Quote of the day

The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade in which the US is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has secured both for going on a century. Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly: We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge. They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge” the underlying basis of the agreement that puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. They really do imagine that US allies are something like colonies or finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis. 

~Josh Marshall

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