Quote Originally Posted by nulle View Post
Yeah - Hanna - would you like that in Sweden police arrest you simply for going down the street?

But now United States have an insane national debt that is getting bigger by 20k $/second
U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time
Sooner or later they will need to do something about it...
See above for my comments on police in Belarus.
The papers and people with an agenda blow up the situation in Belarus much more than it deserves.
There is no real nasty regime in Europe, so it gets interesting to blow up "the last dictatorship in Europe" to something that it isn't.
Guide books and similar make a big issue out of it being like the USSR - that is absolute tosh. The USSR must surely have been 10 times more controlling of its citizens, visitors and media than Belarus is. You hardly even notice anything like that going on at all. The only similarity is that they haven't taken down the old monuments, factories etc. It's a modern country, more or less. It's not that different from Ukraine really.

If we really want to "help" the Belarussians, the thing to do, in my opinion, would to help to MAKE SURE that the next election there is fair and square in its execution. Independent foreign observers present during the voting and during the counts. Both from the EU and Russia. Russia has a lot of influence there and could probably get agreement for that from Belarus. If Lukashenko has nothing to hide, and doesn't have to pay for it, then there shouldn't be a problem agreeing to it. If he refuses, then it is rather suspect.

On the USAs debt -- yes... surely this must be the beginning of the end of American empire. I am not a fan of USA foreign policy whatsoever.
Just hope that whatever replaces it won't be worse. Perhaps there'll just be a split / power vacuum. China hasn't really been flexing its muscles yet, and the EU is too split at the moment to try. First thing I'd like to see, is the USA pack up its bases and leave Europe. If the EU needs defence we should take care of it ourselves, together. France and the UK have nukes, that's more than enough.