great is as great does 🌗

‘If the treasures of Persia and Rome were opened for you, what kind of people will you be? Perhaps you will be something else.’

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

The first Cold War never ended. There still is a Communist Party fighting for top spot against the US. The 21st Century will start when the Cold War ends

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

I'm open to the idea that 1991-2024 was a rump interregnum that will be quickly forgotten.

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@DanTalks1 Please do! Would be helpful these days for those thinking about what happens after Tech $ world

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

WONDERFUL

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

❤️❤️❤️

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@omar_dddg Please do more

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@omar_dddg Thank you very much! This is a beautiful one indeed

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

Did the « Stop the violence against us and then we will negotiate with you » Line ever work anywhere ?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

People probably don't realize the stakes at play here and how thankful they should be for China's unyielding position since "liberation day". The future of the global order literally rests on it.

Basically they keep repeating almost word-for-word the same thing for 3 weeks:

"Tariff and trade wars have no winners... China doesn't look for a war but neither are we afraid of it... If the U.S. wants to talk, it should stop threatening and blackmailing [us] and seek dialogue based on equality, respect and mutual benefit. To keep asking for a deal while exerting extreme pressure is not the right way to deal with China and simply will not work."

Translation: remove the tariffs, approach us as equals, or there will be no deal. Period.

There's a good case to be made that it is this very consistency in China's stance that's:
a) emboldening other nations to resist American pressure—not a single country has capitulated to US demands since China took its stand
b) forcing the Trump administration to negotiate against itself, exposing the fundamental weakness of bullying as diplomatic strategy

This moment echoes pivotal historical turning points where great power behavior set precedents for decades—like Suez in 1956 or the Cuban Missile Crisis—only with potentially more far-reaching consequences.

Like those watershed events, China's resistance now sets a precedent that will probably shape international relations for years to come.

If China were to yield, make no mistake about what would follow:

The geopolitical landscape would transform overnight—smaller nations and probably even regional blocs like the EU would read the writing on the wall and fall in line, knowing resistance would be futile against a vindicated America if even China had to yield.

We'd witness American hubris on steroids, with Trump and future administrations validated in their belief that unilateral bullying is effective foreign policy: it would become their blueprint in an even worse way than it already is.

Most disturbing would be the effective end of multipolarity—for what is a 'pole' if it can simply be intimidated into compliance? In fact, it would undermine the very concept of sovereignty itself.

While China certainly pursues its own interests, its steadfast position makes it objectively the main bulwark against a pure "might makes right" world.

And as such what's at play here goes far whether China or America "wins" this particular standoff, but whether concepts like sovereignty and multilateralism, can survive.

Paradoxically we're in a place where if there's such thing as a "rules-based international order", China is the last meaningful defender of its core tenets, and the primary check against a dystopian slide toward predatory unilateralism, where sovereignty would become merely ceremonial—a polite fiction maintained at the pleasure of Washington.

Future historians may mark this moment as when the international system either reaffirmed its commitment to sovereign equality or surrendered to the law of the jungle—with China, somewhat unexpectedly, standing as civilization's last line of defense.

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@MsResJudicata @amlivemon Mad Respect for the 3500$ top call @DanTalks1

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAYAY

[Nozo @NozoSousFlash]

Elle vient de mettre "a la parisienne" de Bilel elle m'a dit "j'étais tellement fan" c'est du jamais vu

[nostalgia, Ultra @sonjones_]

F.M.S c'est toi qui avait raison, tout se passe comme prevu

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@onechancefreedm @DanTalks1 any thoughts dear friend?

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

tentative de suicide

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

EU AND CHINA START NEGOTIATIONS TO ABOLISH EU TARIFFS ON CHINESE ELECTRIC VEHICLES - HANDELSBLATT

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

2 movies in 1 screen

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

It is indeed "one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of Trump's presidency" in the sheer level of gaslighting at play: he's trying to make one of the biggest and clearest humiliations in US history look like a win.

But there's no amount of lipstick that can disguise this pig. What happened is remarkably similar to the 2022 Liz Truss fiasco in the UK: Trump came out with a remarkably foolish and terribly executed policy that created a market panic—including in the bonds market—and he had to walk it back.

But unlike the British system that—for better or worse—can get rid of woefully incompetent Prime Ministers (that is, more incompetent than the average), the U.S. is stuck with Trump.

And unlike Liz Truss, Trump remains insulated by a circle of sycophants like Lutnick who reframe humiliating capitulations as 'extraordinary' triumphs, and a voter base that interprets even his most flagrant policy failures as masterful 4D chess moves.

Fact is, even after this retreat, the U.S. is in a far worse position than it used to be.

Contrary to what Lutnick and Trump are saying, what this episode proved beyond doubt is that the world is NOT ready "to work with President Trump to fix global trade". In fact, besides Israel's Netanyahu, I haven't seen a single country on earth come out publicly to support Trump's plan.

Sure, a couple of weaker countries who are heavily dependent on trade have reluctantly come forward to find a way to mitigate the damage Trump would do to their economies but to conflate this with enthusiastic cooperation is pure fantasy.

What we're witnessing instead is damage control by nations caught in the crossfire of his insane economic policies. And you can be sure that the long-term strategy of these countries will now be to reduce dependencies and trading links to the U.S. in order to avoid being caught in a similar situation in the future.

More importantly, the countries that together make up about 50% of trade with the U.S.—namely Canada, the EU and China—have all announced retaliatory tariffs and measures, which a) means that Trump's claim that countries other than China "aren't retaliating in any way, shape, or form against the United States" is a complete lie and b) shows that his approach has accomplished the remarkable feat of uniting geopolitical rivals in opposition to him.

Which is undoubtedly why his new approach seems to be to single-handedly focus on China, with a retreat to the good old U.S. strategy of trying to get others to help them contain China.

This has zero chance of working either, for 2 main reasons.

The first one is that if Trump has demonstrated one thing in the past 3 months, it's that he's fundamentally unstable and unreliable, and so is the United States. His chaotic governance sends a clear message to the world: America's word means nothing beyond the next Truth Social post.

If the notion that a country would take the risk of putting all its eggs in the American basket was already delusional before his presidency; it is now beyond absurd. What he's done is transform America from a cornerstone of global trade into a risk factor that must be hedged against.

The second one is that the "deal" on the table for these countries is absolutely repugnant, from their standpoint.

I mean, think about it: the "deal" would presumably be for these nations to abandon or significantly reduce their economic relationship with China—their largest trading partner in many cases—in exchange for a trading relationship with the U.S. that is worse than it used to be, with 10% additional tariffs. In effect it's asking countries to sacrifice their economic sovereignty and strategic flexibility for a lesser punishment.

It's a lose-lose proposition that might play well on Truth Social, but will get you laughed out of the room in the world of international relations. Unless you're say a tiny country that has the misfortune of being too weak and dependent on the American market.

But even in this latter case, these countries might amuse Trump in the short-term but they'll undoubtedly put in place long-term strategies to de-hitch themselves from the US crazy train as fast as possible in the medium term.

So all in all, what we're looking at here is not a strategic masterstroke but the desperate flailing of an administration that didn't anticipate how markets and trading partners would respond to economic coercion.

Trump is "teaching the world a lesson" all right: he taught them that America is now the biggest threat they face for their prosperity and the result of this won't be to "work with him", but to hedge themselves as much as they can from the American madness he's unleashed.

History will remember this not as an "extraordinary" moment of American strength, but as the point when the world concluded that diversifying away from the American market was no longer just economically prudent but existentially necessary for their own economic security.

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

2 movies in 1 screen

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

sic transit gloria mundi

[Secretary of War Pete Hegseth @SecWar]

Congratulations to @ElbridgeColby on his Senate confirmation as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

I look forward to working together to put our warfighters first and strengthen our national defense.

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@omar_dddg i love that humility is a recurring theme in the Quran (Rum 9)

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

!!!!!

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

This resonates so deeply it hurts. My late mom told me something similar before I left for America.

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

@GerardAraud Pareil pour Gaza, l’Ukraine etc…

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

Insanity

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

A very interesting, to say the least, graph by The Guardian.

[great is as great does 🌗 @didi_92i]

Respect

[Turkish MFA @MFATurkiye]

Congratulations to our neighbour and ally Bulgaria on the occasion of its National Day. 🇹🇷🇧🇬