Trump is in talks with Russia to end the war

[chr0naut]

They may want that, but they also want that foreign nation to pay for an unending war and to pay for keeping their economy floating.    They want a pile of free money, while at the same time wanting to trade freely the resources that our hundreds of billions keeps free for them.

Doesn't work that way.

Can't have both.

They'd have NO resources if it weren't for our 100 billion, and hundreds of billions more in the future.

Therefore .... they deal with us with the resources, or we stop handing them our hundreds of billions while getting nothing in exchange.

When did the USA ever hand out money with no expectation of recompense? The USA has always been a bastion of capitalism over every other possible motivation. The idea that the US has been handing out money for nothing is an invention of the current kleptocracy of US billionaires.

Let me explain something: If you looked at your local neighbourhood, there is no way that they could provide, by growing or manufacturing or even internal trade, the variety of stuff that any one of your retail stores supplies. So zoom that out to a state level, and the same is true, just slightly less so. Then zoom that out to a national level, and you will see the same also holds true.

If the US isolates itself, there's a whole world full of stuff that it wont be able to access anymore. It's that simple.

And if something major goes wrong on a national scale (and it always does) and all your eggs are in one basket, with NO backstop of external support or supply, then your nation will just be wiped out! It is a really simple concept. It is surprising that the current rulers are so ignorant of how they got their money.

Someone once put it that the same tide lifts all boats.

We could engineer a world where countries retain their sovereignty and national characters, with free trade regulating the markets equitably. Or we could take our bat and ball and go home, fuming that we cant play anymore.

The USA is lagging behind much of the world technologically. The majority of US consumer tech, going back to WW2, has come from overseas. Go and look in your retail stores and look at where the stuff is actually from, and how little of it is from the USA. As we approach the informational singularity, things will move faster and faster. Take a look at how the AI revolution, even though it has massive investment from US companies, is quickly decentralizing to the rest of the world, who are doing it cheaper and smarter, and rolling out product faster than those 'siloed' big US companies can.

The US economy is now largely services based. The US is no longer a manufacturing giant. The US is no longer a tech giant. Like Russia, it requires a lot of external input to keep its central governance happening and prosperous. So it must necessarily expand, or it will stagnate and shrink very quickly.

If the US isolates itself from the world it has plundered freely from for decades, it will die. There is no backstop. There is no other possibility.

Waving your flag will not feed your family.