For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
> For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think it goes back to him being a symptom. Trump has some personality defects, but those defects seemed to allow him to speak to real issues that prior political consensus wanted to ignore (e.g. questioning globalization and free trade orthodoxy, immigration). He got elected because he spoke to those things, but then that put his personality defects in power.
If the prior establishment had listened and addressed those issues, Trump would have never been viable. His existence as president is due to them arrogantly leaving those issues unaddressed.
> If you look at the fifth chart, the large european economies also seemed to have grown slightly faster after the war than before it. So I’m not sure how much the U.S. is benefitting from being the hegemon.
Nobody's denying that the US-created world order has been good for its partners but that doesn't mean the benefit was at the US's expense. International trade is not a zero-sum game - the lifting tide and all that.
The post I was responding to implied that the U.S. enjoyed a special benefit from being the one maintaining the hegemonic world order: “The US's expenditure on its military was never to protect anyone from the Soviets but to impose its own world order against the Soviets, it's been always self-serving.”
If the U.S. obtained such a special benefit, it should have grown faster than western europe from 1950 to 1990, but it didn’t. If that growth comes from peace, not being the hegemon—as you put it, a rising tide lifts all boats—then the U.S. is disproportionately bankrolled a peace that western europe equally benefitted from.
Part of the story here is that international trade just isn’t that important to the U.S. 90% of U.S. GDP is domestic. Just 1.1% is exports to Europe.
> If the U.S. obtained such a special benefit, it should have grown faster than western europe from 1950 to 1990
Not necessarily; the US could have extracted that benefit by staying ahead of the rest of the world in terms of its citizens' wealth, with all the benefits this entails.
We can't know the "what-if" (would the US have become even richer by being an isolationist MAGA dreamland), but we know for a fact that the world order was created and maintained by the US, so it must have had its benefits all this time.
That’s possible, but it’s a much more uncertain claim than the one being made above. The US became 50% richer than western europe by being an “isolationist MAGA wonderland” before reengaging with the world during the wars.
Did hegemony help the U.S. maintain that edge? Maybe! But I think that’s a harder claim to prove than suggested by OP. I think the direct cause of America keeping its edge in the second half of the 20th century is we have Silicon Valley. I can think of a mechanism how reserve currency status is an indirect cause: reserve currency status means the world invests in American banks, and banks then use that money to fund tech startups. But is that really what’s happening? As I said above, I’m unsure.
Reserve currency status makes increasing money supply easier (the US has run large deficits and monetary expansions with less inflation than peers). "Petrodollars" create persistent demand for USD, independent of US domestic conditions - countries that import oil must earn USD (via exports, borrowing, or reserves) or hold US reserves in advance. Oil exporters, on the other hand, invest surplus dollars into US treasuries. This process absorbs US money creation and lowers US borrowing costs. This is an enormous advantage that the US is likely to lose if it continues on its isolationist course.
"European hostility" is not going to matter when there's no EU. No matter how weak, Russia will always be stronger in terms of the number of warm bodies they are ready to throw into the meat grinder than any country in Europe.
UPD: If you don't believe me, look at the European right-wing leaders (including a sitting head of state, Meloni) currently banding up behind Orban, a widely known Putin's shill in Europe.
Dissolution of NATO has been his wet dream for decades.
Next up is dissolution of the EU; the hard-right shift all over Europe (that he gets some credit for by financing right-wing parties and propaganda) will eventually make that dream of his come true, too.
This part of the situation is the interesting thing to me.
Is this US administration establishing itself as the effective dictator of Venezuela indefinitely? What does running that country have to look like directed by the US president and what changes will they make to restrict the position to prepare it for transition? Is the plan to make no changes to the position and then forever make a mockery of their elections by only letting people run in the future who suite US interests? It feels like this situation has the potential to turn into a colonial-like relationship always under threat of direct US military intervention.
It’s wild to me that (at least for now) Trump has publicly repudiated the second (or first if one swings that way) place vote getter in last election as unqualified even after she brown nosed Trump hard. He apparently needs a bigger sycophant in charge like his cabinet members https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-03/nobel-win...
The only reason Russia has been reluctant to formally annex territories it broke away from other countries until 2022 was minimizing economic damage to itself. They knew how sensitive the western countries were to forceful changes of the world map, and felt no need to inflict economic sanctions on themselves for a mere symbolic act of annexing a territory they already fully controlled.
Once that Rubicon was crossed (sanctions were in place and there was nothing to lose), they annexed the four regions of Ukraine that they partially controlled.
Small correction: for another adversary's clear geopolitical gain. While dissolving the EU has been Russia's wet dream for decades, there's not much to be gained from it by the US and very much to lose. In fact, the speed with which the US is giving up its influence over Europe of its own accord is bewildering.
So true; Russian MO is to use ~18-60 year old males from occupied territories as cannon fodder. Europeans should be flooding Ukraine with weapons (and other kinds of support) and thanking their luck that somebody else is willing to risk their lives and use them against the onslaught that would otherwise be directed at the EU countries.
You must have missed my comment about opposing the war. But this kind of bad faith accusation is really disappointing to see on HN. The caliber of discourse here is usually much higher - people engaging with the actual merits of the points being raised, not reverting to attacking strawmen that only exist in their head as if this was Facebook.
Ordinary Russian and Ukranian people are both victims of this war. It is being waged for reasons neither of them chose, that neither of them asked for, that neither of them wanted. Civilians are being killed on both sides, and the people most vested in the continuation of the conflict are those that reap all of the profits from the war while paying none of the human costs. This is a classic principal-agent problem.
If you can't see the inhumanity in the structural forces at play and want to play a game of "attack the strawman" to score meaningless internet points while millions die needlessly over a pointless war, I can't force you to stop, but I'd at least hope you can grow up and take the tragedy and human suffering seriously enough at some point to care more about that than you do about your HN rep.
> You must have missed my comment about opposing the war.
You're opposing the war in the same way Russian propaganda "opposes" it: if only Ukraine stopped fighting, so many lives would have been saved!
But Ukrainians don't have that choice; if they stop fighting against the Russian aggression, they will be fighting as part of it in a few years when Russia invades the next country over. Not to mention losing their culture in the cultural genocide that Russia is committing in the occupied territories.
On the other hand, Russians can stop fighting and go home any time you guys feel sufficiently "opposing the war". But that option is clearly not what you're advocating here with your posts.
Ukrainians had a choice as well which is why many of their men and women escaped and are now living in various European neighbouring countries instead of rotting in a ditch somewhere.
> But this kind of bad faith accusation is really disappointing to see on HN.
The longer you stick around HN, the less surprising this is.
HN does not punish commenting in bad faith, and the design of HN's gamified engagement systems encourages bad-faith use of the downvote and flagging system.
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