They’re Just Not That Into U.S.

“As our partners enhance their own resiliency to us, future American administrations must prepare plans for avoiding a more fundamental rupture. Whoever succeeds Mr. Trump will be the first to take office with countries around the world asking not what America can do for them, but rather seeking to do as much as possible without us. The first step to coping with the fallout is realizing just how much — and how permanently — the world has changed.” Jon Finer in the NYT (Gift Article): The World Is Cutting Ties With America. It’s Already Costing Us.

+ In some cases, we’re the ones doing the tie-cutting, and the impact has been immediate and terrible. “Gawande, backed up by recent academic studies, says that the decimation of U.S.A.I.D. around the globe has been responsible for some seven hundred thousand deaths, and that number will likely ascend into the seven figures. The policy is not only immeasurably cruel, Gawande argues; it is also stupid, badly undermining what remains of American soft power and prestige, from Africa to Latin America.” David Remnick and Atul Gawande in The New Yorker on Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the ‘public man-made death’ that they’ve caused: The Human Cost of DOGE’s War on USAID. So if sensible people know how much damage Musk has done, why do they line up to put money into the companies that enabled him to touch trillionaire status? If Lindsey Graham were still around, he could probably explain it better than I can.