Fuck, man. Right as the sanctions were actually starting to have a truly crippling effect on the Russian economy in the long term, Trump’s gonna roll everything back. Fucking christ.
To look at the positive side: Even if the US lifts all sanctions, the major gas exports from Russia were through pipelines going to Europe, and that won’t be affected. Also, if I remember correctly, the US is a net exporter of petroleum products, which means they likely won’t be importing that much from russia even if sanctions are lifted.
Finally, the EU has a bunch of sanctions in place that hit anyone trying to help russia circumvent EUA sanctions. If the US lifts sanctions, they might actually start getting hit by some of these secondary effects. The more severely trump fucks up the US, the harder the eventual backlash will hopefully be.
Yeah. I know it sounds a bit paradoxical, but I really do genuinely think that this whole episode needs to be absolutely catastrophic for the vast majority of our citizenry to learn anything - and even then, we’ll still have a large number of jingoistic assholes who will continue to not give a fuck.
To follow that up: I think the only thing that has a chance of shaking the American people out of this craze is that the trump admin crashes and burns the US economy on a level that hasn’t been seen for 100 years. Something so bad people are forced to remember what happened that time they elected a populist dictator’s puppet for president.
The danger with that is what we’ve seen before (and which the people planning stuff like Project 2025 may be banking on): A broken economy breeds populism and fascism. In that sense, there’s the paradoxical danger that trump running everything to the ground may push even more people into the maga-camp.
So yeah - there’s a ton of stupid and gullible people who are just bandwagoning for one reason or another. Those are the people who I think (hope, really) can be snapped out of this shit.
The ones I’m REALLY concerned about are:
- psychopathic capitalists who can never have enough money (see: Bezos, Musk)
- accelerationists (see: Zuck)
- Christian Dominionists (See: Johnson, Pence)
- white supremacists and neofascists (don’t really need to explain that one)
- conservative militias (See: Proud Boys, 3%ers, etc) - they’re WAY better organized than most people realize. And Trump’s probably gonna invoke the insurrection act and deputize those fucksticks, and bam, you got your brand new home-grown American neo-Sturmabteilung.
Ukraine needs to blow up more oil storage and refineries.
