Then you realize there aren’t good guys or bad guys, there’s just a world of immense trade offs, and that on balance the US is a far preferable superpower than the other probable options.
There aren't many that are always good, or always bad, but it's naive to suggest that "there aren't good guys or bad guys." No matter where in the world you are, you're in no danger of being shot by the Swiss government. That's a statement that's not true of the US, even in the US!
Helluva Pandora’s Box.
No, you really really don't want this. I don't know what utopian partnership of nations you have in mind, but what you will get is World War 1 remastered.
Currently, a large portion of the voting age US citizenry no longer believes in the peaceful transition of power. The highest instance of the US judicial system is under the control of specific authoritarian and religious elements for the foreseeable future. We can't know how the US will evolve next, but the picture doesn't seem really rosy at all. We don't know when the next reality TV star or populist politician will take control there, or which ideological movement will capture the institutions in the next few years. Given the country's history of intervening in other nations, we can only guess at what the consequences would then be for the rest of the world.
Given all of this, having no superpower would seem preferable.
[0]http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
Most of South America would likely disagree with calling us the preferable superpower.
A US Citizen thinks the US is the best superpower? color me shocked (I'm also a US Citizen).
A US citizen thinks any of those even has a chance of being preferable to the US? Color me shocked!
What I don't understand is the idea that the EU as a superpower is less plausible than Russia?
I don't think the US would be a superpower if the treaties, tariffs, and military control were parceled out to the individual states and each state governor and state assembly decided when to work as a block and when to act independently.
When asked, Americans are Americans first, then whatever state they come from second.
Europeans are whatever state they come from first, European second.
Most European countries haven’t seen per capita GDP growth since the beginning of the millennium.
They’d rather preserve their “culture” than compete and survive, and it’s starting to show up in the data.
I'm not convinced that much has changed since, and you definitely can't be a super power without an army.
It was this book that made me realize the old saying of history repeating itself was not in the sort of vague allegory that I once believed, but in very specific repeated actions in very specific orders - that keep repeating, separated by millennia. In an odd way it offers peace of mind. The world is not headed towards some unprecedented era of chaos. Instead the era we all grew up in (at least within the developed world), one of peace and relative stability, is what was unprecedented.
We have no place telling anyone else in the world how to live or how to govern.
We can’t even educate or provide healthcare to our own.
We’d rather throw people in prison than provide them with the basics required to be successful.
The outlook becomes even worse when you look at our treatment of women and minorities.
Plenty of EU countries there.
Your chart actually illustrates what I was trying to say, which is that some of the largest EU countries, namely Germany, France, and Italy, have been hesitant to act on a larger scale that would possibly put them in the crosshairs of Russian retaliation. France, being the only sovereign nuclear power remaining in the EU, is particularly important. Having its largest countries be more willing to flex military power would let the EU act outside the shadow of the US and be considered a superpower in its own right.
[0] News to me, albeit unsurprising.
do you have an argument for this claim?
How many countries, when given damn near absolute power, wouldn't have used it to directly conquer?
If you have two evils, you choose the lesser of two evils. If you eliminate the greater of the two evils, all you're left with is evil.
Saying that the country which dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations is better than a hypothetical in which some other other country dropped more of them, it's... I mean, we're still the only country that ever dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations!
Things are rarely as simple as good and evil. But if you want an argument against certainty, there are many.
You know, simple things like 1) not forcing their own women and children to march into machine gun fire [Japan], 2) not building concentration camps and exterminating whole races [Germany], 3) not building a prison state that people regularly got shot trying to escape [USSR], or 4) a combination of all of those prior “techniques” plus a highly capable surveillance state [China]
Because if they would, then this point isn’t relevant to which is preferable, is it?
edit: the > a
https://reason.com/2014/05/15/be-antigovernment-and-proud/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
Democratic, capitalist states commit the least democide.
Of the almost-true scenarios that were available in actual reality, we got a pretty good one with regard to US hegemony.