#ashley is horrible but he is insidious

[daggersandarrows]

i think almost every single issue i have with the cr fandom can be summed up with the responses that i got when i said “molly is yasha’s soulmate”.

“ummm eww, she’s a lesbian?”

there’s so many problems with this one i’ll just take it from the top.

yasha was not confirmed a lesbian (by someone else, btw) until we were in the triple digits. this fandom hates the possibility of bi women so bad it’s embarrassing. y’all know how often i see people call keyleth and vex het? and allura a lesbian?

yes, AND? how does her being a lesbian invalidate her having a soulmate who isn’t a woman. how. i’ll wait. as far as i know “lesbian” means “is attracted solely to women/women adjacent people”. why do soulmates have to have anything to do w attraction.

“gross, yasha is not attracted to a man”

sigh.

first off, see the first point, soulmate does not necessitate attraction.

second off, even if it did, mollymauk is not and never was a man--or at least not solely. and he’s not a cis man, goddammit, which is what the more insidious version of this argument looks like--”yasha isn’t attracted to a cishet man”. also he’s BI.

this wasn’t a late reveal or anything either. in EPISODE GODDAMN TWO we have confirmation of nonbinary molly.

molly ids as genderfluid. now idk how yasha thinks of her own sexuality, but if she wanted to include him in hers then...that’s...okay. it is. stop arguing. there are *plenty* of lesbians dating genderfluid people out there.

“you mean PLATONIC soulmate right haha”

i mean, i could mean that. i could. i could also mean other things this doesn’t have to mean platonic or i’m a terrible person.

this is where i’m sure im gonna lose some people: in addition to the above points about genderfluid molly, let’s just consider for a moment that i did not in fact mean platonic soulmate. or romantic actually.

let’s think about what it means if i meant sexual soulmate.

“thane what does that even mean what are you talking about”

i don’t know! soulmate has extremely variable definitions some of which are highly amatonormative but for right now let’s just say someone whose sex life meshes with yours so well that it feels like you were made to have sex with them.

this fandom has a huge and i mean HUGE problem with thinking that sex = romance and that sex MUST under ALL circumstances = sexual attraction. also the understand of consent is so poor here my god

i don’t have the time energy or brain to get into ace shit here and trust me i’ve been treated horribly by both allos and aces alike for how my identity presents itself but i will just say this

i have never been sexually attracted to anyone i’ve had sex with.

i have never been ROMANTICALLY attracted to anyone i’ve had sex with.

i like having sex.

i also know kind of a LOT of people who have sex with people who are “outside” of their identity. this isn’t an uncommon thing, very online tumblr gays.

for some reason people HATE that here. but my point is: if yasha and molly were fucking it doesn’t change anyone’s identity and it didn’t have to involve any attraction at all, and if you don’t want to see that that’s absolutely valid but it does NOT give you the right to read every thoroughly tagged fic and leave nasty hate comments or worse for the author because of it. (i’m looking at you, allos who decided to run ace fjorclay shippers off the internet.)

and last but not least, the fact that so many people violently object to this statement that i made--angry, indignant, accusing me of hatespeech, etc, when it’s word for word something that ashley said, right next to where she was comparing molly to, y’know, yasha’s literal wife. so. i can’t imagine how mad certain people would get if i made that comparison myself.

which brings me to my final point: i’m not sure that some of y’all are actually watching the same show as i am and it is very annoying for the rest of us.

#cr discourse #sorry i got mad

[peachyromanoff]

The Dangers of Technology

When Ashley LeMay bought two Ring cameras for her Mississippi home, she never imagined that such a trusted device would betray her so horribly. Working late hours as a hospital laboratory scientist, LeMay thought the popular home security camera, Ring, would give her some peace of mind when she couldn’t be at home. After seeing that most of her neighbors had Ring attached to their houses, she decided to jump on the bandwagon. LeMay then purchased two cameras for her home. One was set up in her infant’s room and the other was set up in her older daughters’ room. For the most part, the camera proved as an excellent way to keep in touch with her kids when she couldn’t be there. Until one day, her eight year old daughter, Alyssa, heard strange noises coming from her room. The strange sound was identified as Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”, a song that gained recognition from the 2010 horror movie, Insidious. The song was streaming through both of the bluetooth cameras when Alyssa walked into her room. When she entered, the music was abruptly cut and a strange man’s voice erupted from the speakers, greeting her. The niceties soon turned sour as the hacker began shouting slurs at the young girl and prompting her to “Go tell Mommy you’re a (n-word).” When Alyssa asked who the hacker was, he told her that he was her “best friend” and that “You can do whatever you want right now. You can mess up your room. You can break your TV.” Beyond distressed at this point, Alyssa began screaming for her mother. It was then that the hacker claimed he was “Santa Claus”, later asking Alyssa to be his “best friend”. After receiving no information on who the hacker was, Alyssa left her room in search for her father. As soon as her father heard the chilling story, he immediately disconnected all the cameras within the house. The family has since contacted Ring on the matter—which soon proved futile, as a representative for the company repeatedly tried to switch the blame onto the family, claiming they had failed to set up the two factor authentication. I can only hope that this awful situation will set an example for people to either: A. take all the steps to properly stay secure, or B. avoid gimmicky devices all together. While I’m sure the security cameras have offered more pros than cons, it’s always best to do as much research on new technology as you can before slapping it onto your house. Especially if it’s an Amazon product—but we’ll dive into that another day.

#ring #amazon

[soul-music-is-life]

Thoughts Watching PLL “Never Letting Go”

1) And thus begins the Aria/Jason flirting

2) All my precious liars are happy. What horrible heinous thing is going to happen?

3) Spencer, let your dad eat salt and die. He’s an asshole.

4) How is Emily a better mother to her mother than her mother is to her? She’s such a good person.

5) The girls having that awkward lunch with Ali’s mom is the most painful thing I’ve ever seen.

6) Damn, Ali was constantly teasing Emily about liking her in the flashbacks. Typical little kid pushing the other little kid on the playground because she likes her.

7) Mona taking control of the fashion show is my favorite thing.

8) “You should come…” *long pause* “…see your handiwork on the runway.” *snort* I see what you did there, writers.

9) “She came straight to Emily’s after getting back from Georgia.” Yeah, they endgame…

10) Mona: “I said no flats, Becky.” Me: “Yeah, goddamn. Get it together, Becky.”

11) “Are your legs always that short?” OMFG, Mona is so funny.

12) Spencer: “Mona is 5 feet of insidious snark with a side ponytail…and I want to grab it and I want to yank it really really hard.”

13) Pam, Ella, and Ashley…WINE MOMS FOREVA!!!

14) I love the Spencer/Mona tension in this fashion show. Troian’s reaction shots are priceless.

15) I know that Shay had to love this fashion show ep because she’s always talking about how she never got to get dressed up as Emily.

16) I want to know if they just had random crew members calling out and whistling at the girls as they walked the runway.

17) Lucy Hale just totally slapped Troian’s ass. XD

18) Wait, how are Lucy and Shay the same height in this scene?

#Pretty Little Liars #Never Letting Go #Emily Fields #Hanna Marin #Aria Montgomery #Spencer Hastings #Mona Vanderwaal #Jason DiLaurentis #Alison DiLaurentis #Shay Mitchell #Lucy Hale #Troian Bellisario #Emison #Pam Fields #Peter Hastings #Wine moms #Ella Montgomery #Veronia Hastings #I have a dirty mind #jessica dilaurentis

[kayceecruz]

What you said about Rob being marginalised in this crappy plot is so true and makes me so sad:(, look I get Robron is no fairytale and they're messed up always have been but did they really have to make it quite so bad? When I first saw this I was like ok Aaron's messed and so has Robert this can be worked out but really they way they made Robert look and choices like the mill just made him look 10x worse? did they really have to make it so nasty.

Oh, nonnie, this ask just went epic. 

Alright this answer got away from me so you know if you have stuff to do tl;dr

Looking at it from their point (the writers), they don’t think they did anything wrong because I get the sense that their INTENTION was that they equally messed up. That Robert’s horrible choice was equally as bad as Aaron. I think their intention was to bring to light those issues that they never resolved after the Kasim incident: Robert’s fear of never being good enough and never being able to make Aaron happy; Aaron’s fear that Robert would be unfaithful. He was sure of it even when Robert insisted he wouldn’t (and he meant that). Robert was sure that he couldn’t make Aaron happy even when it was obvious that Robert leaving would break Aaron.

It’s almost like self-fulfilling prophecies. If you think something is going to happen (Rob believing he wasn’t good enough no matter how hard he tried; Aaron never believing Robert wouldn’t cheat) then eventually, it’s going to happen. Let’s be honest, so much of this stems from how they began: the affair. AND MAYBE if I had more faith in ED, I would say that THIS IS WHAT this is about; Robert has betrayed his vows and Aaron (whether you full on call it cheating or not). But it wasn’t out of desire or want or need. (He isn’t looking for someone other than Aaron.)  It was out of losing Aaron. I mean it’s incredibly fucked up but there you have it.

This time, however, Robert’s reactions after are completely different. He feels horrible and guilty (something that never happened with Chrissie). He was going to actually tell the truth even though he really didn’t want to because he doesn’t want to hurt Aaron or lose him (something that never occurred to him with Chrissie). He is taking full responsibility and not trying to blame this on anyone else; he knows he has just hurt so many people he loves: Aaron, Chas, Liv (something that never happened through the affair era because Rob was too self-involved to consider anyone else). He fully admits he doesn’t deserve Aaron and in his mind never did (something he said about Chrissie once but didn’t mean because that Robert believed he was entitled to have what he wanted, this one knows that’s not true ).

All that has happened since Rebecca got here was to get us here. If they can deal with those issues, they have a chance of turning this story on its head.

This time, Robert had tried so hard and though Aaron saw it and knew it, there was that part inside him that lived through the affair, through The Lodge, through the scrapyard confrontation and can’t quite believe it. I mean the beginning of their coming back together was difficult because any wrong foot that Robert made – whether accidental or on purpose – had Aaron kicking him out. That was his gut reaction because of all they’d been through. And yes, things changed slowly and he let Robert in but as soon as Rebecca came into the equation, all of that came rushing back, all of it, and this time it was worse because now he knows what it is like to have all of Robert’s affections and love and attention on him. His mind keeps going there again and again. No matter how much Robert shows him he loves him, tells him he loves him, Aaron thinks Rob has one foot out of the door, just waiting. Robert spent the better part of the year ignoring that. Ignoring that Aaron didn’t believe in him because he doesn’t think he deserves that. It’s been in recent months that Robert has allowed himself to get angry about it and actually speak up. January being that moment where he just couldn’t anymore.

Then everything happened and Robert had to step up and be that awesome guy regardless of what Aaron, his family, Paddy thought. He did it too. He was doing it. And then Aaron chose the drugs over him and Liv. And every single time that Robert felt marginalised came back to him.

Here’s the thing: this was all in the actual narrative. I’m not making it up.

Maybe the execution was the problem more than anything. It was just misery after misery. We as a fandom didn’t see them together except for 2-3 minutes. They felt disconnected (they are supposed to), they felt alone and we felt that way with them. They need that constant connection, where they can look at each other, talk to each other, touch each other. Without that, they flounder and fail.

Aaron was reaching his breaking point long before prison, it was just the thing that sent him over the edge and he broke. He took drugs and choice to deal with his pain that way rather than holding on to Rob and Liv. Ultimately, it was losing Robert, like he thought he had, that pulled Aaron back into himself and made him realize what he was going to lose.

Robert’s breaking point has been quieter and subtler because he doesn’t let his emotions show as easily but they did an excellent job at getting him there, and I do love that it wasn’t played as a breakdown in tears but a complete and total loss of willingness to go on. Rob was completely done. There was nothing left without Aaron, even Liv wasn’t enough to keep him going without Aaron. Somewhere in Robert, he already felt like he failed Aaron long before he made the idiotic choice of getting drunk and sleeping with someone else.

Where they lost the audience was with the way they executed it. It was cheap drama (though awesomely acted by Ryan and Danny) and it just threw everyone for a loop. Having spent weeks without them being them, Aaron being someone else, Rob going crazy, no loving interactions between them for more than a few minutes, no communication, that scene on Thursday was OUR breaking point.

They have been playing the long game with this for a while and sometimes they forget that the audience doesn’t always remember everything that came before and how it plays into the now. That might have been a major flaw in this plan. (Or I could be giving them too much credit, who knows.)

Again, if I didn’t already feel pretty burned by that I would be more hopeful (and somewhere deep inside I probably am) that this was also their point.

Will they be able to fix it? It really all depends on what happens next and how the handle the fallout and the reconstruction of it all. Can they do it? Honestly, I don’t know. However, they brought me SSW, Robron reunion, the wedding, the abuse storyline, Holly’s death, Emma’s amazing characterization, Pierce and Rhona’s insidious domestic abuse, Ashley’s dementia, Rob’s development, Olivia Flaherty, Faith Dingle, pub quizzes, awesome women friendships, book clubs that make me happy….so I am going to try to believe a little bit harder in them.

#kat answers #holy crap #this got long #and winded #but i had stuff to say #i guess #emmerdale #robert sugden #aaron dingle #robron #meta meta meta #writing stuff

[theconservativebrief]

The story of the past few days in news has become clear: It was America versus its allies.

After President Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump announced that he would be suspending joint military exercises — “the war games,” as he put it — with South Korea, as a gesture of goodwill toward the North. This seems to have come as a shock to America’s allies in Seoul: South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s office released a statement saying “we need to find out the precise meaning or intentions of President Trump’s remarks,” implying they had no idea this was coming.

The weekend before, at the G7 summit, a confab for leaders of seven wealthy democracies, Trump got into a fight with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over trade. When Trudeau criticized Trump’s imposition of new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports — saying “Canadians did not take it lightly” — Trump called him “very dishonest and weak” on Twitter. Peter Navarro, one of his top trade advisers, said on Fox News that there was “a special place in hell” for Trudeau.

These two incidents aren’t the only times Trump has infuriated American allies in the past year. Just last month, he pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal — a painstakingly negotiated agreement involving several of America’s top European allies. Last June, he withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. And this all came amid constant carping about how America’s NATO allies needed to pay their “fair share,” and after Trump’s past musings about how he might not defend allies if they didn’t.

Trump’s betrayal of South Korea and eruption at Trudeau are not one-offs, or events you can write off as simple quirks of the president’s personality. It is part of a broader slate of Trump policies and diplomatic efforts that have, put together, fundamentally weakened America’s ties with its traditional allies — in ways that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the world.

America’s alliances depend on the US’s reputation for upholding its agreements and treating its allies fairly. Trump’s blithe disregard for diplomacy and international agreements has damaged the US’s reputation in a way that some scholars worry may be irreparable. And a deep body of research on international relations suggests that the strength of America’s alliances in Europe and East Asia have played a pivotal role in preventing another world war. The more Trump mucks around with American alliances, the more unstable the world becomes — making a large military conflict more imaginable.

Such a disaster hopefully will never happen. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible for most of us to imagine one happening now: We live in one of the most peaceful times in human history, with some of the lowest rates of deaths in conflict ever recorded.

But that’s precisely the point: Our age is such an anomaly when it comes to conflict that we aren’t entirely sure what could trigger a return to the violent historical norm. Serious, lasting damage to the American-led alliance system might do the trick.

And President Trump’s foreign policy could well be doing such damage. His approach is so erratic, so contemptuous of America’s traditional way of doing business, that US allies are openly worrying in a way that we haven’t seen in modern history. This affects world politics at their most fundamental level, undermining an otherwise stable global system in ways that we are only dimly capable of perceiving.

The past week’s news was a particularly naked demonstration of what had been, to date, one of the most subtle and insidious effects of the Trump presidency: an erosion of the foundations of the political system that defines — and protects — the modern world.

In 1956, a leaked Defense Department memo proposing the withdrawal of US troops from Europe terrified European allies; German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared privately that “NATO is finished.” The Nixon administration’s diplomatic outreach to China in 1972 led both Japanese and South Korean policymakers to fear that the US would cut ties to curry favor with Beijing. Seoul even began a covert nuclear weapons program to defend itself in the event of American abandonment.

These examples illustrate a common historical pattern: Alliances between a stronger state and weaker partners become at risk of collapse when the weaker state no longer feels like it can trust the stronger state.

“An alliance may dissolve if its members begin to question whether their partners are genuinely committed to providing assistance,” Harvard scholar Stephen Walt writes in a 1997 survey of the historical record. “This problem will be more severe when … there is a large asymmetry of power among the member-states.”

The US has prevented allies from truly losing faith in the past basically by reassuring them. Presidents promise allies that they’d never abandon them, and provide them tangible goods — like US troop deployments to their country, military assistance, or even trade agreements — to demonstrate America’s continuing commitment.

America’s history of managing allies speaks to a fundamental truth about these agreements: They are grounded entirely in trust. Ultimately, an alliance is nothing but a promise: that the United States will defend its allies, either in Europe or East Asia, in the event of an unspecified future attack. There’s nothing an ally can do to force the United States into defending them; they just have to take America’s word for it.

As a result, a country’s reputation for treating its allies well is crucially important to determining whether its alliances can work. A 2008 paper by Douglas Gibler, a professor at the University of Alabama, found that states that did not honor their commitment to allies in the past were considerably less likely to forge new alliances in the future.

Trade pacts, environmental agreements, and the Iran nuclear deal don’t touch the core US promise in US military alliances — to defend allies in the event of an attack. But backing out of such accords does serious damage to Trump’s reputation as a trustworthy ally. Withdrawing the United States from major agreements and imposing tariffs on allies, all while cozying up to Vladimir Putin and sitting down with Kim Jong Un, tells US allies that Trump doesn’t feel particularly bound by formal agreements or the traditional thrust of US foreign policy. If he decides that an agreement doesn’t put “America First,” he’s perfectly willing to kick it to the curb.

Trump has openly said this in the past. In July 2016, he told the New York Times that he would be willing to disregard Article 5, the provision of NATO’s founding treaty committing allies to defending each other in the event of the attack.

“If we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth … then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, ‘Congratulations, you will be defending yourself,’” Trump told the Times.

Trump has tried to walk back that kind of rhetoric as president. But his actions in the past year — especially the snap cancellation of longstanding military exercises with South Korea — make the threat of abandonment seem all too credible to allies. When NPR asked Tomas Valasek, the recently retired Slovak ambassador to NATO, if Trump would defend his country or another ally in the event of an attack, he couldn’t bring himself to say yes.

“The honest answer is none of us quite knows,” Valasek said. “His heart is not into alliance. He has a zero-sum view of the world. He believes in no permanent friendships, no permanent allies. You know, that’s not the sort of mindset that prepares him well for sort of standing by the side of an ally in case of a crisis.”

The result of Trump’s reputation for unreliability, then, is a weakening of American alliances. Allies will trust the United States less, and may start looking for alternatives to depending so heavily on the United States. Enemies will see cracks in US alliances and may attempt to exploit them.

“The liberal international order depends on us believing that agreements like treaties [and] international organizations have long-term staying power beyond leadership change,” Brett Ashley Leeds, a scholar of US alliances at Rice University, tells me. “The scariest part is the fact that [Trump] is creating so much uncertainty about what US policy is going to be.”

There has never, in human history, been an era as peaceful as our own. This is a hard truth to appreciate, given the horrible violence ongoing in places like Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, yet the evidence is quite clear.

Take a look at this chart from the University of Oxford’s Max Roser. It tracks the number of years in a given time period in which “great powers” — meaning the militarily and economically powerful countries at that time — were at war with each other over the course of the past 500 years. The decline is unmistakable:

Max Roser/Our World In Data

This data should give you some appreciation for how unique, and potentially precarious, our historical moment is. For more than 200 years, from 1500 to about 1750, major European powers like Britain and France and Spain were warring constantly. The frequency of conflict declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the wars that did break out — the Napoleonic conflicts, both world wars — were particularly devastating.

The past 70 years without great power war, a period scholars term “the Long Peace,” is one of history’s most wonderful anomalies. The question then becomes: Why did it happen? And could Trump mucking around with a pillar of the global order, American alliances, put it in jeopardy?

The answer to the second question, ominously, appears to be yes. There is significant evidence that strong American alliances — most notably the NATO alliance and US agreements to defend Japan and South Korea — have been instrumental in putting an end to great power war.

“As this alliance system spreads and expands, it correlates with this dramatic decline, this unprecedented drop, in warfare,” says Michael Beckley, a professor of international relations at Tufts University. “It’s a really, really strong correlation.”

A 2010 study by Rice’s Leeds and the University of Kentucky’s Jesse C. Johnson surveyed a large data set on alliances between 1816 and 2000. They found that countries in defensive alliances were 20 percent less likely to be involved in a conflict, on average, than countries that weren’t. This holds true even after you control for other factors that would affect the likelihood of war, like whether a country is a democracy or whether it has an ongoing dispute with a powerful neighbor.

In a follow-up paper, Leeds and Johnson looked at the same data set to see whether certain kinds of alliances were more effective at protecting its members than others. Their conclusion is that alliances deter war best when their members are militarily powerful and when enemies take seriously the allies’ promise to fight together in the event of an attack. The core US alliances — NATO, Japan, and South Korea — fit these descriptors neatly.

A third study finds evidence that alliances allow allies to restrain each other from going to war. Let’s say Canada wants to get involved in a conflict somewhere. Typically, it would discuss its plans with the United States first — and if America thinks it’s a bad idea, Canada might well listen to them. There’s strong statistical evidence that countries don’t even try to start some conflicts out of fear that an ally would disapprove.

These three findings all suggest that NATO and America’s East Asian alliances very likely are playing a major role in preserving the Long Peace — which is why Trump’s habit of messing around with alliances is so dangerous.

Estonian and US troops participate in a joint NATO military exercise in March 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

According to many Russia experts, Vladimir Putin’s deepest geostrategic goal is “breaking” NATO. The member states where anyone would expect him to test NATO’s commitment would be the Baltics — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — small former Soviet republics that recently became NATO members.

We can’t predict if and when a rival like Putin would conclude that America’s alliances seemed weak enough to try testing them. Hopefully, it never happens.

But the more Trump attacks the foundations of America’s allies, the more likely things are to change. The absolute risk of a Russian invasion of a NATO state or a North Korean attack on the South is relatively low, but the consequences are so potentially catastrophic — nuclear war! — that it’s worth taking anything that increases the odds of such a conflict seriously.

The world order is a little like a game of Jenga. In the game, there are lots of small blocks that interlock to form a stable tower. Each player has to remove a block without toppling the tower. But each time you take out a block, the whole thing gets a bit less stable. Take out enough blocks and it will collapse.

The international order works in kind of the same way. There are lots of different interlocking parts — the spread of democracy, American alliances, nuclear deterrence, and the like — that work together to keep the global peace. But take out one block and the other ones might not be strong enough to keep things together on their own.

At the end of the Cold War, British and French leaders worried that the passing of the old order might prove destabilizing. In a January 1990 meeting, French President François Mitterrand told British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that he feared a united Germany could seize control of even more territory than Hitler. Some experts feared that in the absence of the external Soviet threat, Western European powers might go back to waging war with each other.

Thankfully, those predictions turned out to be wrong. There are multiple reasons for that, but one big one — one that also helped keep relations between other historical enemies, like South Korea and Japan, peaceful — is a shared participation in US alliance networks. The US serves as the ultimate security blanket, preventing these countries from having to build up their own armaments and thus risk a replay of World War I. But if American alliance commitments become and remain less credible, it’s possible this order could crack up.

America’s partners aren’t stupid. They understand that Trump is the product of deep forces in American politics, and that his victory might not be a one-off. If they think that this won’t be the last “America First” president in modern history, depending on America the way that they have in the past could quickly become a nightmare.

The worst-case scenarios for a collapse in the US alliance system are terrible. Imagine full Japanese and German rearmament, alongside rapid-fire proliferation of nuclear weapons. Imagine a crack-up of NATO, with European powers at loggerheads while Russia gobbles up the Baltic states and the rest of Ukraine. Imagine South Korea’s historical tensions with Japan reigniting, and a war between those two countries or any combination of them and China.

All of this seems impossible to imagine now, almost absurd. And indeed, in the short run, it is. There is no risk — zero — of American allies turning on each other in the foreseeable future. And it’s possible that the next president after Trump could reassure American allies that nothing like this could ever happen again.

But the truth is that there’s just no way to know. When a fundamental force for world peace starts to weaken, no one can really be sure how well the system will hold up. Nothing like this — the leader of the world’s hegemon rounding on its most important allies — has ever happened before.

What Donald Trump’s presidency has done, in effect, is start up another geopolitical Jenga game. Slowly but surely, he’s removing the blocks that undergird global security. It’s possible the global order survives Trump — but it’s just too early for us to say for sure.

Given the stakes, it’s a game we’d rather not play.

Original Source -> How Trump is killing America’s alliances

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief