Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'
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lemonde.fr
Two things are important to think about.
1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.
Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.
I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.
>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.
There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.
It's the exact opposite: US citizens got fed up with the domestic problems created by Triffin's Dilemma and wanted out.
Remember, the "imperial revenue" in our model doesn't get helicoptered into the economy, it pumps assets. Stocks, bonds, and real estate. Your share of the imperial loot is proportional to the value of the assets that you own, and worse, even if you don't have a big house and fat brokerage account you still have to compete with people who do and they're going to bid up the price of anything that doesn't have highly elastic supply. Health care, housing, and education are the ones creating problems. America got a great deal, but most Americans got a raw deal: costs went up, income didn't, misery ensued.
Pumped bonds allow (force, really) the government to run deficits (homework: what breaks if they don't? It happened in Clinton's term, you can go and check) and to some extent that distributes the money. There's the whole services narrative which held that the services sector would pump hard enough to backfill manufacturing, but it never did. The people who got the door slammed in their face are no longer convinced that the door is their path to prosperity and now they want to tear the whole thing down.
If you want to hear an actual economist talk about this, see "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
I'm not against calling reserve currency status a privilege so long as you are crystal clear on the point that it was a privilege for America but a curse for most Americans.
That PRC talent cohort are going to stick around 2060/70/80s. Past that, it's hard to extrapolate, but ~50 years with that much talent advantage can build very durable advantages. Meanwhile the population PRC sheds is overwhelmingly going to be the old, undereducated etc, think 200m rural farmers left behind by modernization that bluntly is net drag on economy/system, but they're also relatively cheap to caretake vs US silver obligations.
Short of AGI, US is not a serious competitor vs PRC in terms of skilled demographics that sustains strategic hegemonic advantages, at least not in our lifetimes.
Even if you wanted to, you cannot bring the majority of your population to a high-skill level. That's not surprising, but still it is debatable whether China is producing value in line with their large, highly skilled cohort. They seem to be stuck on the hard problem, relying a lot on the import of foreign-invented technologies. That may change over time; we will see…
Skilled job supply: labour supply is definitely issue, and there is theoretical ceilling on how much high skilled technical jobs there can be. But PRC only country with talent glut, vs everyone else projected shortage. That automatically gives them both strategic and economic advantage (unlimited cheap high end labour). And part of the shortage (i.e. source of youth unemployment) is simply they spammed academia harder than industry. real estate to industry pivot lagged academia machine going brrrt by 10 years. Industry is going brrrt now, but will still take time to generate 10s of millions of high end jobs, which btw will simultaenously erode western high end. Every industry where western incumbants gets displaced by more efficient PRC players basically lose significant portion of their operating profits and downsize.
>be stuck on the hard problem
They are manifestly not. They have been brutally accelerating / demolishing / catching up / and recently leading. Look at actual timeline, bulk of tertiary talent generation is post 2000s academic reforms (add 10-15year masters+industry pipeline), they didn't explode academic system and talent output until ~2010s, bulk of new talent + a few years for cohorts to integrate into and simultaneously expanding high end industry = almost all the high end catchup was done in the last 10 years shortly after workforce composition STARTED STEM/skilled shift. And most of that catch was done when PRC was growing from 20m-40m STEM, i.e. from half US STEM to parity, and exploding before it reached parity due to PRC industry cluster advantages.
Like the amount of progress/catchup they have made across every sector relative to execution time is objectively stupendendous, as in historic outlier tier, and now they're leading/frontier in various sectors, which already invalids they can only fast follow. They're simply not retarded with industrial policy until coldwar 2.0 that forced them to decide to indigenize everything and that was 7 years ago, they're pretty much caught up in nearly everything except the absolute pinacle, and even then they seem to be beating western projected catchup timeline (see today's Chinese EUV prototype report).
This all happened in basically 10 years, when PRC cultivated pool for mid-career professionsals in 2010s from 2000s tertiary reforms. They will have conservatively 50 years and 2x-3x larger skilled workforce and much larger/developed industrial base going forward, i.e. OCED combined, but not paper workforce, workforce with actual access to the densest and most complete industrial chain in the world brrrting at PRC speed.
IMO this is talent/industrial base advantage that is as insurmountable as US WW2 advantage that sealed US hegemony for 50+ years. Like even if US AGIs first cope strategy is true, LBH, said AGI is going to look at the numbers, the industrial chain density, the sheer abundance of power and abillity to generate atoms, and immediately defect to PRC.
Speaking as Indian, Our population growth happened when we were poor, and masses were uneducated/illiterate.
I have one more theory that- Population growth happens when poor people have access to lots of carbohydrates. Plus having lots of children is somewhat akin to having meat robot automatons whom you can send for physical work and make money.
If you want to use sanctions to do reduce population it doesn't work in the modern era. Poor people eat well and make babies.
What does that mean? Seriously; I can't make sense of it.
The exporter countries contain smart people who may seek to suppress this process to maintain revenue flows. This prevents the development from happening.
Two examples:
1: the 'unequal treaties' between 19th century Japan and America prohibited certain kinds of tariffs and subsidies by Japan. This allowed westerners, prominently Americans, to maintain market share in Japan by product dumping.
2: in 18th and 19th century India various British offices at different times had policies of having their sepoys arrest textile workers and maim them by the forcible amputation of both thumbs, to preserve the market share of British textiles.
You can't win by just buying stuff from someone else; it appears that people have a hard time understanding that nowadays.
India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
Relative gaps are smaller, but the persistance of gap is never more entrenched than ever.
That is not a decline. It is however a Great Game, not played with nations but with ideology and where the US and China are quite aligned. That game is less visible until it is seen.
I've always said that if India got a unified national language they would become a nearly instant world power.
Imagine an India where English was mandated in every public school - and every child, regardless of caste (which officially doesn't exist...), attended school. English, because it's more internationally useful than Hindi, and doesn't have the same ethnological competition (Hindi vs Bengali vs Tamil vs <297 others>).
Then imagine that, now that all of India can actually speak to each other, they get their shit together, and build a truly functional national highway system. Top it off with a safe railway system, complete with modern trains. Enough trains that you don't have to ride on top. (OK, I'm starting to dream big.)
One generation later India is a dominant world power. Pakistan is completely fucked, sure, because Delhi will never get over their petty sibling hatred. But India can start power-brokering between all other nations.
India’s big problem is lack of natural resources, and lack of clear hierarchy to manage the limited resources (including choosing to screw some people for the greater good). China had the same issue of enormous population relative to natural resources, but it had the clear hierarchy to be able to execute.
India is similar to the USSR in that it buckets disparate languages, religions and cultures into a single nation with inevitable separatist tendencies.
As for making friends, the US empire is highly atypical in its "friendliness" and it's entirely plausible that its successor will revert to the mean.
If only there was a conflict somewhere with a perieved superpower, maybe a nuclear country or something that would be relatively easy to win without even entering into a direct altercation. Oh, wait!
America could’ve easily won the war in Ukraine by just ging away a bit more weapons, specifically long range missiles. It could even just tell European countries to give their long rhange missiles in exchange for a resupply for some plausible deniability.It could’ve been a bit more generous with intelligence.
Unfortunately, America elected Trump. A person who doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t directly concern him. If it doesn’t benefit (or hurt) him personally it might as well not exist. Which make it easy to sway his foreign policy. Russia is actively trying to buy him and he thinks it’s great. It’s going to be a very fast decline of American influence as more and more countries around the world will see that it takes very little to buy an american president, allegedly the most powerful person in the world. And if any petty dictator can buy him, what worth is his power?
They did speak up. And they lost the popular vote. Democracy is only as good as its voters. A country is only as good as its people. Replace good with productive/sane/not corrupt, etc.
If politicians got that through their heads, and started trying to convince voters on their own merit, instead of simply trash-talking their opponents and telling people they voted “wrong”, they would start to get things done again, and we could actually solve real problems.
A selfish voter will throw the world under the bus if it means they win something. An uneducated voter won't understand the full implications of their vote. A hateful voter will go down with the ship if this takes their enemies down too. What "merit"?
Look around, look at the last US presidential elections, those politicians were elected "on their own merit". Hate, bigotry, populism, treason, corruption. That "merit".
If you like democracy ... then what's wrong with that?
Claiming that the two choices are equally bad is the “trap”, when actions clearly indicate one is worse for democracy, and societal trust in general.
I'm not sure this is true anymore given the splitting of media and news sources. When everyone watched the same 3 news programs it was easier to speak to those people. It is very hard to penetrate the "other sides" messaging platforms.
> instead of simply trash-talking their opponents
This was the President's entire election platform (twice).
> we could actually solve real problems
If voters wanted the solve real problems, they would vote for people who present solutions to real problems. Instead, we vote for people who provide easy scapegoats and fake solutions, which ends up making things worse. Trump has the slimmest policy stance of any President ever elected.
If you buy into liberal universalism, sure you don’t agree with the policy. If you think the only difference between an Iowan and a Bangladeshi is the need for sunscreen and external factors outside people’s control—you don’t see how the policy is a good one. But to say that there’s no policy there is absurd.
When he says success or about “you gonna be so rich you’re not gonna believe it” - he talks about himself and his billionaire buddies not you. His only policy stance is to surround himself with yes-men and enrich himself through blatant open corruption. Anything is for sale: crimes, pardons, citizenships, you name it - directly contradicting your thesis.
Also I truly believe he hates half of Americans because of wrong-think. But he will deal with them after he deals with brown people.
> Closing the border, deporting all illegal immigrants
Lets deport farmers, construction employers and business owners who “import” such workforce to essentially slave for them.
How such employers are not deeply scrutinised by public and politicians - I will never understand.
> abandoning unfounded foreign policy commitments
Abandon Ukraine, but financing Israel, Argentina, attempt truly unfounded war against Venezuela (reasons change every other day and contradict other policies like pardoning Hernandez on drug trafficking but threatening Maduro with war for same reason in the same week).
> using tariffs as a tool of trade policy
Sure if it’s deliberate, calculated and strategic. China laughs at your soy bean farmers. Coffee exporters give zero damns about your tarrifs. Canadians laugh at you when you’ll wait 30 years to grow your lumber. And on top of all of it - policy is so chaotic (who said men are not emotional?) - no actual long term commitment from industries will happen.
Also more points how his views are contradictory from my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158110
Can you please link to when and where he said this? Because it raises a question of when someone becomes "American." Trump's grandfather was born in Germany, so when did the Trumps become American?
> all concrete policies consistent with that thesis
Those were concrete policies from Project 2025, which Trump directly said was not related to his campaign or administration. We know he was clearly and directly lying, but with someone so willing to lie about everything, I'm not sure how you can prescribe some type of unifying thesis about his policy stances or actions. It feels like you are trying to paste your ideas onto his actions.
I wish the folks who are trying to cut off all immigration (and open channels to de-naturalize American citizens) could appreciate this more. Because it exposes their thesis at its core: some Americans are better than others, and these people know which are which. Where do I as an American fall into these categories of theirs?
If you think those principles have worked pretty well, then the question is how to maintain the culture that produced this successful society. This is something Silicon Valley folks should easily understand! You guys screen people endlessly for "fit." Would you want a large number of folks who grew up in IBM's corporate culture to come work at your startup?
But more importantly, I said Americans. Are some Americans more American to you?
America is not a startup. It is not even a company. It’s a country who was built inherently by immigration. And it was wrong to single out the Irish and Italians, and it’s wrong to single out the ___ now.
If you are British American, then yes. Otherwise, no.
> If you are born here, what does it matter?
Empirically, yes it does! https://www.rorotoko.com/11/20230913-jones-garett-on-book-cu... (“The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance, you can partly predict people’s savings behavior just by knowing which country their parents or grandparents came from.”).
You can look at the data and see that about 50% of the difference in levels of social trust between people in Italy and Scandinavia are reflected in the descendants of immigrants from those countries to the U.S., even after generations. You can then use your eyes to look at Minnesota versus New Jersey and see more social trust and less corruption in the former than the latter. You can even tie cultural background back to concrete social indicators! Parts of the midwest settled by Dutch settlers perform better on versus metrics than parts settled by Germans. Parts of the country settled by Puritans outperform nearly everywhere else in terms of good governance and low corruption.
> America is not a startup. It is not even a company.
Culture matters even more in a country than a startup! Startups hire high-IQ people that focus on discrete problems that are amenable to scientific analysis. Voters in democracies must confront a wide range of issues that are not amenable to scientific analysis, and consist of average people who are not capable of such analysis anyway. That means the person’s gut reactions, arising from their culture and socialization, matters even more. For example, most people simply can’t understand numbers on the scale of the federal debt, but cultures differ significantly in their attitudes towards debt and savings. It’s imperative to have a body politic that has pro-adaptive cultural attitudes.
>,It’s a country who was built inherently by immigration.
That’s like saying the country was built by people who drink water. Immigrants from where? The country that exists reflects that it was built by British settlers, with greenfield development by Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest. If the country had been built by my ancestors in Bangladesh, I assure you, it would look very different than it does today.
For months on here you have defended and cheer-led the most nakedly corrupt administration in our lifetimes. (Let's skip the part where we have to talk specific examples of his corruption - you know it, and I know it.) And now you are spouting ignorant anti-Italian stereotypes and acting like you care about corruption. Your inconsistency of values is utterly unpersuasive so far.
> The country that exists reflects that it was built by British settlers, with greenfield development by Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest.
That does not include me, so if I were an immigrant today you would not let me in. If you were an immigrant today, would you let yourself in?
Surely you see the hypocrisy in that, especially if you consider yourself a valuable member of society. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to be a great American if you're not British, German, or Scandinavian. And that's been true for millions and millions of non-British/German/Scandinavians through all of American history.
The fact that I think Trump is the lesser of two evils doesn't change the fact that New Jersey has higher corruption levels than Minnesota. Is it really your contention that communities settled by Italian immigrants are as well governed as those that were settled by Scandinavian immigrants?
Ironically, Trump himself reflects the third-worldization of the American body politic. Our first-past-the-post system guarantees two parties, but cultural change alters what platforms can win a majority. Immigration has killed small-government conservatism--a concept that exists almost nowhere outside the Anglosphere--but a third-world strongman populist can still win the popular vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... ("Our best estimate is that immigrant voters swung from a Biden+27 voting bloc in 2020 to a Trump+1 group in 2024."). Little Bangladesh swung a net 50+ points to Trump in 2024.
> That does not include me, so if I were an immigrant today you would not let me in. If you were an immigrant today, would you let yourself in?
I made an argument based on evidence, so why are you responding with personal feelings? Whether any particular immigration policy would have allowed me or you to immigrate is totally irrelevant. Immigration is about the mass movement of people, who bring their culture with them and reshape the parts of America where they move. It's stupid to talk about it in terms of individuals.
I would love for you to answer the question about whether you’d let us in today, but I suspect you won’t because you’d have to also admit that your stance is hypocritical.
So I think mass immigration is a much bigger risk. Look at the history of Chicago, and the immigration-fueled political machines that gave rise to dysfunctional and corrupt government that persists to this day. Why are American cities so dysfunctional in their governance compared to western european ones? This is not some inevitable consequence of cities. In the south it’s because southern culture is just tolerant of corruption, often tracing back to power structures that arose during the era of slavery and segregation. But in the north it’s mostly the lasting effects of mass immigration of impoverished groups with strong cultural identities. We are seeing the same problem take root in Minneapolis—which until now has been one of the few well-governed cities in the north—in real time.
As to your question about whether I should have been allowed in—I’ll humor you. My dad should have been allowed in, who is a cultural outlier among Bangladeshis. He proudly tells this story about a birthday lunch in Dhaka in the 1970s, where he and a Danish expatriate were the only ones to show up on time. The Danish guy remarked that my dad must find it difficult to get along in a country where people have such a relaxed view of time. My dad loves this story, and that’s why he self-exiled himself from his homeland.
But your argument is illogical. Immigration policy doesn’t screen individuals for fit. It’s a system of mass migration. And when you’re talking about millions of Bangladeshis, not just one, you have to take culture into account. I am acquainted with a bunch of folks from Massachusetts, who grew up among descendants of Puritan settlers. They were socialized with ideas like “food is for fuel, not enjoyment” and a visceral aversion to wealth signaling. They have such an aversion to waste they cut their donuts in half and consider it a good thing if they run out of food at a picnic. They’re exceptionally orderly and temperate people, very much unlike my extended Bangladeshi family. I think America would be much better governed if more of the population was like them rather than like me and my extended family.
Calling the President of the United States “one guy” I think is a bit reductive. He has spent a decade traveling the nation, rallying, and propagandizing. Surely that has impacted American culture? And we (I think) agree that the way he talks and behaves is not what we want our children to model. To me, I’d be much more averse to them acting like that than I’d be worried about them acting like random New Jerseyans.
I also think the president and his administration corrupting the government absolutely will impact regular people’s behavior and I’m surprised to hear you claim otherwise. In the same message that you are concerned with cities being corrupt as a bad thing, you are accepting and endorsing Trump doing that at a much larger and impactful federal level. Corruption is bad and we should want less of it - I don’t see how that happens under Trump.
Just a heads up that I’ll be heading out for a while so I think we have to agree to disagree at this point. Feel free to take the last word.
> Those were concrete policies from Project 2025, which Trump directly said was not related to his campaign or administration.
This is such a weird angle. Democrats focused on Project 2025 because of the abortion stuff. Trump stated that Project 2025 wasn't related to his campaign because it wasn't. Heritage doesn't speak for Trump--especially about abortion. That is not inconsistent with the fact that Trump and Heritage agree on 80% of everything else.
Trump has things that he says—many things that he says. How many of them are beliefs, and how many of them are his normal verbal diarrhea, and how many of them are just the words of the last person who spoke to him?
But it is related to the list of "Trump's Policies" that you created out of thin air, which bare a striking resemblance to many of the policies in Project 2025. This especially true with regard to military, foreign policy, and education. That's the point, he has almost no policies that he truly believes in (maybe immigration and tariffs?).
> Heritage doesn't speak for Trump--especially about abortion.
You cannot claim to know Trump's stance on abortion because he has taken literally every position on this topic. There are news articles spelling it all out [0]. Your comment is actually a perfect example what I am trying to explain:
Trump has no discernible policy on abortion, as laid out in the article below. In order to ascribe him one, you seem to have taken the one that you align with most and applied it to him.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-many-ab...
That’s hard to claim to make right after a Trump victory—trashing their opponents has been the Republicans playbook my entire life, and it’s currently working quite well for them.
This line of reasoning is cute, but fact-free.
The facts are there, easily accessible for people to read or see. That they choose to ignore them is evidence of the problem with democracy. Whatever mistakes were made by the party that lost, their candidate was not the one with a (comparatively) long track record of fraud, treason, and overall lack of decorum.
Trump was more isolationist than Clinton, Biden was more isolationist than first-term Trump and Trump beat Biden last year partially on the basis of becoming much more isolationist than his first term version, surpassing Biden.
The knee-jerk reaction is protectionism but it is too late. The other parts of the world have caught up. And that is normal and sound. It rebalances the world. It is a new equilibrium. This is just the natural way for most closed systems where there is a gradient.
What is weird is that it is almost like watching a movie. Meaning that the current technological push into AI, energy and robotics is likely to spearhead us into a whole new kind of economics (post-money/post-work kind of). And probably requires to open the system (find new territory beyond the existing). The point is that it will probably offset the current protectionist trend.
Wondering how AI will affect governance...
Mind you, another consequence of the regime is that nobody knows what's real and what's keyfabe any more. They were also threatening to invade Canada, lost a colossal amount of goodwill as a result, and got bored and moved on.
Now, whether that's needed or whether the US is handling it in a "good way" is all up for debate. But there is a deliberateness.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Venezuela_relati...
* https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/china-breaks-with-latin-amer...
* https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3335116/china-unlike...
Except that MAGA cheers on new wars. They prefer "ministry of the war", they like the threats to annex Canada and Greenland. They enjoy fishermen boats being destroyed and want to bomb Venezuela.
This is not about distaste toward foreign wars. This is about wanting more of them, wanting more torture and wanting more violence. This is about wanting to feel and appear more manly and getting there via more violence.
The benefits would seem to flow to those countries that would have been swallowed up without Pax Americana.
No, but the USA is getting a lot of stuff in exchange for $$ which it can print for basically free. Consumers in the USA have benefitted a lot from this, which partly compensated the fact that more and more of the pie is going to the richest instead of the average American.
One can view Trump's tariff actions as preparatory for US debt default. This would crash the dollar and make imports much more expensive.
I don’t agree with Trump about much but he’s correct that the other liberal democracies have been more than happy to have us foot the bill for keeping the wolves at bay while looking down on us for doing it.
I’d also be very surprised if US military expenditure decreased by a single cent as a result of increased spending by other NATO countries.
That's just explaining why it's not worth the expense.
1. There is always a national debt
2. There are always things we spend money on, nevertheless
What this fallacy avoids is the necessary question of prioritization. Some things we'd like to spend money on are more important than others. In truth, there's always money for any given thing. There's never money for everything we might desire to spend money on.
"Well, it’s worth it, we just can’t" is just nonsensical. It's either worth it or not, and making that decision requires some work.
It's a fallacy that's used by politicians all over the political spectrum, and it's highly useful for them. "We cannot possibly afford that thing you are asking for" is a lot less alienating to voters than "it's either that thing you are asking for, or this thing my donors have demanded."
It would be possible for us to continue propping up our allies who seemed (until Trump made it clear we might just take our ball and go home) completely uninterested in meeting the defense obligations agreed to, but it would come at a cost that would bankrupt us without us making other major sacrifices. We shouldn’t have to make those sacrifices to ensure the security of people who claim to be allies but don’t meet their own contractual obligations. I don’t find myself agreeing with Trump on very much, but on this one, he’s not only right, he’s the only person who could have caused any change. No other politician of either party was ever going to convince Europe to significantly increase military spending, even with the threat of Russia at their door.
It’s fairly obvious that was meant, and your comment is basically just the standard hacker news “aaaaactually”
I don't think China is against this change, but their agenda seems to be more focused on international trade and internal growth, rather than specific strategy against the US.
The EU is definitely not benefiting from it in the short term. While some argue it needs this change in the long term, it is difficult to imagine that the EU wants it to happen so arbitrarily and quickly.
Those holding any meaningful power in the US are either benefiting from this change, at least in the short term or personally, or oblivious to it, possibly also due to influence from the agents of change.
It's an opportunity for other states to gain influence. And in particular for Russia to advance their geopolitical ambitions, since this is from their playbook.
It would be in the interests of the United States to alter the course, and regain the influence already lost. The leaders seem to have chosen to ignore her interests, though.
On the other hand, the emergence of China, India, and to a lesser extent Russia (as a puppet of the Chinese) upon the world stage as independent actors, out of the shadows of Western domination, is another way in which the US is "losing control" but this is much less politically interesting in the sense that it was an inevitable and expected outcome. There is nothing the US has done, is doing or could do that would diminish non-Western ambition and agitation for power.
It was dragged into the first world war (despite strong public aversion) because J.P. Morgan Jr started lending money to Britain and France to buy American steel, thus setting in motion a cycle of investment and production protection that eventually required boots on the ground.
It was dragged into the second world war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (and Germany's subsequent declaration of war, as it was obligated to do under its treaty with Japan).
It protected Europe and SE Asia in the post-war years in order to contain communism, which it feared more than anything else. Once that threat subsided, there wasn't much reason for it to continue with its overseas footprint other than inertia and protecting important trade routes.
Gulf Wars I was to protect oil prices (and because they already had the equipment for war), and Gulf Wars II was to be seen to be doing something about 9/11.
Now that Trump is in power, America is performing its "great reset" (which was going to come eventually), where it becomes isolationist again, sticking to the Americas (reinvigorating the Monroe Doctrine), and leaving everyone else to their own devices.
Did you not read the Snowden revelations?
I'm asking these questions specifically based on your arguments in the past. I don't understand how you can believe America can thrive in a world without allies and trade partners.
The globalized supply chains needed to get the natural resources alone should be enough to answer your question about why we should care about America's global relationships.
What’s insane about America’s foreign policy is that it costs huge amounts of money, pisses off most of the third world, and doesn’t even seem to result in any flow of wealth to the U.S.
Not really convinced that it's that way round, that Europe actually wants much of this "policing" to be done at all rather than being dragged into it. Until Ukraine, which is the exact bit of world policing that Republicans no longer recognize as crime.
You, a European, want to tell the US public how their resources are to be used, and when they don't agree with you then you act morally superior about it.
As an American, I can confidently say that we do the exact same thing from the other perspective.
Isn't this an extreme low-ball estimate?
The long consequence of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions was providing Russia with a pretext for its own interventions, from the various caucasus states to Syria to Ukraine.
The total toll must have been much higher.
[0]https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/27/im-iraqi-and-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab...
Still, "over 100,000" is technically correct if it's more than 100,000. Since this subject isn't the main point of the article and the Iraq war is generally acknowledged to have been disastrous, I suppose he chose a safe figure so as not to derail the article with disputed estimates at the outset.
Documented civilian deaths from violence
187,499 – 211,046
Further analysis of the WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs
may add 10,000 civilian deaths.
https://psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf
Note that this report was filed in 2010, and the fatalities have continued since then.
Europe could be relevant again if it only embraced China and gave NATO the finger.
Can you link to anything specific? Have there been alliance talks? What are the new alliances being formed called? I know there have been some arms purchases and agreements but that wouldn't have anything to do with forming an alliance separate from what already exists today.
I guess it depends how you define things.
What this is, is a cooperation framework toward a shared purpose. None of those countries are abandoning or being abandoned by the United States as an ally, nor are any of those countries creating new alliances with each other.
I know there's this gut reaction on the Internet to act like the rest of the world is banding together and leaving the United States because of President Trump or something, but it's just not the case. At the end of the day, the only country in the world that has military and industrial power to defend against Russia or China today is the United States. That's not a slight at Japan, or France, or anything like that, but an acknowledgment of reality.
President Trump's administration has been, in my view, haphazard and stupid in how it has treated out allies and partners in many ways. In some ways they've been correct though too, and it's important to not overreact to news headlines.
Really, what exactly are folks asking the United States to do here? Give more money or weapons? Sure we could give even more, I support that. I'm quite hawkish on both Russia and China.
But I don't think that giving more money and arms tips the scales enough for Ukraine to force Russia out. So where does that leave us? The EU isn't going to do anything militarily about the situation. As the PM of Poland said, 600+ million Europeans are asking 300+ million Americans to defend them from 180+ million Russians. Something doesn't seem right. That doesn't mean the Trump Administration has handled this well. I'll give them to the extent that it is genuine that pursuing peace, if possible, is what we should do. But it also doesn't mean that all of the political grandstanding and TRUMP MAN BAD is getting us anywhere either. Has he handled our alliances poorly, yea I think so. Are our allies leaving and forming new alliances? No, not in any material sense. Does Europe need to step up and spend to defend itself, absolutely. It also doesn't mean President Trump needs to be an asshat either. Some ways self-destructive, other ways not.
Still here we are and like you say 600m+ of us wanting 300m+ Americans to defend against Russia is a bit odd although you can see how it got that way - after WW1 and WW2 it seemed quite a good idea not to rearm Europe and the US was quite keen to confront the Soviets. It's changing now due to Trump being a bit useless and Europe not wanting to be next on the list after Ukraine.
I am happy that Europeans are taking their security more seriously, and I don’t fault them for not pursuing US levels of military spending. Both world wars were so catastrophic, how could someone imagine starting another war in Europe?! But then along comes Russia, aided and abetted by China and North Korea and Iran.
I’m not sure if President Trump has been useless. He’s certainly useful to someone but I for the life of me can’t tell who. One day he’s ready to force Ukraine to accept Ukraine’s demands, the next the administration says it’s open season on Russian shadow fleet tankers. He’s tired of paying, and I think we are giving away less, but then they are happy to sell weapons and provide loans. Loans which will be useless if Ukraine is conquered.
Though I do want to point out that post-WW2 European militaries were staffed to be ready to fight the Soviets too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference
We don't know much of it anymore with the decline of Europe, but for several centuries the dominant geopolitical goal of most countries on Earth was to defend themselves from European invasion. Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.
It is not that other countries were full of saints ... but Germany did started both those wars.
But even reading history isn’t enough. I think we’re fundamentally not equipped to understand what a large number of deaths actually looks and feels like. 10 deaths happening in our vicinity is an unbearable tragedy. 1 million deaths is just a number. So folks are struck by a nostalgia for a time when humans killed each other by the millions.
In some ways they remind me of the people who long for the days before vaccines eliminated a bunch of diseases.
(IMO there has actually been a retreat from China trying to do propaganda "please like us" adventures overseas in the past few years. Peaked round about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_(film) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin - second highest grossing film worldwide of 2021! For a Korean War movie?!)
Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.
If a rebalancing were to occur, it is the surplus countries hit with mass unemployment that will hurt much more than deficit countries that can move production back at a much quicker pace. The author is making the mistake of viewing tings from a supply side perspective when given excessive reliance on investment and high savings the world is constrained by chronic underconsumption.
No they're not sending it for free, the US dollars and IOUs are real and ultimately translated into maintaining the salaries of millions of factory workers. Thats the whole point of export driven growth. Trying to abstract away the balance sheet as imaginary is not how real economics works.
The CCP, the IMF, World Bank, BIS, etc certainly aren't thinking like you are, growing consumption has proven extremely difficult in practice over growing industry.
I mean, what makes american so special in their ability to consume? An african can watch football on their 54" TV just as well as an american. Just ship this crap there instead of in the US if you're so concerned about consuming it.
It's trade imbalance! You ship stuff, and the IOUs you get in return are never claimed. It's no better than shipping stuff in Africa and getting Zimbabwean money in return. Everyone knows that it can't be claimed for anything tangible, except from other countries who also owe fealty to the US and are forced to give this currency value. If everyone "asked" for something in return of those IOUs from the US itself, they'd get nothing of tangible value in return. These IOUs only have value insofar as the US is the world police.
Well if you believe so you can go present your findings to policymakers or the CCP rather than in internet forum comments. They would be VERY interested to know what revolutionary insights you have that hundreds of economists are unable to solve.
We don't refer to the same problem. This problem you're referring to is not about finding those people who have the ability, so rare among non-american people, to consume stuff. It's about ramping up production while at the same time paying tribute to the US. This is, indeed, a difficult problem to solve and no doubts requires the best minds of the economic academia world.
However, the nature of the problem changes once the US stops being the world police. The problem becomes figuring out what's the pecking order now.
The us detached itself from the world after ww I and it seems to want to do it again. The tariffs might recapitulate the 30’s but that decade didn’t turn out well at all. So I hope the historical behaviour breaks down first.
I'm personally worried who takes over - none of the other parties vying for power instil even the vaguest sense of wanting to maintain the status quo. I feel fairly malicious authoritarianism and corruption will be observed in our own countries within this century (if that matters to you, depends on your age I suppose).
The top 8 are American and 17 of the top 20. Seven of the top 8 are into AI. I'm not convinced it's going nowhere. Even if AI on it's own isn't profitable, companies like Nvidia, Apple and Google are doing fine.
It's relatively meaningless unless a transaction on stock takes place.
Imagine if everyone holding shares of the top 8 companies decided to sell them simultaneously. That market cap wouldn't last the evening.
Do you have any examples?
This is what I've seen:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-eli-lilly-novo-nordisk...
Wegovy and Zepbound have not been covered by Medicare for weight loss, “and they’ve only rarely been covered by Medicaid,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “They’ve often cost consumers more than $1,000 per month, some a lot more than that. ... That ends starting today."
"“This is the biggest drug in our country, and that’s why this is the most important of all the [most favored nation] announcements we’ve made,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during the briefing. “This is going to have the biggest impact on the American people. All Americans, even those who are not on Medicaid, Medicare, are going to be able to get the same price for their drugs, for their GLP-1s.""Silicon Valley is great for innovating new "intellectual property," but they don't manufacture any real products any more.
China has entire cities which not only can develop IP, but they have the entire ecosystem collocated.
Catching up with them will be expensive and will need focus. Focus is not something the current president seems to excel in.
But I think this past year really changed the direction of the US and to a lesser extent the EU with respect to oil and gas versus renewables.
As the US has realized at the institutional level that China has secured a very strong position on refining rare earth materials into batteries and other green technology it is doubling down on oil and gas as the energy choice for the foreseeable future, climate change be damned. Not that China ever really cared about the climate, they just, for good reasons, wanted an alternative energy production source because even if they seized Taiwan the US Navy can bring oil and gas imports to near 0. Pipelines from Russia are sitting ducks too, so not much reprieve there.
US is putting $40 billion into Al Udeid and signing AI deals with the Middle East powers, and is close enough on a deal to legitimize Israel. Add Venezuela. You can see where this is going.
The EU politically wants to switch to green tech but it’s facing a problem which is doing so will result in effective deindustrialization since they would wind up buying most equipment from China including cars. The EU either did or is about to shelve the requirement that cars are EVs by 2035. I expect this to be fully repealed. While the EU likes to not mince words about US tariffs, they’re ultimately heading in the same direction. China had a $1 trillion export surplus. If the US isn’t buying their subsidized products who is? Brazil? Right now it’s Europe, but do you think Germany will let its manufacturing sector go away? If so I have a ticket to sell you to the next AfD rally. The product dumping from China is going to be too much and in a judo move the west will be able to use China’s manufacturing capacity against it. Nice factories you have there, too bad nobody buys anything you make (relatively speaking).
So the EU is sitting between two oil and gas energy superpowers oh and the Middle East is just around the bend. Politically they’ll still work on climate change initiatives but as push comes to shove, and with China overplaying its hand with export controls on rare earth materials and creating more panic in Brussels (never mind China's support for Russia invading Ukraine), the EU will generally maintain an oil and gas industrial direction, if I were to guess.
I’m not pro gas/oil or anything like that. Drive an EV and love it. But that’s my fun armchair take on what’s going on here.
Because the US was complicit in creating many of them
I'm aware of Le Monde, but didn't they previously use a different domain?
If we go back to being peers, so what? Rich people who've capitalized on the favored position will cry and complain (and spend billions trying to keep control) but the world will go on.
It seems the US wasn't in the war until two years after it started, and was drawn in due to Pearl Harbor. Even the protection of Atlantic trade was handled by the UK and Canada until 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...
It's also a useless discussion: whatever faith you may have in European progressive/socialist parties, they are not willing to give up the prosperity they have. They want fairness in addition to MORE than what the European people already have. If the demand is to give up more than 100% of European economic growth, you will not find them allies. Oh and there's the problem that they've got maybe 10-20% of the vote, and all other parties are not nearly as willing to help.
So these utopian outcomes won't happen. What will?
What these people never discuss is who will replace the US? Because the only real contender is the Chinese CCP. That will, to put it mildly, not be good. Frankly, the absurdly huge distinction between US hegemony and all others, whether you mean British hegemony, Ottoman hegemony or even going as far back as Roman or Greek hegemony is that every hegemon with the sole exception of the US conquered and murdered their empire together using slave armies (to their credit, some European powers, not all but some, at least refused to use slavery)
You might say "but China has promised not to ...". Ok, let's go there. Let's say China doesn't actually go ahead and try to conquer 1/3 of the world. Or, at least somewhat realistically, let's say they take over Taiwan and the Phillippines and stop there. Or let's even say they add Indonesia and Malaysia maybe even Japan to that ... and then stop.
Note: the CCP ideology is authoritarian and racist. We can perhaps argue if they'll go as far as the Nazi's did in the past century, but I don't understand how any rational person can argue it isn't at least going to go quite a ways in that direction. But if you don't live there ... who cares right? Also: if you live in these countries: get the fuck out of there (because the EU is definitely going to refuse to pay for the US securing the seas)
Or you might say you actually believe the CCP, and let's say that you're right to do so. The result is that the US withdraws from the global oceans ... and that's the end of that. What will happen?
The problem is "multilateralism" was demonstrated EXACTLY what it was at the end of WW1, at the real ending of Colonialism (I mean that yes, colonies endured a bit more, but the economic domination of European powers ended there. Their last big hurrah. At that point European Colonial powers had enjoyed a large surplus but right there and then, it was gone, and that's the point where the decline became totally inevitable, and exactly what happened became a certainty: a very large, protracted, slow economic decline. We might also mention what people chose to do in response to this happening: WW2)
This is not theory. This is history. This is what actually happened. Any rational person should at least consider it might happen again.
But let's discuss what will happen to us. Because that's what matters, right?
First, perhaps most obvious, piracy will return, at the very least to East and West African coasts, maybe even the African Mediterranean coast, and to Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as parts of India. None of the countries there have any hope in hell of securing their own coast, never mind international waters. Quite a few will participate in piracy like they did before. As a result international trade will largely collapse.
Maybe EU-US trade will survive, and maybe even US-China trade. But EU-Africa? EU-China? It will at the very least become orders of magnitude more expensive.
Second, a large list of countries (a growing list, I might add) that are at each other's throats but are currently being stopped either directly by the US army, or by US weapons and diplomacy, and even some being restained by EU weapons and diplomacy, will burst out into ethnic violence. We'll have 10, or god forbid 50, Sudan-style conflicts. There is even such a conflict brewing in the EU: Kosovo - Serbia ... nothing is solved there and while people aren't currently at each other's throats, they're not far from it (and if you're truly honest, the problem is Kosovo. Or put it this way. If you erased Serbia from the map, the Serbia-Kosovo conflict would continue. If you erased Kosovo from the map, the conflict would stop). Greece and Turkey ... they're perhaps further from war than Kosovo, but I would still argue that left to their own devices, another war there is inevitable. India-Pakistan. China vs essentially everyone. And so on and so forth.
The problem is "multilateralism" was demonstrated EXACTLY what it was just after WW1. There is a large group of countries that when restraints on their actions are released ... the result is a large set of genocides all occurring at once. I'm a pessimist, but let's be honest: this will simply happen again.
That is at the very least a big risk of what Piketty and other calls "justice". And the problem is simple: for at least the next few years it is extremely in the EU's and EU member states' financial interest to bring us closer to this scenario. Piketty is arguing for social justice, and he should: we need that. We need that influence, because other forces are looking to destroy the rights we currently enjoy. But they'll never talk their way into more than minority influence in "the West".
Perhaps Trump and MAGA are just extreme and cruel fatalists who realize what is coming now: a large, protracted, worldwide economic crisis, caused by Europe and China, followed by WW3. Perhaps they simply think the US will win WW3 and the world will go back to 1950. Perhaps their theory is that the best idea for the US is for WW3 to start before this economic crisis really hits the US, that the only thing they need to do is to withdraw the US army, weapons and diplomacy currently standing between a great many adversaries.
Hell, that may be exactly what happens. But this is both giving these people way too much credit AND ignores that of course WW3 will make the world suck pretty fucking bad for a long time.
The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation. If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state. It might even get worse than the WW2, since the US military is probably more superior compared to almost any other nation on the planet, than Nazi Germany's military was, and already has presence in basically all parts of the world, plus the logistics.
So lets hope that the current period of idiocy ends soon, and we can get back to peaceful international relations, with a sane US leadership, instead of one, that seemingly seeks to tear down as many bridges as possible. However, we are only in year one (!) of the current US government, so we will probably have to hold out breath a little longer, and Europe will have to rely on itself.
> The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.
And in most of Asia too where China is a very immediate threat.
> Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state
That seems alarmist to me. Nationalist policies and rhetoric (and I have lived with worse than the US) do not lead to fascism that easily, especially when you have strong institutions.
It is easy to know what is implied. Issue is emotional - people do not want to admit that yes, these are fascists.
> Speaking in absolutes makes it harder to have productive conversations.
We lack productive conversations due to pressure to not call things what they are. The problem is not that fascism is loaded word. The problem is that when we use it, it becomes harder to pretend and equally blame imaginary both sides.
> people tend to shutdown when they hear trigger words like fascism
Also, it is objectively not true they shutdown. There is nothing shutdown about current conservatives and republicans. They are loudly and actively working on their project. They are not shy afraid to talk ... instead people like you are unwilling to listen to what they are saying again and again.
Either that or pretending to not listen and focusing on trying to make their opposition shut up.
> productive conversation, it's better to use less loaded language.
Do you want productive conversation or you simply want the rest of us help them and pretend they are actually not fascists? Productive conversation and middle ground between democracy and fascism is authoritarian dictatorship and a lot of victims.
Both Obama and Biden were center choice. The whole democratic party is ruled by centrist politicians and ideology which is why they cant oppose the increasingly radical republicans all that effectively.
The left's judicial branch is very active: they sue every chance they get. And since they've diligently packed the court systems for decades, and since population centers that are predominantly Democratic are usually the locations for filing significant legal issues, i.e., they have left-leaning populations, therefore left-leaning juries and leftist judges, they usually get what they sue for.
Maybe someday we'll be able to look at Epstein's mail or Clinton's e-mails even.
The "every accusation is an admission" thing is truly right with right wingers like you.
> Maybe someday we'll be able to look at Epstein's mail or Clinton's e-mails even.
Who was blocking the release? Trump. Trump was blocking the release.
>If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.
Did you seriously write these two sentences one right next to the other and not see the hypocrisy in what you're saying?