
Remarks on the Decline of American Empire - dilap
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/11/remarks-on-decline-of-american-empire.html?m=1
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aaavl2821
I don't always think internal strife is a bad thing, nor that internal strife
is at higher levels now than in the past. We had a civil war, and after that
was the end of slavery and the gilded age. too much harmony stifles innovation

I'd also disagree with the passage at the end of the article. George
Washington was about as mercenary and capitalistic as they come. The
revolution against Britain was started by the wealthy merchant class who
calculated the npv of continued relations with Britain vs independence and
found that independence was more profitable. Rockefeller was obsessed with
money (recorded every penny he ever spent). The Bay Area economy was created
as a result of ambitious young people literally taking part in a gold rush. It
is disappointing that the romantic, politicized and intellectually lazy
notions put forth in that final passage get any credence

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DubiousPusher
Edit: I should say I enjoyed the video. It's much more nuanced than the post
that accompanies it.

I thought historians abandoned "moral decline" arguments with the 19th
century.

What I find funny about them is they're always characterized as a decline in
morals particularly important to the observing historian. And of course, no
empirical measure of moral decline is ever given or even suggested.

So what arguments like this really amount to are a feeling. A feeling felt by
curmudgeonly historians throughout time. Nostalgia. And most likely,
nostaligia for a time they themselves never inhabited. All the better because
there are no negative memories to sour the nostalgia.

America in my opinion is not in moral decline. We are reaching for a moral
high point actually (but just barely). But that's just my feeling, so it's
about as valuable as the ideas on offer here.

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aaron-lebo
The decline is overstated. International goodwill was at a very high point
with Obama's election (Nobel, anyone). There's still nobody that can compete
on the US's scale. There's a reason Macron wants to empower and streamline the
EU (besides his power fantasies). Russia is a stagnant and isolated state,
China has major ongoing issues with poverty and environmental degradation.
China can't wage a war with the US outside of China itself.

It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses
the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The
British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its
greatest extent.

It takes one election or world event to turn things around.

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fooblitzky
At it's greatest extent, but also declining in economical production for many
years and so heavily in debt that servicing interest required nearly half of
the government expenditure. Then WWII ended the British empire, despite
victory, and a massive part of that was the financial debt owed the USA.

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kyaghmour
I was wondering what "RT America" was -- i.e. the video in the article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_\(TV_network\))
"RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian international television network
funded by the Russian government."

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api
To me the lynchpin is the monumental catastrophe represented by Iraq War II
and the entire decades-long Middle East quagmire in general. It's been nothing
short of national suicide, especially when one considers what else might have
been done with all that money. We almost literally set the surplus of an
entire American generation on fire and watched it burn.

The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones. They just represent
the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and
1980s.

We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms
of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show
for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political
extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East
may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when
considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.

~~~
bmm6o
Not only was the disaster entirely predictable, they themselves predicted it.
For Gulf War I, Cheney (then Secretary of Defense) explained why they left
Saddam in power - that removing him would create a power vacuum and a civil
war leading to regional instability. Gulf War II - with Cheney as VP - has
exactly this outcome, leading us to dump blood and money (ours and others) in
the desert sands.

~~~
jancsika
So who was the mastermind? Wolfowitz?

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bmm6o
I don't even know all of the players, and don't claim to know their
motivations. I will say that you don't need a mastermind or a conspiracy if
your incentives are shared or aligned. Some may have done it for money, some
for power, some to prop up W's popularity in order to pass a domestic agenda.

~~~
jancsika
> I don't even know all of the players, and don't claim to know their
> motivations.

I'm asking for a response from someone who knows the players and can give
convincing evidence for their motivations.

I mention Wolfowitz because as I remember it he was one of the chief writers
of the PNAC policy pieces[1] that were urging for a ground war in Iraq during
Clinton's second term.

I'd be interested in reading more from an expert on the chief movers and
shakers in buildup to the Iraq War, especially since almost all of those neo-
cons involved have done a lot to distance themselves from it over the last
decade.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century)

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tolger
I think the bigger risk is internal strife. When half or your citizens hate
the other half, that's a recipe for disaster.

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Fluid_Mechanics
Combined with widespread gun ownership and ethnic enclaves...

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njarboe
Machetes work just as well, if that is all you have (see Rwanda). I imagine
rocks and sticks could be used if your civilization has not got to the
universal machete ownership level.

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soperj
How does what happened in Vegas happen with Machetes?

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seanot
Was there evidence presented that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by
hatred for some group (political or otherwise)? I guess I missed that in the
papers.

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apoorvkumar
You're saying a person (deranged or otherwise) did what he did without malice
towards his fellow humans! That's some seriously warped observation.

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ramzyo
Who is Steve Hsu, and why are his statements, opinions, and speculation about
the future of America notable? Or is he just summarizing the statements,
opinions, and speculation of the historian in the ~30 minute video linked on
the page?

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elliotec
Why does he need to be notable? Maybe he's just some guy on the internet with
an opinion like you and me.

~~~
ramzyo
Well I guess that I implicitly expect opinionated front page HN content to
come from someone whose opinion is more informed than mine. I’m not sure what
to take away from this post, given the lack of supporting evidence for the
assertions made. Currently I’m at “huh, interesting opinions, who is this guy
and how did his post make it to the front page of HN?” Of course this is just
my interpretation of why things get upvoted to the home page.

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rgbrenner
He made it to the front page because people here read it, thought it was
interesting, and gave it a point. The fact it's on the front page means
nothing more than that. Any reputation youre attaching to it doesn't exist.

~~~
ramzyo
Hmm, I see your point. So you don't think that reputability of the source
plays into what makes it to the front page?

Generally, and purely anecdotally, I find HN content to be both interesting
and either a) from a reputable source, generally for opinion pieces such as
this or b) supported by facts, with sources, or with broadly-accepted
knowledge held by the audience (such as with technical posts). Either a) or
b), establish for me at least, some metric of reputability of the arguments
presented.

I found this particular post to be interesting, but neither a) from a
reputable source in the field (not trying to put down the author of the blog,
just don't think based on his bio that this is more than one dude's opinion or
he's just summarizing the content of the video) b) backed up by facts to
support his opinions and assertions.

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rgbrenner
People are free to take whatever criteria they want into their upvote.
Certainly all of that plays into the decisions individual voters make when
they upvote a post, but it's not required.

There's no authority granted by being on the front page. You should feel free
to question any ideas presented, no matter who they are from (including from
people with actual authority... since even smart people are still just
people).

~~~
ramzyo
Thanks for providing your thoughts on this, much appreciated!

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sandworm101
>>>1\. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous --
trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars,
culminating in utter defeat.

Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or
_hundreds of thousands_ dead. Thousands may be how many _american_ military
lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any
war. Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you
want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might
be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing.

And there is more:

>>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the
world should not distract us...

Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant
regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE
Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot
recall any off the top of my head).

~~~
mc32
One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which
presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful
we see a change in our foreign policy.

~~~
ashark
> One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology
> which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

I dunno, seemed to last well into Obama's tenure in practice if not in
rhetoric, from what I can tell, and Syria may well be a bigger disaster than
Afghanistan and Iraq combined by any measure, including realpolitik (see: its
effects on European politics, maybe also on the situation in Turkey though I'm
less certain on that one). Yes, yes, the war in Iraq contributed to it in
certain important ways, but didn't dictate our response to it, which was about
as wrong as it could have been, unless there were some _serious_ poker chips
in play with Russia that we mere observers couldn't see, i.e. aside from the
obvious ones. There's been no widespread condemnation of that action or even
common recognition that we're the reason it's such a big mess, as there
eventually was in the case of Iraq at least, and incidentally we're still in
Iraq and Afghanistan, so neoconservatism seems to be alive and well in some
sense.

Mind, I protested the war in Iraq, was overall a fan of Obama's domestic
policies, so I'm not a partisan looking for reasons to bash Obama or try to
rescue Bush's incredibly poor legacy or anything like that.

~~~
addicted
Syria is inseparable from Iraq (it's ISIS for a reason) and almost certainly
would not have happened, and happened at the scale it did if it wasn't for
Iraq.

~~~
ashark
Sure, but Syria would have burnt out before that got started if we hadn't
half-assedly propped up the opposition, just enough to ensure they couldn't be
defeated but not enough to actually make them win. Year after year. Iraq was
really bad and contributed to all this significantly, but in no way did it
force us to turn the brief fire in Syria into a years-persisting human misery
factory and radicalization engine of a smoldering brush fire as part of a
proxy war with Russia.

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nikdaheratik
We don't actually know that. From what I've seen, the Syrian government
faction was maybe a third of the fighting force, but they had air power and
the other factions were never able to unite for various reasons. The arms from
the U.S. didn't make that much difference, and the war dragged on because the
government didn't have a good way to end it without losing alot of soldiers in
the cities (and massacring even more civilians). That left siege warfare and
massive bombing as their only options, and both of those are slow and
ineffective.

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nikdaheratik
Alot of the same arguments I heard from old people 20 years ago. I agree with
the foreign policy critques, especially regarding the middle east, but we had
similar issues with Vietnam 50 years ago and even larger ones with the Civil
War and still bounced back.

China has alot going for it economically, and that's a good thing overall, but
it has its own issues to reckon with. Also, it's actually harder for its
neighbors to deal with China, and vice versa, because of distance and shared
borders. The U.S. may come across as a noisy policeman at times, but that's
less of a worry that a pushy neighbor that keeps trying to move the fence
line.

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thedevil
Note that China was a juggernaut up until a few hundred years ago.

[https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-
history-1...](https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-
history-1gjk92e6yjwqm16)

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jonathanehrlich
Fyi - RT is paid for by the Russian Government.

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cucuuc
What’s you’re point?

Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when
someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)

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ladon86
They’re very different. The BBC is an independent organization funded directly
by license fees paid by television owners. Unlike RT, it is independent from
direct government intervention, and it doesn’t attempt to advance the
interests whichever party is in power. The BBC primarily exists to serve
people living in Britain. RT is directly funded by the Russian government, and
is targeted primarily at other countries outside Russia.

~~~
cucuuc
Jee, here I thought the World Service (the only BBC I can get) was targeted at
me :S

Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.

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tabtab
I suspect that the Chinese govt's censorship desires will drag it down in
terms of being a tax on productivity. To expand more, Chinese companies will
have to interact more with the rest of the world, and this will create further
censorship and monitoring pressure on the govt.

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perseusprime11
Nobody mentions the amount of diversity present in America when compared to
other homegeneous cultures like China. You will lose if you bet against
diversity!

