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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

Perversely, America's excessive amount of control over all other countries has likely (largely) led to the world's unprecedented amount of peace and stability. This is the theory of Hegemonic stability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory

The US doesn't exert its power for the greater good, it does so for its own economic gain - but world peace and stability are good for the US. It's a very interesting dynamic. It's very subjective if USA's relative waning power is good or bad, but there's a chance we'll see increasing strife in the world as America's power wanes.

edit: based off the ever-changing karma on this comment I'm assuming some people are downvoting this. My comment is meant to be a neutral stance towards a well-respected political theory - how about a response along with the downvotes? I'd love to have some discussion around the Hegemonic stability theory, which I find fascinating.

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I upvoted because I agree with you. I think the long view -- and I've held this view ever since the IT outsourcing trend started and I was asked to cultivate teams in India, Brazil, China & Mexico to replace Americans & Europeans -- is that globalization the rising tide that raises all boats. And, as painful as it sometimes is, it's actually happening. There have been hugely detrimental repercussions: mass surveillance, one-sided treaties & trade embargoes/tariffs, political & military meddling, and lots of death. But, there is no beating around the fact that technology, global manufacturing, and access to digital information & education has swiftly improved the global economy and overall peace & stability within & between many countries. There are plenty of counterpoints, but from the broadest possible perspective, I think it's hard to disagree with your point.

You should be upvoting comments because you think they add value to the topic/discussion, not because you happen to agree with the poster. That is how echo chambers are created.

Sometimes you upvote a comment because you agree with it and consider it informative and correct — this is why you agree with it.

Sometimes you upvote a comment that you don't agree with but see it as genuinely informative or at least insightful.

What you don't is upvoting a comment which is not informative, or even misleading, but still conforming to your views.

While the American situation is far from perfect and the Statue of Liberty would be a better fit for Switzerland than the US nowadays (I still like that a country's most famous symbol is a "Statue of Liberty"... that brings positive vibes), I much prefer a hegemonial USA over China, Russia or whatever else there might come.

To borrow Winston Churchil's phrasing: America is the worst possible global hegemon, except for all the others.

no voting up or down, just my 2 cents from europe: US likes peace, if it helps economically (ie getting stuff from given place cheaply, selling your produce well.. you get the idea).

US doesn't care about peace, and will take any excuse to start a war, kill millions, make life extremely miserable for additional huge amounts of people (yes, tens of millions easily) if it's worth the goal. Which can be economical, power, or, as usually, mix of both. so many examples of murders of officials, nazi-style staging of attacks to get a foot into war (Tonkin bay, anybody?) etc. No my dear, war is a great business, is you are providing right products or services.

to cover this topic properly I would have to spend rest of evening just writing, and my knowledge of reality is anyway severely limited, as things like Snowden leaks reveal. US is not a single panel or one central brain, but composed of individuals, powerful, twisted, fucked up greedy bastards, who will do anything to get more (power, money) not because they need it, just because they can and their egos get kick from it. then you have the good guys in politics, who are honest, hardworking for people who voted them and not those who gave millions to campaigns to get them where they are in first place... NO. there are no such people, even if they were, they would be discredited easily by first group, or anyhow removed. Most I would say are somewhere in between. If you think army in level of general and higher is anything else than similar politics, think again (it isn't).

Is it in interest of US to have strong states in Gulf area, sitting on biggest oil reserves in this world? I don't think so, command and conquer is a proven strategy for millenia. US tried to help, but selectively, and mostly marginaly (if you help my enemy, you become my enemy is common logic all around the world). I still haven't heard a proper jsutification why US is still in Afghanistan when it lost that war, there is no will of winning it, and daily they are just killing more and more locals. US may conveniently label them terorists, but they are locals, fighting invading force (external fighters omitted).

Or training ukraininans? Just on the border of Russia? That's one hell of a peace move right there :) I am disgusted with US, don't expect anything good in terms of world politics coming out of it, and percieve it as necessary evil. Very happy seeing nations like Chinese rising to power. All empires rise and fall, ours and yours are no exceptions.

> the world's unprecedented amount of peace and stability

... in Syria, Iraq, Libya.

You can view them as huge tragedies or local aberrations, depending on where you live I guess. But if you consider what the modern world is capable of in terms of armed conflict (probably few orders of magnitude more of what WW1/2 was) I think it's reasonably peaceful at the moment.

They become even more extreme aberrations when you consider the state of modern communications technology, and the fact that the news media only reports on the most sensational stories. I can't even imagine what a representative sample of "news" would look like, but it's worth the thought experiment.

IMHO since 9/11, the situation is going downwards. just because we have potential for more destruction than there is currently being done, I wouldn't call it a success and happy peaceful times. maybe that's an US view, far removed from all the mess you guys are creating daily

I think the situation has been generally going downward since the decline of the Soviet Union as a global power and its subsequent fall (I don't think that contradicts the core of hegemonic stability theory, really: late in the Soviet Era, the superpower conflict was less of a source of conflict than it had been earlier in the Cold War, and both the US and the USSR were exerting stabilizing influences in their respective spheres of influence -- since then the US has become unrivaled, but its expanding influence hasn't been enough to replace the influence of the USSR.)

If you look at a lot of the big conflict regions since then, they are often places that had conflicts under the surface that were contained either specifically by Soviet influence, or by the combination of Soviet and US influence because, while both may have sought to exploit opportunities from the bubbling conflicts, neither really was prepared to accept the risk of a major conflict getting out of control where they might lose key interests, and neither had enough local influence and power to be confident of attaining a positive outcome.

But the US's level of global influence through hard power -- maintained by military spending on par with the rest of the world combined -- is probably unsustainable, for much the same reason that the Soviet empire was (the US just started the hard-power spending war that was the Cold War from a much better starting point, and was able to carry it out longer.)

Subjugation is more profitable than total annihilation.

> You can view them as huge tragedies or local aberrations

... or as successful strategy. Those countries were considered 'rogue states' and enemies. Predictably, they are now failed states in which the diverse ethnic and political groups fight each other. No danger for the US any more. Mission accomplished.

The number of people dying annually in military conflicts is steadily declining since approximately the end of Vietnam war. The French-German border is experiencing the longest stretch of peace in its entire history since the end of WWII.

So yes, the current state of peace is unprecedented, though definitely not perfect.

Breaking news: American thinks that America is really, really good for the world. "Neutral stance" my ass.

But there is practically world peace here in the First World far away from the proxy wars and such, so who's complaining...

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