Why the decline of US power has been greatly exaggerated
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Look up how underfunded Germany’s Bundeswehr has been these past few years, how France’s push to build up European defenses is going, how Eastern European countries rely on NATO.
When you get defense for “free” from an overstretched US military, you obviously have more budget to develop your own country.
The U.S. has barely any public transportation infrastructure, it's ridiculously car-centric, it has enormous inequality, lacks a functional healthcare system (leading to dystopian situations like "medical bankruptcy"), suffers from insidious pollution (PFOAs are an American invention; meanwhile, a lot of drinking water in the U.S. does not meet requirements for safe levels of lead, and the U.S. is still mostly on fossil fuels), and has a deeply dysfunctional political two-party system that constantly threatens democracy.
A lot of people visiting from the U.S. or other countries marvel at my European country's high quality of life. We have great public healthcare, and a significant social safety net for the disadvantaged. We have a great public transportation infrastructure, a surplus of green energy (no coal), and there's generally little need to own a car for many people, nor a car-obsessed culture. We work less and allow more time for family and friends. Everyone gets 5 weeks of paid vacation every year, by law. Sure, we get paid less, but financial wealth isn't everything. Considering healthcare, we (both individuals and the state) spend a lot less than the U.S. I don't have any data on the sizes of apartments, but plenty of people live in big (perhaps not by American standards) detached houses here.
They are. But they're still expensive(†). My point is that GP says the US can't have nice things because they're spending all their money on the defense of the rest of the developed world and Europe is just rolling in dough to spend on public infrastructure. The US absolutely has money that it can spend on these things if it wanted to, but it doesn't. $60k pickup trucks (the median cost) aren't a thing anywhere else in the world, and in every thread here on EVs it's full of excuses of why these vehicles are ESSENTIAL to the functioning of US society. If all of that money was spent on public infrastructure instead, they could have much nice things.
I totally agree that lots of people are suffering in the US. It's not being spread equally. I totally agree that US politics are completely dysfunctional. I agree that that is the problem. I'm just refuting GPs argument that "it's because we're sending money overseas". It's because you're misallocating money locally.
GP is saying Europe can have these things because the the US is defending them. I'm saying the US has more than enough money to do these things, if they allocated it the same as Europe does (even after removing military spending)
(†) Debt, sure, but Japan's national debt is 200% of GDP and people are touting them in this thread as an example of how you can have your cake and eat it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Off topic: China has done a great job pulling half a billion people out of poverty and it shows.
This is the major flaw with democracy and the reason it’s a moral imperative for the US to spread democracy. It’s easy for a small group (in reality, many disparate small groups) to manipulate a large population.
While technically it’s true the people of the US could fix this with voting, in reality it’s an insane way to operate. Our democracy was originally founded with restrictions on who could vote as well at a time when we had much stronger cultural bonds. Limiting who could vote mixed in with a healthy culture is necessary for democracy to work - otherwise it is exploited.
We need and deserve leaders who want to do the best for their people. Representative democracy allows for parasites to prevent this while placing the onus on the voter for their woes, knowing full well the voter will never be able to organize in a meaningful capacity because the population is too large and diverse. If the answer to our problems is always “get out and vote better”, nothing is ever going to get done and anyone pushing that idea is either ignorant or malicious.
Don't forget that is not "free", the US has benefited from a lot of perks due to the position they're in.
But it is true sovereign countries should take care of their defenses beyond what the US has to offer, but that will also come at the cost of the US.
You can't have the cake and eat it at the same time - which is what some people seem to be forgetting among all of those internal politics complaints, and the mixing of the US geoplitics with internal politics.
Because you can't be the "leader of the free world" and get all the benefits from it, while you cherry pick what it entails. Now you might argue that you don't see the benefits of that position, which is fair, but a lot is going on more than just military bases in Europe.
And the world will carry on, and those voids left by the US will be filled. China is very happy to fill those empty spaces.
In that case, if the US decided that they don't really care about a potential nuclear war for the sake of some distant Eastern European countries, we would be caught with our pants down. Only Poland was somewhat prepared.
Many European countries grew fatter and lazier under the American defense umbrella. It was easier to stuff money into popular projects than into guns and soldiers. Only, it turns out, sometimes you really need those guns and soldiers even in the 21st century.
"Si vis pacem, para bellum."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579988
The average people in powerful democracies have a responsibility to avoid the circumstances which historically have led to mass civilian casualties. For USA, the toll of nuclear strikes is an approachable example. Other great powers have a worse record in avoiding malicious mass suffering.
The part relevant to your comment is that the US military now needs to prevent war rather than excel at it. And it has chosen to look as formidable as possible to rational enemies. I think Europe agrees with this, but I don’t know if there are other ways.
I have been saying for decades, they need to pay tribute. Never before in history has a super power defended smaller nations and expected nothing in return. The US taxpayer should enjoy some relief from foreign governments who want to be defended.
> I want affordable housing. Affordable healthcare. High speed rail. Better zoning laws. New subway lines.
Are you saying we only need 12% of the budget to fix these things? Note that coincidentally medicare is already accounting for ~12% of the total.
Say the military budget goes to zero (which it can't), and we spend half of that on medicare (it would be 18%). Will it fix the problem?
I think the problem is much deeper than wasting this 12%.
>While prescription drug costs only accounted for 8 percent of total U.S. healthcare spending in 2020, the price of such drugs has risen substantially over the last few decades. ... The U.S. spends twice as much on prescription drugs as other comparatively wealthy nations, on average.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2022/11/how-much-does-the-united-s...
> Pharmaceutical breakthroughs are financed by the high prices paid by American patients (and backed by abundant venture capital); government-run health systems in Europe then bulk-buy the same drugs for much less. Europe has had some successes—German companies were among those pioneering mrna vaccines—but most of the cutting-edge research in science and technology is done at universities and companies elsewhere.
[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...
https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Among-Immigrants-and-Native...
Japan has started to encourage immigration, but probably too little, too late.
Almost every country in Asia has a declining birth rate.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171367/apac-total-ferti...
Healthcare is hardly affordable, costs are skyrocketing and meeical staff are overloaded. The system has been overhauled recently, remains to be seen what the effect is.
Cost of living is generally high if you want to live near cities.
Subway lines only in the capital.
The US took over from the British as the power that protects global trade networks, which means patrolling the seas. The capability and willingness to do so attracted a lot of other developed nations into the US-led political coalition, and contributed to enormous growth of international trade (something like 5-fold since the 1970s?)
Without enough of a Navy, this network will disintegrate, or will be taken over by someone else, much like in the UK-to-US case around the time of WWII. Realistically, the only nation capable of doing so is China and I am not even certain if they wanted to, as their international projects like Belt-and-road are being abandoned.
Why does China invest in peaceful commercial agreements (like Belt and road, which is still active btw) while the US invests in global military control?
China was able to export its goods to the rest of the world using ships. Those ships sailed mostly safe seas (yeah there are exceptions like the Malacca Straits, where pirates still lurk) without any Chinese navy protection, because those seas were made safe by someone else. That is not hard to understand.
If the global trade as a whole is protected by the US Navy, Chinese trade, a subset thereof, is protected as well.
BTW The US does not have global military control. They do have quite a lot of control of the seas, but dry land is a different story. They had to withdraw from Afghanistan after trying to impose their will for 20 years. They didn't succeed in remaking Iraq to their ally either. And, in the steppes of Ukraine, a war has been raging for almost two years by now, with no end in sight - obviously not "in control" of the US, not least because one of the combatants is a major nuclear power and you cannot have any meaningful military control over a major nuclear power.
Someone has to, or you get piracy. A lot of it. And I don’t mean movies. We have the most to lose from impaired trade, so we pay for it.
We have floating airbases all over the world. As Madeleine Albright said to the president of China, “Jiang Zemin, one of my favorite men, but when you’re not so sweet, I send the Seventh Fleet.”
Nukes mean that no nation-state will attack us openly. The Navy means that fucking with the US is a personal death sentence.
Why doesn't that happen to Austria, for example, or China?
Perhaps "fucking" with the world is what caused the US to be considered an enemy by so many countries.
Almost like the more they impose their force globally, the more other countries feel the need to resist it.
There is absolutely nothing insinuating this perception in his comment.
He says that without the US Navy, there would be a lot more piracy on the high seas, and he is likely right. The historical experience from all corners of the world confirms that weakening naval control leads to increase in opportunistic piracy all around. Piracy is one of the oldest organized criminal activities in the world and most civilizations, including the really old ones (like Ancient Egypt) had to deal with it this way or another.
From OP:
> Nukes mean that no nation-state will attack us openly. The Navy means that fucking with the US is a personal death sentence.
China has shown us that you can modernize a country and make it a global actor without imposing yourself as a hegemon, and I choose that as a role model.
There is nothing to believe here, such a world certainly existed before, and will likely soon exist again, but don't rely on it being peaceful.
Competing superpowers, even if avoiding direct confrontation between themselves, will start a lot of proxy wars to push out their adversaries from country X or region Y. See also the entire Cold War 1.0. In multiple places, said war was actually very hot.
So I'll gladly keep some conflict but without Uncle Sam's oppression, thanks.
We have so many wars going on precisely because Uncle Sam is slowly losing its hegemonic status - which is not a boolean (true/false), but more of a continuum. If you look at the wars going on, many of those involve US allies vs. allies of smaller powers hostile to the US (Russia, Iran, Venezuela), which is precisely the sort of proxy wars that I was talking about.
IDK where you live, if you're a Latinoamerican, you've had real US oppression - though, let me tell you from the former Eastern Bloc, don't expect Russian or Chinese influence to be any more benign than American one. It is a "choose your poison" situation.
If you are a European, there is no US oppression here. The last European power that was forcibly suppressed by the US was Nazi Germany.
But anyway you can be glad as you wish, because if the current trends continue, you will have a lot more conflicts than today. I am not really sure if "less US influence" will be an upside. Perhaps to you, in your situation, yes.
Don’t tell China’s neighbors this. The reason they are so friendly with the USA ATM is that China has long aspired to being (and often is) the regional hegemon (and it’s a huge region).
Latin americans had to be subjugated with brutal anti-communist dictatorships and the US are the ones who made it happen.
Look at what they're doing to Cuba as a punishment for freeing themselves from Batista, the fascist puppet the US forced as a leader in order to protect their interests there.
You could say the same thing about China invading Vietnam because the Vietnamese overthrew their puppet Pol Pot in Cambodia, that guy said to be even worse than Batista because he literally killed a few million people. But then again, the USA and China were allies at the time (the USA tacitly supported Pol Pot as well, as the enemy of their enemy I guess).
My ancestry is Irish and British. We were apes painting ourselves blue when China was building a world. Austria is beautiful. But it hasn’t been a power for 100 years.
Being in control means making enemies of everyone else who wants to be in control. The US is not an innocent bystander, but you could have worse. Don’t forget that.
Perfectly put. US is hegemon and has been since end of WWII when all competing powers, including those in the victorious side, were so grievously damaged that US became the only country capable of refinancing and rebuilding the rest of the world. US is in decline only in relative terms, as China and India rise from grinding poverty to something like middle income
The US isn't maintaining a defense perimeter for the sake of it. it does so in partnership with nations from Australia all the way up to Japan.
For example, going into the 2016 election, more Americans claimed to value honesty highest among the qualities of candidates. That did not signal to the future President what trait he should pursue to gain support for re-election. He stood to claim credit for winning a War on Coronavirus by following career policy people (the safest thing, rely on their competence), but chose to vilify them instead. I know CEOs, and none would have been so incompetent.
When it comes to the legislative branch, the way it apparently works is: the process of forming regulations bestows congresspeople with insider-trading knowledge. Some congresspeople choose to believe wingnut lobbyists whose industries depend on subsidies, and then privately hedge. Others take the regulatory lessons back to their district and essentially spread the insider-trading knowledge around. This is their only job —- they don’t make “hard choices” —- yet Americans choose ten qualities before competence.