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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

Great, so every country can just smoothly descend further into tyranny with no pushback from any other country. Thankfully we won't have any world police though!

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The world police was never really there to stop tyrants, the evidence is that they'd conveniently look the other way whenever they benefitted from it, and they would even put tyrants in place when it suited them. They did stop some tyrants, for sure, but only when it was convenient.

The world saw it's greatest peace under US hegemony. It wasn't perfect and there were bloody avoidable wars on the behest of the US, but by and large things ran smoothly and US sponsored globalism brought prosperity and peace to many.

I think it's too early to make that call, considering pax romana lasted 200 years and we're not even a 100 into us hegemony.

Too early to make what call? Pax Americana could end tomorrow and it wouldn't make the statement false (well, it would if whatever followed was even more peaceful).

During the US's period as hegemon, its influence extended only so far, and was only so often used to oppose tyranny.

> its influence extended only so far, and was only so often used to oppose tyranny

America was a major force behind post-War decolonization. It was one of our terms of the European peace.

The US provided lip service to the idea, but quickly became paranoid about the threat of world wide communism and changed its tune relatively quickly. In the places where this wasn't a factor, it wasn't altruism by any stretch, but economic interests. The US saw that a post-colonial world would be fantastic for business...

I would pick tyranny over "democracy" import any day. Neither US or UK have a great track record here.

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