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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to think through the implications of living in a world where it is accepted that countries with more power simply invade each other and take land and possessions from those with less power. I can't think how it doesn't ultimately lead to broadscale instability and ultimately, war. In turn it depresses me that this is toxic to the humanity progressing and solving its bigger picture problems.

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No imagination is necessary: we've been there. The 1800s were exactly that and culminated in two world wars on the next century.

You can even go further, _all_ human history had stronger groups taking things from weaker groups. On the classical era of Aristotle and on the paleolithic pre-history. We sometimes forget that humanity can be cruel and work only for self-interest, we like to think that war and pillaging is something from the past, but it will be forever with us

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This isn't universally true. There are actually a very large amount of cultures where we have ZERO evidence of violence. E.g. for the Sámi in southern Scandanevia we have zero evidence of violence. Similarly the Tripolye culture in modern Ukraine/Moldova/Romania is famous for building megaworks and housing for up to 15,000 people. But despite this large population there is virtually zero evidence of walls/forts/moats/any defensive fortifications. Not specialized weapons.

Evidence of large-scale warfare in prehistoric periods is also extremely rare in general. Most violence we have evidence for seems to be driven by personal conflict. This could just be due to decreased population densities but the conclusion that humans have always widely used war or organized violence is certainly not supported by the existing evidence

Just the 1800s? We’ve been doing for the past 150 years at least

Isn't it literally all of history??

Speaking of the 1800s, I wonder if we could learn anything about peace in a multipolar world by studying the Concert of Europe. Might be a good topic for a historian to write a book about. I'm looking right now, and it's kinda sad to see so many books about WW1 and so few about the peaceful period which came before.

Years of advocating against bullies, my takeaway from this thread is “the US did this because it can”. So bullying is ok now I guess.

I’m sure it had nothing to do with oil too, just about democracy.

When has the US not been the bully?

A lot of people woke up to the news and had their initial "Are we the bad guys?" moment.

As a non American its pretty funny to watch.

No, they didn’t, and if your media tells you that’s what’s happening, it’s either misinformed or propaganda (or both).

Our political left already thinks we’re the bad guys. Our political right is posting pictures of eagles on Facebook. Nobody feels any different than they did yesterday.

If they don't that's on them.

Why? It really isn’t anything new. The only new thing is the admission it is for oil, which we usually pretend it isn’t.

Those of us who are opposed to it probably didn’t vote for Trump and surely have no foreign policy influence, which is the same as when Bush invaded Iraq. Same old song and dance.

Because you should update your figures based on past performance.

If you don't see this as anything new then that is not in my power to change. To me it is something new.

This isn’t out of line with past performance. We have spent decades toppling regimes. Basically since WW2.

Hows this any different than what we did to Noriega? Saddam? Qaddafi?

That’s my original point, to anyone who is paying attention it’s already been priced in. The method was novel perhaps, but nothing else about it was anything different. I’m not that old and I’ve already seen it happen several times.

If somebody punches you in the face from Monday through Friday, then they punch you in the face on Saturday you probably don’t feel any different about them on Sunday.

True, those are good examples and in particular Noriega because there are some close parallels.

Even so I think this was not exactly expected. It makes me wonder how close we are to an actual invasion of Mexico, Cuba, Canada or Greenland.

I certainly can’t say I expected the exact method of capture, but I had no doubt all of those carriers were moving to the Caribbean for some reason other than show. I figured we would just blow some stuff up and topple the regime that way.

I would guess not at all for any of them. Drugs clearly aren’t that much of the reason involved here. If you were listing the countries that export the most drugs to us, Venezuela wouldn’t even be top five. I am not sure I would be opposed to us taking out cartel leaders in Mexico, but there are certainly a lot of downsides to it that have held us back. I don’t think Gloria Shienbaum is on our enemies list.

What they have that we care about is a third of the world’s oil reserves. They are friendly with our biggest geopolitical rival, China. This is not to endorse what we did at all, but it’s pretty clear that there is a future coming where oil gets scarce, and the last thing we want is China to have a better supply of it than us.

I don’t think this was probably the right way to solve the problem, but it is a problem that needed to be solved, and even though I don’t like it, I have to admit there is a lot of upside.

Whether there is a lot of upside or not remains to be seen.

Let's revisit this in five years. That's usually long enough to see where the rocks have landed.

Yeah, I don’t have high confidence guesses on anything anymore. I wish they had a reminder feature here.

Going by the historical record the chances of a mess are larger than the chances of a net positive. One thing is for sure: the US reputation abroad just sunk a little lower and it really did not need that.

Certainly possible. There are plenty of examples where these sorts of interventions worked for the country we intervened in though. Even in Latin America, which I’ve travelled extensively. I’ve talked to them about it.

A year ago today I was in Grenada looking at a statue of Reagan. The Grenadians love America (and the older ones love to tell you about it) for our intervention in the 80’s which I was not old enough to remember. They did not want to become another Cuba and we saved them from it.

South Korea. Japan. Germany. There were some solid wins in our nation building along with the losses.

Upside for Americans.

The rest of world will gladly watch the US burn when the time comes.

Because of the upside of course.

Yeah things were so great in Venezuela that they can really only get worse.

The adults are talking, go eat your legos.

I think the shock is more of a shift from the lawful evil spectrum, where the US either did things covertly or had a much better narrative prepared, to chaotic evil. Apparently Congress had no clue here, and Trump simply called them "leakers".

To be more blunt, we knew America was a pompous asshole, but it always pretended to be orderly. This is the US putting in a toupe and plucking its mustache. The act isn't surprising, the shift in attitude is.

How about when Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel? Carter also gave the canal back to Panama and normalized ties with China.

Carter may not have won the FIFA Peace Prize. But he did win the Nobel one. My father respected Carter more than almost any other living person, and I trust his judgement.

Thats all of human history.

Our biggest problem is us, the Earth will be a much better place when we are gone.

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