Our friends in the global majority can see it from miles away: the dynamics that best capture Europe's position today are those of neocolonialism. The end state isn't to become a formal colony but having to choose who to be a client state of.
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We still have the capacity to turn this around, a lot of it actually. But for that to happen, we need leadership whose understanding of reality has moved on from watching reruns of The West Wing. It's not clear that we have it.
aug 27, 2025, 10:14 am • 16 1 • view
I wonder if the human instinct to ignore the tyre fire going on in the US instead of internalising that the US government is actually on fire because we’re so busy dealing with all the small effects of the tyre fire in our lives - that self protective normalisation without which we can’t function…
aug 27, 2025, 12:58 pm • 1 0 • view
Do EU leaders have that too? “The US as a functional entity can’t really be gone can it, I mean the planes are still flying and we all just went over there and faced down Trump and he didn’t sign over Ukraine to Russia so we can still work with this” or whatever?
aug 27, 2025, 12:58 pm • 1 0 • view
I mean, it’s such a weird reality to try to understand!
aug 27, 2025, 12:58 pm • 1 0 • view
you've got it right though. it's not that the US is done, but this will be a long period of instability AT BEST, and if you're preparing for the best case then you're not doing your job.
aug 27, 2025, 1:05 pm • 2 0 • view
Hope for the best, expect the worst (I saw the 12 chairs at a formative age)
aug 27, 2025, 1:13 pm • 2 0 • view
My read (which of course could be wrong) isn't so much that the problem is US-centric as it is misunderstanding the geopolitical shift. If they somehow manage to avoid the worst from Trump and if the US somehow returns to normal, the geopolitics will still have irretrievably changed.
aug 27, 2025, 2:59 pm • 1 0 • view
And they're not ready for that. The era has changed. This started before Trump I even, even though that and Brexit were the obvious events. But there's no going back to the international global rules-based order that they are comfortable operating in.
aug 27, 2025, 2:59 pm • 2 0 • view
arguably globalism ended in the 90s, it just wasn't immediately obvious
aug 27, 2025, 3:00 pm • 1 0 • view
It did, it's just that the 90s went all the way to ~2016.
aug 27, 2025, 3:08 pm • 2 0 • view
i really liked what john ralston saul had to say about globalism a while back (youtu.be/90UAEtt0ta8 and especially youtu.be/F58AkoeSpn0?...) —"globalism" doesn't mean "international trade" per se (although it incorporates that) but rather all human interaction viewed through the lens of economics
aug 27, 2025, 3:27 pm • 2 0 • view
oh why does he have to be on substaaack 😭😭😭
aug 27, 2025, 4:32 pm • 2 0 • view
i mean he's still on twitter too; i find boomers in general just straight up aren't sensitive to Platform Politics™
aug 27, 2025, 4:35 pm • 2 0 • view
Ooh, thanks, I'll have to watch that.
aug 27, 2025, 4:23 pm • 1 0 • view
the second one that i cued to a timecode, the remark about "managers in drag" i think is 👨🍳💋🤌
aug 27, 2025, 4:24 pm • 1 0 • view
somethng about Fukuyama and that 'end of history' nonsense and thinking that economics had taken over from history in there maybe?
aug 27, 2025, 4:13 pm • 1 0 • view
heh yeah i still haven't read that but feel like i should for posterity
aug 27, 2025, 4:14 pm • 0 0 • view
too many large powers (*cough* Russia China maybe India *cough*) who don't *do* rules, even before the US copied their approach
aug 27, 2025, 4:12 pm • 1 0 • view