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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

The world was already moving on from US hegemony. China is already a super power, other economies are growing, and the west in general (i.e. all the countries mentioned here) are a shrinking proportion of the world economy (and population, or military strength).

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Not if we kick off WW3 as a last ditch attempt to hold on to the old order ;)

You jest, but if you've ever seen a wounded animal fighting like mad for survival, I wouldn't be so confident that won't be the exact same things that's going to happen.

You don't have to look into the animal kingdom, history works too. No ruling empire has fallen silently and without conflict. Changing the world order always included an aggressive transfer of power

The British Empire dismantling wasn't exactly peaceful, but it could have been much worse. Next to India, everything else becomes a rounding error.

It was mostly peaceful in itself. There was a lot of conflict that followed in the wake of it as borders and power structures were settled. Just in South Asia we had the partition of India, the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Sri Lankan civil war, and various smaller separatist conflicts.

Not to mention the whole Middle East mess is due to the British on how they drew the borders when they left

In the case of my country, USA, we are the ones wounding ourselves. We made the conscious choice to elect a government that prefers isolationism to economic competition, and which rejected near-peer military preparedness in favor of more deadlock wars with third world middle east countries. It’s not like we were somehow victimized by the EU.

This unfortunately tends to happen, declining empires usually cause a lot of destruction in history on their way out.

The collapse of the USA as the world leader was already happening, but plenty of countries were under the impression the USA and the other western countries were working together to save the sinking ship.

The USA did plenty of offensive stuff before that (like a full campaign labeling the French as cowards for not supporting their baseless war in the middle east), but it took until Trump and his unhinged behaviour for the world to see how bad the situation really was.

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