Trump dismantles Voice of America with executive order - BBC News

Because Trump knows that China can and will fight back.

Canada and Denmark are friends of ours that Trump is now throwing salt in their eyes and saying "neener neener" while showing them his ass.

Because of our history, they aren't fighting back.

If they do, Russia wins.

I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that's college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.

That's an incredibly myopic take that confuses correlation with causation.

These moves may benefit Putin, but Russia isn't the only county to benefit. Infact, Russia is in a historically weak position to fill gaps left by a receding American empire.

I'd wager that China is likely to see much more geopolitical gains because they have the resources and capacity to take advantage of the situation.

I'm not saying Putin won't benefit, just pointing out how limiting it is to view Trump through a singular lens.

America cannot dominate the world militarily, nor could that even serve the goals of its contemporary brand of neoimperialism.

Soft power i.e. culture, propaganda, and diplomatic/idealogical relationships, are the foundation upon which it's built.

Yes, military hard power plays a critical role, but it cannot replace soft power.

This isn't empire for the sake of raw nationalism, and nothing would accelerate the American collapse faster than dismantling the state's soft power tools. The end result will be attempts to maintain power by spending its military resources on peer, or near peer conflicts.

Well, there was an attempt but unfortunately he wasn't a very good shot.

It's a pretty scary idea when the odds are very high that we would just get murdered by police or secret service. And in this hypothetical, if we were to fail, Trump would just bring them hammer down even harder on everyone else, making future attempts much more difficult if not impossible. Until the people are organized on a large scale and collectively convinced this is the only option we have left, we have too much to lose with very little chance of success.

This is the same country that classified its nukes so hard that the engineers couldn’t find non-redacted procedures for making a critical component of fusion bombs.

We’ve always been incompetent, now it’s just partnered with enhanced stupidity.

I won’t be surprised when China increasingly fills this void.

The language barrier makes that unlikely. I think this one is going to remain empty for a while.

but let’s face it the amount of people that you can only reach via short wave is dwindling, they mostly switched to satellite. They rather feed into the local FM broadcast network, and of course you can stream over the internet.

You would actually be surprised how many poor regions in Central and South America as well as in Africa and Central Asia actually rely on shortwave still.

A lot of it is Christian and right-wing broadcasts, but still, it's used more than you would think. Not everyone can afford expensive satellite rigs to receive.

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RT

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