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.
There is an unspoken alternative for dealing with being out-populated by rival states. That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war. These methods have been used by the Soviet Union in Ukraine, Germany/USSR in Poland, Imperial Japan in China, Belgium in the Congo. It continues to happen today, most openly in Palestine.
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.
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?
High skill demographics. PRC is going mint more STEM in next 20 years than US is set to increase population, all sources total. That's more or less locked in from past 20 years of births. In relative terms, PRC is going to have OCED combined in just STEM, excluding all the other technical skilled workforce. It's the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history, in country with superstructure to allocate talent. All the rapid catchup PRC made in last 10 years was built on fraction of highend human capita they will have.
That PRC talent cohort are going to stick around 2060/70/80s. Past that, it's hard to extrapolate, but ~50 years with that much talent advantage can build very durable advantages. Meanwhile the population PRC sheds is overwhelmingly going to be the old, undereducated etc, think 200m rural farmers left behind by modernization that bluntly is net drag on economy/system, but they're also relatively cheap to caretake vs US silver obligations.
Short of AGI, US is not a serious competitor vs PRC in terms of skilled demographics that sustains strategic hegemonic advantages, at least not in our lifetimes.
> 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?
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.
India is divided by its caste system and religion to a much greater extent than it is by language. Successive governments have put far more effort into dominating its Muslim and Sikh minorities than implementing a high - quality universal education system that harmonizes a base level of skill across the population. The most educated state in the country is the Communist-run Kerala where the people speak Malayalam.
India is similar to the USSR in that it buckets disparate languages, religions and cultures into a single nation with inevitable separatist tendencies.
Isn’t English the de facto national language in India? Everyone who can afford to, teaches their kid English.
India’s big problem is lack of natural resources, and lack of clear hierarchy to manage the limited resources (including choosing to screw some people for the greater good). China had the same issue of enormous population relative to natural resources, but it had the clear hierarchy to be able to execute.
Natural resources aren't that important anymore. Look at Singapore with essentially no natural resources, but a high standard of living for example. And the U.S. has strong natural resources, but they represent a fairly small portion of the economy.
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.
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.
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.
I think it is fair to say everyone has failed on every level and every side to some extent. This is classic tragedy of the commons, where the commons is the seemingly unlimited power and wealth of America that everyone wanted to cash in on and externalize the costs.
> 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.
> 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.
When he says success or about “you gonna be so rich you’re not gonna believe it” - he talks about himself and his billionaire buddies not you. His only policy stance is to surround himself with yes-men and enrich himself through blatant open corruption. Anything is for sale: crimes, pardons, citizenships, you name it - directly contradicting your thesis.
Also I truly believe he hates half of Americans because of wrong-think. But he will deal with them after he deals with brown people.
> Closing the border, deporting all illegal immigrants
Lets deport farmers, construction employers and business owners who “import” such workforce to essentially slave for them.
How such employers are not deeply scrutinised by public and politicians - I will never understand.
> abandoning unfounded foreign policy commitments
Abandon Ukraine, but financing Israel, Argentina, attempt truly unfounded war against Venezuela (reasons change every other day and contradict other policies like pardoning Hernandez on drug trafficking but threatening Maduro with war for same reason in the same week).
> using tariffs as a tool of trade policy
Sure if it’s deliberate, calculated and strategic. China laughs at your soy bean farmers. Coffee exporters give zero damns about your tarrifs. Canadians laugh at you when you’ll wait 30 years to grow your lumber. And on top of all of it - policy is so chaotic (who said men are not emotional?) - no actual long term commitment from industries will happen.
> His thesis is that American success is due to Americans and what is distinctive about them
Can you please link to when and where he said this? Because it raises a question of when someone becomes "American." Trump's grandfather was born in Germany, so when did the Trumps become American?
> all concrete policies consistent with that thesis
Those were concrete policies from Project 2025, which Trump directly said was not related to his campaign or administration. We know he was clearly and directly lying, but with someone so willing to lie about everything, I'm not sure how you can prescribe some type of unifying thesis about his policy stances or actions. It feels like you are trying to paste your ideas onto his actions.
Thanks for pointing out the irony that these folks refuse to engage with: that they (we) are all here as the result of immigration. It's about as plainly hypocritical that they get. Their immigrants were fine, of course..
I wish the folks who are trying to cut off all immigration (and open channels to de-naturalize American citizens) could appreciate this more. Because it exposes their thesis at its core: some Americans are better than others, and these people know which are which. Where do I as an American fall into these categories of theirs?
Of course some immigrants are more American than other immigrants! You can tell who those are by whose ancient legal documents are incorporated into the U.S. constitution and laws and whose aren't.
If you think those principles have worked pretty well, then the question is how to maintain the culture that produced this successful society. This is something Silicon Valley folks should easily understand! You guys screen people endlessly for "fit." Would you want a large number of folks who grew up in IBM's corporate culture to come work at your startup?
A thesis doesn't have to be published in some academic paper. It's just a basic set of ideas or assumptions underlying a worldview. Trump has a very distinctive set of beliefs underlying his policies, and he talks about them at length if you listen to his speeches, his interviews, etc. Just because he expresses them at a 6th grade level doesn't mean that there aren't ideas.
> Those were concrete policies from Project 2025, which Trump directly said was not related to his campaign or administration.
This is such a weird angle. Democrats focused on Project 2025 because of the abortion stuff. Trump stated that Project 2025 wasn't related to his campaign because it wasn't. Heritage doesn't speak for Trump--especially about abortion. That is not inconsistent with the fact that Trump and Heritage agree on 80% of everything else.
> 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.
You fell into the same trap: You only provided an argument for WHY NOT to vote for Trump. Instead, provide an argument for why to vote for somebody else.
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.
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 US is pulling back from NATO and simultaneously re-asserting dominance in the Americas, i.e., the Munroe Doctrine, which has suffered setbacks in recent decades.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes "we" can, but the difference is that in a liberal order "we" at least ostensibly represents the people, and in an illiberal order, "we" represents a naked power grab by whichever elite group currently has the reigns.
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.
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.
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 remember you trying to defend the tariff policies as a defense against China. Do you still honestly perceive China as a threat to American power and livelihood? If so, how do you square this stance of conceding global power to China at the same time? At the very least, surely you can see the importance of global supply chains to American manufacturing that you want to protect?
I'm asking these questions specifically based on your arguments in the past. I don't understand how you can believe America can thrive in a world without allies and trade partners.
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?
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!
Not sure what 23434dsf means but America's traditional allies like Canada, Europe and maybe post WW2 Japan are forming an alliance against Russia's invasion into Europe, while Trump's position seems to be it's ok for Russia to take land by force as long as he/the US get a cut of the plunder.
Are you suggesting that Canada, Europe (I take it you mean the EU and UK), and perhaps Japan are forming a separate alliance without the United States because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Can you link to anything specific? Have there been alliance talks? What are the new alliances being formed called? I know there have been some arms purchases and agreements but that wouldn't have anything to do with forming an alliance separate from what already exists today.
Nothing of note, yet. Like most US corporations, they're holding off on implementing real changes to see if we the people choose to continue on this self-destructive course after He leaves office.
In some ways self-destructive, in other ways not. President Biden restricted early use of long range weapons to strike Russia - that was self-destructive too.
Really, what exactly are folks asking the United States to do here? Give more money or weapons? Sure we could give even more, I support that. I'm quite hawkish on both Russia and China.
But I don't think that giving more money and arms tips the scales enough for Ukraine to force Russia out. So where does that leave us? The EU isn't going to do anything militarily about the situation. As the PM of Poland said, 600+ million Europeans are asking 300+ million Americans to defend them from 180+ million Russians. Something doesn't seem right. That doesn't mean the Trump Administration has handled this well. I'll give them to the extent that it is genuine that pursuing peace, if possible, is what we should do. But it also doesn't mean that all of the political grandstanding and TRUMP MAN BAD is getting us anywhere either. Has he handled our alliances poorly, yea I think so. Are our allies leaving and forming new alliances? No, not in any material sense. Does Europe need to step up and spend to defend itself, absolutely. It also doesn't mean President Trump needs to be an asshat either. Some ways self-destructive, other ways not.
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.
A "world police" are useful to almost everyone (nations involved in international trade) for situations such as piracy or border enforcement on the high seas. OTOH being such police is a costly endeavor so most nations will do their best to avoid investment and get a free ride.
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.
It sort of happens because in the absence of a proper world police, when one county tries to steal another countries stuff/land it falls to the most powerful decent country available to stop it. See Hitler sending tanks into Ukraine and Putin sending tanks into Ukraine.
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.
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).
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.
The top 8 are American and 17 of the top 20. Seven of the top 8 are into AI. I'm not convinced it's going nowhere. Even if AI on it's own isn't profitable, companies like Nvidia, Apple and Google are doing fine.
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”).
Wegovy and Zepbound have not been covered by Medicare for weight loss, “and they’ve only rarely been covered by Medicaid,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “They’ve often cost consumers more than $1,000 per month, some a lot more than that. ... That ends starting today."
"“This is the biggest drug in our country, and that’s why this is the most important of all the [most favored nation] announcements we’ve made,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during the briefing. “This is going to have the biggest impact on the American people. All Americans, even those who are not on Medicaid, Medicare, are going to be able to get the same price for their drugs, for their GLP-1s.""
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.
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.
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.
That "consumption" is such a difficult thing to do is a preposterous idea, since you can always set things on fire. These theories are all make believe.
I mean, what makes american so special in their ability to consume? An african can watch football on their 54" TV just as well as an american. Just ship this crap there instead of in the US if you're so concerned about consuming it.
It's trade imbalance! You ship stuff, and the IOUs you get in return are never claimed. It's no better than shipping stuff in Africa and getting Zimbabwean money in return. Everyone knows that it can't be claimed for anything tangible, except from other countries who also owe fealty to the US and are forced to give this currency value. If everyone "asked" for something in return of those IOUs from the US itself, they'd get nothing of tangible value in return. These IOUs only have value insofar as the US is the world police.
>That "consumption" is such a difficult thing to do is a preposterous idea, since you can always set things on fire. These theories are all make believe.
Well if you believe so you can go present your findings to policymakers or the CCP rather than in internet forum comments. They would be VERY interested to know what revolutionary insights you have that hundreds of economists are unable to solve.
Propaganda is supposed to be for the proles. Whatever those bureaucrats say is not the candid truth, that should be obvious to anybody. Once the elite begins absorbing it at its first level of speech, it's a sure sign that the nation is in decline.
We don't refer to the same problem. This problem you're referring to is not about finding those people who have the ability, so rare among non-american people, to consume stuff. It's about ramping up production while at the same time paying tribute to the US. This is, indeed, a difficult problem to solve and no doubts requires the best minds of the economic academia world.
However, the nature of the problem changes once the US stops being the world police. The problem becomes figuring out what's the pecking order now.
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)?
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.
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.
It is no more historically loaded them any other name for a movement or a political philosophy. The debate collapses because people refuse to name things what they actually are. Not just with refusal to engage with the word fascism. There is this persistent tendency to euphemism away everything going on the right, to sane wash, to make it sounds nicer.
> Speaking in absolutes makes it harder to have productive conversations.
We lack productive conversations due to pressure to not call things what they are. The problem is not that fascism is loaded word. The problem is that when we use it, it becomes harder to pretend and equally blame imaginary both sides.
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.
>"Meanwhile, left barely does anything. They are not rocking the boat, they are powerless."<
The left's judicial branch is very active: they sue every chance they get. And since they've diligently packed the court systems for decades, and since population centers that are predominantly Democratic are usually the locations for filing significant legal issues, i.e., they have left-leaning populations, therefore left-leaning juries and leftist judges, they usually get what they sue for.
Maybe someday we'll be able to look at Epstein's mail or Clinton's e-mails even.
What are you talking about here. It was right wing who packed the courts - to the point the bias is blatant and obvious. They are not even trying to pretend they are impartial.
The "every accusation is an admission" thing is truly right with right wingers like you.
> Maybe someday we'll be able to look at Epstein's mail or Clinton's e-mails even.
Who was blocking the release? Trump. Trump was blocking the release.
>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?
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.
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