4 hours ago
If Alice and Bob strike a deal then Alice must be confident that an acceptable subset of her interests are met and that Bob will stick to the deal.
If Bob shows evidence of not sticking to deals, there's little point in Alice striking any deal.
9 hours ago
Art of the deal strikes again.
9 hours ago
Very good yesterday, very bad today. I understand completely why nations are not eager to bargain with a petulant child
9 hours ago
The problem is more long lasting. The world cannot accommodate 180 degree turns every 4 years in Washington.
So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
7 hours ago
> So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
That is the fundamental problem. The only way out, is to make changes to the constitution to specifically prohibit the executive branch from having any of this power to arbitrarily change things on a whim. That is the only way international peer could in the future trust an agreement made with the USA.
As long as the US feels it is ok to sign an agreement and immediately violate it, nobody in their right mind will bother to negotiate any future agreements. Which is not a good state to be in.
3 hours ago
It's not only the power structure, it's also the flawed democracy that allows gerrymandering and can only have 2 parties. It's the oligarch controlled media. It's the legalised corruption.
an hour ago
Winner-takes-all democracies do tend to have only 2 parties.
3 minutes ago
Very few “democracies”—a term that is more strained the more the structure of the political system structurally disenfranchises rather than represents views in the electorate—are as winner-take-all as the US, combining a strong Presidential system with FPTP voting, and basically none of any significance has as strong of a duopoly as the US.
9 minutes ago
Canada typically elects 5 parties, though the Greens, NDP, and Bloc are typically sub-50 in a 338 seat house.
4 hours ago
That won't solve anything. Congress already has this power they just abdicated it to the Executive. The only fix is better voters electing better people into Congress. -- good luck with both of those. The US is cooked.
3 hours ago
No, it’s not good enough, you need a better system. Like in Switzerland
17 minutes ago
Congress moves a lot slower, though. Congress isn't going to change tariffs every 24 hours. It takes a lot longer to get anything through Congress.
I mean, you still have the "every 4 years", or worse, "every few months". It's not at the pace that Trump changes things, though.
8 hours ago
At least the timing of the turns is predictable... I imagine working with countries with snap elections is harder, especially when they have trouble forming a government.
8 hours ago
You might think. The UK would be the most prominent example and in fact has been a much more predictable and consistent trading and negotiating partner than the USA
8 hours ago
The UK hasn't really changed, regardless of who's in charge, in 20 years. Because it's mostly run by the state and not by the politicians.
8 hours ago
In case you hadn't noticed, within the last 20 years the UK made an enormous constitutional change by leaving the EU.
7 hours ago
That is the one change, and it hasn't resulted in the thing people actually were voting for (but couldn't): less immigration. Because the state says we must just import 750k people a year, so that's that.
7 hours ago
Made by the people rather than the politicians- the mainline politicians all thought it would/wanted it to fail- they just thought they’d get a boost from catering to a disaffected minority.
8 hours ago
But no government has reversed that step.
7 hours ago
Yeah but that step itself was a dramatic change within said 20 year timeframe
4 hours ago
You've probably noticed, people like this like to adjust the goalposts.
8 hours ago
You didn’t say it and it may not occur to you, but you are correct, the UK is among the many sham democracies, which is arguably the primary objective of “democracies”; an illusion supported by a concept called choice supportive bias, i.e., if you believe the outcome of something was due to your own action, choice, or agency you’re prone to accept it, defend it, not question it, and ignore its detrimental effects.
It’s a rather diabolical form of control, democracy. “You have fake choices and you like … nay, you love what you choose”, quite literally. You have to love it, because you have to believe it’s true. And that’s where they latched onto your mind.
It’s quite ingeniou.
8 hours ago
> The UK would be the most prominent example and in fact has been a much more predictable and consistent trading and negotiating partner than the USA
European here: Oh hell no. The Brexit breakup drama was years of chaos with each of the braindead Prime Ministers somehow managing to make things worse.
8 hours ago
It still is.
We still aren't doing border checks on EU imports.
Still, Boris Johnson wasn't as bad as Trump.
8 hours ago
That's quite a take.
The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.
The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.
For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.
7 hours ago
The EU position was consistent from even before the referendum: Either in or out of the single market, no cherry picking.
Each PM in the UK's neverending parade gained power by telling their electorate "I have this genius plan that'll totally let us cherry pick" only to be deflated when the EU held to its clearly stated position.
The problem with Brexit was that the Brits wanted something that was never on the table, they voted for Brexit under false pretenses and then got mad when they couldn't get what they wanted.
7 hours ago
>the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing
Please state the official "consistent" position regarding the main problem caused by your own decision to leave: the Irish border.
7 hours ago
What?
"Forced into the Brexit outcome"
Cameron stepped down after he shat the bed, every PM was a Tory.
And yeah, the position was consistent. Before it was 'we could have all the benefits of being in the EU, with none of the down sides'. We could have soft Brexit, or the less popular hard Brexit.
Teresa Mays position was "Brexit means Brexit" and non of the others had a clue either. Because they promised everything to everyone. In the event we got a harder Brexit than the hardest Brexit discussed before the vote.
So if you want to say the UK was consistent, I say fuck you to the civil servants that consistently ignored the conversation prior to the vote.
8 hours ago
No, why would that be?
That's the reality of most mature democracies from UK to Germany to Italy.
If anything, that makes change slower and based on coalition consensus, not a single winner-take-all individual mood.
Which means that there isn't much to "work" as previous arrangements keep holding and they hardly change.
I would never exchange our democracy for a king electing one like in US, Turkey or Russia.
I'd rather have our democracies slower, the governments more unstable, but representative.
7 hours ago
Deliberative and hopefully self-stabilising. Real directional change happens over the span of a decade, not a few months. All arms of government (including non-kingship executive) brought to a rough consensus of choice and consequences.
6 hours ago
Countries realise that trade agreements are too important for politics.
They are usually negotiated by a nation's crack team of experts. America just does not take any of this seriously anymore.
7 hours ago
But we’re talking 180 degrees every… 2 weeks?
8 hours ago
> So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
There is only one chance the US has - they need to do what us Germans were forced to post-1945, rearchitect everything.
The US and UK are the only major countries that didn't undergo some sort of revolution, war or other reset of their constitution and legal systems and it shows everywhere.
If we Europeans (or anyone else) are supposed to ever trust the US again, we demand they properly fix their shit and prevent another madman's rise for good.
8 hours ago
I fear this is just the beginning, I’ve seen nothing to say the voting American public are any less into divisive politics than they have been for the last decade
[edit autocorrect changed divisive to decisive]
an hour ago
Americans absolutely love winner-takes-all narratives. They love it and they dread our "beta" democracies that cannot achieve anything.
They'd rather fall into Russian models of government where a single person can promise you the world and you give it the power to do so, rather than bother with things like "compromise" or "representation".
Re-electing somebody who openly attacked the institutions, instead of taking what happened on Jan 6th as a wake up call is the clear sign.
8 hours ago
You do realise that Germany had a shiny new constitution, and then went on to elect that Austrian painter. And that's after the prior new and shiny constitution leading into ww1
Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.
As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
8 hours ago
> The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.
A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.
8 hours ago
"That's like a toddler with a harpoon. There's a toddler wandering around in that office with a harpoon." The Thick of It s4e2.
7 hours ago
"He's so dense that light bends around him"
9 hours ago
This administration has a thing for being really vicious with the closest allies.
It really feels strange, odd, yet unsurprising that the US is going from a globalist leadership to selfish nationalism.
6 hours ago
Its easier since they have no defenses up and lots of valuables are in reach. It makes sense if you are that ethically challenged.
8 hours ago
Trump projects his greed and selfishness onto everyone else. So doesn't understand that there can be such a thing as a win-win relationship.
8 hours ago
I think you are ignoring the situation of a WIN-win relationship where one party is winning much more at the other party's expense. Just because it may be net positive for both countries that doesn't mean that it's a fair arrangement. The excuse that the smaller winner is still technically winning is not a good excuse against pushing for a more fair deal.
8 hours ago
In what way was the US not the big winner already? Canada bought all sorts of military equipment from the US, followed 99.9% of US foreign policy, produced tons of raw materials for the US economy and freely traded it for finished goods and consumables, contributed to many US wars. Canada gave US priority in pretty much every international trade and political matter and even bandwagoned onto many US laws.
Literally the only losing move was to mess with our relations to them.
7 hours ago
That just sounds like greed. It's not enough to be winning, I need to be winning as much if not more than everyone else.
an hour ago
You must have been living under a rock if you didn't notice how much did the US has thrived in the globalist world, and how much did it thrive more than the rest of its allies.
7 hours ago
Where is Trump pushing for a "more fair" deal? State what is his metric and demonstrate it is "fair" for both sides.
Show us it isn't just lies and bad faith.
7 hours ago
It is a common theme in his speeches on tariffs.
2 hours ago
Sure, in the same way a child tries to invoke unfairness when they don't get their way. Do you really fall for this?
6 hours ago
No, you don't understand: what exactly is "unfair" and what "fair" alternative is he proposing? And show us how it is fair for both sides.
4 hours ago
That's not going to happen. These people are not competent.
3 hours ago
Yeah, but I want the suckers who still defend them to put up or shut up.
an hour ago
Wait, how is he not right? /s
It's absolutely fair to count how much lumber and oil and cars you're importing-exporting while ignoring how much services in technology, IT, space, software, cloud, finance, etc, you're exporting. /s
8 hours ago
> the US is going from a globalist leadership to selfish nationalism.
It’s worse than that. This doesn’t suit the US. It suits Trump (or at least, that’s what his addled mind thinks).
8 hours ago
The US doesn’t have allies; it has interests.
8 hours ago
Meanwhile Israel is sucking USA empty and they call out Canada for being not "fair".
What a sick people.
8 hours ago
Someone has to fund Israel's universal healthcare.
2 hours ago
Remember the halcyon days of “earlier this year” when the Supreme Court ruled these tariffs illegal and unconstitutional?
7 hours ago
You cannot negotiate with a country that doesn’t stand by its word.
All other issues aside, Trump and the Republicans love to boast that they aren’t bound by anything including their own promises. This is the end result of that.
You’d be mad to cut a deal with the US right now. The Trump Admin will just try to take another bite. They are dishonest and unreliable. Making America’s word mean nothing is the greatest long term damage done to the country and the surest indicator of the end of the American Century (80 years but we can round up)
6 hours ago
It has to do with how America politically structured. The trade nego change every 1-2 terms. China is much more consistent in this, and will scrap all markets from America in the long term. I simply dont see America able to force a Plaza Accord out of this. Japan fizzled because of that. But China wont. And China now backed by Russia, world powerhouse of fossil and minerals. Russia has way more natural reserve than what Venezuela America and Middle East officially published.
3 hours ago
If China is backed by Russia then they are properly fucked.
8 hours ago
It is a good thing canadians are so nice. Dropping US alcohol is a tiny thing compared to some of the weapons canada might deploy. Look at all the back-and-forth deals in recent years and you will see an exemption for oil and potash. Think gas prices are high now? See what happens if canada starts shipping less crude. Think food prices are high? See what happens when there is no fertilizer because canada has restricted potash exports. And what will make Musk's head explode: canada is starting to allow cheap chinese EVs into north america. Canadians will be driving them around the US very soon.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-to-secure-the...
> US mines produce roughly 500,000 metric tons of potash per year, only about 8 percent of the 5.9 million metric tons of apparent annual US consumption. The remaining demand is met through imports, producing a net import reliance of about 92 percent. Reflecting the high concentration of global potash production, most of that supply comes from Canada (79 percent), with smaller volumes from Russia (12 percent) and other producers (9 percent) including Israel.
8 hours ago
The sentiment here is that nobody wants U.S. citizens to be negatively impacted by trade restrictions or tariffs. We are figuratively and, in many cases, literally friends and family. (Aside, even if our provincial governments allow southern booze back on shelves, it'll stay there.)
It would be decidedly un-Canadian to leverage electricity, potash, or other commodities necessary for survival in trade negotiations -- despite what Ford may suggest. We're nice, but we won't bow to bullies. Elbows up, eh!
3 hours ago
> nobody wants U.S. citizens to be negatively impacted by trade restrictions or tariffs.
As much as it pains me to say it as an American, little will change unless US citizens are negatively impacted. Trump is losing power and support in the US precisely because people are becoming more aware that he's hurting them.
2 hours ago
I see the same thing in Russia. It seems like there is no such thing as a civilian target because getting your opponents citizens to uprise and while yours to support you is the key strategy now.
It’s Vietnam Hearts and Minds all over again.
7 hours ago
I want them to be negatively impacted. Maybe a couple family members spoke publicly about what’s happening, and the rest remain silent or indifferent. My cousins are too busy with their multi million dollar AI roles to even see us non-millionaires as human.
8 hours ago
You do realise it's the citizens that voted trump in?
And you don't have to ban them, just make them more expensive. Your US brethren did vote for tarriffs. With that comes higher prices.
8 hours ago
It's a slow moving train wreck. I hope the consequences of these petulant actions scar the minds of voters for years to come. We're seeing the yield on treasuries creeping up, I think that's one of the consequences.
11 minutes ago
>Think gas prices are high now? See what happens if canada starts shipping less crude.
As of 2025, 90% of Canadian crude and 100% of natural gas goes to the US. <https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...> In other words, Canada hasn't been selling to the US merely out of the goodness of its hearts, but because its infrastructure is built that way. As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>
Just one of about a billion reasons why annexation is inevitable (and, really, should have happened two centuries ago).
PS - It will make your head explode that Tesla has competed quite well versus the likes of BYD in China for some time. That's why Musk sought to renew the US EV subsidies; he calculated that Tesla would be able to survive in the post-subsidy market better than rivals, and that's turned out to be the case.
5 hours ago
And what will make Musk's head explode: canada is starting to allow cheap chinese EVs into north america
Another Musk moment: most aluminum in the US comes from Canada. Most of Musk's vehicles are built with aluminum. These tariffs will directly increase Tesla manufacturing cost in the US, making them even less competitive.
7 hours ago
People here in Canada have not been sitting still. It is a truely fantastic oportunity, it's almost like 10% of the US market was suddenly transported to another country for free, and all we have to do is fill it.
7 hours ago
Prepare the distilleries ...
8 hours ago
There's a good opportunity to use that tariff money and subsidize critical exports to everywhere but USA. Europe gets cheaper minerals and Trump gets left begging China for scraps at insane prices.
If you want political gestures then impose heavy sanctions on Israel and declare that Latinos can get refugee status in Canada because of ICE. That would be an economic win too.
7 hours ago
But the Canadian government wants to be the 51st state. They have rapidly defunded social services, expanded fossil fuels and will adopt US style militarization. In fact, purchasing those munitions from the only country that has threatened to take it over.
5 hours ago
Sweden? Germany? Last two defense contracts negotiations…
8 hours ago
Meanwhile Trump is pushing to rekindle his love affair with Kim Jong Un.
3 hours ago
At some point , looking at all the damage, it becomes hard to dismiss Trump as merely unintelligent and incapable. The other possibility is that the destruction deliberate, and the goal to end US hegemony. Would things proceed any differently if it were?
27 minutes ago
Much of the self-destruction flowed from the pages of Project 2025. You can't just blame Trump: you have to include the Heritage Foundation and the entire Republican party.
This is not a problem that goes away when Trump ultimately leaves office.