io
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    23 hours ago

    Internationally, the wars continue. The US military stockpile is structured so that if there’s a full US commitment to a war, the stockpile will last a couple of years while the US transitions to a wartime footing, building and renovating munitions factories to continue the war effort. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the US and the EU started sending their stockpiles to Ukraine, and they ramped up munitions production - but neither power pivoted ro full wartime production. Hell, the European NATO countries were still debating whether to dedicate 2% of their GDP to defence.

    With Trump fully in Putin’s pocket, the US is going to drastically scale back the supply of arms to Ukraine, and the EU isn’t in a position to make up the entire shortfall. Even now, they’re talking about giving money and supplying some arms, but I’m not seeing any reports of building new factories or scaling up production at existing ones (it takes a couple years to fully scale up production, so extra arms available now needed to be started 2 years ago, and extra production now won’t make a noticable difference until two years from now). So Ukraine is going to be struggling for arms.

    The good news for Ukraine is that Russia has also been struggling with both manpower and munitions. Putin is relying on literal cannon fodder from other countries and his own prisoners to make the war palatable to his people. But I think it’s possible he may decide to push harder, annex a bunch of Ukraine, then declare that the war is over and spend some time consolidating his gains.

    In the meantime, I’d expect the US to be increasingly focused on the war in Israel, both as a distraction from Ukraine and because Trump really wants ‘wins’ there - in this case, he likely wants to build some hotels, and he’d really like to be able to proclaim that he “brought peace to the Middle East” [the genocide of the Palestinian people being a mere technicality to Trump].

    With the US being increasingly unreliable, Europe will focus more on their own affairs (including Russia and Ukraine). The US will go their own way on things, increasingly alone and alienated. It will never be fully trusted again (nor should it be), so accomplishing foreign policy goals is going to be increasingly hard, and accomplishing domestic goals isn’t going to be much easier.

    The US economy will eventually collapse and the weight of the national debt will come crashing down. That’s going to affect other countries as well, though I don’t know enough to be able to predict how badly. The US will end up the big loser and Russia can probably chalk up some wins in Ukraine. The Arabic countries will make noises about Israel, but I don’t think full-scale war will happen there, just long-simmering tensions with both sides encouraging terrorism.

    I think China and India are poised to be the big winners: they’re both staying publicly out of things, biding their time, waiting for America to fall and Europe to be more internally-focused. And at some point, human civilization collapses, because we couldn’t agree that maybe we should just buy less stuff and all the infrastructure and farmland is swallowed by rising sea levels, extreme drought, floods, wildfires, hurricanes and whatever else is waiting for us.