Bret Devereaux

The main benefit of the UK's relationship with the US is that they could huff the fumes of empire and it's clear their establishment is just frantic at the prospect of losing thathttps://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1432410630137524226 …

I think that's an apt analogy. I've been more than a bit frustrated that it seems like a number of our NATO partners wanted the US presence in Afghanistan to remain. But not, like, enough to have their own troops there.

Or enough to want to lay out the money to build the kind of military capabilities that would let them sustain that kind of deployment. I mean, the French needed US planes to operate in the Sahel, which is practically their backyard.

And, don't get me wrong, I can respect a country that looks overseas and says "well, that's just none of our business" but then you can't really do this whole grandstanding about how someone else should go out and protect human rights or stop migrant flows.

You'd have thought interminable prime directive episodes of TNG had prepared us for the moment where the pursuit of human rights and anti-imperialism were on conflict (and they kind of did)...

...but they did not prepare us for the moment where the federation just uninstalled all of their phasers and mothballed all of their ships and then wondered why the Klingons wouldn't fight the Borg/Romulans/whatever for them.