The documents show the fallout for the US in Bahrain, Indonesia and Azerbaijan as it struggles to catch up with pro-Iran messaging.
The Iran war is risking America’s global security ties and damaging its reputation, especially among the world’s Muslims, according to a set of State Department cables obtained by POLITICO.
The cables, dated Wednesday, described the fallout of the war for America’s standing in three countries in different parts of the world: Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Indonesia.
U.S. diplomats at embassies in the countries’ capitals painted damning portraits of an America under siege in multiple media spheres by pro-Iranian actors that are exceptionally agile in the digital space.
[…] an America under siege in multiple media spheres by pro-Iranian actors that are exceptionally agile in the digital space.
What the fuck are they talking about?
This is hardly about who is better at propaganda, it’s about who’s doing what.
The whole world has been bending to the will of the pedophiles regime, allowing the US to kill and loot… just since the start of 2026, USA is starving Cuba, stealing the wealth of Venezuela and trying to turn Iran into another Iraq or Syria.
Europe isn’t stupid, Latin America and the middle east aren’t stupid either, but everyone is playing ball, a mechanism of survival. Question is, if Iran continues to humiliate the Epstein regime, how quickly is the world going to start saying no to US and stop abiding by its sanctions and bullying.
Point is, Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Indonesia are just the start.
JD Pon Don once again confirming he plays an active role in the demise of the US empire. Classic
Have the day you voted for wanks.
Don’t forget about the European countries. The disdain in Spain for the US is palpable for example.
Yes, and that’s why US tourists should stick to visiting coastal regions when visiting, as the disdain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.
Nah, it’s actually the anti-tourist squirt guns in the plain - the 19th century Brits just couldn’t understand such a superior technology when they coined the rhyme.
Good, kill the USA hegemony. Let this serve as an example for future people on what not to do.
Someone else will just do it again unfortunately.
But the upshot is that the next empire will replace capitalism with socialism, which is better for all.
Trump is the modern world’s version of “You will destroy a great empire.”
Don’t worry, Trump’s son-in-law is in the negotiations! He brought peace to the Middle East, he’ll save us!
I am having a stroke please send short bus
The Bondulance?
Apart from all the obvious US policy failures, there are also the less obvious ones.
The current admin has no understanding of soft power. The US spent decades building trust in the Voice of America. Sure, it was US propaganda in some ways, but it was often much more truthful about the facts than the local government news. The people who worked at VoA cared about being reporters and wanted to tell the truth. They had bureaus around the world broadcasting in local languages, and it cost almost nothing. It was old fashioned radio, a technology that’s a century old. Something that might have been useful in Iran where the Internet has been cut off for months now. So, Iran can now get their narrative out to all the other countries nearby, and the US has no way of correcting / countering the Iranian propaganda.
The US also used to know the value of diplomats. The Trump admin doesn’t think expertise matters. So, the Iran deals are being conducted by the President’s son in law, and a buddy of Trump’s who’s also a real estate developer. Unsurprisingly, they’re not succeeding. Ambassadors have always been a cushy job, often given to big donors or friends. But, Trump has made it so entire embassies are effectively useless.
The kinds of damage being done in just a couple of years will last for decades. I don’t know if the US will ever recover from this. Many of the problems probably won’t even show up for more than 5 years. Instead of a US military base in a foreign country having a lease that’s easy to renew, the next time it comes up there will be pushback or refusals.
The US dominated world sucked in a lot of ways, but at least it was stable. My guess is that the next few decades will be a lot less stable. Maybe the end result will be better. I’d love it if Europe stepped into the vacuum left by the US. They’re doing a lot of good things when it comes to environmental laws, privacy, anti-monopoly, etc. If it’s China that steps forward, I’m less confident it will be an improvement on the US. Other than those two, I don’t really see any other country or bloc of countries that could try to do the necessary work.
Sure, it was US propaganda in some ways, but it was often much more truthful about the facts than the local government news
The Russians, after seeing their lives collapse in the 1990s, were rumored to have said something to the effect of “we always knew our government was lying about communism, so we assumed they were also lying about how bad capitalism is. Turns out they weren’t.”
So, Iran can now get their narrative out to all the other countries nearby, and the US has no way of correcting / countering the Iranian propaganda.
Fortunately in this case, since Iranian propaganda is more or less just the truth in this case. Can’t get much more fucked up than bombing a girls’ school on day one.
I’d love it if Europe stepped into the vacuum left by the US. They’re doing a lot of good things when it comes to environmental laws, privacy, anti-monopoly, etc. If it’s China that steps forward, I’m less confident it will be an improvement on the US.
Europe is part of the same imperialist apparatus as America, and fortunately for everyone involved it won’t be able to replace the US. Pretty much every US imperialist action gets European support, even if it comes with denial or condemnation. For example Europe was deeply involved in turning Iran into a pariah state, making the current war possible. And that’s before we get into Europe’s own neocolonialism (see: France). China has plenty of skeletons in its own closet, but they don’t have a habit of overthrowing regimes they don’t like halfway across the world.
The US dominated world sucked in a lot of ways,
Agreed
but at least it was stable.
Highly debatable.
I think we’re going to appreciate how stable it was soon.
You are assuming it was stable for everyone. It used to be unstable for specific groups, now its unstable for everyone. Fair is fair I guess.
Concerning the ‘will the US recover?’ question, my two cents:
I don’t think the US will be able to recover the lost influence since the prerequisties for it reaching that level if power and influence have changed / are gone. The US dominated ‘the West’ in its fight againgst an authoritarian communist regime and build its global hegemony on the victory in this conflict. Even if the US could regain some trust the current system rival China is way smarter and more convincing in its promises to the regular citizen than the SU was during most of its time… eventhough both systems labeled themselves ‘communis’.
That being said I don’t think the modern US could realistically neither win an arms race based on state finances against China nor make a better promise for the insividuals future. The US hegemony crumbels and imho impossibly will return… if a chinese dominance is better, especially for western citizens, also remains questionable.
and build its global hegemony on the victory in this conflict
It also built its hubris which is now destroying it.
Not only did the US immediately set aside pretenses of international law once the USSR fell, but even the illusion of shared prosperity for US workers, who started seeing their wages stagnate and decline in the 1990s went along with it.
On top of all the Trump Christofascist nonsense (which has long lasting generational repercussions) The US debt increases by a trillion dollars a month. You don’t recover from that as a viable country.
The US pivoted seamlessly from an imperial power that was using communism as a reason to overthrow democratically elected leaders, etc. to a cultural behemoth that used its economic power to bend laws in foreign countries so that they privileged US cultural exports and tech companies. It maintained a large military, but if you compare the 50s to the 80s in terms of how much and how that military was used to recent decades, there’s a huge difference.
The Korean war and Vietnam were huge conflicts. They were drafting military-age men to fight in those “wars”. By comparison, the first Iraq war was smaller, and waged with a very wide alliance of countries. The second one was bigger, but still significantly smaller than Vietnam or Korea.
I think the US as a cultural and economic world power could have lasted a very long time. Some countries grumbled about Google and Facebook making it hard for local news organizations. They didn’t do much to stop these companies, only some small fines on occasion. The newest wave of companies, the AI wave, seemed to be happening the same way, with all the major companies being American.
I think most people from rich countries would still prefer the US to be dominant than China. The US at least talks a good game when it comes to freedom of speech, etc. China doesn’t even try to pretend to care about that. But, the US is chaotic and belligerent, whereas China is mostly using soft power these days.
I think most people from rich countries would still prefer the US to be dominant than China
I don’t think so anymore - even in Europe, you’re seeing large splits. Germany might be content to follow the Americans to hell, but Ireland, Spain, and others are open about seeing the US as a much more dangerous and untrustworthy entity.
The current US admin may be more dangerous and untrustworthy, but I don’t think that will hold in a post-Trump world. I don’t think the US will get back to the point it was at before Trump, but I think it will dip back below the China line. China is much less chaotic, but they’re also much more menacing on average.
For example, as bad as the US is, I don’t think it has ever set up police stations in foreign countries.
You might want to look at the hostiles of Mexico and South America.
Or, the other way, the NYPD stations in Israel.
I think most people from rich countries would still prefer the US to be dominant than China. The US at least talks a good game when it comes to freedom of speech, etc. China doesn’t even try to pretend to care about that. But, the US is chaotic and belligerent, whereas China is mostly using soft power these days
I agree with you.
The assumption I make is that the advantages of the US (higher personal freedom, of speech and economically) will further decline as Mango Mussolini respectively the people pulling his strings are far from done with restructuring the US democracy in their favor. In the end US citizens might end up with a repressive system similar to China but with lack of the claim to care for everyone.
For the moment I agree that most Western citizens will still prefer the US society over a Chinese one.
IMO Trump and co. might have wanted to pull a full coup on the US, but they’re so incompetent that they haven’t managed to do that. Even though they’ve had the US house, senate, executive and judiciary on their side, they haven’t done what’s typically done in a coup which is to secure everything that could allow opponents to resist. Sure, they control the supreme court, but there are plenty of judges in lower courts who keep interpreting laws honestly and finding that Trump broke those laws. A competent coup would have jailed judges who weren’t on their side using some pretext, and used fear to keep the other ones in line. Trump routinely breaks the law and then is astonished when lower-level judges find that whatever he did can’t go forward because he broke the law.
Because of that, I think there’s a decent chance that they won’t be able to suppress the outrage in the midterm vote. They’re doing all kinds of underhanded things to try to make it harder for people to vote and to have their votes counted. But, people are much more outraged than scared. I think there’s a decent chance there will be a big turnout in the midterm elections and that the GOP will lose bigly. That might be enough to put the brakes on what Trump is doing, until the next presidential election in 2028.
There may be people pulling Trump’s strings, but if so, it really seems like they’re fighting over the strings and getting in each-others’ way, rather than acting in some coordinated way to control him. More realistically, I think that there may be people who have tied strings to Trump and want to control him, but he’s not going along with it. It seems like the only skill he may have in life is ensuring that people around him are loyal to him personally, and anybody who isn’t is gone. It doesn’t matter how good they are at their jobs otherwise, the number one thing that matters to him is loyalty. So, he’s surrounded by idiots, but idiots who are loyal. That means that people who are trying to manipulate him have to do it with flattery and praise rather than threats, browbeating, etc.
Because of that, I think the US might survive Trump in some way. It will be diminished, and it will take decades to build back the trust the rest of the world had in the US. (And I’m not talking about blind trust, I’m talking about basic things like “The US generally takes its treaties seriously” or “If we negotiate a trade deal with the US it won’t just ignore its side of the deal”.) I do think that some values, like freedom of speech, will survive the post-Trump US. But, it won’t be in a position to police those values around the world.
For the moment I agree that most Western citizens will still prefer the US society over a Chinese one.
We’re at the tipping point right now in Europe - I am regularly having the “lesser of two evils” discussion of China vs US (and China gets the win by a hair btw in my circles). Both are clearly a threat to me and my family, the only real difference is I speak the language of one of them.
If we “prefer” the US over China it is purely inertia and avoidance of change.
I actively boycott all the US products I can, I’ll only buy US if there is no viable alternative. On the other hand I preference European over Chinese but I don’t actively boycott.
The reason is quite simple, one has actively threatened war, has corporations that are actively making my life worse and is actively meddling in the region’s politics.
China will probably do the same once the US has been destroyed by the Pumpkin Pinochet and turned into the dystopia he’s working towards. But for now one is an active threat and one is a distant threat.
I genuinely doubt most Americans realise just how much you’ve lost in terms of goodwill.
China would at least be better than the US for environmental and anti-monopoly laws, and at this point, I think it’s fair to call it a parallel move on privacy. That’s rough to realize.
I don’t think that’s true. Yes, the Trump admin is horribly corrupt, but a collection of states just won in court, finding that Ticketmaster was an illegal monopoly. There’s a chance that after Trump goes away / dies that whoever replaces him will take monopoly enforcement seriously. It’s a popular bipartisan issue.
Meanwhile, in China, what President Xi wants, he gets. At the moment he doesn’t seem to be doing the Trump speed run of corruption and personal enrichment. But, rule of law in China is limited because ultimately it’s whatever Xi decides.
Privacy is basically non-existent in China. Sure, the US tries to spy on its citizens, but often the FBI is reduced to buying data on Americans from private companies because they can’t spy on people directly. There’s a lot of self-censorship in the US, and oligarchs are buying up media to restrict what views are published. But, that pales in comparison to the Great Firewall of China, and the massive internal censorship network.
And, keep in mind, that’s what China does to Chinese citizens. When they show up in Africa they definitely don’t treat Africans the same way Chinese people are treated. They are happy to help Chinese companies do corrupt deals that would never be permitted in China, but when it’s Africans that suffer they really don’t care. The US was hardly an angel around the world, but at least it made tiny steps towards trying to curb things a bit, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Trump may be speed-running overt corruption and self dealing, but there are still remnants of the old system of laws and rules that occasionally stop some of the things he’s doing. Xi is not as obviously overtly corrupt, but the Chinese system has never been in any way democratic. It has always been one where the people at the top get to dictate how the people at the bottom live their lives. Personally, I’d prefer a fighting chance against a corrupt mob boss style dictator who hasn’t yet fully corrupted the entire system, vs. being ground under the boot heel of a “president for life” who maybe was making decisions that he thought was best for his country, but who isn’t even willing to allow protests or mockery, let alone the free communication of ideas.
Okay, I’m trying to be as nice as I can about this, but most of the world legitimately doesn’t give a shit about anything you just said. Why would someone from Africa or South Asia or South America care what America or China allow to happen in their own borders? Do you seriously think the “freedoms” afforded to Americans but American law mean anything to an Iraqi whose life was and remains defined by the fallout from American imperialism? That’s not how modern empires work; neither China nor America are going to treat a third party anything like they treat their own citizens, and in a comparison of how they treat others’ citizens China has nothing that can top this. Your appeals to tiny steps and corruption aren’t just meaningless; they’re outright insulting to the hundreds of millions of lives that were ruined by America around the world.
Xi has no more absolute power over the government than Mao had (who was forced to step aside). And saying it is in no way democratic is patently false considering all their politicians need to be elected in at the local level. Lastly, Xi’s family was exiled from Beijing and they survived only to have Xi become the leader.
We won’t know how much power Xi had until he has to step aside. Saying he’s no more powerful than Mao, who ruled for more than 30 years and who ruled until the day he died, is an interesting choice.
Considering it was under Mao that Xi’s family was exiled it is a rather salient comparison.
Edit: and we can know how much power Mao had by how big of a power vacuum he left. The fact of the matter is it is a single party republic, and that’s why Mao was replaced with someone more sensible. If there was a sizable power vacuum things would not have turned out this way.
IMO, this is what the goal was. Instability and loss of power. This was a coup, and many if not most of its goals were met.
A coup by whom? Nobody is benefiting from it.
Plenty of people are benefiting. In one ear you have the Christofascists who simply want to punish women and turn the US into a religious state, in the other you have the VCs who want to weaken America so they can establish autonomous zones outside the US purview.
The VCs and Christofascists are currently on the same side, but have almost no interests in common. The VCs in particular care about the rule of law because it’s hard to invest in something that won’t start making money for years if you don’t know that the laws will be stable through those years. The VCs might like that Trump is removing some burdensome regulations. But, for example, the tariff chaos would have been horrible for them because from one day to the next who knows what the tariffs will be.
Then there’s immigration. A lot of the MAGA nazis want the US to be a purely white place with white, christian, men dominate. That means severely restricting immigration. Meanwhile the VCs want to be able to bring in all the cheap foreign labour they can, which means they want H1B visas to be easy to get. Those are directly opposing sides. If one side wins, the other one loses.
It’s hardly a coup when the backers all want different things, and they’re not getting what they want anyhow because Dear Leader is obsessed with settling personal grudges and doing whatever his dementia-addled brain thinks of on the spot.
China is, but that’s just doing nothing and winning
Doing nothing is hardly a coup.
I really wish more Americans understood soft power and how much we used to have. Hell, I was on vacation to Montreal a few years back and I ran into a dude from France there. You know what we did? Quoted American TV to each other, in English. He knew lines from futurama and archer in English.
Hell at work I run into a lot of Germans and French folk and dispite not using imperial they knew how far a mile was in kilometers (1.6 for the curious)
Your closest allies are aghast and trying to work out how to divorce themselves from what they thought was a great relationship.
It’s hardly surprising that those who were at best ambivalent are now actively hostile.
What exactly did you expect.
Enjoy your new best buddy Russia.
If it were just divorce, that would not be as bad. Former allies are increasingly concerned they are going to be the next target of Trump’s greed. Canada and Europe, automatic American allies forever, have to make contingency plans for a US invasion. That’s absolutely nuts.
Divorce proceedings happens to be a time in which domestic abuse tends to spike. So it’s actually a pretty apt description.
It’s like being in a relationship with an abusive spouse. You act like everything in okay on the surface, if not a little detached, and then once all of your planning is in place, you execute it before they have a chance to react.
Since vietnam. Europe should have started decoupling from the US empire but they was benefiting from american imperialism
Please stop writing shit like this like those of us reading it have any control over the situation. Russia will not be my “buddy.”
I’ve been banned from reddit for pointing out that you do actually have recourse to change things, but that answer isn’t safe and comfortable. Ukraine didn’t shake off a dictator without paying a price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
Or if you prefer your own history, you didn’t get rid of the Brits by just asking nicely and hoping.
DC is over 20 hours away by car and that’s assuming I could afford the gas or my 15 year old car could make it that far… and I’m only halfway to the other coast.
I’m not your buddy, paren.
The memes are coming from inside the house!
Substitute Iran war with Donald Trump and now you have reality.
Please dont use or link politico. It is part of Springer Publishing, which is attempting to become the European equivalent of Fox News
Fox News isn’t putting out a lot of stories that shed negative light on Trump.
Believe me, nothing good comes from this publishing house. In Germany, they are neoliberal and right-wing. They are largely responsible for right-wing ideas gaining acceptance even within middle-class circles. They are against climate protection policies, in favour of fossil fuels, against feminism, against migrants, nationalistic and racist, against social policies, in favour of militarisation, and against anti-fascism. They will always side with employers, persuade people to vote against their own interests, and defend the interests of capital. At the moment, they’re in a growth phase with Politico, and you don’t win over right-wing Europeans with pro-Trump rhetoric. After all, he threatens national European interests.
The Republican party’s destruction of the US is almost complete and other countries are loath to follow.
I am sure in 30 years there will be plenty of Americans worship Trump just like they are doing now to Reagan.
Even though both of them fucked literally everything up.
The only good thing the Republicans have done. Hopefully this will reduce the US ability to enact crimes against humanity in the future if it loses allies and the “moral” standing people pretend it had.
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