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Comment by gradus_ad | Hacker News Reader

There must always be a hegemon. Will it be Europe? No, too weak and divided..will it be China? No, too authoritarian..

The US remains the best option among a mixed field of weak, corrupt, divided and authoritarian alternatives.

You're not totally wrong but you do underestimate the power of an organized Europe with freedom of movement and commerce. I'm not saying you're getting this wrong but many people reading these comments take seriously that nominal US per capita GDP is an unequivocal signal that we've got it right. A lot of that signal goes away on the basis of a PPP comparison, and then even more goes away when you compare things like healthcare costs. And on top of all of that Europe can point to superior quality of life outcomes. If that GDP number doesn't translate into quality of life, what good is all of that money?

European, living within the EU, who loves the idea of the conmon market.

But it is badly implemented and in need of drastic improvements. Just see recent comments made by EU President Von der Leyen and head of the ECB Christine Lagarde on how the biggest obstacles to the EU isn't US tarrifs but internal tarrifs.

Counted up they effectively make goods twice as costly as they should be.

A true common goods and finance market in the EU would be a force to reckon with.

We’re seeing a return to multilateral regional hegemony. Russia, China, India, a new Persia, Israel and Turkey duking it out in Asia. The edges of those conflicts trying to bring war back to Europe. And America getting potentially balanced by China and Europe in the Americas, with the Pacific theatre figuring out its own balancing game plan.

The wild card being this will be the first time the world has entered this sort of unstable state since the invention of nuclear weapons. I expect to see a total failure of non-proliferation and the first nuclear civil war in my lifetime, if not the first nuclear war of territorial conquest. (I do not expect to see the first nuclear extermination.)

> America getting potentially balanced by China and Europe in the Americas

I can't figure out a way to parse this sentence that makes sense. Are you saying that "Europe" will "balance" the USA in the Americas? As in, European influence will counteract US influence in the Americas?

> European influence will counteract US influence in the Americas?

Yes. If you’re Canada or Mexico or frankly anyone else in the Americas, you probably don’t want all your weapons systems to be dependant on American supply chains. And then if you think about it, you probably don’t want all your energy imports dependent on Washington’s noblesse. Et cetera.

American exceptionalism was built on the trust the world put in us getting so unilaterally powerful without being balanced.

Would assume it's in reference to things like the EU offering associate membership to Canada, or China's trade deals with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, etc.

This seems right to me. Nuclear proliferation could very well end up being the most consequential legacy of this administration. Their malicious incompetence in this area has dimmed the outlook for humanity to a material degree.

The amount of countries with nukes is going to increase dramatically in the medium term. That will mean exponentially more opportunities for a nuclear conflict to break out. I think there is a very good chance we see a nuclear war in the next couple decades, and the odds are dramatically higher than they were pre-trump.

The only spot I sort of disagree is that I think it's an uncomfortably short hop from a moderately sized nuclear war to a global nuclear war, and I think the chances of the latter are uncomfortably high now as well.

> […] of weak, corrupt, divided and authoritarian alternatives.

Is the US included in the set of alternatives/possibilities with these attributes?

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