>“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”
Aside from the fact that this could be a humanitarian disaster, it’s also bad for US-Vietnam relations. And it goes to show that in a country like the US, where there is almost no foreign policy consensus anymore, every change of government after an election leads to a complete 180 on all these important global commitments.
How can we expect countries to align with the US over China when there is such a degree of unreliability? I’m not defending China here, which I think is a fascist regime, but they are a much more consistent partner, and that is a benefit in itself. If we want America to be treated as a credible international partner in the future, we will need to commit to destroying the political influence of domestic reactionaries, so that potential partners feel safe in making the bet that the deals they sign now will not be disrupted in the future by people like Trump.
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>“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”
Aside from the fact that this could be a humanitarian disaster, it’s also bad for US-Vietnam relations. And it goes to show that in a country like the US, where there is almost no foreign policy consensus anymore, every change of government after an election leads to a complete 180 on all these important global commitments.
How can we expect countries to align with the US over China when there is such a degree of unreliability? I’m not defending China here, which I think is a fascist regime, but they are a much more consistent partner, and that is a benefit in itself. If we want America to be treated as a credible international partner in the future, we will need to commit to destroying the political influence of domestic reactionaries, so that potential partners feel safe in making the bet that the deals they sign now will not be disrupted in the future by people like Trump.
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