Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is the key reason why the United States is the financial power of the world that it is.

It isn't so much about our freedoms or our GDP, although they play a role.

Unlike China and Russia, we have WAY more guns and we're WAY less corrupt. That's a pinnacle of financial security; you can be confident that the United States will honor its treasury securities. China and Russia? Probably, except who knows what internal or external conflicts shake their fragile economies, and maybe they just won't pay out on time or at all.

People hate the fact that we spend so much on our military, but the inconvenient truth is that we have the comfortable lives we have now in large part because we have so many god damned weapons, and very advanced ones at that. That goes for those who live in foreign ally nations; deep down, their leaders know we will intervene on their behalf if shit hits the fan. America has had its share of fuckups, but they're still not eclipsed by the fuckups of Russia or China.

> we have the comfortable lives we have now

"We" = the 1% which reads Hacker News? Speak only for yourself

You uses fallacies to spread misinformation about war. No source, no number, no reference. Convenient.

> "We" = the 1% which reads Hacker News? Speak only for yourself

No, actually "we" as in most Americans and many other countries in multiple senses of "comfortable". Yes, there is poverty and many social problems present in America. At the same time, many aspects of the average American life, as well as life in Europe and other parts of the world, have consistently improved, and millions of people still choose to live in America instead of even other places of comparable rights and opportunities. Contrasted with many parts of the world, we're pretty damned comfortable.

But you know what? That doesn't even matter. If I were to alter my premise to only encompass the "1% which reads Hacker News", it wouldn't affect my comment at all. Why do you think Silicon Valley continues to exist in America and not the UK?

Fallacies are specific, and you haven't mentioned what "fallacies" I've made. What I wrote was a comment on an industry forum, not an academic paper. You want citations? Work it out yourself. You're on the internet. Nothing that I wrote hasn't been said before by others with greater authority than mine.

You haven't made a single argument, yet you accuse me of using fallacies and misinformation. By not justifying your claims, you're being very unfair.

“Way less corrupt”

Just because an internet search puts America as less corrupt than the likes of China and Russia. Doesn’t mean it’s actually less corrupt.

The perseption of America is that it’s less corrupt but in reality we have absolute no idea what’s going on behind closed doors and what deals are being done.

Well, for starters, try bribing a police officer in USA vs. Russia over a speeding ticket and see how far it gets you. My money is on you going to jail in USA and getting off scot free in Russia.

Well, there's certainly less low-level corruption.

how can one imagine at a higher level, it will just magically get better then?

This is not the discussed point.

AKA pervasive corruption. See, also, Vietnam.

Less high level corruption, too. Jeff Bezos probably worries about a lot of things but I highly doubt that he worries Trump will throw him in jail and seize all his assets. Now if Bezos were in Russia? Putin would do it in a heartbeat [1]. There's no way you would get away with criticizing Putin the way WaPo does with Trump.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky

I have a different perspective after moving from America to a developing country. Where I live now corruption is commonplace and everyone knows it. But it is relatively petty in most cases and costs everyone a little. But America is rife with what I call legalized corruption. Laws passed to enrich government cronies. Excessive licensing requirements to eliminate competition and enrich encumbants. The list goes on. And it costs everyone much, much more.

Do we really know that we will intervene for our allies with the current “America First” rants and threatening to leave NATO?

Trump is just (somewhat justifiably) trying to get Europe to step up to the plate and not leave everything to the US. Remember that we fixed their Yugoslavia ethnic cleansing problem while they twiddled their thumbs waiting for diplomacy to work. When the shit hits the fan the US will participate, if only to keep the MIC chugging along.

I think one of main things keeping Europe more or less stable, is that Russia's armed forces are probably more broke-dick than the EU's.

Honest question: we are almost 30 years away from the fall of the Soviet Union, which NATO was founded to defend against.

What specific things in terms of Defense is America responsible for on the European continent?

My basic understanding of NATO is that it says:

- If any NATO country is invaded by anyone, all NATO countries will go to war to defend it. This doesn't apply if the NATO country is the aggressor.

- It outlines some minimum funding commitments, but those are more aimed towards the non-US countries involved.

I think the main thing is still to deter Russia from literally invading member countries. It's hard to call that far-fetched in light of Russia literally invading Ukraine and, before that, Georgia.

That doesn’t answer the question.

Why should we draft a bunch of folks from South Dakota and Kansas (and let’s be honest here ... folks from New York or SF who write opinion pieces about this aren’t going to be the ones paying blood) to fight Russia? Why can’t these countries defend themselves?

Who is being drafted? It's a volunteer army and we are in basically no wars where our soldiers are at serious risk of wartime death. It's far more common for NATO troops to die helping us in our wars than vice versa.

NATO is a low cost way for us to maintain our geopolitical position as a leader and to maintain a reliable group of military allies in case we need them (yeah, we spend a ton on military, but that is not due to us defending NATO countries from Russia).

A war with Russia would require a draft. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. Everyone is being evasive and not answering the question, which is: why should a guy from the Midwest die to defend Eastern Europe?

Your point about spending is ignorant and silly. We don’t buy billion dollar submarines to fight Islamists in land locked countries.

That's a meaningless hypothetical. No Americans are dying to defend Eastern Europe. History shows us that treaties are easily discarded in the face of actual war with another great power. But the value of NATO for the US right now is not hypothetical.

You don't buy billion dollar submarines because of NATO either. When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern. Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?

>When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern.

Are you kidding? Then what's Grafenwöhr for? Entire procurement strategies have been - and are - focused on countering Russian military hardware (the IAV is just one example - there are plenty of others).

>Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?

You should really reconsider that statement, and which clause follows from the other. This has nothing to do with my first point, which no one seems interested in answering. My original question was attempting to tease out why people think NATO is useful in a post-post Cold War world. I don't think it is, and struggle to understand this obsession with Russia that continues to warp people's perception of the global security situation. Instead people pivot to "well it was actually about reducing the amount of nuclear weapons" or "we would spend that money anyway", neither of which address the fundamental question of whether or not NATO in its present form is useful or whether the US should have to continue shouldering the vast majority of the security responsibility in the Western World.

Near-peer is essentially {Russia, China}. New funding is generally "counter the rise of China", especially in maritime spending, but land force "reset from the counterinsurgency back to fighting a near-peer adversary" is basically Russia.

Because defending themselves would necessarily require acquiring their own nuclear deterrent, and the US correctly realized that a world where every country had nukes was a world where they'd eventually be used. Alliances like NATO reduced the risk of human extinction while pulling countries closer into the US orbit. It's ridiculous to look at that from an ROI perspective; the ROI is not dying in a nuclear war.

I think you need to reevaluate your understanding of Cold War history if the argument you're making is "we started NATO to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons".

Would your argument hold equally for US intervention in Europe in world war 2?

Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. That wasn't a US "intervention".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com