Comment by myrmidon
12 days ago
Do you think that global hegemony by force is long-term (centuries) sustainable at all?
What makes you confident that this could ever work on a longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I would expect any industrial/technological lead to melt over the years unless there is a monumental, continuous difference in spending (like what the US military did since WW2).
But I see no indication that you can keep that situation stable over the long term, and I honestly think that attempts like the current tariff approach don't help one bit in the long run while having massive harmful side effects (price inflation, loss of planning stability/soft power/productivity).
Global hegemony of the US is based not on 5% of people, rather the US sphere of influence. US, Canada, EU, Japan, Australia, South Korea, etc. The combination is immensely rich, powerful and advanced. Even more so when you keep India on board as well.
It at least stands a fighting chance if it wasn't the case that this alliance is being destroyed before our eyes.
I will admit that even an integrated alliance cannot push around China in the way it could decades ago.
Yeah, but look at what GP is responding to:
That does not make sense.
Low value manufacturing has been disappearing from the US for decades and arguably the US -- up until the recent turmoil -- has continued to maintain its hegemony.
Yes America needs to do this because the manufacturing capacity of allies in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan is under threat by China.
America is the only country with the military capacity to take on China, and Europe isn't going to get up to speed in time to defend Taiwan.
It must be America out of necessity not preference.
4 replies →
I can see your point, but I disagree on this.
It is specifically "US hegemony" and not "western democracy hegemony" because the US is so extraordinarily powerful in economy and military.
Interests/culture with other democracies aligns well enough (and the power differential is large enough!) that US leadership is tolerated/supported.
But Canada, EU, Australia, Japan are NOT vasall states: If interests would clash and/or the US lose a lot of its relative power, those would cease being majority supporters and push for domestic interests instead.
Calling them "fairweather friends" might be too cynical but I think it's much more accurate than considering them integral parts of the US hegemony.
The reworking of the AUKUS deal seems like turning Australia into a vassal state
I think "centuries", plural, is too long for anything much to last since the industrial era. I'm not comfortable guessing past 2032 even without any questions about AI.
The United Kingdom of England and Scotland didn't exist until 1707, and even that was sans-Ireland until 1800.
And yet, even with the biggest empire the world had ever known, WW1 could only be won with the support of another huge empire (France) and the subsequent arrival of the USA; shortly after this, most of Ireland became semi-independent.
WW2 was "won", again with huge support, but a pyrrhic victory from the UK's point of view, and India soon after became independent. The Suez Crisis was 1956, and showed that the old empires of the UK (and France, Union française) were no longer economically hegemonic — even when working together — and the US had replaced them in this role.
Looking into the future, there's no way to guess. The more tech advances, the easier it becomes for a single person to cause enormous, world-altering impacts: hackers are already relevant on the geopolitical stage; there's good reason to think that quality of life is directly related to how much energy a person can process, but once you have sufficient energy per-capita, it's not hard to use a cyclotron to brute-force the purification of weapons grade uranium, or to transmute depleted uranium into plutonium; simple genetic manipulation has been a standard technique for first year biology students for at least two decades, and can be done in a home lab, and at some point we will have risks from someone trying to use this for evil rather than decorative bioluminescence. All these things can topple a hegemon that spends its tomorrows looking at yesterday's battlefield.