Joseph R. Biden has just taken the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States.

I'm leery as fuck about Biden but Jesus at this point it's fucking stunning to have someone without an overt psychological pathology as the President.

Like it's fucking weird to have someone who can devise policy and explain that policy and petition congress to make that policy into law and not just screaming that he's going to magically make another country pay for the racist border wall designed to keep them out.

It's been as much a blessing as a curse that most of the time Trump has had no fucking idea how to implement policies.

Remember that shit he was doing with the Census? He fucked it up because he just declared something and left it to others to figure out how. It's not happening.

But then you had the times when Trump was like "Make the brown people stop" and he threw Stephen Miller at it and we end up with kids in cages and troops on the Mexican border with vague orders to maybe start shooting people.

It's been this constant farce of horrors.

The "trade war" with China, what the fuck was that?

Place tariffs and demand negotiation.

Wait, no, they implement their own tariffs. MORE TARIFFS THEN.

Shit they still aren't negotiating and now to keep the farmers from revolting we did a socialism shit fuck shit

✅ 🇺🇸 ✅ How can Joe Biden be inaugurated if Democrats circumvented the state legislatures, defiled the Constitution, and forced the certification of a fraudulent popular vote?

Even though the Democrat Party and their media cohorts are pushing Joe Biden into the presidency as

After 4 years of Donald Trump, the US must "reassure" its allies.

That's what I'm reading/hearing lately, such as in this @nytimes piece. What do international relations scholars know about reassuring allies? Can it be done? Is it even

This passage from the article captures well the call for "reassurance": the US must convince its allies in Asia and Europe that the US would indeed use its nukes to protect them.

That's a tall order!

Indeed, such a tall order that it's been a major question explored by international relations scholars for a long time. A LONG TIME.

The topic was of keen debate in the 1950s, with Henry Kissinger writing a series of pieces on the topic, such as this 1956 @ForeignAffairs

The academic discussion picked up in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This included Robert Schelling's paper in the first issue of the Journal of Conflict