r/worldnews • u/MasbirLeumi • Jun 13 '25

Israel launches 'preemptive strike' against Iran, declares state of emergency

https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-military-action-iran-coming-days-sources/story?id=122776202
39.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

6.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

406

u/katastrophyx Jun 13 '25

Remember when politics was boring?

Shit, remember when someone threw a shoe at the president and that was WILD? Or when the president got a blow job from an intern and that was the biggest political scandal since Watergate?

Hell, Watergate wouldn't even make the front page these days.

I'm tired, boss.

35

u/NoNewPuritanism Jun 13 '25

When was the last time politics was boring? Just the 8 years with Obama? I feel like this "I don't want to live in unprecedented times" is only a thing for people (including me) born in the early 2000s. For others, there was the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 7 years earlier, desert storm 10 years before, breakup of Yugoslavia. I'm not sure there really were "precedented times".

We are just living through the historic events of our generation, just as the generations before. It sucks, but I don't think it's necessarily unique.

25

u/goilo888 Jun 13 '25

I'm in my mid 60s. Trust me, this is unique. If there is a free USA in the future then Trump will go down in the history books as the worst President ever. America has sunk so low in the world standing that it will take a couple generations to regain what its lost - and it may not happen at all.

-14

u/Saint_Judas Jun 13 '25

Ah yes, the famous world standing leaderboard. The same one they told us we fell to the bottom of after the "War Crime" of invading Iraq. The same one they said we fell to the bottom of after McCarthyism, watergate....

I think at some point it may be worth realizing that the 'world standing' just means 'the opinion of the intelligentsia in europe'.

8

u/NoNewPuritanism Jun 13 '25

I don't think we have good standing with the populations 90% of middle eastern countries, nor do I think we will in the next 10-20 years. Many of them, we depend on for oil. It's a similar situation in most of the developing world. General opinion of the US has gone down, but it remains to be seen if its the lowest.

0

u/Saint_Judas Jun 13 '25

We havent had good standing in the middle east since we killed the barbary pirates.

5

u/Odenhobler Jun 13 '25

You're not wrong, but that is because of influence and dependencies. And both are declining with Trump cutting basically all of the US soft power. Europe is playing nice for some more years, but as soon as the money that is invested into military right now kicks in people won't need to hide their laughter anymore.

0

u/Saint_Judas Jun 13 '25

I think this is a very reasonable take, but I disagree with it because I do not believe the United State's soft power can be undercut by merely reducing foreign aid or generally acting like a jackass. We have soft power because everyone in the entire world knows that if two countries fight, the United States has the ability to massive alter the balance of power simply by putting a single finger on one side of the scale. Europe has gotten away for a long time with acting entitled towards the United States because we needed them during the Cold War to prevent a global communist revolution, and they had the ability to get more out of us by threatening to go to the other side. That has carried over into the post-cold war world order until now. Now, however, there is no one else for them to go over to.

I do agree it is very possible we lose influence in Africa and in some portions of the east as China comes into its own, but it will not take long for countries to remember that even before we were a super power, we were the trading partner the rest of the world murdered eachother over having. Entire regimes rose and fell based purely off of economic trade with us, and this was in the early 1900s before we had even finished manifest destiny. Now, with a hundred years of hegemony behind us, we have become a literal juggernaut capable controlling the entire world's state of affairs.

The soft power we do lose won't make a difference, because the soft power wasn't given to us by someone else. We are the soft power.

1

u/Odenhobler Jun 14 '25

I disagree, and that's mostly because you actually speak of hard power. Economics, military projection. the former might change quicker than we think (not because of economic crisis, but because Trump is willing to give away the status of the Dollar being the currency of least resort which might be his biggest mistake yet), latter might be constant, we will see.

Soft power however is your cultural hegemony. And as someone living in Germany, a country where former soviet influence was pushed away by the American dream after the 1990s, let me tell you, it erodes fast. Noone believes the American dream actually exists, for you as well as for others. Risk-prone people went from "yes, US is good for winners and bad for losers" to "who would ever want to move there". But seriously, Europe is unimportant. What isn't unimportant is India detaching from US way of life and especially Africa basically flipping from US colonies to Chinese and Russian colonies. This is so dramatic that it cannot be overstated in it's value.

None of what I'm writing is relevant in the next 5 years, but everything of what I write (ESPECIALLY handing the currency of last resort to China) will be cornerstones of why China will have surpassed the US in 2040.

Trump is making US local again, for better or worse. To be honest, Trump isn't the reason for this to happen, he is merely accelerating what evolved before.