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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

In simple terms, if you're the Philippines and you're selling fish to Russia, would you rather have Rubles or US dollars? Way back in time, US Dollars were one to one based on gold in fort knox. Right? But no country has a gold reserve now. Most countries have a dollar reserve to back the paper money they print themselves. This is the main reason the dollar hasn't collapsed already.

[edit] someone who graduated college with an economics degree please come and correct the following vague and possibly totally wrong perceptions I have as a subject of the American empire /edit

The value of a country's money is backed by a combination of how much they produce and how much foreign currency and assets from other countries they hold (euros, dollars, gold) they have on reserve. Only the US gets away with having no actual reserve ...because a combination of military might and cultural strategic dominance has allowed it to BE the reserve for everyone else. This is why it somehow makes sense for America's economy to be based entirely on consumption rather than production.

OP is right. Whichever superpower controls the levers of global trade is the one that can sell debt and enforce the currency regime.

Some of us think that it's a lucky thing that it's been America, rather than a more authoritarian power, who had held that control for the past 80 years. Europe would not have recovered from WWII otherwise, and be living behind an iron curtain. Anyone who controls global trade after America is likely to be worse from a human rights perspective.

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It seems that other currencies have their own peculiarities; for example, when Russia sold oil to India for Indian rupees (to show that they don't want dirty American currency), they found out that you cannot transfer them outside of India or convert; you need to spend them locally.

I wonder can China use this to make Yuan a new world currency (we all buy Chinese things anyway) or they cannot do it or doing this is not beneficial to them?

China has 2 currencies - Yuan for foreign trade and RMB for internal exchange

I can definitely imagine Yuan being used more

RMB and Yuan are two names for the same thing. Maybe you're thinking of FEC? That ended in 1994.

China maintains a soft peg on the yuan in order to keep their industrial output cheap.

Part of the way they do this is with heavy currency controls. Those currency controls make it difficult to do international trade with the yuan.

But worse from Chinas perspective you can’t maintain a peg if your currency is used to trade goods, particularly fungible commodities because the commodity itself becomes the medium of exchange and derails the currency peg.

That would be disastrous for their exporters and their economy is not in a position to sustain that currently.

It's likely not beneficial to them, for a couple reasons.

First of all, they can print Yuan. They want people to buy those pieces of paper for something of value. It doesn't do much good to have people send all that paper back in exchange for phones and tablets and stuff. Then they would've just got back some paper they printed in exchange for something that took time and resources to make.

No, they need something physical or at least valuable for that paper. Such as local labor. Then their own population can spend the paper internally, because it's in theory exchangeable for something external. When China buys stuff from the US, it spends dollars. Which it buys from the US not with Yuan, but with computer parts. It pays its own people Yuan to make the computer parts... but the Yuan is only valuable because the government holds dollars and euros to buy stuff that their citizens can then buy for Yuan.

This is why Trump's overall foreign policy and particulatly his tariffs scheme risks destroying America. If at some point enough countries decide that the USD is too unreliable, they may look for the next best paper to trade. That would be catastrophic for the US which may deserve it in any case, but it would be truly terrible if the alternative were a currency privately owned and manipulated by the leaders of a dictatorship. Perhaps the world isn't stupid enough to do that, but the size of China's economy compared to anything else would make it tempting.

I'll stipulate right now that if China were a democracy with civil rights and a fair legal system, I would have no problem with it taking over world trade from the US. But currently it's a repressive authoritarian state.

> I wonder can China use this to make Yuan a new world currency

I suspect a strong precondition for this is to switch world oil trade away from the dollar, and that is currently enforced by a combination of military power and "winner takes all" network effect mechanics of the trade.

> Anyone who controls global trade after America is likely to be worse from a human rights perspective.

Next thing you know they might start sending innocents to megaprisons in El Salvador and lose track of them.

don't get me wrong. I'm writing everything I'm saying because I desperately do not want America to go on a trajectory where it loses all credibility and becomes as bad as all the other human rights abusers.

I think most Americans have no idea how much power their country wields. And it's horrific that they're susceptible to the kind of small thinking jingoist nationalism that doesn't befit a country so large built on an idea of cohesion.

> if you're the Philippines and you're selling fish to Russia, would you rather have Rubles or US dollars?

I would have assumed the fisherman in the Philippines would like to be paid in Philippine peso.

but it's not easy to come by large amounts of Philippine pesos in Russia, cause no-one wants to hold significant amount of foreign currency they can't use for anything else. In some cases it may even be legally problematic.

That's why international trade uses "strong" currencies, which are very liquid: you can generally get USD/EUR and then trade them for anything else with a limited spread. Good luck converting Hungarian forints to Lao kips.

Being cut off from USD is why news of Russia resorting to barter[0][1] have occurred in the news since they got cut off from the US trading system

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oranges-trade-barter-pakista... [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/first-russia-china-barter-tr...

I think that is (used to be) higher risk: Internal events could make the peso lose its value, but the dollar was pretty stable?

(Probably it'd be a pretty big fishing company, exporting to a far away nation like that. Not a single person in a small boat)

Edit: I suppose riffraff's sibling answer is better

The fishermen will get paid in pesos but the company will be paid in dollars. And the company will probably put their dollars in a bank outside the Philippines, which only accepts dollars, euros or swiss francs.

If the fishermen could be paid in dollars, they would probably prefer that.

And the fact that they'd prefer that to being paid in Rubles or Renminbi is the underlying guarantor of American economic power... which, if it goes away and was replaced by Chinese power in the south china sea, would be catastrophic for the fishermen as well.

For this the Russian buyer would have to previously sell something to the Philippines and accept pesos. Why would they accept those pesos if they are not generally accepted elsewhere?

Where does the Russian company get its Philippine Peso from?

Russia overall may have exported some stuff to Philippines but it’s a huge country. The specific company would now need to find a way to acquire a highly illiquid currency available in tiny numbers which would be expensive.

Instead, they simply buy dollars which are highly liquid, available in huge numbers, until now absolutely reliable, and accepted by everyone.

Trading in dollars was at the end of the day cheap.

> The value of a country's money is backed by a combination of how much they produce and how much foreign currency and assets from other countries they hold (euros, dollars, gold) they have on reserve.

I think the simplest way to think about it is simply supply and demand. Currently there is constant high demand for USD due to its reserve status as you said (supply is also growing btw , deficits, printing of money etc). If demand goes down, there will be too much supply so the Dollar will naturally weaken against other currencies. As far as I know the fact that one USD equals 0.95 Euros (or whatever) is simple market forces of supply and demand.

> Only the US gets away with having no actual reserve

Money is a credit. The US didn't get away with anything. Being a reserve currency has its advantages but the US is holding these liabilities with assets inside the country itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_inter...

> In simple terms, if you're the Philippines and you're selling fish to Russia, would you rather have Rubles or US dollars?

I can easily see why Rubles would have been unacceptable several decades ago, but nowadays with the speed of financial markets why not set the price in the seller's currency and at payment time the buyer can trade enough of their currency for the seller's currency on the currency markets to get the payment?

The challenge is that for a lot of countries, the forex markets for their own currency aren’t deep enough to settle all of their international trade.

Consider a country that has a large trade imbalance—they import a lot of goods and have very few exports. When a business in that country tries to import goods, say from the Philippines in Pesos or from Germany in Euros, the business will have to go to a forex markets and sell their local currency to buy the foreign currency.

Who’s going to take the other side of that trade? Normally, if a country exports a lot of goods, then foreign businesses will need to buy the country’s local currency to pay for them, and that provides a market for exchanging Pesos and Euros for the local currency. But the country doesn’t export very much, so other businesses in the Philippines or the Eurozone don’t have much use for the business’ local currency, and that means that there isn’t a large market of people selling Pesos or Euros to buy the local currency.

This example is a bit of an edge case where this fictional country runs a trade deficit with all of its trading partners. In reality, you’ll likely have a trade deficit with some partners and a surplus with others. If you decide to denominate some of your international trade in US Dollars, then you’re able to use the excess dollars coming in to your country from your exports to finance your imports. It’s a lot easier than hoping that you can sell enough of your local currency or the currencies of the countries you’re exporting to to buy enough of the currencies of the countries you’re importing from.

In some ways it’s similar to the hub-and-spoke model of airlines. If you want to get from small town A to small town B, there might not be enough traffic in both directions to warrant a direct flight. But if there’s a hub X, then there might be enough traffic between A and all the other flights into X to make it worthwhile to fly from X to B and vice versa. There might not be enough balanced trade between two small countries for there to be a deep market in their currency pair, but if you have both imports and exports denominated in US Dollars then you can generate an internal market in your country for exchanging your local currency for USD.

> But no country has a gold reserve now.

Supposedly Zimbabwe's new currency ZiG is gold based. Not sure how many people would trust them though. They don't have the best experience with currency...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68736155

So how about a decentralized currency that no one controls? Preferably digital. If only we had the technology ;-)

Power abhors a vacuum. No such thing can exist without some state eventually dominating 51% of it. We've just tested this out since 2009 and it's already obvious that no crypto can escape state control, because the ingress and egress points are already under state control. Short of establishing your own colony on the moon or Mars, this ain't gonna happen.

Luckily, it's still possible to change governments. Sometimes, in some places. Maybe not for much longer. But the idea that crypto will free us is a fantasy that at this point is mostly being peddled by secret police agencies in name-your-country.

This is a gross misunderstanding of what a currency actually is.

A currency is a social construct. It has no inherent value beyond what people who trade in it place on the currency.

As a result people don’t want a currency whose rules of trade are defined once and it’s unable to respond to actual world events.

If you have a currency that is indeed responsive to changes in the world then there needs to be someone who you entrust with making those changes.

At that point it doesn’t matter whether that currency is digital or cash based. I mean, in actuality even the USD digital trade is order of magnitudes greater than its physical trade.

The U.S.’s monetary institutions and its role as a trade promoting superpower is what makes the dollar stronger. Now that those institutions are not as reliable anymore and the U.S. is clearly not a trade promoter anymore, the dollar is definitely at risk.

A currency is a social construct but it doesn't just come down to people who trade in the currency in a decentralized sense: the US govt imposes taxes on economic activity, and demands those taxes be paid in dollars (as other states do in their respective currencies), and this is enforced by the coercive power of the state, which is ultimately based on its military strength, since that's the ultimate guarantor of the continued existence of all the other institutions of the state.

Of course, there's more to it in the complex system of the global economy, but the power of the state is still an important central factor in a currencies' strength - it's not just about collective perceptions of value.

I'm sorry, but the US has an abysmal human rights record.

It has a per capita incarceration rate lower only than Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba and El Salvador (which is a prison subcontractor _for_ the US).

It has started more wars than any other country since the second World War.

It is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in anger.

It has a death penalty.

It supports numerous regimes with abysmal human rights records, Israel, Egypt and Saudi spring to mind, but that's just `head(3)`.

It has bombed it's own population, shot its own students, had racial segregation in living memory.

Given its scale and reach, I'd suggest that the US is, in fact, the world's greatest human rights abuser.

I'm struggling to think of a country with a worse record.

Definitely the worst human rights abuser in history followed by the British, French, Germans, etc.

uh... are you being ironic?

Do you know what's going on to average citizens in North Korea?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aquariums_of_Pyongyang

Do you know that showing ANY anti-war symbol in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine will get you arrested?

Do you know how many Tibetans put their lives on the line to organize resistance in Tibet, now, against the genocidal CCP?

Do you know anything about the civil war in Sudan?

if the worst human rights abusers in your mind are America, the UK, France and Germany, is that because those are the only countries you can name? Or because you don't understand what the rest of the world is?

It's scale. North Korea is mainly abusing North Korean human rights, the US has brutalised many more countries, not incidentally including Korea.

Yes, I'm very familiar with the Russia situation, but are you trying to say all arrests in the US are completely justifiable? Despite their apparent arrest-happiness, they've a much smaller prison population than the US.

China, I know less about, but let's call the Uighurs and Tibet equivalent to say, Iraq and Libya, the US has done far more besides.

Having worked in the aid business, I'd say I'm sadly a little familiar with Sudan. For example I know they've been victims of US sanctions which have created and exacerbated the famines and economic misery paved the way for this war. The US even lobbed a cruise missile them once.

This sounds obvious: No country extends civil rights abroad that they don't extend to their own citizens. If Russia or China can't even give their own citizens a fair hearing for exercising their opinions against the government, what hope have their colonial subjects?

The US has dominated the western world for 80 years, much of that in battle against adversaries who were much more brutal to their own citizens. Which by extension means more brutal toward innocent bystanders who fell under those adversaries power.

It's a form of confirmation bias to assert now that all the world's maladies and wars stem from American interventionism. One can easily imagine a counter-history in which any of the forces America fought against had run over neutral countries without opposition.

The very fact that South Korea and Taiwan, Germany, Japan, France, the UK, Norway, et al, are democracies with relatively decent human rights records and not, like, slave states subjugated to totalitarian regimes... does that fact not put hundreds of millions of human lives lived in dignity and freedom on our side of the ledger? Unless you think those lives would have just as well have been spent in a concentration camp or a gulag.

South Korea was torn apart by a brutal US-led war; Japan nuked, twice, by the US. For every country where US barbarism has led to stable, peaceful societies, there are countless ruined shells: see Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya for recent examples.

As far as the outcome of WWII is concerned, I'm presuming this is what you're referring to, Europe owes just as much to the Soviet union in the fight against the Nazis, they gave many more lives. Does that go on the Russian ledger?

> It's a form of confirmation bias to assert now that all the world's maladies and wars stem from American interventionism.

At no point have I claimed this. My claim is that I struggle to think of a country that has a worse human rights record than the US, which I'd lightly tweak for living memory.

Still struggling.

What rights does Russia give its citizens? Any? I suppose they're allowed to live as long as they speak not a single word against their boss, and are perfectly obedient slaves...

What rights does Russia give to Ukrainian civilians? Not even a right to live.

So, from there you criticize us.

> One can easily imagine a counter-history in which any of the forces America fought against had run over neutral countries without opposition

There are examples of that. Tibet, North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Warsaw pact countries.

On average the US side was MUCH better. There are examples that go the other way (e.g. Afghanistan) and that were bad enough it might have been better with the other side (many South American dictatorships)

> Do you know that showing ANY anti-war symbol in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine will get you arrested?

Like students protesting against Palestinian genocide?

> Do you know how many Tibetans put their lives on the line to organize resistance in Tibet, now, against the genocidal CCP?

Like the Hawaiian sovereignty movement?

Why do you believe everything the western media tells you as they lie about everything relating to Israel and Palestine?

Your North Korea info. America is the one that didn’t allow free elections and invaded (yes I know you will say North Korea invaded. I know what people who repeat every western talking point say).

—

How do you think Africa turned out the way it did? Which people in the late 1800s decided to carve up Africa? Which people continue doing [neo]colonialism?

Why is Sudan a country with its borders? It’s the west that did that. A country can’t be free when colonizers draw the borders. Even if you try to bring in the Arab states screwing Sudan up, those states are also a cause of western colonialism.

—

Tibet was a slave society and part of China for many many years.

Most Tibetan people speak their native language. How about native Hawaiian or indigenous people in continental US?

—

Like I said in another comment. If Xinjiang had been in Europe or America. The Muslims would’ve been genocided. Thank god my people were in Xinjiang China and not elsewhere.

I’d advise you to read Manufacturing Consent and learn more about the world before saying the most typical western talking points.

This is easy. We're sitting here texting on an American platform and both willing to say that the imprisonment rate in America is abysmal, that in its history America has supported awful dictatorships and racist regimes.

You can't do that in China or Cuba or Russia. You can't even mention it or you would be black holed and your family would be taken away in the night.

I'm in America and I have no fear of telling the authorities what I think.

As awful as some of the things America has done in the past 249 years are, you really can't compare them to the actions of non-democracies and authoritarian regimes. To do so is an insult to the people who struggle every day as prisoners under those regimes. You can hate America with all your heart, but you can't reasonably compare its foreign policy to that of Napoleon or Hitler or Stalin. You can't say that America ever attempted a Great Leap Forward leading to the starvation of 40 million people, or the Holodomor, or the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide or even the current genocide against Uighurs by China. Even the British empire looks incredibly cruel by modern American standards.

Is it still a big world power dominating other smaller countries? Definitely.

America has acted as if it were a global empire in its own self interest. But it's probably been the lesser of most evils, certainly throughout the 20th Century. What it is or may be now, it's harder to say, and we'll find out. But comparatively speaking, only a person who hadn't been to the countries you listed would make the claim that it was worse to have America running the world.

Someone's going to run the world, you know.

In the past 249 years? The genocide of Native Americans was on the same scale as any of the atrocities you listed. Slavery too.

In recent years? I'd say the War on Terror was one of the deadliest things in 21st century so far.

Ok. Name a country 249 years ago that wasn't a conquering power, that didn't commit atrocities and that didn't have slavery.

You can't. They didn't exist.

Name one that opened its doors to immigrants, has the most diverse population in the world, progressively enhanced civil rights and enshrined freedom of speech, built a rule of law into its practices, and most importantly, name a single country that has had a peaceful democratic transition of power for more than half that time.

San Marino, obviously.

The US's atrocities and slavery happened much more recently. And kept happening while other countries moved on to modern social democracy.

And are still happening today, under the thin disguise of for-profit prisons and no-work = no-healthcare.

The US has a long history of murdering people who are too politically progressive and/or get in the way of corporate profits.

Racial segregation was still considered normal in the 1950s. There's still a huge swathe of the population who can't cope with the idea of anyone who isn't rich and white, ideally a man, with political power.

As for immigrants - there are some people in El Salvador who won't agree with you.

Well, given that countries are a relatively new thing, that's a question that's complex to answer.

I think what you mean to say is name a European country that wasn't doing all that stuff, because most of the world wasn't. I can name a European one actually, Ireland.

That last bit doesn't sound so great to the non-US ear. Immigration, seriously? Ask MLK or Mahmoud Khalil about free speech. Democracy in America is a whole long conversation, but let's say it's at best of debatable quality.

whew. Well, I and almost everyone I know are the sons and daughters of legal (and some illegal) immigrants to the US. Among us, a small group: Irish, Austrian, Persian, Jewish, Russian, Mexican, Filipina and Haitian. I've actually only met a few people in my life who claimed their family had been here more than 3 generations. My grandparents were illegal aliens who were granted amnesty. As such, almost everyone I know is very pro-immigration. We're all aware that there are nativist forces out there who think America is just a white christian nation, but I don't run into them much.

As far as deporting visa seekers who lied on their forms and are shilling agitprop for terrorist organizations? sure.

Ireland wasn't a country until what, 1916 or something. That's like saying the Czech Republic never invaded anyone. It's not quite clear it was due to any moral high standing, obviously when you're not in any position to do so it's easy to say you never did. What Ireland did excell at was terrorism, (er, anti colonialism) similar to the early anti-British forces in Jewish Palestine, although you wouldn't know it since the IRA went off to train in Iran.

    > Name one that opened its doors to immigrants, has the most diverse population in the world, progressively enhanced civil rights and enshrined freedom of speech, built a rule of law into its practices

I'm pretty sure that Brazillians would raise their hand here.

    > most importantly, name a single country that has had a peaceful democratic transition of power for more than half that time.

Does Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and UK count? Probably we can include France, Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. I'm sure other people here can name others.

Comparing that last list of countries, I do not think any has as strong protection of free speech as the US has. On the other hand the UK seems to be a LOT less racist - I think the other countries are some where in between the US and the UK.

Most of the listed countries do much better than the US in the free speech index:

https://rsf.org/en/index

How is the index calculated?

I definitely disagree about the UK. We have nothing like the constitutional protections the US has.

The other country I know well, Sri Lanka, is fairly bad, but has got a lot better in recent years and that does not seem to be reflected in the change (I cannot see a history so maybe it got better and fell in the last year) and I find it hard to believe it is really just a few places away from the likes of Yemen or Belarus.

Looked at it. It is really an index of press/journalistic freedom, not free speech in general with is far broader (private individuals, right to protest, etc.)

The quantitative part will have issues with data quality, and it focuses entirely repression of journalists and the media. It will be heavily distorted anywhere there is prevalent self-censorship.

Since you know Sri Lanka well (and I do not), can you share one or two specifics?

If you change the parameter to a more accurate <%50 of time the country has existed> you can include plenty of post colonial nations to that too.

Plenty of African ones none the less, Botswana, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal.

Canada does not have freedom of speech.

> Someone's going to run the world, you know.

The entitlement in that statement is jaw-dropping. No, no one needs to run the world.

And I definitely, definitely can compare US actions to Hitler and Stalin. Vietnam alone, over fifty years ago, ignoring everything that's gone on since was 1.4 million deaths, more than Auschwitz, about a third of the Holodomor.

In the 20th century, leaving aside WWI and WWII, America fought its native population, and in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Lao, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Congo, Bolivia, Cambodia, Granada, Libya, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.

These are troops on the ground wars, in the twentieth century alone, which are a matter of public record. We're not even at the War on Terror, small scale secret stuff, or counting the viscous regimes the US has propped up. Or sanctions, or internal repression, lynching, assassinations and the like.

We don't have a body count as the US stopped counting in Vietnam, but I'd wager if we took all the deaths for which the US is directly responsible, it outstrip would outstrip Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined by an order of magnitude.

[Breathes] To the initial point, and speaking from somewhere where one's political views can definitely get one locked up. The (debatable) free speech of Americans means nothing to those not protected by US law, which is most of the world.

The American human rights record may look passable from the inside, but from the outside it's just another monstrous empire.

Ok. Breathe.

What would have happened if the US hadn't entered WWII or hadn't remained in western Europe to stop the Soviets, or hadn't responded to the invasion of South Korea?

Presumably, someone or something besides what we politely call liberal democracy would be running those places, mmm? Probably in the manner in which either Germany or the USSR was run at the time, or in which North Korea is run today?

Perhaps after murdering all the intellectuals and landowners and shop owners, they would have come to some phase of neo-communist authoritarian capitalism like Vietnam or China now, (or if the Nazis had won, maybe their kids would have agitated for free speech and minority rights!) although it's debatable whether a Stalinist or Maoist country could get there without an evil capitalist villain to push it toward perestroika.

I'm not defending America sending troops hither and yon to defend banana companies.

But you say it's breathtakingly entitled to simply state that someone is going to run the world, and I think it's just a plainly obvious fact. By someone, hopefully you understand that I mean a polity and not a person, and ideally a group of nations with a commitment to the rule of law and civil rights. That would be as good as it has ever gotten in the long dark history of the world.

FYI I'm writing from a former Soviet state and need no lectures and whatifs on matters of the USSR.

A US-led unipolar world existed between 1989 and 2025. Multipolarity is the norm, even the British empire was truly top dog for like 50-100 years at best.

Attempts to control the world are what lead to the sort of acts of barbarism, exemplified by the US, that are the subject of this conversation.

The US is, once more, the greatest human rights abuser in living memory, in large part because it believed it should run the world.

The main learning from WWII, which America has consistently eroded over its period at the helm is that on a global scale, multi-state governance based on mechanisms like the UN, the international criminal court etc should be the mechanism for global governance. Not some state with a manifest destiny complex's self interest.

> on a global scale, multi-state governance based on mechanisms like the UN, the international criminal court etc should be the mechanism for global governance.

The UN is not for “global governance”, it is to prevent the nuclear holocaust that would be WWIII by giving super powers a place to resolve conflicts. The international court at the Hague is only able to try war criminals, for example from the Yugoslav Wars, because the countries were not powerful enough to just ignore it. Just because we were able to try and convict Slobodan Milošević, doesn’t mean that China or Russia would ever extradite a former head of state for trial.

They did Bibi, which was good. Growing a pair in its old age.

Unfortunately the world bodies like the UN are overwhelmingly stocked with dictatorships ranging from Angola to Russia which have no interest in civil liberties or human rights. While they frequently claim the US to be the world's greatest human rights abuser, as you have, they perpetrate mass murder on their own citizens. The living memory of my family from Odesa, who survived the holocaust, who survived the famine, to see the invasion of Ukraine and the butchery of Hamas, while the culprits and murderers themselves run the United Nations and ICJ, and while people trying to survive are told they are the worst war criminals in history by the people whose history is one of ceaseless murder tells me that it's better to be American and, if necessary, spit out all those organizations for their lies.

>No, no one needs to run the world.

Previous to the current unipolar hegemony of the US, it was the bipolar days of the US and USSR, otherwise known as the Cold War. That gave us Vietnam, Afghanistan part 1, Korea, and the Greek, Lebanese, Nicaraguan, Angolan civil wars. Before that it was a multipolar system of competing empires, fighting and carving up sections of the globe, which gave us both world wars, and countless wars before that. Unipolar hegemony provides stability and reduces interstate violence. The idea that Russia, China, and the EU competing for power and influence is a better situation does not ring true for me. The war in Ukraine is the first major interstate territorial grab since the end of the Cold War, and that is only the beginning in a multipolar world.

Right. Next question being, of the current contenders for crown in a unipolar world, which one would you want to live in - and which would you think your children and their children had a chance of improving and being free in, rather than being slaves? Because if there's a better option than America, I'll move there.

Everything changes. The America of 20 years ago is different from the America of today, and will be different in 20 years again (I have no idea how). Likewise for Europe (either individual countries or the EU). Will Argentina finally get of the constant ruin from decades of unchecked leftism and become a world power in 20 years - who knows. Some of the changes will be good and some bad. There are things to like and dislike about every option. So far I'm holding out hope that the US and Europe both overall remain good choices. 20 years ago I was expecting China to become a good choice, but now they are not. I didn't even think of Vietnam 20 years ago, but they have some good signs (I'm not sure if there are enough). There are a few countries in Africa that are doing good things even though the continent as a whole is a string of one bad thing after another.

Well argued.

Unipolarity has however also seen considerable brutality, in the places the empire cares about (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) and the places it doesn't, like Rwanda.

My point was made in frustration at the flippancy of the parent comment. The attitude that "someone has to run the world so it might as well be us" is precisely the source of the misery that the US, and every other empire, has inflicted on the world. It's a justification for untold evil and had to be challenged.

I'd further argue that the war in Ukraine isn't the first interstate territorial land grab, far from it. What else was the War on Terror?

The main characteristic of the (pre-Trump) US empire is that it doesn't incorporate territories, it plants bases and friendly governments. With varying degrees of success.

>Unipolarity has however also seen considerable brutality, in the places the empire cares about (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) and the places it doesn't, like Rwanda.

We should probably view these in context to alternatives. Just looking at Afghanistan, the 20 year “War on Terror” is estimated to have killed approximately 200,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In contrast to the Soviet Afghan War, which was half a long, but resulted in between 1.2 and 2 million people killed, an order of magnitude more bloody.

Your comparison of the US and “every other empire” and equating Ukraine to the War on Terror is the same lack of context argument. The US “soft empire” of economic pressure, military protection, and clandestine regime change is not comparable to empires that literally would invade, conquer, and rule over other countries. The US does not own land in Afghanistan, did not annex and take control of oil or other natural resources in Iraq. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it is equivalent to other bad things and I think it is very clear that the US has been much “less bad” than the previous alternatives.

I'm sorry, but going back to my very first post on here, staying in living memory, the US has a vast litany of egregious human rights offences to its name. This is an objective fact of record.

The notion that it's any better than a hypothetical does not address the core point that the US government, has in actuality caused more suffering, to more people, in more countries, over a longer period of time than any other since the end of WW2.

I don't want to see another empire, but the world won't be sorry to see the back of the US.

> going back to my very first post on here…address the core point that the US government, has in actuality caused more suffering, to more people, in more countries, over a longer period of time than any other since the end of WW2.

Lets look at that.

>Vietnam alone, over fifty years ago, ignoring everything that's gone on since was 1.4 million deaths

This ignores that the USSR was on the other side of this war, so those deaths are shared equally.

>Cuba, Nicaragua, Korea, the Congo, Cambodia, Lao

These are all Cold War proxy wars with the Soviet Union, a direct result of duopolistic fighting.

> the former Yugoslavia

The Yugoslavian wars were internal/civil wars over nationalism and involved extensive ethnic cleansing. The US stepped in and ended the wars after a fairly short bombing campaign.

>We don't have a body count as the US stopped counting in Vietnam, but I'd wager if we took all the deaths for which the US is directly responsible, it outstrip would outstrip Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined by an order of magnitude.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward is estimated to have caused 30 to 45 million deaths. Stalin’s Great Purge murdered between 700,000–1.2 million. Stalin also forcibly deported 15 million people as part of his Dekulakization, and cause 20 million deaths total. This claim that the US has killed orders of magnitude more people has no basis in fact.

A majority of the wars were proxy wars, and as horrible as they were, they were less destructive than wars of conquest they replaced. The Napoleonic wars killed 6.5 million with muskets and cannons. Meanwhile, the Iraq war, the worst US war since the fall of the Soviet Union, resulted in less than a third of the deaths in Korean or Vietnam wars.

Listing the United States Superpower misdeeds only sound horrible when you ignore the context of what the other Superpowers were doing. At it ignores the amount of violence in a unipolar US world compared to duopolistic and multipolar worlds.

Can we summarize international politics like this: once a nice person gets a gun, he realizes that there is no need to be nice anymore?

Absolutely crazy when we see countries like China not be close to as bad as the most evil empire ever, the US. And yet somehow the thought is the US isn’t the worst with human rights.

When I was in my early 20s in Thailand I hated America under George W Bush. I had a conversation with a Tibetan guy who was on his way to sneak into China to help his village in Tibet which had been invaded back in the 50s, then colonized. He was going to help dig wells.

I said to him: "America is just as bad as China! We're becoming the same thing!" This was during the Iraq war.

He stopped me short. He said, "no you cannot compare them, at all, ever. You don't understand. I went to school at [ivy league college]. America is still a democracy. You have no idea how dangerous it is in China."

He was right. I didn't...I was a spoiled kid with good intentions, and no understanding of how much evil there was in the world. You don't have the reference point of experiencing pure evil either to say what you're saying.

Tibet was a slave society. What are you talking about? Tibet was also a part of China for many many years.

America is a liberal western democracy. Just because you disagree with the democracy of China does not make it true.

You know in Tibet, 90%+ of people still speak their native language. Do you know how many indigenous people in Hawaii or the continental US speak their native language? Not close to the same.

I am Muslim. I see what the west does to Muslims. I have looked into Xinjiang. If Xinjiang was near Europe or in America, the Muslims would’ve been genocided.

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