Timothy Snyder -- How The Crisis in This Country is In the Oval Office: The Show of Strength is Not Power

[ancianita]

There was something really desperate about that performance, I thought.

Because what the vice president was doing, what he was yelling across the room at Zelenskyy was "You're wrong, you're wrong," as though Vance knows anything about any of this.

This is a man who isn't responsible for a country at war. This is a man who hasn't visited Ukraine. This is a man who's unable to say anything about the war except what has first been said in Russian propaganda. And yet there is a sense that the only thing that matters in the world is yelling that you're right and the other person is wrong.

Not only is that shameful in terms of basic decency and ethics, it also reveals a very profound strategic poverty.
Because if the people running the country from the Oval Office are so sensitive, so psychologically vulnerable that they can be triggered by pretty much anything, and if they consider it a victory for themselves (as they proclaim) when they treat their allies badly -- it's not that they may have malign intentions to join an alliance led by Russia, it's also that they displayed themselves as being weak and open to manipulation.

What's happening abroad echoes what's happening within.
In both cases you have this performance of 'strength' -- and I would kinda caution all of us from using the word strength too often, because the theatrical self persuasive performance of strength is not the same thing as power. It's not the same as being able to get things done.
So even as at home we're dismantling the state and we're reducing our ability to do anything,
abroad, we're trading 80 years of trusting, effective, and enriching alliances for a country whose main way of engaging us -- Russia -- is to spy on us, is to hack us, and steal our technology. That country's economy is about 1/20th the size of our allies.

So we're trading something which has worked and which has brought us power for a different kind of world order in which we'll not only be morally indefensible but will be much weaker.

That word weakness has to be used more. The Trump administration is choosing a form of weakness with which they are comfortable. That style of mafia intimidation -- that doesn't actually bring power on world scale. It just puts you into the same company as Xi and Putin. But it doesn't even make you the leader. -- you're trading the chance of being leader of the free world for being a midpacker in unfreedom.

Start 25:03
(hinky foreign vid, so stop at 34:50)