Paul Nadeau

This is my "sometimes you gotta hand it to them" moment

I've gotten pretty drunk with some random Balkans nationalists and even those guys when hammered where relatively coherent and logical compared to this

We could have had a smooth glide-path to “first among the great powers” but a bunch of fascists and kleptocrats had to burn it all down.

The level of threat to 🇺🇸 power & hegemony posed by relative military decline to 🇨🇳 is asymptomatically approaching zero relative to the rise of far right authoritarianism & the near-total failure of our democratic political institutions at home. The problem & the fix is 99+% about domestic politics.

"Only Kafka would appreciate a fuel-economy system that makes small fuel-efficient cars hard to sell and giant trucks easy. Yet the looser rules remove a barrier to greener vehicles while also handing a windfall to big truck makers." marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

“.. By my count, today's $12B farmer bailout is the FIFTH thing that Trump's tariffs were gonna pay for.”

- @scottlincicome.bsky.social

Was waiting for you to weigh in

What in the 4-dimensional-chess is this?

"Now that I've hit everyone with ruinous taxes, I'll dole some of it back out to my political supporters as welfare payments."

Look, what don't you people understand about how we have to out-compete China but also need to keep making concessions to them to maintain the illusion of a comprehensive bargain between U.S. and PRC leaders?

I'm still a dullard, just for different reasons

I still don't believe in the death penalty

2026 Osaka Expo mascot myaku myaku

Already here in Japan

Personally I give them credit for raising enough revenue from tariffs to pay for a $12 billion farm bailout, $2000 dividends for each American, paying down the federal debt, replacing the income tax, and restoring everyone's belief in magic for the holiday season

The thing I try to explain the most to those who don’t live here is that the Nuzzis of the world live in Washington (the place that deserves your ire) and the rest of us live in D.C., a collection of diverse, mostly quiet, walkable residential neighborhoods with no federal representation

Once again, for 2028 I'm a single issue voter and that issue is post-Trump lustration. GTFO with "better angels of our nature" for once.

Matthew Petti 💍 @matthew_petti · 1h Throwing money at dictatorships and shrugging when they do destructive or repressive things is not due to a lack of U.S. power, as you argue. It is precisely how U.S. power is exercised in the region — and may in fact be becoming a model for maintaining U.S. power globally. Matthew Petti 💍 @matthew_petti And isn't even a case of hypocrisy. The stated priorities of U.S. policy in the region to secure Israel, make the Gulf safe for capital, and stamp out Islamist militancy. If domestic values (democracy etc) are on this list, they rank lower and are at odds with the first three.

Interesting discussion going on on Twitter between Shadi Hamid and Matthew Petti, the latter being of course more correct than the former. In particular this struck me:

(link to broader convo in next post)

Yup, nonresident but still shows up on the website

Sometimes I get frustrated by Asia's relative ambivalence towards normative values and then I then I see something from Europe and think to myself "chill out, values aren't a +12 on each roll"

And the guy who could actually make a difference by speaking up has been staying quiet

How many chess games are there??

Anyone still doing the "three-dimensional chess" thing these days?

In other words, I don't want a bunch of Winston Churchill cosplayers thinking that this is their moment

One of those things where the crazy hawk bros are doing the framing and calling the shots and the normal people are ignoring the discussion on the basis that it's something the crazy hawk bros are talking about

Also Pete Hegseth is exactly the kind of ass hat who would make a war that nobody wants much more likely, so there's that as well

(Also my hunch is that the Trump administration, as with many other things, wants the outcome - U.S. dominance - but not the work and effort required to achieve it)

If the U.S. really is ceding the Asia Pacific, then I'm really hoping for a more grounded discussion of what PRC regional hegemony would look like

(My two cents: Not great, but not the Warsaw Pact)

Him and the Quincy Institute deserve each other

I could believe it at least...Tokyo is constantly under (re)construction and for a guy who grew up around old buildings and whose dream house would be ~250 years old, it's very unsettling to me