Originally Posted by Greger
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It’s common just now to see these events as a temporary road bump on the route to a future of business as usual

Well yes. Part of "business as usual" is competition.

And some of the other large nations in the world are competing for a bigger slice of the pie.

That means somebody else gets a smaller piece...or everybody agrees to an equal slice.

Yeah, let’s say you’ve agreed that geopolitics is a zero sum game for arguments sake (I don’t agree, btw).
What’s amazing to me I’d how were going about it. I don’t see an upside to this gambit of maintaining our pie slice. Trying to keep a soon to be impoverished Europe in our economic sphere and stop its eastward gaze by the inability to do contract law (undermining several agreements, seizing assets and reserves of a sovereign country, weakening your dominant currency and causing widespread economic, political and agricultural chaos seems a funny way to maintain your slice.

Smells like failure and desperation. A very dangerous combo for people with hands on levers.

The other problem with the pie argument is- who’s pie?

Last I looked, our country is becoming increasingly impoverished starting with de industrialization . That’s now coming to the vassal states in Europe.

Russia didn’t deindustrialize. Or China. Last I looked, our drywall screws come from China. We scrapped our B&S screw cutting machines decades ago along with the working classes that ran them. Not everyone got that retraining to become iPod designers, financial planners or diversity training consultants.

Seems like a foreign policy in conflict with economic policy to me.