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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 bein...
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.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
Europe could be relevant again if it only embraced China and gave NATO the finger.
Isn't this an extreme low-ball estimate?
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.
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 bein...
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).
Because the US was complicit in creating many of them
I'm aware of Le Monde, but didn't they previously use a different domain?