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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

European nations might buy a lot of hardware from the States, but the US also maintains a large and very expensive military presence there, and everywhere.

So if military relations cool down, the US pulls out of Europe, and Europe exclusively buys its own arms, it might actually save the US money.

But that seems a little far-fetched. There's a lot of transatlantic banter on the internet but when the chips are down, the West will likely pull together yet again.

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I wouldn’t bet on that last sentence. The leaders were about 100x more mature then than the ones we will likely have at the time we are next faced with an existential threat (meaning 1-10 years from now likely). Everything is a meme and a joke and a way to score political points. If a politician thinks they can own the libs / stick it to the filthy republican right by causing/allowing the global system collapse into complete chaos, they’ll happily do it.

Now, they’ll regret it instantly as they suddenly notice how everything they take for granted is suddenly not true (imagine if, thanks to abdicating naval superiority, sea transport becomes nearly impossible thanks to rampant piracy). But it’s not guaranteed that things can be undone.

Culling American military bases overseas would also reduce the risk of American politicians capriciously choosing to use those military bases as the staging points for military adventurism; the "War on Terror" was greatly facilitated by those bases. As somebody who thinks that 'war' was a disaster for the interests of average Americans, I would not be sad to see the means for America to wage foreign wars greatly diminished. I simply don't trust the American political system to be a responsible steward of that much global military power.

You may be right, but who else would do it? I feel like Russia would be invading the entire EU, and China would invade Taiwan if they thought they could get away with it.

Countries should be left to handle their own affairs; that's the responsibility that is inherent to sovereignty. The premise of a global hegemon who babysits the world and enforces the rules (dictated by themselves and their allies of course) is an anachronistic leftover from the age of imperialism. If the rest of the world wants America to play world police (and for the most part, I don't believe they do) let them pay the American public for this service.

Very reasonable, but the last time an American president suggested this, the world shouted him down as an idiot.

In a world where we have 9 nuclear powers, I struggle to see how your system would keep them in check; nuclear fallout effects all of humanity and quite literally could make the planet inhabitable.

I bring this up because any system that replaces the current world order needs to be able to keep these nuclear powers in check.

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