I’ve stopped watching press statements and conferences altogether. They are noise. Choreography. What matters to me is the substance of what is happening to the world right now, not the words recited at lecterns.
For decades, the world convinced itself of one thing: there are no real consequences. Yes, we all watched Saddam Hussein being pulled out of a manhole and later facing Iraqi justice. But that was treated as a historical anomaly — a blip. To the world’s madmen and aspiring dictators, the lesson was not restraint. It was escalation. Double down. Make yourself too big to fail. Entangle yourself so deeply in the interwebs of the international system that removing you becomes a risk no one dares to take.
The developed world took note. And it trembled. The result was a global free-for-all for strongmen.
No, Trump did not suddenly solve this or make diplomacy elegant again. That was never his nature. But he reintroduced something far more unsettling: uncertainty. The uncomfortable idea that if you do things you really shouldn’t do, something unpleasant might actually happen to you. A drone might suddenly find you. A bunker buster might visit your underground vanity project. You might even be picked up in the dead of night and quietly extracted to face justice elsewhere.Uncertainty is a terrible thing to live with — especially when the sole superpower is breathing down your neck. And that, more than any speech or summit, is what changed the atmosphere.
https://www.whathappensnextin6minutes.com/p/understanding-trumps-foreign-policy