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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

You can also draw a comparison with the late imperial stage of other empires, most recently the British.

The British Empire actually reached its greatest territorial extent in the 1920s and 30s, but it was overextended, policymaking was becoming increasingly erratic and in hindsight we can see the writing was already on the wall

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The British didn't really make unforced errors like Germany did, though. They mostly were forced into a fire sale situation as they were fighting for their lives. Even with everything they sold off, they were still within an inch of surrendering. The French story is similar. They may have been in a slow decline, but the war threw them off a cliff.

It's hard to look at what the US is doing and not become extremely angry, because historically the dumb hubristic nationalism always leads to crushing misery. It's so utterly predictable, and yet we're forced to watch the idiocy play itself out again.

I agree but the difference between the French and the British is the French really didn't have a choice (they got physically invaded).

You could make a very good case that for Britain entering into WW1 was a catastrophic and ultimately unnecessary decision. And you could make a (much more controversial but I think also true) case that entering into WW2 was also not necessary and ultimately fairly catastrophic.

Yet the British elites chose to do both. Pride, hubris, stupidity, maybe well deserved, call it what you want, but in the end British power was given away cheaply. I think what the US is currently doing is foolish but as you say there's also a sort of inevitability about it.

Edit: You could also add the Soviet Union to this, an even more recent example of the end of an empire. Towards the end during the Gorbachev era policymaking went from relatively "normal" (by Soviet standards) to extremely bizarre in a short space of time

Britain should have stayed neutral like Sweden and Switzerland instead of getting economically devastated.

One good thing about the collapse of Soviet Union was that Gorbachev refused to start senseless wars. There were hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers stationed in various countries of Eastern Europe, but he explicitly said he will not use force to hold the countries in the Soviet fold. After that the communist regimes there promptly fell. Putin apparently thinks this was a mistake he decided to correct. So I don't know, maybe Gorbachev was telling us the (hubris, stupidity) is not inevitable, and Putin is telling it is inevitable, after all? Time will tell I guess.

this seems ongoing. From yesterday:

Lavrov: Russia is ready to communicate with the US on the Balkans

https://www.balkanweb.com/en/lavrov-rusia-eshte-e-gatshme-te...

Please make the case that the UK should have (and could have) stayed neutral during WWs 1 & 2 and gained from it.

What the guy below said - the UK would have become more like switzerland, much richer, not had a lot of its historic architecture destroyed and two generations of young men slaughtered.

I think it's actually really difficult to make the case for entering either war

What makes you think that the UK would fare like Switzerland and not like Norway, who also tried staying neutral?

What makes you think a Europe with, for example, Nazi Germany as hegemon would be safer for the UK, or that the UK would have a choice in fighting or not?

My point is that projecting some future based on choices not taken is purely historical fiction and there is no reason to believe anything would go the way you or I think it would have gone had UK done this or that. There are far too many variables to consider, and it is impossible to experiment. I think you can make the case the other way just as well that politics of appeasement in the time leading up to WW2 led to the war being even more devastating.

EDIT: Here's some actual plans that the Nazis had for Switzerland btw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenbaum

So you're right that we don't know for sure what would have happened in the counterfactual.

Hitler was very willing to cut a deal with Britain in 1939 and in fact supposedly was extremely upset when Britain declared war (as he should have been, it was a bad scenario for him as well).

Now could he have been trusted? Perhaps not, but bear in mind the UK in 1939 still had the world's most powerful navy and as an island would have been very difficult to invade.

I would argue that the British elite's obsession with playing Risk and thinking they have a divine right to decide the political makeup of continental europe was and is pure hubris, narcissism and stupidity.

Leave it up to france, germany and russia to sort out who runs the north european plain, that's none of our business

this is so wrong. Hitler wanted switzerland and they had allready the operation "tannenbaum" rdy but mussolini failed hard and the eastern front didnt go as expexted. That Hitler did exclude anyone because of "neutrality" is utter bs

When societies can't solve their internal problems internally they tend to turn outward for solutions.

Everybody could see the long string of preventable phenomena leading up to this: financial deregulation, decline of civic institutions, high levels of deaths of despair, rampant individualism, unchecked commerce, rising internal violence, rising inequality, rotten media landscape, open political corruption (not in this order).

My only hope at this point is the minimization of violence when the US resets.

How often has a decaying empire been reset without either war or violent revolution?

May US exceptionalism apply to a peaceful resolution for this as well.

it won't. the fragile maga have already and will again turn to violence if they feel the walls are closing in on them.

(As a US citizen self-identified moderate) I think I understand some of the intentions of de-dollarization. Being the reserve currency is an exorbitant privilege of forcing the world to allow the US to essentially print money that the world ends up using. It is not a privilege that "the average American" gets to enjoy for many, many reasons. It might be telling that no other nation is trying to fill that role of reserve currency with their own currency; perhaps it's not as much of a privilege as we might think. Given the political climate, both domestic and foreign, I think de-dollarization has large potential upside for the well-being of humans.

I see the US trying to position itself so that it is no longer the world power/world police, or at least significantly reduce the magnitude of the role it plays as the world police. This will bring about a new world order and upend existing diplomatic relationships which will bring about chaos and uncertainty.

I disagree with kidnapping Maduro and posturing to annex Greenland on the grounds of national sovereignty; I actually like the rules-based world order (even if I am not so attached to the USD being the reserve currency).

The actions of the Trump administration clearly and perhaps even intentionally puts the US hegemony at great risk and thus also invites much chaos. This, I still humbly see the possible upside. The Trump administration is also accelerating the deterioration of the rules-based world order. This, I do not particularly support, though I see the possible counterargument that this is only accelerating what was game-theoretically inevitable anyways.

The thing is, either some country is going to be the world's referee, or we're going to descend into a lot of regional conflicts with a million dead here, ten million dead there, forever, or we will see rampant nuclear proliferation.

My money is on the last possibility. Honestly that might be the best outcome, even if it's the riskiest. A nuclear-armed Ukraine never would've been invaded. A nuclear-armed Taiwan will never be invaded. A nuclear-armed Canada will never be invaded. At this point, honestly I'd heartily endorse giving Denmark a nuclear triad of their own.

> even if it's the riskiest Future ancient history: How one loose screw ended the anthropocene.

We may fare better with super intelligent AGI as the ultimate referee. It is developed with similar urgency as nuclear weapons were after all.

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