In what way. The way I see it if America pulls back, the alternative is either China picking up the mantle of a superpower and enforcing its world view ... or anarchy where local despots enforce a regional order as they see fit. Did you ever wonder why there was/is a proliferation of democracies and the lack of regional wars between local despots?

I'm genuinely curious what you imagine would replace the present American world order.

>I'm genuinely curious what you imagine would replace the present American world order.

The present American world order requires: a) utter ignorance of its war crimes by its people, b) endless debt to pay for war and war machines, c) invalidation of sovereignty of foreign nations according to American political expediency, d) the pretence of a society governed by systems of democracy while factually being run by a cabal of oligarchs, e) more spent on war per week than on health care for its citizens per year, f) the continued degradation of cultures deemed inferior by the ruling cabal.

I'd be happier if the major world power was actually democratic and used its powers to increase peoples health and well-being rather than the wholesale destruction of, and mass interference with, states not towing the American line ..

You're very good at pointing all the things that you hate about America and you're very good at wishing for an Utopia. Guess what! So is everyone else. Every human is a little arm-chair general about everything. What's hard is building something in a complex, gray world.

So I ask again, what do you think will ACTUALLY happen if America collapses or pulls back to only concern itself with what happens within its border?

Exactly. The counter factual to the world order that prevails now is not utopia. It is hegemony by some other superpower. The current candidate is China, a country ruled by a government that doesn’t even pretend to care about liberal values.

Please let me know when China has demolished a sovereign state, at the same order of magnitude as America has in the last 20 years.

China isn't great, and has its low scores in many ways, but America is far, far worse in terms of its sheer destruction of sovereign states.

Just because the iron fist is wrapped in a velvet glove doesn't make it any better for those being smashed in the face by it, and there is a huge, huge pile of dead bodies behind the American smashing...

A counterfactual is something that has not happened, but could reasonably. The question is not what China has done, since China has not been a world superpower, but how they are likely to behave once they are a superpower. When you argue against the U.S., you have to compare it against what is likely to happen, not what you would like to happen. I think Russia, the last superpower, is probably a good example of how China will behave. And there the comparison makes the U.S. look somewhere between ambiguous to relatively benevolent, depending on how you weigh various wars and geopolitical maneuverings.

My point is that the common thread throughout history is that world super powers have been incredibly brutal. The sun never sets on the British empire, as they say. For all of its faults, and there are many, America has been a relatively benign superpower.

>My point is that the common thread throughout history is that world super powers have been incredibly brutal.

Huh??? That's the opposite of what happened. Ages with empires are characterized by peace, trade, and cultural and scientific development. War was the default state in the interim time between empires.

And yes, the American empire (if you want to call it that), has been the most prosperous and benign in history.

How many innocent people has America murdered in illegal wars since 2003?

Illegal? To have something be illegal, means there are a set of laws and a body to enforce them. There is no supernational government. There is the UN, a loose confederation of nations to provide a platform to discuss and solve issues on a volunteer basis. This is why it tolerates the existence of authoritarian and autocratic governments as members and why powerful nations even bother with it at all.

Maybe you wish there was a democratic global government, but that isn't the world we exist it and it will not be a world we live in any time soon.

Game of Thrones has a nice metaphor of "summer born", people like you and me who have been born in a time of peace and prosperity - an outlier period in human history - but who think this is the default state of the world.

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One more point ... Do you disagree that the American 'Empire' has been the most prosperous and peaceful in human history? If so, which one was better?

American wars are illegal even by American law standards.

There is no declaration of war that makes what America is doing in Niger legal, by American legal standards. There certainly isn't any legal cover for America's illegal occupation of Syria. Not to mention, support for genocide in Yemen is absolutely illegal.

Its just that the people remain ignorant of this fact - and its politicians - choose not to enforce those laws for their own purposes (war profit, intolerance, hatred, etc.)

> Huh??? That's the opposite of what happened. Ages with empires are characterized by peace, trade, and cultural and scientific development. War was the default state in the interim time between empires.

I know. But peacetime can be brutal. As a superpower, America has not taken slaves, nor engaged in genocide, nor established colonies. In those ways it’s hegemony has been much less brutal than all the world superpowers who came before.