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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
Empires on average last for 250 years. It's about time for the US to start losing power. Not only that America really doesn't know what to do about many of the problems that it helped create. American capitalists helped create China, American foreign policy helped create the "new" Middle East. Which is an unstable hell hole and will probably continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Would be good to know how that figure came about! Are you sure this isn't skewed by maritime empires, such as the British and Spanish? The landmass based empires I study with interest have typically lasted more than twice that. The Roman Empire is one, which holds true if you consider both the Byzantine empire as separate and a continuation. The Ottomans, although not my interest, I do know lasted a long time. The HRE lasted much longer too.
I understand that the average case is pulled in either direction from multiple empires but I think it's useful to compare with empires with similar qualities and their longevity as opposed to comparing against the average case.
For example, comparing to Britain wouldn't make sense since the base of power was a much smaller landmass with a strong central governing tradition within the nation proper. Their empire was based on supreme naval and economic dominance, which was outmoded by the natural advance of technology.
EDIT: I've just noted the link below. I wouldn't say that the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist at that point but was perhaps less strong. Is the fall of an empire the decline in strength or the point in which it is no longer deemed an empire?
But I think there's a very substantial difference between empires past and the american one: Cheap, ubiquitous, high speed communications and ditto + safe travel.
Managing far-flung territories in the British and Spanish empires caused major, major friction, in a way that just isn't the case in the present day. Back then, colonial service was a life career, and you'd spend years at a time deployed overseas. Letters took weeks to turn around. Today, if you need the help of a specialist, you pick up the phone, or you could even easily fly one out and he'll be there tomorrow or the day after, and he'll be back home a few days later still.
Pretending a maritime empire is relevant in an age of ICBMs and jet travel is just foolish. All these "lessons from history" always fail to take into account the serious, radical differences in technological capability.
You can't project power with ICBMs like you can with an aircraft carrier.
A lot of American might is still inextricably linked with maritime power, purely because of those aircraft carriers and the support fleet that accompanies it.
I'd say submarines and aircraft carriers do still make a difference in the South China Sea (or any potential conflict with the PRC), and the US are bound by treaty to defend the Philippines and Japan.
Unless we start having Mexican sectarian unrest in the southwest, the US has the resiliency of Russia + the global reach of Old Britain. If we're in decline, it's a very very long arc for the US in the imperial-like sense.
In terms of the republic, I think that we're in a dangerous time. But we've been there before and came out ok.
the HRE was not really an empire, more of a loose confederation ('In a famous assessment of the name, the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire remarked sardonically: "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."'[1])
Could the same be said for the USA? Though a bit more tightly knit, states tend to have a degree of autonomy, each with representatives - the adjacency of States is also similar in a way to the HRE. The model of electing an emperor from the princes of each elector state holds some similarity is also somewhat significant in my opinion, though democratically much different.
The USA is a federation but it's much more integrated - maybe the comparison holds more water against the early US in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Has America been an empire for 250 years? That's quite flattering. Especially given the fact that, 250 years ago, America was part of the British Empire. America only became the world's largest economy in the 1870s, after the Civil War, and only became a superpower after WW2.
Also, please explain a statement like "American capitalists helped create China". I think the Chinese would laugh at a statement like that. If anyone "helped create China", it was the Soviet Union.
Regarding creating the "new" Middle East, the 20th century Middle East was created by the UK and France and led to the formation of Israel, the definition of all the borders, and the control of strongman dictators over nearly every nation in the region. We can credit the USA for creating the dictatorship in Iran and destabilizing Iraq, but what's boiling over now is largely a result of nearly 100 years of pent-up shit that America most definitely did not put in place.
I'm not sure americans are for anything in the current mess. China was a strong power for centuries thanks to its huge population and territory. It just lagged a bit behind and just catched up.
Middle east has also been a mess for centuries ( at the minimum). Shiites vs sunnites is a forever running war, and you can't tell the US are really the root cause of it.
As for saying "empires on average" , i don't think it means anything. Some lasted for more than 1000 years, other less than 5. But we don't have enough statistics to assume anything is "about time".
Yes I know America as a country loves to meddle everywhere but completely refuses to take responsibility for any of its actions. As for averages, see above. Yes we have a list of all human empires and there are outliers that are 1000 years old. I don't think America will be an outlier.
Quite the opposite. China was a 2nd player due to its vast territory and population. Chinese are not homogeneous like Koreans for example when it comes to culture and one language. They were always hard to manage and hard to rule and organize. That's why they kept loosing to japanese, mongols, british and the US.
China has to always pay attention to its neighbours. They can be economic dwarves compared to US or China but are extremely powerful when organized.
First of all America was a colony to begin with, until Independence. And since then it has been expanding by colonizing. It's been an Empire since the Revolution.
The continental USA hasn't been considered an empire since the 1840's, any more then the UK is considered an "English Empire".
I suppose the continental USA could be invaded by Mexico or Canada, in which case one would have to see a much more considerable reversal of fortunes than that being considered in the OP.
There was a beautiful thought yesterday somewhere on HN, on a completely unrelated subject. Forgive me for not remembering the author, or the thread. I was half drank :)
Every generation thinks it invented sex, rebellion, and curiosity.
It seems to me that the similar thought could be applied to many things. Is this a known logical fallacy, does it have a name?
I think that's partially because people generally tend to become more conservative as they age. Older generations, then, act as if sex, rebellion, and curiosity never existed.
I'm sure every person in the past connected to any one of those empires thought exactly the same thing. We can't really help thinking like that either, after all the present is so special, this time it will be different and history is already long gone.
I don't think they were relevant in the past either. The British empire may have been similar to the Spanish or Dutch and followed a similar path. These were maritime trade empires in the age of discovery, monopolizing new trade routes.
But, I don't think the Ottoman, Chinese, Arab, Hitite empires give us any predictive information for the longevity of the later ones.
I mean, history does show pretty convincingly that "stuff ends" eventually. It's got some examples for how, they are usually fairly specific and unclear. Europe has been obsessively theorizing about The Fall of Rome for 1500 years. All those musings really tell us about is the people doing the musings. It was because of Debauchery, Christianity, Tyranny, Civil Strife, Monetary Policy, Cultural Purity, Military Discipline etc. etc. depending on who you are.
I bet you can guess that Victorians suspected orgiastic debauchery while Marxists suspected class structure.
This is the first era in history in which we have a complete, unobstructed view of the world. We can communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. We can share our culture and our ideals instantly with anyone, anywhere. What does this mean for traditional powers? Does it mean they will last longer or die sooner? I don't know the answer to that question. But to suggest that this era is not special is incredibly short-sighted.
They said the same about the clipper ship, I'm sure at some point in time someone thought that smoke signals were a pretty good idea and that now all would be different.
So yes, we can do all this stuff better, faster. It makes for a huge difference in degree and if that difference is large enough by itself it becomes a qualitative difference.
But I think the mistake is to think that a change like that is enough to significantly decrease or increase our ability to build empires or to destroy them because those forces tend to balance out (assuming both sides have roughly equal access to the technology).
That's why none of the other technological advances from the past made a huge difference either, the 'empire' that was expanding brought their technology with them, it became adapted and then was used against them or they simply regressed.
The only times it worked was when the natives were entirely slaughtered or intermixed and those countries typically ended up declaring independence.
Empire building is a losing business in the longer term, and there is no proof to date that a complete and unobstructed view of the world or instant communication are a key element to empire success (or failure).
Empire building is about war, pure and simple. Communications lines and information are a tool in the hands of those that wish to build empires and those that wish to bring them down.
But since you're framing the argument in terms of ignorance and such I think I'll bow out here.
but the discussion isnt about building an empire, increasing its land holdings or anything of the sort.
Its about maintaining an empire, which i think is an important distinction.
I dont see the US waging war against anyone who is trying to dethrone them as a superpower. The ways that other countries are trying to dethrone the US are much more economic.
Economic war can be waged over the internet quite well, without any ships or smoke signals.
Why do you assume only external threats? Keep going with the extreme (and accelerating) inequality and there will be a breakdown. Look at your debt levels. Look at internal issues. Education/healthcare hyperinflation. Disrepair of infrastructure. Massive incanceration rate. Exploitative employment practices. Wage stagnation. Police brutality. Corruption/wastage in public projects (Big dig, for example, hyperoverpriced subway) Do you think it can be fixed in time? Is it even possible to have a factual, problem oriented discussion, when both sides of political discourse are too tangled into ideology to try and solve the real, underlying problems? How long is it before it all boils over?
And lets not even go to the actual military might - a lot of your current procurement programs are completely dysfunctional: the helicopter contract, Bradley controversy, F-35 fiasco, Ford carriers issues, the LCS joke, Raptor cancellation, just from the top.
Ottoman empire 250 years ?? I didn't read the whole book but to my knowledge, it started around 1300 and ended brutaly after WW1.
Same goes for roman empire, they make it stop at 200AD, but i've always learned it lastest till 4th century.
With those kind of figure bending you can pretty much say anything you want.
The Roman 'empire' actually lasted almost 2000 years when you take the eastern Roman empire (the Byzantine empire) into consideration. The Roman republic started in 509 BC, the eastern roman empire ended in 1453 AD.
Btw, the western Roman empire ended in 476 AD. The ~200 number you mentioned probably refers to the split of the Roman empire into a western and an eastern part, in 284 AD.
Ottoman empire stopped expanding and pretty much stagnated after about 250 years. America could see a similar fate. With robotics and economy and global problems it can't do much about... even meddle.
Your other comments in this thread discount the actual length of time other empires that lasted longer than 250 years held power, and extend the length of time the U.S. has held empire-like power around the globe. While you might be right that the average is 250 years, the variance is high, and your arguments to defend your position are weak.
So many sci-fi episodes from startrek/stargate come to mind. US foreign policy (for that matter any countries') is designed to exploit all other countries for the benefit of their own interests. Sometimes immediate interests cause shortsightedness which results in a mess being created for them as well. It used to be that mess everywhere else is good for US businesses. But given how all economies are interconnected in more direct ways and hardly any major company has US interests only, the game is more interesting and the political thinkers and lobbyists are yet to catchup to this new reality.
How do you complain about the decade of war and then in the same article complain about countries that the president didn't go to war with? The unique insanity of trying to blame a declining empire on such recent actions... does this happen outside of US politics?
I don't think there's any blaming or complaining in this article. It's merely statements of America's in/actions, and the global perceptions of them over the last 15 years.
In particular, every paragraph save two comprises a single sentence. It does read like someone took a list of bullet points, removed the bullets and called it an article.
I've noticed, this is a growing style trend in British journalism. At least the sentences here are longer. The few times I've accidentally ended up on the Daily Mail, it's been infuriating trying to read their Sesame Street-level sentences.
While I dislike the Daily Mail I actually like their writing style when I'm just looking for a simple article on a specific event/topic I'm ill-informed about. They condense and prioritise the most important information clearly, better than most journalistic sources.
In fact when I had to write copy during my first startup job the founder told me to look at how the DM write to see how to communicate simply.
Sure. But, I mean, look at some of the points they try to make. The situation in Syria is supposedly evidence of the decline of US power. No, Syria is evidence of the US public's unwillingness to contribute more American blood to a foreign war. We spent the last century dying in various jungles and deserts without much to show for it. It simply illustrates that foreign military power, in many conflicts, accomplishes very little. We could be MORE powerful, that fact still wouldn't change.
The stupidest part of the article, though, was part about young Americans not thinking the US is great. Uh, newsflash: the suggestion that the US is objectively the greatest country in every way has always been absurd. The fact that young Americans now realize this isn't indicative of anything. Again, we could be getting MORE powerful and MORE influential, it still wouldn't affect the absurdity of that statement.
It's definitely a huge shift, but I think most would agree that the waning of the idea of American exceptionalism comes down to life in the rest of the world getting better, not life in the US getting worse.
The rest of the modern world spent half the past century coming back from the brink after two world wars that left American lands almost entirely untouched. The US had a head start with modern innovation and prosperity but the rest of the world has caught up. Who cares about which arbitrarily defined nation state is "best"? It'sbecoming a great time to be alive in places all over the world, and that's a good thing.
I don't think America is the greatest country in the world, but I don't think any other country truly deserves that title either. It's kind of an antiquated concept really, given how interconnected and global everything has become.
You've literally just reworded the statement of the article.
Neither you nor the author explain how patriotism is linked to power. I (and your parent) think that's an absurd position. If anything, a realistic rather than jingoistic view of the nation's stance in the world enables a sort of realism that prevents stupid mistakes of hubris -- mistakes that can sap a country's ability to project both military and diplomatic power.
> Neither you nor the author explain how patriotism is linked to power
It's linked to the people in power, no? A population that's highly patriotic and supportive of the country they live in are more likely to go along with whatever the leaders of the country do. Like root out people with communist ideas or supposed Japanese spies (and put them in big old camps). Hitler was an expert at stoking the patriotic fires and this helped in immeasurably at the start.
A disenfranchised populous is unlikely to follow their leaders to war and be far more critical (and vocal) about their policies.
Japanese internment camps, wasted energy on McCarthyist witch hunts, Nazi concentration camps, and futile wars are all excellent examples of how patriotism can undermine national power.
Patriotism is an emotion. Emotional decision making can help avoid debates that lead to inaction, but it can also enable horrendously stupid decisions.
It's not clear to me that overbearing patriotism in the general population is a net benefit to a democratic superpower.
The three major powers in the world today are the US, the EU, and China. The trade that makes them world powers also makes military conflicts between them unthinkable. The US needs to focus on maintaining its economic superiority and not waste its time on fighting the peanut gallery. So far it is doing a pretty good job, or rather, not as bad a job as the other two.
Great powers often decline from inside-out. It's reasons outside them just assist the process.
Most empires do not truly collapse. They just decline and change into something else, often parts of other empires. British Empire is now small part of power structure in its ex-colony. If you join British Empire and American hegemony together, get 400 years of expanding Anglo-Saxon culture with internal power shifts (like different dynasties in China).
In the "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", Kennedy argues that all Western powers in last 500 years are drawn into strategic entanglements that force them to spend more of their GDP on defense. This leads to domestic underinvestment. First the great power experiences relative economic decline, then its rivals start to challenge it. Then wars bankrupt it.
The issue with these "economic decline" stories and speculations is that "decline" is never defined in any kind of useful way. So, arguments tend to rise with people talking past each other because they are using a different idea of what axis the decline is moving along.
Are we talking about the power to dictate trade terms or monopolize trade routes? This is a lot less important than in the 17th century. Do they mean cultural influence? I can report as a European that I understand US politics better than my own country's. I watch more US movies than al else combined. Do they mean "highest GDP?" Military power? the ability to be the "world Policeman?"
The wealth of the united states has been concentrated to very few people in the past 20 years. Those people are owners of multinational conglomerates that don't give much about borders anyways. Where the U.S. as a state used to be a driving force of those money horses, it is now a glorified container for the US defence department. The state(country) officials are allowed to fight as long as the bottom line of the 1%(0.1%) is not endangered...
Joseph A. Tainter had the best theory about empire collapse. The empire usually has some way of making an economic profit. They exploit it till it starts returning negative returns and then they try all kinds of counterproductive things that only make things more complicated to try and save that little scheme they've got going.
Yeah, but while others exploited natural resources or other things that decrease in volume over time, the US exploits currency, which only increases over time.
Rome did not collapse because of natural resource problems. Neither did Byzantium. They collapsed because their civilizational business model started generating negative marginal returns. This can happen for environmental reasons or it can happen for other reason.
Well, for me USA is still great. For cultural reasons mostly(, because I'm already from a rich country). For instance, I'd like to go and work in Silicon Valley for a while. If I could get a Visa. ;)
No Ferguson/Baltimore mentioned nor fast growth of govt. debt ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+government+debt&lk=4... , log scale by default!). It seems from the article the biggest problem of the country it doesn't kill so easily people owned by "dictators" anymore. Such a brutal western crap is definitely a huge problem itself.
Not really. US is a powerhouse because it attracts zillions of bright minds with the quality of live and opportunities (recently that got fucked up because of corporations). The language is relatively simple, the culture is welcoming, the landmass is beautiful and there are not so many crowded cities / places.
If you are a "skilled" person of foreign nationality would you rather go to the US or China if you would have an option ?
neither, if I would be non-european, I would choose either europe or australia. better quality of life, more personal freedom (yes, compared to US, the land of free), and just a more interesting places to be (EU culture diversity is still astonishing to me even though I live here 34 years already, Australia has all south east asia and great barrier reef just next to it, which are amazing places to explore)
> If you are a "skilled" person of foreign nationality would you rather go to the US or China if you would have an option ?
Do you know if China is evolving culturally? The reason I wouldn't want to live in a place like China or Russia is that people there are not socially developed. By that I mean, people there are not pleasant and rudeness is the norm. Hopefully, China will be different in a decade or so.
Hard to say. They are experiencing "got rich quickly" syndrome of post-communist countries.I doubt China will be different anytime soon (that includes your decade :-)) as it is an isolated world within a world.
The thing that is ignored and has to be ignored or you would not have a story, is the near total alignment of the entire West. Economically, militarily and culturally the West is absolutely the dominant force, and that is a good thing.
>Democrats with reservations about free trade have tried to sabotage the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the biggest trade deal since Nafta.
Well that's a great big lie. It's Democrats who are concerned about giving corporations carte blanche to sue in secret courts for loss of expected profits.
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.