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Outside of values, China and Europe have very few conflicting geopolitical goals. Core interests don't clash outside of Europe's conflict with Russia, and some rather minor disagreements in Africa. A Eurasian block with a weak Russia and a stable but balkanized Middle East would be very beneficial to both China and the EU. Even India could be largely integrated into that.
Even if the cost of NATO was higher than its immediate benefit, there is a very real risk of not only losing allies, but making new adversaries.
Admittedly, I don't know how to sunset NATO smoothly, but it ought to be done.
It's fucking bonkers that's even an argument to be had, it seems it's never enough for the empire.
The US's expenditure on its military was never to protect anyone from the Soviets but to impose its own world order against the Soviets, it's been always self-serving and for someone so educated it's a bit ignorant to not understand that.
> And what does my background have it do with my point? What Trump thinks of me has nothing to do with my analysis of any particular policy
It has to do with you aligning with the agenda, repeating the rhetoric about US's allies as not being worthy even though it built the USA as it exists today in 2026. The same applies to your background, it helped to build the USA as it exists today but given how you look [0] you'll also be considered not worthy when it's convenient by the agenda of the same administration you're aligning with to betray allies.
Good luck thinking the USA as it exists can do so without allies, it's a shame that "when education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor".
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world before either world war, coming out of a long period of economic isolation.
US GDP per capita growth has been about 2% per year continuously since 1830: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-cap.... It wasn’t notably higher after World War II than before World War I.
> The same applies to your background, it helped to build the USA as it exists today
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world before mass immigration from countries like mine.
The real reason the U.S. is so rich is that it was already the richest country in the world in 1900. The U.S. had almost 50% higher GDP per capita than western europe in 1900: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Population-GDP-and-GDP-p.... Today, its still about 50%.
Nobody's denying that the US-created world order has been good for its partners but that doesn't mean the benefit was at the US's expense. International trade is not a zero-sum game - the lifting tide and all that.
If the U.S. obtained such a special benefit, it should have grown faster than western europe from 1950 to 1990, but it didn’t. If that growth comes from peace, not being the hegemon—as you put it, a rising tide lifts all boats—then the U.S. is disproportionately bankrolled a peace that western europe equally benefitted from.
Part of the story here is that international trade just isn’t that important to the U.S. 90% of U.S. GDP is domestic. Just 1.1% is exports to Europe.
Not necessarily; the US could have extracted that benefit by staying ahead of the rest of the world in terms of its citizens' wealth, with all the benefits this entails.
We can't know the "what-if" (would the US have become even richer by being an isolationist MAGA dreamland), but we know for a fact that the world order was created and maintained by the US, so it must have had its benefits all this time.
Did hegemony help the U.S. maintain that edge? Maybe! But I think that’s a harder claim to prove than suggested by OP. I think the direct cause of America keeping its edge in the second half of the 20th century is we have Silicon Valley. I can think of a mechanism how reserve currency status is an indirect cause: reserve currency status means the world invests in American banks, and banks then use that money to fund tech startups. But is that really what’s happening? As I said above, I’m unsure.