Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
There are a lot of things going on that could result in the US losing a great deal of it’s power. NATO’s poor performance in Ukraine will likely greatly reduce their reputation for an invincible military. The US’s illegal seizure of funds from Russian oligarchs and from Afghanistan seems to have greatly reduced confidence in the dollar. The Yuan is seeing more and more use in international trade, and Saudi is thinking about letting countries use currency other than dollars to buy oil. The famines or near-famines caused by the war in Ukraine has greatly damaged NATOs already poor reputation in the Global South. And of course the US domestic economy is in free fall, with many people struggling just to afford bread and a roof, and hundreds of thousands of homeless. And hundreds of thousands is likely a severe undercount. Plus the GOP aligned states are leading an active genocide against trans people, with an estimate by Erin Reed suggesting there are at least 250,000 internal refugees fleeing state repression in the US, with many more unable to flee for financial or other reasons. The US is going to face an enormous social burden from Long Covid related disability which will likely continue to increase as more and more people are disabled by Covid complications. The US is trying to provoke a war with China despite having no way to pay for it, no confidence in the government at home, and no way to replace the access to manufactured goods that a war with China would result in. To say nothing of the nuclear apocalypse. Large swaths of the US south hit a wet-bulb temperature that was fatal to human life earlier in the summer. This was not predicted to happen for decades yet. Given the state of infrastructure in the US south, especially Texas’s grid, this may lead to a truly horrific mass death event in the near future, with a commensurately horrific refugee crisis as people flee the death zone.
There’s a lot of destabilizing factors in the US. The future is never certain, but it doesn’t look good for America.