Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

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>You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially.

Foreigners are always insisting on this to me, but they're never able to come up with concrete examples that are very compelling.

The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period, in fact.

If Europeans really think it so wonderful to dominate the world stage, they should be very happy for the US to step aside and let Europe take a try. The fact that they aren't happy shows that they're not being honest.

>Which is why it grates and/or is mystifying when you complain about that state of affairs. How you distribute the wealth internally is also mystifying, but for different reasons, and largely unrelated to how you get that wealth in the first place.

It's very simple. I want the dollars spent defending Europe to be spent here at home.

The way I see it, a nation can emphasize one, or maybe two, of the following three: growth, welfare state, military.

Post-WW2 US has historically emphasized "growth" and "military". Emphasizing "military" is silly because we barely face any military threats, and we were doing great prior to WW2 with far less military spending.

Europe has historically chosen "welfare state".

I want the US to switch to emphasizing "growth" and "welfare state", and let the Europeans handle their own continent. The fact that Europe has historically underinvested in growth and military is very much their problem.

> The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

Well sure, I might as well link you to info on the 2008 crash to demonstrate that the modern US economy is just as broken.

Here are some interesting facts from the Wikipedia page you linked:

* "The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world" -- i.e. we were doing really well, as I said: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Gr...

* "with the devastating Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929" -- sounds like it didn't have much to do with a failure to defend Europe

* If you're going to try to argue that tariffs worsened the Great Depression -- I'm not advocating tariffs. I didn't vote for Trump btw. I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them. (I don't advocate a gold standard either.)

* "Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs." If you think the New Deal ended the depression, which some economists appear to believe, that's basically an argument for the "welfare state" course I'm advocating.

* As far as I can tell, literally no one argues for the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance:

>The precise causes for the Great Depression are disputed. One set of historians, for example, focuses on non-monetary economic causes. Among these, some regard the Wall Street crash itself as the main cause; others consider that the crash was a mere symptom of more general economic trends of the time, which had already been underway in the late 1920s.[3][8] A contrasting set of views, which rose to prominence in the later part of the 20th century,[9] ascribes a more prominent role to failures of monetary policy. According to those authors, while general economic trends can explain the emergence of the downturn, they fail to account for its severity and longevity; they argue that these were caused by the lack of an adequate response to the crises of liquidity that followed the initial economic shock of 1929 and the subsequent bank failures accompanied by a general collapse of the financial markets.[1]

Fun fact: Chaos in Europe might have even been good for the US economy:

>According to Christina Romer, the money supply growth caused by huge international gold inflows was a crucial source of the recovery of the United States economy, and that the economy showed little sign of self-correction. The gold inflows were partly due to devaluation of the U.S. dollar and partly due to deterioration of the political situation in Europe.[56]

I advocate a Swiss foreign policy for the US. We should have a much stronger default towards neutrality, and stop being so eager to sanction so-called "bad actors" like Russia. That will strengthen the USD as a reserve currency, since central banks won't feel as much need to diversify away from it in order to beat sanctions.

> the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance

Not caused by, but the economy didn’t fully recover until all the wartime production started, and the measures that had been put in place to curb unemployment had been short term solutions with only a limited effect

> I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them.

You see the problem with you people is that you’ve strong armed your way into everyone’s business for the past century, trying to change cultures and ways of life, far beyond simple alliances - only to now turn around and abandon your so-called allies as soon as they become inconvenient for you. I say this as an African living in Europe who experienced firsthand one of your regime changes and subsequent cutting of ties when the new regime didn’t align

>Not caused by, but the economy didn’t fully recover until all the wartime production started, and the measures that had been put in place to curb unemployment had been short term solutions with only a limited effect

Are you seriously arguing that we need military commitments so we can hope that war breaks out right around the time of an economic depression?

It seems to me that you've basically conceded the point that the US doesn't benefit from its involvement in Europe, and its involvement is simply out of misplaced idealism. I'm just saying, we should stop doing the idealism.

We both agree that the idealism is misplaced and America is a nation of fools. All I'm saying is you should accept the logical consequence of your position, and agree with me that us fools should stop wrecking everything in the name of "freedom and democracy" nonsense.

>You see the problem with you people is that you’ve strong armed your way into everyone’s business for the past century, trying to change cultures and ways of life, far beyond simple alliances - only to now turn around and abandon your so-called allies as soon as they become inconvenient for you. I say this as an African living in Europe who experienced firsthand one of your regime changes and subsequent cutting of ties when the new regime didn’t align

Europeans mostly complain about our influence on the continent, despite 80 years of peace and prosperity post-WW2. If that's not enough to please them, nothing ever will be.

But in any case: We are very bad at foreign policy and we should do less of it. That's my position. We aren't going to get any better.

The post-WW2 experiment, initiated by Dwight Eisenhower, to have a more interventionist foreign policy, has been a failure, and at this point everyone agrees on this. Most of all, it has been a failure for the USA -- our relative GDP has fallen, meaning the rest of the world got rich quicker than we did. (This demonstrates how we have been manipulating the global economic system for our own benefit, naturally.)

As a voter, I don't have the capability or wisdom necessary to reform the US foreign policy establishment. Best I can do is to hope for less foreign policy.

Everything is always America's fault, as you yourself say. No other countries have agency or responsibility. For example, America is the only country that ever seeks to influence others.

America is the only country which seeks to ally with leaders that are aligned with it. Other countries don't care whether their partners are on the same page or not. This is a uniquely American trait. Other countries just choose who to ally with based on whether they like the design of another nation's flag.

Regardless of how things go with e.g. Ukraine, America will always to blame. We will be to blame no matter what we do. So we might as well focus on helping ourselves, and mind our own business.

>It's very simple. I want the dollars spent defending Europe to be spent here at home.

Presumably you would still like to spend some dollars defending the US? How many dollars do you think is the difference? (keep in mind there are many nonlinearities in defense spending: you can very easily cut spending by 20% and wind up with 20% of the capability instead of 80%) The US's presense in Europe is very much strategically part of the US defending itself.

>I want the US to switch to emphasizing "growth" and "welfare state", and let the Europeans handle their own continent. The fact that Europe has historically underinvested in growth and military is very much their problem.

If Europe ceased to be an ally to the US and instead became hostile (due to being occipied by e.g. Russia), then it very much would be the US's problem.

I noticed you weren't able to provide any compelling concrete examples, as expected.

At best, the US does a bad job of providing global public goods which benefit all nations. At the peak of the British Empire, the Brits controlled 25% of the globe. By contrast, US territory barely expanded in the wake of WW2, during the period that we've supposedly been running the world for our own benefit.

During this period, relative US economic strength also declined considerably: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-share-of-global-economy...

>Presumably you would still like to spend some dollars defending the US? How many dollars do you think is the difference? (keep in mind there are many nonlinearities in defense spending: you can very easily cut spending by 20% and wind up with 20% of the capability instead of 80%) The US's presense in Europe is very much strategically part of the US defending itself.

I think we should have a nuclear deterrent. I don't think we should have bases in Europe or commitments to defend foreign countries. We should evaluate all of our spending on the basis of how much it helps with homeland defense.

>If Europe ceased to be an ally to the US and instead became hostile (due to being occipied by e.g. Russia), then it very much would be the US's problem.

I don't seek a hostile relationship with Russia. It's critical for global peace and stability that the major powers have good relationships.

Part of the strategy is to stop inserting ourselves in foreign conflicts so we have less need for military spending. We get nothing but complaints for inserting ourselves in foreign conflicts anyways. If things go right, our involvement is forgotten or taken for granted; if things go wrong, somehow it is always our fault.

> providing global public good

> At the peak of the British Empire

Global public goods and peak British Empire don't belong in the same thought IMO. Might as well go in about how great a public good the Belgians and French brought to Africa in their heyday.

I definitely agree the US shouldn't insert itself as much directly like the Iraq wars. But thinking that means we should walk away from controlling global naval shipping and near immediate air presence is missing out the enormous soft power we can project. Align with us on trade and we'll make sure your ships can leave, your planes can take off. Disagree, and we'll see who answers the call when those Houthis start shooting at your boats.

Losing those air fields and making the Navy considerably smaller massively reduces the ability for the US to project security on a global state.

Meanwhile the Trump administration cuts programs while ballooning the military budget to $1T...

>Global public goods and peak British Empire don't belong in the same thought IMO. Might as well go in about how great a public good the Belgians and French brought to Africa in their heyday.

Yes, I was deliberately contrasting the US with the British Empire. The British Empire is what it looks like when a nation actually runs the world for its own benefit.

>But thinking that means we should walk away from controlling global naval shipping and near immediate air presence is missing out the enormous soft power we can project.

Again: Give me concrete examples of the benefits from this, which justify hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending.

>Losing those air fields and making the Navy considerably smaller massively reduces the ability for the US to project security on a global state.

I don't want to "project security" on a global scale.

>Meanwhile the Trump administration cuts programs while ballooning the military budget to $1T...

I'm a Democrat. I voted against Trump.

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