Not sure that's true. America's military keeps peace for trade to happen in a lot of the world... Not always successfully but it's there. That works because they have the reserve currency and can therefore print money for free. Which benefits the US greatly in all sorts of ways. But everyone else also sees some good. If that goes away its going to have impacts on everyone else as well as America. Maybe not as much of an impact on the rest of the world but this is not good for anyone. I can get the anger at the way the US acts, particularly over the last couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean that them doing badly helps the rest of us

I really don't think we do.

France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense. It really is good for essentially everyone aside from the US itself, once the disruption is over. Obviously we'll have some kind of crash though, but I think that was inevitable with or without this.

>> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense.

That was a different world. France and Britain today have nowhere the kind of force projection the USA does, via its military bases and aircraft carriers.

Yes, but the US basically had to intervene and tell them to stop using it. If that hadn't happened they wouldn't have.

The US probably wasn't in preventing an invasion of Egypt, but if not restrained I'm sure that Britain and France could have realised their objectives, and if they had had a continuous need to realise different changing objectives they would have retained more capability.

I don't think that's completely true. Wasn't the US Navy founded (by a Scotsman of course) because the US at the time lacked the funds to pay off the pirates? European countries did pay them off, hence didn't need as large navies.

isn't this ancient history now? the formations in the last 50 years are large

> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense

France and Britain used to be two of the world's largest imperial powers, and at any time you could plausibly claim France and Britain alone could defend global trade routes, Britain, at least, still was.

You really aren't making a case for it being an easy, cheap job.

Yes, but I think they can basically still do it. If they hadn't been buying F-35s they'd presumably have pushed their stealth fighter projects to be finished by now, and what more is really required?

I think these trade routes etc. will stop mattering rather soon. Batteries are coming and once that's here the oil trade's gone, and then you have no need to export things to get something to trade for it, so in a decade or so none of this will matter.

International trade will go from being mandatory to optional, and thus become much less important.

I agree. I would argue that Pax Americana has been pretty great for even the USA's supposed "arch enemies." My gut feeling is that everyone loved that stability, whether friend or foe, and the fact that it's now gone will mess everyone up.

I am biased here, but I look forward to the next century of Pax Europa. This is the only way forward.

Europe isn't playing aggressively enough or really doing enough to innovate. China is in a position to reap a huge windfall from Trump putting the US in the dumpster. China will bring Europe into the fold with the promise of gradual reforms, and they'll win the global south with soft power and trade agreements.

My fear is that Trump sees America's position eroding quickly relative to China before his eyes and decides to do something an order of magnitude dumber than anything he's done before.

If you really think the US is going to just, what, retire all that military equipment you haven’t been paying attention.

Disclaimer: As it turns out, predicting the future is somewhat difficult.

However, in isolationist MAGA, the US military is just a jobs program. This is plain facts, is it not?

The other major power of the USA, post-WWII, was "soft power." That has now been cancelled. So, I am really not sure what is happening.

I once thought that "may you live in interesting times" was a blessing. I now believe that this saying is a curse.

So you’re saying Greenland and Canada have nothing to worry about?

It was always a curse.

The speed with which things are ending are most important I think. For decades there has been a slow decline in US power. Today we have the BRICS trade block representing more than half of the world's population. And countries hold a basket of reserve currencies, where the dollar is still a large percentage, but not nearly as large as it used to be. If all these pillars of American empire are carelessly self-destructed, crashing the world order, it will be hugely disruptive. It forces other powers to act and move to occupy the power vacuum, while lacking the economic weapons may force US'es hand to engage with military force, to reestablish itself.

I really don't agree. Rather, the 2015-2024 period has seen a huge increase in US GDP relative to the EU, which is probably largely driven by the US ability to spend, due to these particular things.

Of course, countries like China are catching up anyway-- they're more than a billion people and very able, and of course, people are working hard to get out of this arrangement. I agree that it will be disruptive, but I think the crash has been in the making for years.

When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices or a corresponding increasing in dividends I could only interpret that as pure irrationality, and even now companies like Tesla still have P/E ratios of 133.54 whereas excellent firms in the same business-- Volkswagen and Toyota have P/E ratios 3.24 and 6.21 respectively. I'm surprised it still hasn't gone through the floor. The traders by trading at these prices are implicitly assuming interest rates will go back to <1% without any drop in earnings, and that won't happen.

> When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices

The Dow crashed from ~36k to ~28k in less than a year, and that decrease in value doesn't account for inflation. Adjusting for inflation I don't think the markets have actually fully reached their late 2021 peak.

>Today we have the BRICS trade block representing more than half of the world's population.

As far as I understand, the BRICS block does not actually exist. I mean, being member of it does not mean anything serious. There are no obligations, no agreements, no roadmaps. We might as well talk about a alliance of countries whose names begin with the letter "S"

Agreed otherwise but

  s/forces other powers/makes other powers want to/
  s/force US/make US want to/

Starting wars is not something forced upon a country, and that's ungood doublespeak.