I can’t name a single country that has all of the items you mentioned at the same time. Especially affordable housing.
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.