Remarks on the Decline of American Empire

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/11/remarks-on-decline-of-american-empire.html?m=1

by dilap • 9 years ago

80 67 9 years ago

infoproc.blogspot.com

>>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).

robin_reala• 9 years ago

Certainly hundreds of thousands, even the low end official figure for the Iraq war alone is 110,000 (top-end more pessimistic estimate is 1m+)[1]. Add on to that Afghanistan[2] (estimates of 110,000 to 360,000) and you’re up to a lowball quarter of a million total.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...

mc323• 9 years ago

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.

bluetomcat3• 9 years ago

It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.

Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.

api2• 9 years ago

It was a delusional ideology that presumed that democratic systems can be imposed on another country by military force. This wouldn't work even if social democracy were the best possible system. To understand why just invert the circumstances and imagine China attempting to impose a (even superior) political system on the United States following an invasion or via foreign intelligence meddling. Do you think that would work?

ashark2• 9 years ago

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.

distances• 9 years ago

Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war.

The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.

eeZah7Ux• 9 years ago

> trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars
Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives

...and american lives as well: I'm always surprised at how in some cultures it's considered acceptable mixing money and human lives in the same sentence as if they were somewhat comparable items.

On top of that, human lives are often listed after money, yet nobody seems to take notice of this.

"oh it's just semantics"...

timthelion4• 9 years ago

Are you sure that money and life are not comparable? After-all, people spend all of their lives making money. People die of hunger. And to be killed is not so much a matter of a loss of life, everyone is mortal after-all, we will all die, it is a loss of time. And time is money, and money is time.

aaron-lebo3• 9 years ago

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.

fooblitzky• 9 years ago

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.

api2• 9 years ago

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.

aaron-lebo3• 9 years ago

Not Germany waging two world wars? Germany in 1910 was dynamic, and due to those wars they lost multiple generations and at least a third of their land.

Germany recovered from that within 40 years. The Iraq war was a disaster, but there's nothing especially trying about recovering from that given time.

throwawayjava2• 9 years ago

Germany was rebuilt from that, first through a brutal dictatorship and then, after that, with enormous assistance from the largest and strongest economies in the world, powered by a demographic boom in the richest parts of the world.

And no matter how much progress has been made between 1950 and 2017, there's so little comfort in drawing a parallel between our present situation and the trajectory Germany from 1910 to 1945.

bmm6o2• 9 years ago

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.

jancsika2• 9 years ago

So who was the mastermind? Wolfowitz?

duderific• 9 years ago

Gulf War II was advantageous to Cheney, as he had been the CEO of Halliburton, and still had ties in the defense industry. As we know, Halliburton and other similar companies ended up with billions of dollars in US Government contracts supplying food and personnel for the Iraq war. Probably one of the greatest unenforced conflicts of interest in the history of the United States.

empath753• 9 years ago

Not only that but the torrent of lies used to sell it and the torture regime that went along with it destroyed the ability of the populist right wing to discern the difference between truth and reality and led directly to Trumpism. The failure of the policy led people to look for scapegoats and trump handed them to them. Ironically the people who pushed the policy were the first victims and I can’t think of anyone more deserving.

ramzyo4• 9 years ago

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?

elliotec• 9 years ago

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

scribu• 9 years ago

If you have an illness, who’s opinion would you like to hear most? That of a random internet person or that of a medical professional?

If you don’t have an illness and just want to read random stuff, instead of some other leisure activity, I guess it doesn’t matter.

ramzyo4• 9 years ago

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.

throwawayjava2• 9 years ago

https://vprgs.msu.edu/stephen-hsu-vice-president-research-an...

tolger• 9 years ago

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

Fluid_Mechanics• 9 years ago

Combined with widespread gun ownership and ethnic enclaves...

njarboe• 9 years ago

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.

aaavl2821• 9 years ago

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

DubiousPusher• 9 years ago

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.

kyaghmour• 9 years ago

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

thedevil• 9 years ago

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

https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...

jonathanehrlich• 9 years ago

Fyi - RT is paid for by the Russian Government.

cucuuc4• 9 years ago

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)

ladon86• 9 years ago

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.

RickS• 9 years ago

In the context of a nation the UK had an adversarial relationship with, yes, that would be a prudent thing to point out.

nikdaheratik4• 9 years ago

I guess that depends on how much you trust a government news source when that government is headed by a guy that murders journalists that disagree with him.

tabtab• 9 years ago

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.

nikdaheratik4• 9 years ago

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.

perseusprime11• 9 years ago

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!

Remarks on the Decline of American Empire

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