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You think NATO is stronger in January 2025 than it was in January 2020? For any comparison from before the war or the start of the war to at any point after summer of 2023, I honestly don't think this is a defensible position at all.
it's simply patently ridiculous to characterize "conservatives," the major part of which has been talking about getting out of entangling alliances requiring hundreds of military bases all over the world and the continuing forever wars for at least 15 years as "you just hate the libs"
we're just too far apart on what reality looks like to really have a productive discussion without expending a lot of effort hashing out the factual disagreements we have and, to be frank, I don't think you acknowledging what I view as reality would change your ideological opinions anyway
Certainly NATO was stronger before Trump's election in 2024 than it was in 2020. That's really not a very high bar since Trump was trashing NATO in his first term too. The fact you can't even begin to see how this could be possible is indicative that you're either using some weird scorecard in terms of "stronger", or something else similarly strange is going on. I don't think I've seen any serious piece of analysis claim NATO got weaker from Trump --> Biden.
Further, if you don't think negative partisanship is the absolute most critical factor driving basically every voter in the US for the past decade, you're quite wrong. This applies to both sides for what it's worth. There are a few principled ideologues out there, but the id of both sides' voterbase looks a lot closer to Catturd's twitter feed than it does to a coherent list of policy positions.
You're right that it seems we're probably too far apart to have a productive discussion.
I'm using a weird scorecard where the strength of NATO is its ability to affect and put in place what it wants in the real world. It's an amalgamation of the strength of its various militaries, economies, and possible budgets and includes a comparison between NATO's position compared to its mortal foe and only reason for existence , the USSR which died 35 years ago so we use Russia now instead.
In 2020, NATO was strong and sizing up consuming Ukraine and giving Russia a black eye. They had more money, they had a better industrial base, and they had full armories. NATO weapon lethality and tactics on the battlefield was perceived as high. They fully believed and had reason to believe they could spank Russia and get them to behave so the gas would keep flowing. In 2024, the Ukraine War was a loser and nothing was going to change that. Europe (and the US) had already used all of their usable escalatory threats, they've already emptied their armories and "excess" money they could give, and it wasn't working. Each day of 2024 was Russia winning more and being in a better position in Ukraine and in the world.
at some point, reality was going to need to rear its ugly head about the Ukraine War and the Euros and many Americans who bought their own insane levels of propaganda about the conflict and what was happening there was going to end and the Trump election is forcing that issue; it's not that NATO was riding high before bad guy Trump ruined the parade, it's that Trump is turning the lights on
nah, the "negative partisanship" angle is a simplistic analysis; there are actual real differences between the values stacks of "conservatives" and "liberals," and it's not just that the other likes or dislikes what the other is doing but that these value stacks sort into real world behaviors and each group's behavior is a signal to low-info people about what they would likely think if the knew more anyway
productive discussions are pretty rare, especially about this topic, it's why I mostly avoid them and simply let my predictions and bets do the talking most of the time but I think there is value in competing realities to put their cards on the table for others to read
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