The benefits would seem to flow to those countries that would have been swallowed up without Pax Americana.
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.
One can view Trump's tariff actions as preparatory for US debt default. This would crash the dollar and make imports much more expensive.
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.
That's just explaining why it's not worth the expense.
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.
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.
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.
As an American, I can confidently say that we do the exact same thing from the other perspective.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Also more points how his views are contradictory from my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158110
If you like democracy ... then what's wrong with that?
Claiming that the two choices are equally bad is the “trap”, when actions clearly indicate one is worse for democracy, and societal trust in general.
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".
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.
This line of reasoning is cute, but fact-free.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
It is easy to know what is implied. Issue is emotional - people do not want to admit that yes, these are fascists.
> 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 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 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.
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.
Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.
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?
Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.
(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?!)
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.
What does that mean? Seriously; I can't make sense of it.
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.
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.
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’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.
India is similar to the USSR in that it buckets disparate languages, religions and cultures into a single nation with inevitable separatist tendencies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Isn't this an extreme low-ball estimate?
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.
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.
Documented civilian deaths from violence
187,499 – 211,046
Further analysis of the WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs
may add 10,000 civilian deaths.
The total toll must have been much higher.
[0]https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/27/im-iraqi-and-i...
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.
Do you have any examples?
This is what I've seen:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-eli-lilly-novo-nordisk...
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.""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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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?
jleyank•8h ago
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.