Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
Two things are important to think about.
1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.
Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.
>Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute.
I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.
>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.
There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.
> Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted.
It's the exact opposite: US citizens got fed up with the domestic problems created by Triffin's Dilemma and wanted out.
Remember, the "imperial revenue" in our model doesn't get helicoptered into the economy, it pumps assets. Stocks, bonds, and real estate. Your share of the imperial loot is proportional to the value of the assets that you own, and worse, even if you don't have a big house and fat brokerage account you still have to compete with people who do and they're going to bid up the price of anything that doesn't have highly elastic supply. Health care, housing, and education are the ones creating problems. America got a great deal, but most Americans got a raw deal: costs went up, income didn't, misery ensued.
Pumped bonds allow (force, really) the government to run deficits (homework: what breaks if they don't? It happened in Clinton's term, you can go and check) and to some extent that distributes the money. There's the whole services narrative which held that the services sector would pump hard enough to backfill manufacturing, but it never did. The people who got the door slammed in their face are no longer convinced that the door is their path to prosperity and now they want to tear the whole thing down.
If you want to hear an actual economist talk about this, see "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
The fact that successive US governments choose to use their economic hegemony to pump assets rather than invest in their education and healthcare, or at least in their infrastructure, doesn't contradict the fact that it was a great gift, engineered since Bretton-Woods, confirmed at the Smithsonian institute and a few years later at the Kingston accords (and btw, had nothing to do with gold standard but the convertibility of the Dollar. The gold standard realistically ended in the 50s (died for the 5th time in the US alone), and for the 1st time, stayed dead).
True. We could have taxed and spent enough to spread the wealth around. We chose not to, and now the proverbial children who weren't embraced by the village are burning it down to feel its warmth.
I'm not against calling reserve currency status a privilege so long as you are crystal clear on the point that it was a privilege for America but a curse for most Americans.
An important caveat to #2. Rising populations can only be leveraged into more power if they can be channeled into import substition. Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.
Import substition is a process where domestic industry develops by adopting the processes of overseas industries contributing to imports, so that the country can import the raw materials and make the product, instead of importing the full product at the market price. Most surveys of macroeconomics reveal that it is integral and foundational to the development of most industrialised countries today, e.g. China.
The exporter countries contain smart people who may seek to suppress this process to maintain revenue flows. This prevents the development from happening.
Two examples:
1: the 'unequal treaties' between 19th century Japan and America prohibited certain kinds of tariffs and subsidies by Japan. This allowed westerners, prominently Americans, to maintain market share in Japan by product dumping.
2: in 18th and 19th century India various British offices at different times had policies of having their sepoys arrest textile workers and maim them by the forcible amputation of both thumbs, to preserve the market share of British textiles.
> Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
If only there was a conflict somewhere with a perieved superpower, maybe a nuclear country or something that would be relatively easy to win without even entering into a direct altercation. Oh, wait!
America could’ve easily won the war in Ukraine by just ging away a bit more weapons, specifically long range missiles. It could even just tell European countries to give their long rhange missiles in exchange for a resupply for some plausible deniability.It could’ve been a bit more generous with intelligence.
Unfortunately, America elected Trump. A person who doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t directly concern him. If it doesn’t benefit (or hurt) him personally it might as well not exist. Which make it easy to sway his foreign policy. Russia is actively trying to buy him and he thinks it’s great. It’s going to be a very fast decline of American influence as more and more countries around the world will see that it takes very little to buy an american president, allegedly the most powerful person in the world. And if any petty dictator can buy him, what worth is his power?
Demographic stagnation? compared to who? everything is relative and I don’t think US demographics has it at a disadvantage over EU, China, Japan, South Korea, does it? So then who is left to take seriously as a competitor?
China has grown old before it grew rich. The past decade has been one of a collapsed houehold sector (and birth rate below the already gloomy concensus back in 2010), general deflation, and bright lights and conspicious technology achieved only through throwing government spending at ritzy projects - centrally planned growth and waste. Being unable to escape the domestic security agenda will forever neuter global aspiration, from currency to technology.
India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
Relative gaps are smaller, but the persistance of gap is never more entrenched than ever.
That is not a decline. It is however a Great Game, not played with nations but with ideology and where the US and China are quite aligned. That game is less visible until it is seen.
> India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
I've always said that if India got a unified national language they would become a nearly instant world power.
Imagine an India where English was mandated in every public school - and every child, regardless of caste (which officially doesn't exist...), attended school. English, because it's more internationally useful than Hindi, and doesn't have the same ethnological competition (Hindi vs Bengali vs Tamil vs <297 others>).
Then imagine that, now that all of India can actually speak to each other, they get their shit together, and build a truly functional national highway system. Top it off with a safe railway system, complete with modern trains. Enough trains that you don't have to ride on top. (OK, I'm starting to dream big.)
One generation later India is a dominant world power. Pakistan is completely fucked, sure, because Delhi will never get over their petty sibling hatred. But India can start power-brokering between all other nations.
The "centrally planned growth is hollow and doomed" narrative doesn't seem to fit China like it fit the USSR. Did the USSR ever make 80% of the stuff in your home?
As for making friends, the US empire is highly atypical in its "friendliness" and it's entirely plausible that its successor will revert to the mean.
The America First agenda is predicated by isolationism. You have a demagogue with whom nobody is willing to say "no" and an army of self serving sycophants lined up to try and win favors. The political messaging is all built around zero sum language and arguments, and toughness is demonstrated by punitive measures taken against any allies deemed "weaker" than the U.S. (basically everyone). Those who know where this will lead are unwilling to speak up and the rest follow. Everyone involved seems to be in it for short-term transactional benefits, and nobody seems to acknowledge or care about what the long term outcomes will be for the country.
> Those who know where this will lead are unwilling to speak up and the rest follow.
They did speak up. And they lost the popular vote. Democracy is only as good as its voters. A country is only as good as its people. Replace good with productive/sane/not corrupt, etc.
If you do not get votes, it’s not the voters who failed, it is you.
If politicians got that through their heads, and started trying to convince voters on their own merit, instead of simply trash-talking their opponents and telling people they voted “wrong”, they would start to get things done again, and we could actually solve real problems.
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit
I'm not sure this is true anymore given the splitting of media and news sources. When everyone watched the same 3 news programs it was easier to speak to those people. It is very hard to penetrate the "other sides" messaging platforms.
> instead of simply trash-talking their opponents
This was the President's entire election platform (twice).
> we could actually solve real problems
If voters wanted the solve real problems, they would vote for people who present solutions to real problems. Instead, we vote for people who provide easy scapegoats and fake solutions, which ends up making things worse. Trump has the slimmest policy stance of any President ever elected.
Trump has a far-reaching policy stance. His thesis is that American success is due to Americans and what is distinctive about them, and our engagement with foreigners on the present terms is not good for America. That has implications for everything from immigration policy, to trade policy, military positions, to how to teach kids in schools. Closing the border, deporting all illegal immigrants, screening legal immigrants, abandoning unfounded foreign policy commitments, using tariffs as a tool of trade policy, shutting down USAID, pushing patriotic education, etc., are all concrete policies consistent with that thesis.
If you buy into liberal universalism, sure you don’t agree with the policy. If you think the only difference between an Iowan and a Bangladeshi is the need for sunscreen and external factors outside people’s control—you don’t see how the policy is a good one. But to say that there’s no policy there is absurd.
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit
A selfish voter will throw the world under the bus if it means they win something. An uneducated voter won't understand the full implications of their vote. A hateful voter will go down with the ship if this takes their enemies down too. What "merit"?
Look around, look at the last US presidential elections, those politicians were elected "on their own merit". Hate, bigotry, populism, treason, corruption. That "merit".
When voters vote for the person who baseless attacked an election (counts as treason in my book), and campaigned on aiding and abetting those who perpetrated treason against the country, it is the voters (and non voters) who failed.
Why? If you look at history you will quickly realize that voters vote pretty much like shareholders do. While not excluding every last other factor, democratic voters vote largely in their own short term economic interest. Trump convinced them that was where he was superior and was rewarded with the election.
If you like democracy ... then what's wrong with that?
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit, instead of simply trash-talking their opponents
That’s hard to claim to make right after a Trump victory—trashing their opponents has been the Republicans playbook my entire life, and it’s currently working quite well for them.
I don’t know if that’s meaningfully true. When a candidate lies and the information distribution industries are by and large just repeating the lies, on top of decades of voter suppression measures, can we say that the popular vote really represents what people want? I don’t think so. So yeah one candidate will win by a razor-thin margin but I don’t think that actually gives legitimacy to what is happening.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug. Many people's views are shaped by algorithms and established without any grounding in actual facts. The last election was largely decided based on affordability with a healthy dose of nostalgia for an economy that no longer exists. The democrats made a huge mistake running Harris without a real primary. Biden should have stepped down long before the election, yadda yadda yadda.
> Many people's views are shaped by algorithms and established without any grounding in actual facts
The facts are there, easily accessible for people to read or see. That they choose to ignore them is evidence of the problem with democracy. Whatever mistakes were made by the party that lost, their candidate was not the one with a (comparatively) long track record of fraud, treason, and overall lack of decorum.
Not only did they lose the popular vote, they lost it repeatedly. Although it was only a matter of degree at each step, Clinton was more isolationist than Bush and Dole. Bush was more isolationist than Gore and Kerry. Obama was more isolationist than McCain and Romney.
Trump was more isolationist than Clinton, Biden was more isolationist than first-term Trump and Trump beat Biden last year partially on the basis of becoming much more isolationist than his first term version, surpassing Biden.
I'd posit that it is trying to wrestle it back actually.
It lost it when their industries went abroad.
From a global perspective this is good because it makes peace more sustainable if the world is interlinked and interconnected. National interests being distributed all over. Alignment of incentives.
The issue is that it is not without friction. People's interests don't align so flawlessly.
The knee-jerk reaction is protectionism but it is too late. The other parts of the world have caught up. And that is normal and sound. It rebalances the world. It is a new equilibrium. This is just the natural way for most closed systems where there is a gradient.
What is weird is that it is almost like watching a movie. Meaning that the current technological push into AI, energy and robotics is likely to spearhead us into a whole new kind of economics (post-money/post-work kind of). And probably requires to open the system (find new territory beyond the existing).
The point is that it will probably offset the current protectionist trend.
I think the US is giving up control willingly and turning more isolationist. It has been building for some time but I do not thing it is forced. It is a deliberate policy shift turning away from trying to control and police the world. America is pushed in and on to other countries and societies that a retraction might be the best thing
I don't believe it's trying to give up control, the current US administration don't want to be the world police but still wants the control given by being the world police, both can't exist at the same time and some sort of reckoning will happen.
They're currently threatening to invade Venezuela!
Mind you, another consequence of the regime is that nobody knows what's real and what's keyfabe any more. They were also threatening to invade Canada, lost a colossal amount of goodwill as a result, and got bored and moved on.
The "world", implicit in your comment, is the liberal world order. This world order worked for America (ie Americans) until it became apparent that it did not, at least in a political and cultural sense (in a material sense it is of course still working perhaps even too well). The greatest champion of this world order, the EU bureaucratic class, views Americans' play for their sovereignty with bewilderment and casts it as renouncing its leadership in the world, yet leadership is not just blindly following a path to ruin but instead forging ahead down new and promising paths. In this sense the US is indeed still "leading" and it is the EU that stands firm in its intransigence and refuses to follow the leader. Yet it need not be this way and the EU very well could follow the US away from the excesses of hegemonic liberalism. There are signs of change in the air. This is politically interesting and the eventual outcome is not at all clear.
On the other hand, the emergence of China, India, and to a lesser extent Russia (as a puppet of the Chinese) upon the world stage as independent actors, out of the shadows of Western domination, is another way in which the US is "losing control" but this is much less politically interesting in the sense that it was an inevitable and expected outcome. There is nothing the US has done, is doing or could do that would diminish non-Western ambition and agitation for power.
They'll only realize what they lost, when they lost it. When their influence all over the world crumbles away, because of disrespectful treatment of other nations, and negligence in maintaining good relations. The bad awakening comes, when most of the good relations are gone, and the people feel consequences domestically.
> How is that? Are we taking stuff at the point of a gun?
No, but the USA is getting a lot of stuff in exchange for $$ which it can print for basically free. Consumers in the USA have benefitted a lot from this, which partly compensated the fact that more and more of the pie is going to the richest instead of the average American.
Dollar holdings outside the US come to about $1 trillion. What you are talking about there are holdings of debt. Yes, US prosperity has been propped up by borrowing increasing amounts of money. This is not sustainable.
One can view Trump's tariff actions as preparatory for US debt default. This would crash the dollar and make imports much more expensive.
It’s not that it’s not worth the expense, it’s that we’re unable to continue funding global peace and prosperity ourselves. And we shouldn’t have to.
I don’t agree with Trump about much but he’s correct that the other liberal democracies have been more than happy to have us foot the bill for keeping the wolves at bay while looking down on us for doing it.
You have to consider how much it felt like progress for Europe to become less militaristic. The continent had been obliterated by war and then divided and filled with tanks during the cold war. For Europe, reducing military spending was seen as a welcome step away from the internal conflicts of the past. This is changing now, and while America may see this as a victory I find it hard to welcome headlines like “Germany to massively increase tank production” for all the negative historical echos.
I’d also be very surprised if US military expenditure decreased by a single cent as a result of increased spending by other NATO countries.
These are fair points and I get it, but the world of today is very different than the world of the early to mid 1900s. Lack of military is far from the only thing keeping Germany from attacking other European countries now. I feel reasonably confident that no matter how many tanks Germany builds, they won’t go rolling into France in my lifetime. What they may do is repel Russia (though even then, I am skeptical that any major nation will attack a NATO country.)
> It’s not that it’s not worth the expense, it’s that we’re unable to continue funding global peace and prosperity ourselves. And we shouldn’t have to.
That's just explaining why it's not worth the expense.
Hasn't this been the Russian agenda for decades? I don't think it's a secret, or a fringe theory. They have worked on it long term, and seemingly finding success now.
I don't think China is against this change, but their agenda seems to be more focused on international trade and internal growth, rather than specific strategy against the US.
The EU is definitely not benefiting from it in the short term. While some argue it needs this change in the long term, it is difficult to imagine that the EU wants it to happen so arbitrarily and quickly.
Those holding any meaningful power in the US are either benefiting from this change, at least in the short term or personally, or oblivious to it, possibly also due to influence from the agents of change.
It's an opportunity for other states to gain influence. And in particular for Russia to advance their geopolitical ambitions, since this is from their playbook.
It would be in the interests of the United States to alter the course, and regain the influence already lost. The leaders seem to have chosen to ignore her interests, though.
America is, and always has been, an isolationist nation - behaving like an island nation even though it's not an island (although it might as well be, given it has only two neighbors of little consequence).
It was dragged into the first world war (despite strong public aversion) because J.P. Morgan Jr started lending money to Britain and France to buy American steel, thus setting in motion a cycle of investment and production protection that eventually required boots on the ground.
It was dragged into the second world war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (and Germany's subsequent declaration of war, as it was obligated to do under its treaty with Japan).
It protected Europe and SE Asia in the post-war years in order to contain communism, which it feared more than anything else. Once that threat subsided, there wasn't much reason for it to continue with its overseas footprint other than inertia and protecting important trade routes.
Gulf Wars I was to protect oil prices (and because they already had the equipment for war), and Gulf Wars II was to be seen to be doing something about 9/11.
Now that Trump is in power, America is performing its "great reset" (which was going to come eventually), where it becomes isolationist again, sticking to the Americas (reinvigorating the Monroe Doctrine), and leaving everyone else to their own devices.
You cannot separate monstrously expensive calamities like Vietnam or Iraq from the military-industry complex that is the foundation for the U.S.’s role as the defender of the west. So many thousands of lives lost or ruined, trillions spent. To say nothing of the millions of foreign civilians killed and maimed. The American people are sick to death of it. Some politicians smartly harnessed that sentiment.
> The American people are sick to death of it. Some politicians smartly harnessed that sentiment.
Except that MAGA cheers on new wars. They prefer "ministry of the war", they like the threats to annex Canada and Greenland. They enjoy fishermen boats being destroyed and want to bomb Venezuela.
This is not about distaste toward foreign wars. This is about wanting more of them, wanting more torture and wanting more violence. This is about wanting to feel and appear more manly and getting there via more violence.
Why should we control the world? It’s very expensive running an empire, and all it has accomplished is getting people around the world to hate us. Do you know how much people in my home country hate Reagan and Nixon (who opposed our independence because of some stupid alliance with Pakistan against Russia)? Much more than they hate Trump.
I think folks in my home country could at least understand wealth extraction. But what wealth has America extracted from Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iraq, etc? The Chinese got the oil contracts in Iraq.
What’s insane about America’s foreign policy is that it costs huge amounts of money, pisses off most of the third world, and doesn’t even seem to result in any flow of wealth to the U.S.
The Europeans want it both ways: they want the US to pay for and be responsible for policing the world, but to do it the way the Europeans want with them free to criticize the US and act morally superior the whole time. This act has become utterly tiresome.
> want the US to pay for and be responsible for policing the world
Not really convinced that it's that way round, that Europe actually wants much of this "policing" to be done at all rather than being dragged into it. Until Ukraine, which is the exact bit of world policing that Republicans no longer recognize as crime.
You, a European, want to tell the US public how their resources are to be used, and when they don't agree with you then you act morally superior about it.
> You, a European, want to tell the US public how their resources are to be used, and when they don't agree with you then you act morally superior about it.
As an American, I can confidently say that we do the exact same thing from the other perspective.
Not only that, which I agree with, but also consider the US demographics are extremely advantageous over other nations. There is a chance the US isn’t losing control but is pulling away because the rest of the world has increasingly less to offer it. The US is energy and food independent and with increased automation is on a path to industrial independence. As a small example, Chinese had thought they had the US on hook with rare earths, well it’s starting to look now like that threat led to Americans looking around for them and then discovering, oh wait, we do have them, let’s go dig them out, and in 5 years it’s possible the US will be rare earth independent. What happens when the US is increasingly independent and isolationist? do you really think that will be a problem for it? or instead a problem for others?
Trump's project is to turn the US into a playground for oligarchs such as himself, like in Putin's Russia. It doesn't matter if the US becomes way poorer and weaker in the process. "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven".
Thiel and Musk want to decentralize as much as possible, and split everything into small autonomies, so they can pit different jurisdictions against each other, and pressure/manipulate them. That's fairly sure. The goal has never been revealed, but one can assume it is not because it hurts their interests.
I'm not sure anyone really is debating if the US is losing its control, I feel that's a given - I'd say much quicker recently than before, but still happening.
I'm personally worried who takes over - none of the other parties vying for power instil even the vaguest sense of wanting to maintain the status quo. I feel fairly malicious authoritarianism and corruption will be observed in our own countries within this century (if that matters to you, depends on your age I suppose).
Reality is that the US doesn’t want control of the world. Why do we want the blame for the world’s problems. Let the world take care of their own problems.
The Lancet had numbers around 600k, but that included the wider context of deaths due to the temporary collapse of society, medical services, electricity supplies, ongoing violence and insurgency, and so on.
The long consequence of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions was providing Russia with a pretext for its own interventions, from the various caucasus states to Syria to Ukraine.
Still, "over 100,000" is technically correct if it's more than 100,000. Since this subject isn't the main point of the article and the Iraq war is generally acknowledged to have been disastrous, I suppose he chose a safe figure so as not to derail the article with disputed estimates at the outset.
Yes, it is a very low-ball estimate. The more accurate estimate is that Iraq lost 5% of its population, and in many areas, Iraq continues to lose babies born with birth defects due to the use of depleted uranium.
Not really, it’s the lower end of what we can be confident about from direct evidence per things like the Iraq body count project. There are statistical estimates that are higher but they have very large error bars. Over 100k is completely defendable and plenty high that any reasonable person should be horrified by it!
Framing this as the US “losing control” misses one of the points i.e what’s actually happening in energy sector. Oil worked as a lever of power precisely because it was scarce, centralised, and geopolitically choke-pointed. Renewables will flip that model. Sun and wind don’t care about borders, navies, or petrodollars.
Well you can’t power fighter jets or tanks on renewables yet so there’s still that.
But I think this past year really changed the direction of the US and to a lesser extent the EU with respect to oil and gas versus renewables.
As the US has realized at the institutional level that China has secured a very strong position on refining rare earth materials into batteries and other green technology it is doubling down on oil and gas as the energy choice for the foreseeable future, climate change be damned. Not that China ever really cared about the climate, they just, for good reasons, wanted an alternative energy production source because even if they seized Taiwan the US Navy can bring oil and gas imports to near 0. Pipelines from Russia are sitting ducks too, so not much reprieve there.
US is putting $40 billion into Al Udeid and signing AI deals with the Middle East powers, and is close enough on a deal to legitimize Israel. Add Venezuela. You can see where this is going.
The EU politically wants to switch to green tech but it’s facing a problem which is doing so will result in effective deindustrialization since they would wind up buying most equipment from China including cars. The EU either did or is about to shelve the requirement that cars are EVs by 2035. I expect this to be fully repealed. While the EU likes to not mince words about US tariffs, they’re ultimately heading in the same direction. China had a $1 trillion export surplus. If the US isn’t buying their subsidized products who is? Brazil? Right now it’s Europe, but do you think Germany will let its manufacturing sector go away? If so I have a ticket to sell you to the next AfD rally. The product dumping from China is going to be too much and in a judo move the west will be able to use China’s manufacturing capacity against it. Nice factories you have there, too bad nobody buys anything you make (relatively speaking).
So the EU is sitting between two oil and gas energy superpowers oh and the Middle East is just around the bend. Politically they’ll still work on climate change initiatives but as push comes to shove, and with China overplaying its hand with export controls on rare earth materials and creating more panic in Brussels (never mind China's support for Russia invading Ukraine), the EU will generally maintain an oil and gas industrial direction, if I were to guess.
I’m not pro gas/oil or anything like that. Drive an EV and love it. But that’s my fun armchair take on what’s going on here.
We don't know much of it anymore with the decline of Europe, but for several centuries the dominant geopolitical goal of most countries on Earth was to defend themselves from European invasion. Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
> Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.
You can say this but the people who need to hear it won’t listen. They lack the perspective of actually reading history to understand the scale at which people were killed before the world police era.
But even reading history isn’t enough. I think we’re fundamentally not equipped to understand what a large number of deaths actually looks and feels like. 10 deaths happening in our vicinity is an unbearable tragedy. 1 million deaths is just a number. So folks are struck by a nostalgia for a time when humans killed each other by the millions.
In some ways they remind me of the people who long for the days before vaccines eliminated a bunch of diseases.
Allow? It just happens, and when you're the weaker part in the equation, there's not much you can do against it. Where Russia and the USA give up power, China will grab it.
The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.
100%. They should just step aside and let all those theocratic shit holes arm them selves with more nuclear weapons and wipe each other out. Problem sorted.
Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.
Tom Clancy used this as the catalyst for one of his many techno war stories - something along the lines of “if you piss off your creditors they won’t give you any more money”. Think it was bear and dragon, the China Russia war. Debt is sold, and the purchaser’s willingness to buy sets the interest rate. And they don’t like uncertainty.
The us detached itself from the world after ww I and it seems to want to do it again. The tariffs might recapitulate the 30’s but that decade didn’t turn out well at all. So I hope the historical behaviour breaks down first.
There's a very real chance the USA will get lucky and find a new means of economic domination through its AI companies and the looming space build-out. Its self-destructiveness right now, flouting longstanding alliances and truckling to its enemies, would ruin it in any other moment in its history. But in these unusual circumstances, it might not matter.
Nah, AI is a massive money pit, and Starship has proven to be a dead end. The real tech revolutions of the moment are in energy production and storage and health care advances like mRNA and GLP-1. The US is actively self-sabotaging on both energy and health care at the moment.
They are decimating academic research into health care tech in general. There’s been mixed messaging from the administration on GLP-1s (although if they keep pushing on the eugenics theme, they will solidify as anti on those as well soon enough) but that wasn’t really the point. I named mRNA and GLP-1s as two examples of modern tech revolutions that are not AI or space-related. Those are the modern tech breakthroughs, not AI and definitely not space launches. (I went back and edited the post to make it clearer what I meant by “both”).
Before WWII America was content with it's own company and business. Then we found ourselves holding the big stick and everybody looking to us to solve their problems.
If we go back to being peers, so what? Rich people who've capitalized on the favored position will cry and complain (and spend billions trying to keep control) but the world will go on.
I read somewhere that the sentiment in Europe after WW2 was that Soviet had a bigger impact than the US. But narrative has shifted over time. I'd guess Churchill saw the US as a last resort, not the goto fixer. Happy to be corrected by someone who knows history, thouogh.
It seems the US wasn't in the war until two years after it started, and was drawn in due to Pearl Harbor. Even the protection of Atlantic trade was handled by the UK and Canada until 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...
The US will try to avoid this by privatizing the Fed through stablecoins, but I predict this backfiring massively. Private creation of money will likely tank the world economy worse than 2008 and in the rubble a new order will form without the US at the center.
Lol, the US deficits are what sustains the production of demand stricken surplus economies. Everything that has happened is the ultimate result of surplus countries doubling down on mercantalist investment than growing internal consumption.
If a rebalancing were to occur, it is the surplus countries hit with mass unemployment that will hurt much more than deficit countries that can move production back at a much quicker pace. The author is making the mistake of viewing tings from a supply side perspective when given excessive reliance on investment and high savings the world is constrained by chronic underconsumption.
So, America is great at consuming, but if ratio of debt to GDP continues to grow, it's unsustainable for the U.S. Sure, China needs the U.S. to be a major customer, but it doesn't seem like things can continue as they're going now, especially as the willingness to ignore the extremity of the debt is largely based on good faith and credibility.
It's a trade imbalance. They send stuff out, they get nothing in. They could just continue to produce the stuff, then just set it on fire. No mass unemployment. Problem solved, no? It seems easier to do than to build an industrial base again.
That's why I said "set it on fire". This whole economic speak is just a cover to avoid saying that trade imbalance is a fealty payment to the US. It's ridiculous to say that a country that was previously sending out stuff for free to the US would suddenly have a big existential problem when they suddenly don't have to do it anymore. They will have other problems due to a changing world order, that's for sure, but figuring out what to do with that production won't be one of them.
>for free to the US would suddenly have a big existential problem
No they're not sending it for free, the US dollars and IOUs are real and ultimately translated into maintaining the salaries of millions of factory workers. Thats the whole point of export driven growth. Trying to abstract away the balance sheet as imaginary is not how real economics works.
The CCP, the IMF, World Bank, BIS, etc certainly aren't thinking like you are, growing consumption has proven extremely difficult in practice over growing industry.
Why assume rebalancing is mainly a demand problem but not a (slow) supply-constrained adjustment driven by demographics, capital stickiness, and institutional limits (in deficit countries)?
America never had control.
What it did have was the natural, organic attention of a very large portion of the world population, just after the end of WW2.
Anericans were physicaly bigger, stronger, better educated, cool and casual about all the gadgets,tools,and toys they tossed around, and the media evidence of the goings on in the US, painted a come on over and join the fun immage that many fought to get any piece they could.
Thats, over.
This article reads as if this person seriously believes that ... Europe and European trade (strangely not the US, but okay) is the only thing preventing just and utopian outcomes across the entire world.
It's also a useless discussion: whatever faith you may have in European progressive/socialist parties, they are not willing to give up the prosperity they have. They want fairness in addition to MORE than what the European people already have. If the demand is to give up more than 100% of European economic growth, you will not find them allies. Oh and there's the problem that they've got maybe 10-20% of the vote, and all other parties are not nearly as willing to help.
So these utopian outcomes won't happen. What will?
What these people never discuss is who will replace the US? Because the only real contender is the Chinese CCP. That will, to put it mildly, not be good. Frankly, the absurdly huge distinction between US hegemony and all others, whether you mean British hegemony, Ottoman hegemony or even going as far back as Roman or Greek hegemony is that every hegemon with the sole exception of the US conquered and murdered their empire together using slave armies (to their credit, some European powers, not all but some, at least refused to use slavery)
You might say "but China has promised not to ...". Ok, let's go there. Let's say China doesn't actually go ahead and try to conquer 1/3 of the world. Or, at least somewhat realistically, let's say they take over Taiwan and the Phillippines and stop there. Or let's even say they add Indonesia and Malaysia maybe even Japan to that ... and then stop.
Note: the CCP ideology is authoritarian and racist. We can perhaps argue if they'll go as far as the Nazi's did in the past century, but I don't understand how any rational person can argue it isn't at least going to go quite a ways in that direction. But if you don't live there ... who cares right? Also: if you live in these countries: get the fuck out of there (because the EU is definitely going to refuse to pay for the US securing the seas)
Or you might say you actually believe the CCP, and let's say that you're right to do so. The result is that the US withdraws from the global oceans ... and that's the end of that. What will happen?
The problem is "multilateralism" was demonstrated EXACTLY what it was at the end of WW1, at the real ending of Colonialism (I mean that yes, colonies endured a bit more, but the economic domination of European powers ended there. Their last big hurrah. At that point European Colonial powers had enjoyed a large surplus but right there and then, it was gone, and that's the point where the decline became totally inevitable, and exactly what happened became a certainty: a very large, protracted, slow economic decline. We might also mention what people chose to do in response to this happening: WW2)
This is not theory. This is history. This is what actually happened. Any rational person should at least consider it might happen again.
But let's discuss what will happen to us. Because that's what matters, right?
First, perhaps most obvious, piracy will return, at the very least to East and West African coasts, maybe even the African Mediterranean coast, and to Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as parts of India. None of the countries there have any hope in hell of securing their own coast, never mind international waters. Quite a few will participate in piracy like they did before. As a result international trade will largely collapse.
Maybe EU-US trade will survive, and maybe even US-China trade. But EU-Africa? EU-China? It will at the very least become orders of magnitude more expensive.
Second, a large list of countries (a growing list, I might add) that are at each other's throats but are currently being stopped either directly by the US army, or by US weapons and diplomacy, and even some being restained by EU weapons and diplomacy, will burst out into ethnic violence. We'll have 10, or god forbid 50, Sudan-style conflicts. There is even such a conflict brewing in the EU: Kosovo - Serbia ... nothing is solved there and while people aren't currently at each other's throats, they're not far from it (and if you're truly honest, the problem is Kosovo. Or put it this way. If you erased Serbia from the map, the Serbia-Kosovo conflict would continue. If you erased Kosovo from the map, the conflict would stop). Greece and Turkey ... they're perhaps further from war than Kosovo, but I would still argue that left to their own devices, another war there is inevitable. India-Pakistan. China vs essentially everyone. And so on and so forth.
The problem is "multilateralism" was demonstrated EXACTLY what it was just after WW1. There is a large group of countries that when restraints on their actions are released ... the result is a large set of genocides all occurring at once. I'm a pessimist, but let's be honest: this will simply happen again.
That is at the very least a big risk of what Piketty and other calls "justice". And the problem is simple: for at least the next few years it is extremely in the EU's and EU member states' financial interest to bring us closer to this scenario. Piketty is arguing for social justice, and he should: we need that. We need that influence, because other forces are looking to destroy the rights we currently enjoy. But they'll never talk their way into more than minority influence in "the West".
Perhaps Trump and MAGA are just extreme and cruel fatalists who realize what is coming now: a large, protracted, worldwide economic crisis, caused by Europe and China, followed by WW3. Perhaps they simply think the US will win WW3 and the world will go back to 1950. Perhaps their theory is that the best idea for the US is for WW3 to start before this economic crisis really hits the US, that the only thing they need to do is to withdraw the US army, weapons and diplomacy currently standing between a great many adversaries.
Hell, that may be exactly what happens. But this is both giving these people way too much credit AND ignores that of course WW3 will make the world suck pretty fucking bad for a long time.
The real problem is not the US no longer being the influence it was for "the west" (to simplify). The real problem is, what takes the space the US previously filled and still partly/mostly fills.
The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation. If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state. It might even get worse than the WW2, since the US military is probably more superior compared to almost any other nation on the planet, than Nazi Germany's military was, and already has presence in basically all parts of the world, plus the logistics.
So lets hope that the current period of idiocy ends soon, and we can get back to peaceful international relations, with a sane US leadership, instead of one, that seemingly seeks to tear down as many bridges as possible. However, we are only in year one (!) of the current US government, so we will probably have to hold out breath a little longer, and Europe will have to rely on itself.
I agree with your first point. The alternatives are a lot worse. its not going to be Russia (its not got the economy to do it) but China.
> The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.
And in most of Asia too where China is a very immediate threat.
> Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state
That seems alarmist to me. Nationalist policies and rhetoric (and I have lived with worse than the US) do not lead to fascism that easily, especially when you have strong institutions.
I have concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the current admin, but I think the word "fascism" should be avoided in these types of discussions, as it's such a loaded term that it's hard to know exactly what's implied. The main risks I see are the erosion of democratic norms (weakening of core institutions) and a reduced access to due process, particularly for non-citizens. You see this in ICE deportations to offshore prisons without any clear indication of what happens next. Threats to invade territories for which the U.S. has no basis for occupation (i.e., Greenland and Panama) further raise concerns. As well as use of federal force against protesters, targeting dissent and media pressure (threats to revoke broadcast licenses), surveillance and visa revocations used for political gains, and purges and restructuring of law enforcement. The list could go on, but the threats are real.
Both political far sides are rocking the boat, not just rights even tho they are in power. It's both of them together and the dysfunction of their inability to compromise or reason on anything. Moderates or centrist voters in the USA have no representation and haven't for some time.
Frankly, bullshit. The center is ruling the democratic party, actively suppressing left and frequently tacitly enabling the far right. Meanwhile, left barely does anything. They are not rocking the boat, they are powerless.
Both Obama and Biden were center choice. The whole democratic party is ruled by centrist politicians and ideology which is why they cant oppose the increasingly radical republicans all that effectively.
>The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.
>If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Did you seriously write these two sentences one right next to the other and not see the hypocrisy in what you're saying?
Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
Two things are important to think about.
1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.
Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.
>Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute.
I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.
>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.
There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273326
> Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted.
It's the exact opposite: US citizens got fed up with the domestic problems created by Triffin's Dilemma and wanted out.
Remember, the "imperial revenue" in our model doesn't get helicoptered into the economy, it pumps assets. Stocks, bonds, and real estate. Your share of the imperial loot is proportional to the value of the assets that you own, and worse, even if you don't have a big house and fat brokerage account you still have to compete with people who do and they're going to bid up the price of anything that doesn't have highly elastic supply. Health care, housing, and education are the ones creating problems. America got a great deal, but most Americans got a raw deal: costs went up, income didn't, misery ensued.
Pumped bonds allow (force, really) the government to run deficits (homework: what breaks if they don't? It happened in Clinton's term, you can go and check) and to some extent that distributes the money. There's the whole services narrative which held that the services sector would pump hard enough to backfill manufacturing, but it never did. The people who got the door slammed in their face are no longer convinced that the door is their path to prosperity and now they want to tear the whole thing down.
If you want to hear an actual economist talk about this, see "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
The fact that successive US governments choose to use their economic hegemony to pump assets rather than invest in their education and healthcare, or at least in their infrastructure, doesn't contradict the fact that it was a great gift, engineered since Bretton-Woods, confirmed at the Smithsonian institute and a few years later at the Kingston accords (and btw, had nothing to do with gold standard but the convertibility of the Dollar. The gold standard realistically ended in the 50s (died for the 5th time in the US alone), and for the 1st time, stayed dead).
True. We could have taxed and spent enough to spread the wealth around. We chose not to, and now the proverbial children who weren't embraced by the village are burning it down to feel its warmth.
I'm not against calling reserve currency status a privilege so long as you are crystal clear on the point that it was a privilege for America but a curse for most Americans.
An important caveat to #2. Rising populations can only be leveraged into more power if they can be channeled into import substition. Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.
> Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.
What does that mean? Seriously; I can't make sense of it.
Import substition is a process where domestic industry develops by adopting the processes of overseas industries contributing to imports, so that the country can import the raw materials and make the product, instead of importing the full product at the market price. Most surveys of macroeconomics reveal that it is integral and foundational to the development of most industrialised countries today, e.g. China.
The exporter countries contain smart people who may seek to suppress this process to maintain revenue flows. This prevents the development from happening.
Two examples:
1: the 'unequal treaties' between 19th century Japan and America prohibited certain kinds of tariffs and subsidies by Japan. This allowed westerners, prominently Americans, to maintain market share in Japan by product dumping.
2: in 18th and 19th century India various British offices at different times had policies of having their sepoys arrest textile workers and maim them by the forcible amputation of both thumbs, to preserve the market share of British textiles.
If you can't produce something domestically that takes away the need to import that thing, the nation cannot gain power.
> Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
If only there was a conflict somewhere with a perieved superpower, maybe a nuclear country or something that would be relatively easy to win without even entering into a direct altercation. Oh, wait!
America could’ve easily won the war in Ukraine by just ging away a bit more weapons, specifically long range missiles. It could even just tell European countries to give their long rhange missiles in exchange for a resupply for some plausible deniability.It could’ve been a bit more generous with intelligence.
Unfortunately, America elected Trump. A person who doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t directly concern him. If it doesn’t benefit (or hurt) him personally it might as well not exist. Which make it easy to sway his foreign policy. Russia is actively trying to buy him and he thinks it’s great. It’s going to be a very fast decline of American influence as more and more countries around the world will see that it takes very little to buy an american president, allegedly the most powerful person in the world. And if any petty dictator can buy him, what worth is his power?
Demographic stagnation? compared to who? everything is relative and I don’t think US demographics has it at a disadvantage over EU, China, Japan, South Korea, does it? So then who is left to take seriously as a competitor?
China has grown old before it grew rich. The past decade has been one of a collapsed houehold sector (and birth rate below the already gloomy concensus back in 2010), general deflation, and bright lights and conspicious technology achieved only through throwing government spending at ritzy projects - centrally planned growth and waste. Being unable to escape the domestic security agenda will forever neuter global aspiration, from currency to technology.
India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
Relative gaps are smaller, but the persistance of gap is never more entrenched than ever.
That is not a decline. It is however a Great Game, not played with nations but with ideology and where the US and China are quite aligned. That game is less visible until it is seen.
> India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
I've always said that if India got a unified national language they would become a nearly instant world power.
Imagine an India where English was mandated in every public school - and every child, regardless of caste (which officially doesn't exist...), attended school. English, because it's more internationally useful than Hindi, and doesn't have the same ethnological competition (Hindi vs Bengali vs Tamil vs <297 others>).
Then imagine that, now that all of India can actually speak to each other, they get their shit together, and build a truly functional national highway system. Top it off with a safe railway system, complete with modern trains. Enough trains that you don't have to ride on top. (OK, I'm starting to dream big.)
One generation later India is a dominant world power. Pakistan is completely fucked, sure, because Delhi will never get over their petty sibling hatred. But India can start power-brokering between all other nations.
The "centrally planned growth is hollow and doomed" narrative doesn't seem to fit China like it fit the USSR. Did the USSR ever make 80% of the stuff in your home?
As for making friends, the US empire is highly atypical in its "friendliness" and it's entirely plausible that its successor will revert to the mean.
Largely the US isn't losing control, it's giving it up willingly. For what reason, no one knows yet.
The America First agenda is predicated by isolationism. You have a demagogue with whom nobody is willing to say "no" and an army of self serving sycophants lined up to try and win favors. The political messaging is all built around zero sum language and arguments, and toughness is demonstrated by punitive measures taken against any allies deemed "weaker" than the U.S. (basically everyone). Those who know where this will lead are unwilling to speak up and the rest follow. Everyone involved seems to be in it for short-term transactional benefits, and nobody seems to acknowledge or care about what the long term outcomes will be for the country.
> Those who know where this will lead are unwilling to speak up and the rest follow.
They did speak up. And they lost the popular vote. Democracy is only as good as its voters. A country is only as good as its people. Replace good with productive/sane/not corrupt, etc.
If you do not get votes, it’s not the voters who failed, it is you.
If politicians got that through their heads, and started trying to convince voters on their own merit, instead of simply trash-talking their opponents and telling people they voted “wrong”, they would start to get things done again, and we could actually solve real problems.
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit
I'm not sure this is true anymore given the splitting of media and news sources. When everyone watched the same 3 news programs it was easier to speak to those people. It is very hard to penetrate the "other sides" messaging platforms.
> instead of simply trash-talking their opponents
This was the President's entire election platform (twice).
> we could actually solve real problems
If voters wanted the solve real problems, they would vote for people who present solutions to real problems. Instead, we vote for people who provide easy scapegoats and fake solutions, which ends up making things worse. Trump has the slimmest policy stance of any President ever elected.
Trump has a far-reaching policy stance. His thesis is that American success is due to Americans and what is distinctive about them, and our engagement with foreigners on the present terms is not good for America. That has implications for everything from immigration policy, to trade policy, military positions, to how to teach kids in schools. Closing the border, deporting all illegal immigrants, screening legal immigrants, abandoning unfounded foreign policy commitments, using tariffs as a tool of trade policy, shutting down USAID, pushing patriotic education, etc., are all concrete policies consistent with that thesis.
If you buy into liberal universalism, sure you don’t agree with the policy. If you think the only difference between an Iowan and a Bangladeshi is the need for sunscreen and external factors outside people’s control—you don’t see how the policy is a good one. But to say that there’s no policy there is absurd.
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit
A selfish voter will throw the world under the bus if it means they win something. An uneducated voter won't understand the full implications of their vote. A hateful voter will go down with the ship if this takes their enemies down too. What "merit"?
Look around, look at the last US presidential elections, those politicians were elected "on their own merit". Hate, bigotry, populism, treason, corruption. That "merit".
When voters vote for the person who baseless attacked an election (counts as treason in my book), and campaigned on aiding and abetting those who perpetrated treason against the country, it is the voters (and non voters) who failed.
Why? If you look at history you will quickly realize that voters vote pretty much like shareholders do. While not excluding every last other factor, democratic voters vote largely in their own short term economic interest. Trump convinced them that was where he was superior and was rewarded with the election.
If you like democracy ... then what's wrong with that?
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit, instead of simply trash-talking their opponents
That’s hard to claim to make right after a Trump victory—trashing their opponents has been the Republicans playbook my entire life, and it’s currently working quite well for them.
Yes, the Democratic Party was the one who "took the high road", and lost.
This line of reasoning is cute, but fact-free.
I don’t know if that’s meaningfully true. When a candidate lies and the information distribution industries are by and large just repeating the lies, on top of decades of voter suppression measures, can we say that the popular vote really represents what people want? I don’t think so. So yeah one candidate will win by a razor-thin margin but I don’t think that actually gives legitimacy to what is happening.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug. Many people's views are shaped by algorithms and established without any grounding in actual facts. The last election was largely decided based on affordability with a healthy dose of nostalgia for an economy that no longer exists. The democrats made a huge mistake running Harris without a real primary. Biden should have stepped down long before the election, yadda yadda yadda.
> Many people's views are shaped by algorithms and established without any grounding in actual facts
The facts are there, easily accessible for people to read or see. That they choose to ignore them is evidence of the problem with democracy. Whatever mistakes were made by the party that lost, their candidate was not the one with a (comparatively) long track record of fraud, treason, and overall lack of decorum.
Not only did they lose the popular vote, they lost it repeatedly. Although it was only a matter of degree at each step, Clinton was more isolationist than Bush and Dole. Bush was more isolationist than Gore and Kerry. Obama was more isolationist than McCain and Romney.
Trump was more isolationist than Clinton, Biden was more isolationist than first-term Trump and Trump beat Biden last year partially on the basis of becoming much more isolationist than his first term version, surpassing Biden.
I'd posit that it is trying to wrestle it back actually. It lost it when their industries went abroad. From a global perspective this is good because it makes peace more sustainable if the world is interlinked and interconnected. National interests being distributed all over. Alignment of incentives. The issue is that it is not without friction. People's interests don't align so flawlessly.
The knee-jerk reaction is protectionism but it is too late. The other parts of the world have caught up. And that is normal and sound. It rebalances the world. It is a new equilibrium. This is just the natural way for most closed systems where there is a gradient.
What is weird is that it is almost like watching a movie. Meaning that the current technological push into AI, energy and robotics is likely to spearhead us into a whole new kind of economics (post-money/post-work kind of). And probably requires to open the system (find new territory beyond the existing). The point is that it will probably offset the current protectionist trend.
Wondering how AI will affect governance...
I think the US is giving up control willingly and turning more isolationist. It has been building for some time but I do not thing it is forced. It is a deliberate policy shift turning away from trying to control and police the world. America is pushed in and on to other countries and societies that a retraction might be the best thing
I don't believe it's trying to give up control, the current US administration don't want to be the world police but still wants the control given by being the world police, both can't exist at the same time and some sort of reckoning will happen.
They're currently threatening to invade Venezuela!
Mind you, another consequence of the regime is that nobody knows what's real and what's keyfabe any more. They were also threatening to invade Canada, lost a colossal amount of goodwill as a result, and got bored and moved on.
The US is currently starting a war with Venezuela. You are ascribing coherence and deliberateness where I don’t see evidence for its presence.
I came to the comments to say exactly this. I think the reason is a combination of incompetence, ignorance, and greed.
The "world", implicit in your comment, is the liberal world order. This world order worked for America (ie Americans) until it became apparent that it did not, at least in a political and cultural sense (in a material sense it is of course still working perhaps even too well). The greatest champion of this world order, the EU bureaucratic class, views Americans' play for their sovereignty with bewilderment and casts it as renouncing its leadership in the world, yet leadership is not just blindly following a path to ruin but instead forging ahead down new and promising paths. In this sense the US is indeed still "leading" and it is the EU that stands firm in its intransigence and refuses to follow the leader. Yet it need not be this way and the EU very well could follow the US away from the excesses of hegemonic liberalism. There are signs of change in the air. This is politically interesting and the eventual outcome is not at all clear.
On the other hand, the emergence of China, India, and to a lesser extent Russia (as a puppet of the Chinese) upon the world stage as independent actors, out of the shadows of Western domination, is another way in which the US is "losing control" but this is much less politically interesting in the sense that it was an inevitable and expected outcome. There is nothing the US has done, is doing or could do that would diminish non-Western ambition and agitation for power.
Hegemonic liberalism is way, way, better than hegemonic illiberalism.
Hegemonic idealism is dangerous either way. We can pick and choose what works best.
It's because it's not worth the expense. Vanity is a hell of a drug, but it has its limits.
They'll only realize what they lost, when they lost it. When their influence all over the world crumbles away, because of disrespectful treatment of other nations, and negligence in maintaining good relations. The bad awakening comes, when most of the good relations are gone, and the people feel consequences domestically.
This sounds like vanity again. Oh noez, others think less of me.
A large part of the lifestyle Americans enjoy is owed to its control of the world.
How is that? Are we taking stuff at the point of a gun?
The benefits would seem to flow to those countries that would have been swallowed up without Pax Americana.
> How is that? Are we taking stuff at the point of a gun?
No, but the USA is getting a lot of stuff in exchange for $$ which it can print for basically free. Consumers in the USA have benefitted a lot from this, which partly compensated the fact that more and more of the pie is going to the richest instead of the average American.
Dollar holdings outside the US come to about $1 trillion. What you are talking about there are holdings of debt. Yes, US prosperity has been propped up by borrowing increasing amounts of money. This is not sustainable.
One can view Trump's tariff actions as preparatory for US debt default. This would crash the dollar and make imports much more expensive.
It’s not that it’s not worth the expense, it’s that we’re unable to continue funding global peace and prosperity ourselves. And we shouldn’t have to.
I don’t agree with Trump about much but he’s correct that the other liberal democracies have been more than happy to have us foot the bill for keeping the wolves at bay while looking down on us for doing it.
You have to consider how much it felt like progress for Europe to become less militaristic. The continent had been obliterated by war and then divided and filled with tanks during the cold war. For Europe, reducing military spending was seen as a welcome step away from the internal conflicts of the past. This is changing now, and while America may see this as a victory I find it hard to welcome headlines like “Germany to massively increase tank production” for all the negative historical echos.
I’d also be very surprised if US military expenditure decreased by a single cent as a result of increased spending by other NATO countries.
These are fair points and I get it, but the world of today is very different than the world of the early to mid 1900s. Lack of military is far from the only thing keeping Germany from attacking other European countries now. I feel reasonably confident that no matter how many tanks Germany builds, they won’t go rolling into France in my lifetime. What they may do is repel Russia (though even then, I am skeptical that any major nation will attack a NATO country.)
> It’s not that it’s not worth the expense, it’s that we’re unable to continue funding global peace and prosperity ourselves. And we shouldn’t have to.
That's just explaining why it's not worth the expense.
Well, it’s worth it, we just can’t.
Hasn't this been the Russian agenda for decades? I don't think it's a secret, or a fringe theory. They have worked on it long term, and seemingly finding success now.
I don't think China is against this change, but their agenda seems to be more focused on international trade and internal growth, rather than specific strategy against the US.
The EU is definitely not benefiting from it in the short term. While some argue it needs this change in the long term, it is difficult to imagine that the EU wants it to happen so arbitrarily and quickly.
Those holding any meaningful power in the US are either benefiting from this change, at least in the short term or personally, or oblivious to it, possibly also due to influence from the agents of change.
It's an opportunity for other states to gain influence. And in particular for Russia to advance their geopolitical ambitions, since this is from their playbook.
It would be in the interests of the United States to alter the course, and regain the influence already lost. The leaders seem to have chosen to ignore her interests, though.
America is, and always has been, an isolationist nation - behaving like an island nation even though it's not an island (although it might as well be, given it has only two neighbors of little consequence).
It was dragged into the first world war (despite strong public aversion) because J.P. Morgan Jr started lending money to Britain and France to buy American steel, thus setting in motion a cycle of investment and production protection that eventually required boots on the ground.
It was dragged into the second world war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (and Germany's subsequent declaration of war, as it was obligated to do under its treaty with Japan).
It protected Europe and SE Asia in the post-war years in order to contain communism, which it feared more than anything else. Once that threat subsided, there wasn't much reason for it to continue with its overseas footprint other than inertia and protecting important trade routes.
Gulf Wars I was to protect oil prices (and because they already had the equipment for war), and Gulf Wars II was to be seen to be doing something about 9/11.
Now that Trump is in power, America is performing its "great reset" (which was going to come eventually), where it becomes isolationist again, sticking to the Americas (reinvigorating the Monroe Doctrine), and leaving everyone else to their own devices.
those things are usually hard to discriminate
You cannot separate monstrously expensive calamities like Vietnam or Iraq from the military-industry complex that is the foundation for the U.S.’s role as the defender of the west. So many thousands of lives lost or ruined, trillions spent. To say nothing of the millions of foreign civilians killed and maimed. The American people are sick to death of it. Some politicians smartly harnessed that sentiment.
> The American people are sick to death of it. Some politicians smartly harnessed that sentiment.
Except that MAGA cheers on new wars. They prefer "ministry of the war", they like the threats to annex Canada and Greenland. They enjoy fishermen boats being destroyed and want to bomb Venezuela.
This is not about distaste toward foreign wars. This is about wanting more of them, wanting more torture and wanting more violence. This is about wanting to feel and appear more manly and getting there via more violence.
Why should we control the world? It’s very expensive running an empire, and all it has accomplished is getting people around the world to hate us. Do you know how much people in my home country hate Reagan and Nixon (who opposed our independence because of some stupid alliance with Pakistan against Russia)? Much more than they hate Trump.
From outside massive wealth extraction and exploitation of less powerful countries. Worked long enough, but cracks are starting to appear.
I think folks in my home country could at least understand wealth extraction. But what wealth has America extracted from Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iraq, etc? The Chinese got the oil contracts in Iraq.
What’s insane about America’s foreign policy is that it costs huge amounts of money, pisses off most of the third world, and doesn’t even seem to result in any flow of wealth to the U.S.
The Europeans want it both ways: they want the US to pay for and be responsible for policing the world, but to do it the way the Europeans want with them free to criticize the US and act morally superior the whole time. This act has become utterly tiresome.
> want the US to pay for and be responsible for policing the world
Not really convinced that it's that way round, that Europe actually wants much of this "policing" to be done at all rather than being dragged into it. Until Ukraine, which is the exact bit of world policing that Republicans no longer recognize as crime.
You're doing all of it right there.
You, a European, want to tell the US public how their resources are to be used, and when they don't agree with you then you act morally superior about it.
> You, a European, want to tell the US public how their resources are to be used, and when they don't agree with you then you act morally superior about it.
As an American, I can confidently say that we do the exact same thing from the other perspective.
It's my freedom of speech to be morally superior about it.
Not only that, which I agree with, but also consider the US demographics are extremely advantageous over other nations. There is a chance the US isn’t losing control but is pulling away because the rest of the world has increasingly less to offer it. The US is energy and food independent and with increased automation is on a path to industrial independence. As a small example, Chinese had thought they had the US on hook with rare earths, well it’s starting to look now like that threat led to Americans looking around for them and then discovering, oh wait, we do have them, let’s go dig them out, and in 5 years it’s possible the US will be rare earth independent. What happens when the US is increasingly independent and isolationist? do you really think that will be a problem for it? or instead a problem for others?
Israel is rising to fill the void, and there are many indications that this is by design, all along...
I think that's overestimating their influence and, crucially, their size. The country barely has a navy and is dependent on oil imports.
Do you forget their deal with the NSA? And their financial prowess?
I mean its hand has been forced. That's good imo, maybe my country will be able to regain its sovereignty after all.
Trump's project is to turn the US into a playground for oligarchs such as himself, like in Putin's Russia. It doesn't matter if the US becomes way poorer and weaker in the process. "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven".
Thiel and Musk want to decentralize as much as possible, and split everything into small autonomies, so they can pit different jurisdictions against each other, and pressure/manipulate them. That's fairly sure. The goal has never been revealed, but one can assume it is not because it hurts their interests.
I'm not sure anyone really is debating if the US is losing its control, I feel that's a given - I'd say much quicker recently than before, but still happening.
I'm personally worried who takes over - none of the other parties vying for power instil even the vaguest sense of wanting to maintain the status quo. I feel fairly malicious authoritarianism and corruption will be observed in our own countries within this century (if that matters to you, depends on your age I suppose).
Reality is that the US doesn’t want control of the world. Why do we want the blame for the world’s problems. Let the world take care of their own problems.
https://archive.ph/CcFhs
Thank you. This is what I was looking for.
"The Iraq War, launched in 2003 – resulting in over 100,000 deaths"
Isn't this an extreme low-ball estimate?
The Lancet had numbers around 600k, but that included the wider context of deaths due to the temporary collapse of society, medical services, electricity supplies, ongoing violence and insurgency, and so on.
The long consequence of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions was providing Russia with a pretext for its own interventions, from the various caucasus states to Syria to Ukraine.
Yes, it's on the low end of estimates and corresponds most closely to the US military's Iraq war logs that were leaked by Wikileaks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab...
Still, "over 100,000" is technically correct if it's more than 100,000. Since this subject isn't the main point of the article and the Iraq war is generally acknowledged to have been disastrous, I suppose he chose a safe figure so as not to derail the article with disputed estimates at the outset.
Indeed it is. Madeline Albright admitted in an interview that at least 500,000 children died but "it was worth it."
The total toll must have been much higher.
[0]https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/27/im-iraqi-and-i...
Yes, it is a very low-ball estimate. The more accurate estimate is that Iraq lost 5% of its population, and in many areas, Iraq continues to lose babies born with birth defects due to the use of depleted uranium.
https://psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf
Note that this report was filed in 2010, and the fatalities have continued since then.
There's a pretty famous website that tracks Iraqi civilian deaths:
as of todayhttps://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
Not really, it’s the lower end of what we can be confident about from direct evidence per things like the Iraq body count project. There are statistical estimates that are higher but they have very large error bars. Over 100k is completely defendable and plenty high that any reasonable person should be horrified by it!
Framing this as the US “losing control” misses one of the points i.e what’s actually happening in energy sector. Oil worked as a lever of power precisely because it was scarce, centralised, and geopolitically choke-pointed. Renewables will flip that model. Sun and wind don’t care about borders, navies, or petrodollars.
Well you can’t power fighter jets or tanks on renewables yet so there’s still that.
But I think this past year really changed the direction of the US and to a lesser extent the EU with respect to oil and gas versus renewables.
As the US has realized at the institutional level that China has secured a very strong position on refining rare earth materials into batteries and other green technology it is doubling down on oil and gas as the energy choice for the foreseeable future, climate change be damned. Not that China ever really cared about the climate, they just, for good reasons, wanted an alternative energy production source because even if they seized Taiwan the US Navy can bring oil and gas imports to near 0. Pipelines from Russia are sitting ducks too, so not much reprieve there.
US is putting $40 billion into Al Udeid and signing AI deals with the Middle East powers, and is close enough on a deal to legitimize Israel. Add Venezuela. You can see where this is going.
The EU politically wants to switch to green tech but it’s facing a problem which is doing so will result in effective deindustrialization since they would wind up buying most equipment from China including cars. The EU either did or is about to shelve the requirement that cars are EVs by 2035. I expect this to be fully repealed. While the EU likes to not mince words about US tariffs, they’re ultimately heading in the same direction. China had a $1 trillion export surplus. If the US isn’t buying their subsidized products who is? Brazil? Right now it’s Europe, but do you think Germany will let its manufacturing sector go away? If so I have a ticket to sell you to the next AfD rally. The product dumping from China is going to be too much and in a judo move the west will be able to use China’s manufacturing capacity against it. Nice factories you have there, too bad nobody buys anything you make (relatively speaking).
So the EU is sitting between two oil and gas energy superpowers oh and the Middle East is just around the bend. Politically they’ll still work on climate change initiatives but as push comes to shove, and with China overplaying its hand with export controls on rare earth materials and creating more panic in Brussels (never mind China's support for Russia invading Ukraine), the EU will generally maintain an oil and gas industrial direction, if I were to guess.
I’m not pro gas/oil or anything like that. Drive an EV and love it. But that’s my fun armchair take on what’s going on here.
Thank god. I don't understand how we, as in humanity, allow a single country to be "world police". Seriously, no one asked for it.
In 1944 huge numbers of people, from a large number of countries, asked for a hegemonic world police stemming from a sole hegemon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference
We don't know much of it anymore with the decline of Europe, but for several centuries the dominant geopolitical goal of most countries on Earth was to defend themselves from European invasion. Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
> Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.
Germany only started the second and all parties in the first had some prior experience with conducting a genocide.
Diplomacy before the "world police" era involved a lot more war than you might be willing to stomach.
You can say this but the people who need to hear it won’t listen. They lack the perspective of actually reading history to understand the scale at which people were killed before the world police era.
But even reading history isn’t enough. I think we’re fundamentally not equipped to understand what a large number of deaths actually looks and feels like. 10 deaths happening in our vicinity is an unbearable tragedy. 1 million deaths is just a number. So folks are struck by a nostalgia for a time when humans killed each other by the millions.
In some ways they remind me of the people who long for the days before vaccines eliminated a bunch of diseases.
Allow? It just happens, and when you're the weaker part in the equation, there's not much you can do against it. Where Russia and the USA give up power, China will grab it.
If it’s not the US, it will be China (or the EU if they’re up for it). The main question is how much chaos will there be during the interim.
The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.
(IMO there has actually been a retreat from China trying to do propaganda "please like us" adventures overseas in the past few years. Peaked round about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_(film) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin - second highest grossing film worldwide of 2021! For a Korean War movie?!)
100%. They should just step aside and let all those theocratic shit holes arm them selves with more nuclear weapons and wipe each other out. Problem sorted.
Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.
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Americans cant have their cake and eat it too. The allies are quietly leaving the room and forming alliances without Americans.
Any specific examples you can speak to? Which countries? Who are they allying with?
I'll bite. What are those new alliances of significance? I mean real significance in military means, or trade, or industry?
https://archive.ph/WAMWI
Tom Clancy used this as the catalyst for one of his many techno war stories - something along the lines of “if you piss off your creditors they won’t give you any more money”. Think it was bear and dragon, the China Russia war. Debt is sold, and the purchaser’s willingness to buy sets the interest rate. And they don’t like uncertainty.
The us detached itself from the world after ww I and it seems to want to do it again. The tariffs might recapitulate the 30’s but that decade didn’t turn out well at all. So I hope the historical behaviour breaks down first.
There's a very real chance the USA will get lucky and find a new means of economic domination through its AI companies and the looming space build-out. Its self-destructiveness right now, flouting longstanding alliances and truckling to its enemies, would ruin it in any other moment in its history. But in these unusual circumstances, it might not matter.
Nah, AI is a massive money pit, and Starship has proven to be a dead end. The real tech revolutions of the moment are in energy production and storage and health care advances like mRNA and GLP-1. The US is actively self-sabotaging on both energy and health care at the moment.
In what specific way is the United States self-sabotaging on GLP-1s? Is the current Republican administration against them? I’m confused.
They are decimating academic research into health care tech in general. There’s been mixed messaging from the administration on GLP-1s (although if they keep pushing on the eugenics theme, they will solidify as anti on those as well soon enough) but that wasn’t really the point. I named mRNA and GLP-1s as two examples of modern tech revolutions that are not AI or space-related. Those are the modern tech breakthroughs, not AI and definitely not space launches. (I went back and edited the post to make it clearer what I meant by “both”).
Unlikely.
Silicon Valley is great for innovating new "intellectual property," but they don't manufacture any real products any more.
China has entire cities which not only can develop IP, but they have the entire ecosystem collocated.
Catching up with them will be expensive and will need focus. Focus is not something the current president seems to excel in.
Before WWII America was content with it's own company and business. Then we found ourselves holding the big stick and everybody looking to us to solve their problems.
If we go back to being peers, so what? Rich people who've capitalized on the favored position will cry and complain (and spend billions trying to keep control) but the world will go on.
I read somewhere that the sentiment in Europe after WW2 was that Soviet had a bigger impact than the US. But narrative has shifted over time. I'd guess Churchill saw the US as a last resort, not the goto fixer. Happy to be corrected by someone who knows history, thouogh.
It seems the US wasn't in the war until two years after it started, and was drawn in due to Pearl Harbor. Even the protection of Atlantic trade was handled by the UK and Canada until 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...
The US will try to avoid this by privatizing the Fed through stablecoins, but I predict this backfiring massively. Private creation of money will likely tank the world economy worse than 2008 and in the rubble a new order will form without the US at the center.
Lol, the US deficits are what sustains the production of demand stricken surplus economies. Everything that has happened is the ultimate result of surplus countries doubling down on mercantalist investment than growing internal consumption.
If a rebalancing were to occur, it is the surplus countries hit with mass unemployment that will hurt much more than deficit countries that can move production back at a much quicker pace. The author is making the mistake of viewing tings from a supply side perspective when given excessive reliance on investment and high savings the world is constrained by chronic underconsumption.
It is difficult to see how in an environmental crisis the problem is under consumption of finite resources.
So, America is great at consuming, but if ratio of debt to GDP continues to grow, it's unsustainable for the U.S. Sure, China needs the U.S. to be a major customer, but it doesn't seem like things can continue as they're going now, especially as the willingness to ignore the extremity of the debt is largely based on good faith and credibility.
It's a trade imbalance. They send stuff out, they get nothing in. They could just continue to produce the stuff, then just set it on fire. No mass unemployment. Problem solved, no? It seems easier to do than to build an industrial base again.
Yeah, try building a product nobody wants and let's see how long you stay solvent... Brush up on macroeconomics first maybe
That's why I said "set it on fire". This whole economic speak is just a cover to avoid saying that trade imbalance is a fealty payment to the US. It's ridiculous to say that a country that was previously sending out stuff for free to the US would suddenly have a big existential problem when they suddenly don't have to do it anymore. They will have other problems due to a changing world order, that's for sure, but figuring out what to do with that production won't be one of them.
>for free to the US would suddenly have a big existential problem
No they're not sending it for free, the US dollars and IOUs are real and ultimately translated into maintaining the salaries of millions of factory workers. Thats the whole point of export driven growth. Trying to abstract away the balance sheet as imaginary is not how real economics works.
The CCP, the IMF, World Bank, BIS, etc certainly aren't thinking like you are, growing consumption has proven extremely difficult in practice over growing industry.
Why assume rebalancing is mainly a demand problem but not a (slow) supply-constrained adjustment driven by demographics, capital stickiness, and institutional limits (in deficit countries)?
Read Michael Pettis
"In movies, the United States saves the world. In real life, the world has to be saved from the United States."
America never had control. What it did have was the natural, organic attention of a very large portion of the world population, just after the end of WW2. Anericans were physicaly bigger, stronger, better educated, cool and casual about all the gadgets,tools,and toys they tossed around, and the media evidence of the goings on in the US, painted a come on over and join the fun immage that many fought to get any piece they could. Thats, over.
This article reads as if this person seriously believes that ... Europe and European trade (strangely not the US, but okay) is the only thing preventing just and utopian outcomes across the entire world.
It's also a useless discussion: whatever faith you may have in European progressive/socialist parties, they are not willing to give up the prosperity they have. They want fairness in addition to MORE than what the European people already have. If the demand is to give up more than 100% of European economic growth, you will not find them allies. Oh and there's the problem that they've got maybe 10-20% of the vote, and all other parties are not nearly as willing to help.
So these utopian outcomes won't happen. What will?
What these people never discuss is who will replace the US? Because the only real contender is the Chinese CCP. That will, to put it mildly, not be good. Frankly, the absurdly huge distinction between US hegemony and all others, whether you mean British hegemony, Ottoman hegemony or even going as far back as Roman or Greek hegemony is that every hegemon with the sole exception of the US conquered and murdered their empire together using slave armies (to their credit, some European powers, not all but some, at least refused to use slavery)
You might say "but China has promised not to ...". Ok, let's go there. Let's say China doesn't actually go ahead and try to conquer 1/3 of the world. Or, at least somewhat realistically, let's say they take over Taiwan and the Phillippines and stop there. Or let's even say they add Indonesia and Malaysia maybe even Japan to that ... and then stop.
Note: the CCP ideology is authoritarian and racist. We can perhaps argue if they'll go as far as the Nazi's did in the past century, but I don't understand how any rational person can argue it isn't at least going to go quite a ways in that direction. But if you don't live there ... who cares right? Also: if you live in these countries: get the fuck out of there (because the EU is definitely going to refuse to pay for the US securing the seas)
Or you might say you actually believe the CCP, and let's say that you're right to do so. The result is that the US withdraws from the global oceans ... and that's the end of that. What will happen?
The problem is "multilateralism" was demonstrated EXACTLY what it was at the end of WW1, at the real ending of Colonialism (I mean that yes, colonies endured a bit more, but the economic domination of European powers ended there. Their last big hurrah. At that point European Colonial powers had enjoyed a large surplus but right there and then, it was gone, and that's the point where the decline became totally inevitable, and exactly what happened became a certainty: a very large, protracted, slow economic decline. We might also mention what people chose to do in response to this happening: WW2)
This is not theory. This is history. This is what actually happened. Any rational person should at least consider it might happen again.
But let's discuss what will happen to us. Because that's what matters, right?
First, perhaps most obvious, piracy will return, at the very least to East and West African coasts, maybe even the African Mediterranean coast, and to Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as parts of India. None of the countries there have any hope in hell of securing their own coast, never mind international waters. Quite a few will participate in piracy like they did before. As a result international trade will largely collapse.
Maybe EU-US trade will survive, and maybe even US-China trade. But EU-Africa? EU-China? It will at the very least become orders of magnitude more expensive.
Second, a large list of countries (a growing list, I might add) that are at each other's throats but are currently being stopped either directly by the US army, or by US weapons and diplomacy, and even some being restained by EU weapons and diplomacy, will burst out into ethnic violence. We'll have 10, or god forbid 50, Sudan-style conflicts. There is even such a conflict brewing in the EU: Kosovo - Serbia ... nothing is solved there and while people aren't currently at each other's throats, they're not far from it (and if you're truly honest, the problem is Kosovo. Or put it this way. If you erased Serbia from the map, the Serbia-Kosovo conflict would continue. If you erased Kosovo from the map, the conflict would stop). Greece and Turkey ... they're perhaps further from war than Kosovo, but I would still argue that left to their own devices, another war there is inevitable. India-Pakistan. China vs essentially everyone. And so on and so forth.
The problem is "multilateralism" was demonstrated EXACTLY what it was just after WW1. There is a large group of countries that when restraints on their actions are released ... the result is a large set of genocides all occurring at once. I'm a pessimist, but let's be honest: this will simply happen again.
That is at the very least a big risk of what Piketty and other calls "justice". And the problem is simple: for at least the next few years it is extremely in the EU's and EU member states' financial interest to bring us closer to this scenario. Piketty is arguing for social justice, and he should: we need that. We need that influence, because other forces are looking to destroy the rights we currently enjoy. But they'll never talk their way into more than minority influence in "the West".
Perhaps Trump and MAGA are just extreme and cruel fatalists who realize what is coming now: a large, protracted, worldwide economic crisis, caused by Europe and China, followed by WW3. Perhaps they simply think the US will win WW3 and the world will go back to 1950. Perhaps their theory is that the best idea for the US is for WW3 to start before this economic crisis really hits the US, that the only thing they need to do is to withdraw the US army, weapons and diplomacy currently standing between a great many adversaries.
Hell, that may be exactly what happens. But this is both giving these people way too much credit AND ignores that of course WW3 will make the world suck pretty fucking bad for a long time.
The real problem is not the US no longer being the influence it was for "the west" (to simplify). The real problem is, what takes the space the US previously filled and still partly/mostly fills.
The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation. If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state. It might even get worse than the WW2, since the US military is probably more superior compared to almost any other nation on the planet, than Nazi Germany's military was, and already has presence in basically all parts of the world, plus the logistics.
So lets hope that the current period of idiocy ends soon, and we can get back to peaceful international relations, with a sane US leadership, instead of one, that seemingly seeks to tear down as many bridges as possible. However, we are only in year one (!) of the current US government, so we will probably have to hold out breath a little longer, and Europe will have to rely on itself.
I agree with your first point. The alternatives are a lot worse. its not going to be Russia (its not got the economy to do it) but China.
> The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.
And in most of Asia too where China is a very immediate threat.
> Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state
That seems alarmist to me. Nationalist policies and rhetoric (and I have lived with worse than the US) do not lead to fascism that easily, especially when you have strong institutions.
I have concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the current admin, but I think the word "fascism" should be avoided in these types of discussions, as it's such a loaded term that it's hard to know exactly what's implied. The main risks I see are the erosion of democratic norms (weakening of core institutions) and a reduced access to due process, particularly for non-citizens. You see this in ICE deportations to offshore prisons without any clear indication of what happens next. Threats to invade territories for which the U.S. has no basis for occupation (i.e., Greenland and Panama) further raise concerns. As well as use of federal force against protesters, targeting dissent and media pressure (threats to revoke broadcast licenses), surveillance and visa revocations used for political gains, and purges and restructuring of law enforcement. The list could go on, but the threats are real.
How are they NOT fascists? They match pretty much any definition of that word.
It is easy to know what is implied. Issue is emotional - people do not want to admit that yes, these are fascists.
Fascism is historically loaded and collapses debate. It's a binary label. Speaking in absolutes makes it harder to have productive conversations.
Both political far sides are rocking the boat, not just rights even tho they are in power. It's both of them together and the dysfunction of their inability to compromise or reason on anything. Moderates or centrist voters in the USA have no representation and haven't for some time.
No representation, huh? Is that why Obama was in office for two terms and Biden was in for one?
Frankly, bullshit. The center is ruling the democratic party, actively suppressing left and frequently tacitly enabling the far right. Meanwhile, left barely does anything. They are not rocking the boat, they are powerless.
Both Obama and Biden were center choice. The whole democratic party is ruled by centrist politicians and ideology which is why they cant oppose the increasingly radical republicans all that effectively.
>The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.
>If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Did you seriously write these two sentences one right next to the other and not see the hypocrisy in what you're saying?
It's pointless trying to educate the wilfully ignorant.