First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV

To placate or appeal to the current American leadership?

What's the desired outcome? European, NATO, or Ukrainian security guarantees?

From what I read, the new pope is much like Francis on human rights and political topics, but a bit more conservative about church doctrine. Perhaps it's to have a counterpoint to Trump in America, to show that not all American-born leaders are trash? Time will tell, I suppose.

To exert political pressure on the current American leadership by influencing the masses and achieve the objectives of the Catholic Church? Have you forgotten what happened with Wojtyła and Solidarność?

I wouldn't presume Prevost is more doctrinally conservative than Francis, just because Francis wasn't as liberal as popularly claimed. Rather, American conservative bishops attempted to paint Francis as doctrinally liberal as part of their rhetorical strategy to attack Francis' non-doctrinal liberalism (e.g. on high-profile but non-doctrinal matters related to discipline, liturgy, etc). Similarly, progressive activists chose to interpret Francis' policies as doctrinal shifts, when they weren't. Though it's possible the latter phenomenon was something Francis was content to leave uncorrected. Francis seemed to embrace ambiguity in his pronouncements as a method of rapprochement.

Current USA leadership is already taking actions well aligned with the church (such as stripping rights from women, homosexuals).

On some things.

On others, like social safety nets, rights for migrants (particularly those from Latin America where Leo XIV spent a lot of time), and militarism, the RCC and Trump's GOP are at stark odds.

Here's an oddity: apparently Noam Chomsky doesn't fully agree with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSJnuF7_zg

> What's the desired outcome? European, NATO, or Ukrainian security guarantees?

that would be pretty dump to try, I don't think there are any such goles

> To placate or appeal to the current American leadership?

only we speak about "appealing to them to be more human", "appealing to them to follow christian values", denouncing people which claim to represent christian values in their action which in fact are opposite to what the Roman Church things Christian values are etc.

if we speak about directly influencing politics, especially geopolitics that seems very unlikely to be the intend, or doable

While the Church is conservative in some ways people dislike it also advocates things like peace, ending capital punishment, and nondescrimination based upon race. In my home city, the Church was the only place that wasn’t racist. For my entire life, the Church has been the only place in America with a majority that didn’t want to bomb poor brown people all over the planet. In modern America, not wanting to bomb people is… umm… foreign to both sides of the political spectrum.

Thanks, I am not that informed, I don’t know why I even commented.

What relevance, in any way, does this hold to the current discussion?

Additionally, Noam refers to Trump's statements from the beginning of the Ukraine war. Trump's position on the matter has done a total 180 since. Why would Noam continue to hold the same view if Trump doesn't?

Maybe the Roman Catholic Church* is that way. Evangelicals are not. They are for whatever their crazy leaders want, including blowing up brown people whenever they get in the way or cross borders. Also counting fascism as family values.

Yeah, peace on their own terms and ideology.