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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

Services feed me every day, yet I don’t grow my own food. I trade for it, using currency as an intermediary.

What I can do for myself, nations do every single day.

I don’t know what this “real power” language is about, but it sounds like claptrap to me.

It actually sounds like you live in an era where these things are guaranteed by a hyper power and are frankly out of touch with how international relations really work

Please, professor, teach us how international relations really work. Just let me grab my popcorn first.

(Seriously, knock it off with the attitude. You have no idea who you’re talking to. People with highly varied educational and career backgrounds are represented here.)

Appealing to credentials is irrelevant and bad faith, the fact is your ability to make a good living purely in services is irrelevant to the fact that nations have real national defense to consider and the last 80 years of global trade has been upheld by American military might. Your credentials mean nothing if you can’t appreciate how spoiled we have all been by this very unique system, and your arguments should stand on their own and your current argument is to respond to a discussion about securing vital industries with “I’m able to feed myself with just services” as if that scales to an entire nation that has been the one upholding global trade rather than a benefit of, and downstream, of that nation doing that. And that nation has until recently taken very serious steps at every turn to ensure its military and resource dominance so that people like you and I can feel comfortable with our office jobs.

I don’t have an attitude, it’s just annoying hearing people still pretend history is over and great power conflict is no longer a concern because we’ve reached utopia, and thinking that because they have a certain job that means real, cold and calculating, geopolitics is no longer a requirement.

The thing is, you're not really making a clear and persuasive case as to your position, which sounds like you're arguing against interdependency. Perhaps you mean something else, so if I'm mistaken, some clarity would be appreciated. As far as I can tell, you're only contending, without much support, that alternatives are worse.

> the last 80 years of global trade has been upheld by American military might

Have you considered whether these might be coincidental, not causative, and that the Bretton Woods system is largely responsible for this? Leading by example and through persuasion and making friends tends to be much more effective than building armies and making implied threats, dangling a Sword of Damocles over the world. (Case in point: the U.S. has never been able to bring Afghanistan, North Korea, or Iran into the fold, and keeps holding to the same failing strategies regarding these nations despite their persistent ineffectiveness.)

> I don’t have an attitude

I'm telling you how it's coming across. Calling someone "out of touch" is demeaning.

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