My ancestry is Irish and British. We were apes painting ourselves blue when China was building a world. Austria is beautiful. But it hasn’t been a power for 100 years.
Being in control means making enemies of everyone else who wants to be in control. The US is not an innocent bystander, but you could have worse. Don’t forget that.
There is absolutely nothing insinuating this perception in his comment.
He says that without the US Navy, there would be a lot more piracy on the high seas, and he is likely right. The historical experience from all corners of the world confirms that weakening naval control leads to increase in opportunistic piracy all around. Piracy is one of the oldest organized criminal activities in the world and most civilizations, including the really old ones (like Ancient Egypt) had to deal with it this way or another.
From OP:
> Nukes mean that no nation-state will attack us openly. The Navy means that fucking with the US is a personal death sentence.
China has shown us that you can modernize a country and make it a global actor without imposing yourself as a hegemon, and I choose that as a role model.
Don’t tell China’s neighbors this. The reason they are so friendly with the USA ATM is that China has long aspired to being (and often is) the regional hegemon (and it’s a huge region).
Latin americans had to be subjugated with brutal anti-communist dictatorships and the US are the ones who made it happen.
Look at what they're doing to Cuba as a punishment for freeing themselves from Batista, the fascist puppet the US forced as a leader in order to protect their interests there.
You could say the same thing about China invading Vietnam because the Vietnamese overthrew their puppet Pol Pot in Cambodia, that guy said to be even worse than Batista because he literally killed a few million people. But then again, the USA and China were allies at the time (the USA tacitly supported Pol Pot as well, as the enemy of their enemy I guess).
There is nothing to believe here, such a world certainly existed before, and will likely soon exist again, but don't rely on it being peaceful.
Competing superpowers, even if avoiding direct confrontation between themselves, will start a lot of proxy wars to push out their adversaries from country X or region Y. See also the entire Cold War 1.0. In multiple places, said war was actually very hot.
So I'll gladly keep some conflict but without Uncle Sam's oppression, thanks.
We have so many wars going on precisely because Uncle Sam is slowly losing its hegemonic status - which is not a boolean (true/false), but more of a continuum. If you look at the wars going on, many of those involve US allies vs. allies of smaller powers hostile to the US (Russia, Iran, Venezuela), which is precisely the sort of proxy wars that I was talking about.
IDK where you live, if you're a Latinoamerican, you've had real US oppression - though, let me tell you from the former Eastern Bloc, don't expect Russian or Chinese influence to be any more benign than American one. It is a "choose your poison" situation.
If you are a European, there is no US oppression here. The last European power that was forcibly suppressed by the US was Nazi Germany.
But anyway you can be glad as you wish, because if the current trends continue, you will have a lot more conflicts than today. I am not really sure if "less US influence" will be an upside. Perhaps to you, in your situation, yes.
Why doesn't that happen to Austria, for example, or China?
Perhaps "fucking" with the world is what caused the US to be considered an enemy by so many countries.
Almost like the more they impose their force globally, the more other countries feel the need to resist it.