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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15885 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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It turns out Greenland/Denmark and Canada aren't the only friendly countries that the US has been threatening, the Vatican's ambassador to the US (according to The Free Press and Letters from Leo a Catholic focused blog) was given both explicit and coded threats of military force against the Holy See.

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

“America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

As tempers rose, one U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

JD Vance, a Catholic himself, has done a pretty rare thing for the Trump admin and said they're gonna get to the bottom of it first, instead of immediately dismissing it as fake news.. This doesn't confirm it as real, but that it wasn't immediately denied and dismissed like the typical M.O. is quite interesting.

This could help explain why Pope Leo has felt so emboldened to speak up against Trump's war efforts in Iran, cause the administration officials have been warmongering against them behind the scenes. The chance that the admin actually pulls the trigger and attacks the Vatican is obviously low, but that they keep threatening many of our allies both publically and privately seems quite concerning to me. It also opens up a new thing to consider, how many other allies are they threatening behind closed doors too?

“America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

If this story is true, did Colby think that the cardinal is not aware of the military abilities of Russia and China?

We do not even need to go there, obviously America does not even have the power to do what it wants with Iran.

Or perhaps more accurately, while it might have the military power, it lacks the power to stop the negative consequences and the will to suffer through them.

I mean, I could easily murder my neighbor. Most humans are utterly unprepared to defend themselves from assassination attempts in their daily life. But even if I thought that this was a great outcome, it would not be the end of the story, but there would be adverse consequences for me. I might hate my hypothetical neighbor enough that I was willing to dedicate a week or months to planning their death, but I would lack the will to go to prison for a few decades as a consequence.

Likewise with the US and Iran. The US has the military power to occupy Iran, obviously. If 300M Americans woke up tomorrow with the firm belief that occupying Iran was their topmost priority, before their lives, family, career, investments, human rights, community, other geostrategic issues and so forth, there is no doubt that the US military would succeed.

But that is not the reality we live in, where whatever happens in Iran ranks well below the gas price for most Americans. In this reality, the US military does not have effective power to do what they want with Iran, as the last weeks have shown.

An invasion of China is something where I am doubtful if the US could pull it off even if they were utterly convinced that it must happen no matter the costs.

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