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Comment by qsdevacc | Hacker News Reader

I find it laughable that you completely disregarded USA as one of the other "aggressive, belligerent" countries out there...

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Actually this is debatable. The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to and nobody would oppose them. Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent. The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.

Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent

I wonder what kinds of things history will be saying about the United States in 200 years, a nation who probably didn't take the brutish British approach to invasion, but has tripwire forces-I mean "installations" dotted all over everyone else's back yards instead.

Considering how NATO, The Gulf Countries, China and Russia are behaving, seems that in 200 years we will be still learning how to build the wheel again. If were are lucky.

Gratitude, I hope.

Without the US, the world would be a sh*tshow. The tripwire bases prevent the likes of Russia putting its paws on Eastern Europe or China snatching more islands they claim as there own.

Back when the Serbs were genociding their Muslim citizens, Europe was inept while the US saved the day, as usual.

The US enjoys the status quo - most military interventions are to maintain it.

The US has no problem arming and training SA who is committing genocide in Yemen as we speak.

I am not a big fan of current US policy, but definitely agree that our presence is a stabilizing factor in the world geo politics. Take the US out of the equation and there would like be a huge imbalance. The UK and other European countries are but a shadow of their past... At least militarily.

The USA should never be out of the equation. Nor should Europe, China or Russia.

All the actors are needed for a multi-polar world.

What everyone needs is for all of them to stop waging proxy wars, grabbing international waters and deploying nukes around each other.

  US saved the day

I suspect that the Croats and Bosnians would consider that an exaggeration.

> Since they are not doing so

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

Well they've done it, remember when they took half Mexico?

Yeah, the us invaded mexico in the 1800s and 1900s, and murdered millions of native americans, and uncountable lynching against black people.

Mexico came a long time ago, we aren't doing stuff like that anymore. Except when we invade small countries like panama, that we still do.

> we aren't doing stuff like that anymore.

The US still does it via corporate resource extraction and puppet regimes.

You're setting a high bar for belligerence. The US is diplomatically & militarily sophisticated enough that it frequently exercises rational restraint. It also is an admirably open society, undergoing strategic policy shifts as internal arguments get won and lost.

But no-one (for other than ideological purposes) ever mistook the US for a fundamentally peaceable nation (internally or externally).

Well said.

Further more, US is so scary they often don't need to do anything. The fact that they make their will known suffices to further their political goals.

War is an extension of politics.

> nobody would oppose them

Except the local militias that would inevitably form, and would cause considerable losses on the US side, leading to poor public appetite for war

See: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan

> The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to and nobody would oppose them.

This is false. Have you heard of the korean war or the vietnam war? Or the afghanistan/iraqi war? There are ( and have been ) powers that opposed the US ( sometimes successfully ). Look at current day syria.

> Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent.

What? We have been in a state of perpetual aggressive war ever since ww2 ( frankly since the american revolution war if we are being honest ).

> The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.

It may or may not have been worse. But being belligerent isn't a relative matter of comparison. It's a matter of state. It's like being pregnant. You are pregnant or you are not.

because we don't have to. USA enjoys global hegemony and the methods have evolved. Still brutal, just less so.

Different times, back during the higjt of the british empire war and colonization have been normal things to do. Even the British were quite aggrez, but still not out of the norm. This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2. So you can still be as aggressive as the British back then, it just manifests itself in different ways. Also, nowadays it is a lot easoer to control countries by economic means alone.

>>Different times, back during the higjt of the british empire war and colonization have been normal things to do.

Indian here. Colonization is just a placeholder term to describe resource grab. There is no real chance England could have annexed India.

Why do all this annexation business, and offer the other country free citizenships? All you have to do is militarily control the country while you can take their resources and ship to your homeland.

>>This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2.

Territorial control often has further ulterior motives. Like grabbing useful land, or creating buffer zones etc.

> The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to

We'll ignore Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice) for the sake of this comment?

Also lets ignore all those south american Coup d'états because it helps the narrative.

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