Comment by solenoid0937 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solenoid0937 | Hacker News Reader

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You seem to be mistaking my comment for a moral stance.

I am not making a call to do anything, I am simply describing the nature of international relations throughout the vast majority of human history (including the current day), in a framework most commonly defined as realism.

Superpowers act in their self interest, ignoring "international law" when the benefit meaningfully exceeds the cost. They can do this because there is no one to stop them. They will do this because it is in their self interest.

Americans will probably benefit from this action, or at least that is the administration's thesis. Is it moral? No, but discussions of morality are irrelevant on the world stage, which is a zero-sum game defined only by leverage.

I think I assumed you're commenting for a reason because it doesn't make sense to make these comments otherwise - they're more or less vacuously true, and there's no value to them outside of an assertion of some sort.

> the world stage, which is a zero-sum game

I'm not at all convinced this is true.

You should think about the question posed in my first comment - why do you think we don't choose to overpower one another regularly to take what we want?

svnt and HN's misunderstanding of international relations and the concept of "sovereignty" is what my comment is directed at: in discussions about superpowers on the world stage,

(a) moralizing is simply irrelevant, discussions about whether this is "good" or "bad" are childishly naive and have no place - only whether it was advantageous or not; and

(b) sovereignty is meaningless if a nation does not have the hard/soft power (and the will) to back it, just as if you declare your house a "sovereign nation" it will not be respected unless you are able to back it up.

Perhaps this is an obvious/vacuous truth to you, but most HN'ers are clearly failing to grasp this.

> why do you think we don't choose to overpower one another regularly to take what we want?

Because it is not always advantageous to do so. When it is clearly advantageous, nations tend to do so (as evidenced by virtually all of human history, including the current era.)

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