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fspades posted:Why the worlds sole superpower has the need to repeatedly invade and bomb foreign countries and mess with their domestic politics through dirty, underhanded methods? Does it come with being a super power or can it be maybe, just maybe, how the US perpetuates its position as the world hegemon? It's how hegemons in general perpetuate their position. It's important for the citizens of a hegemon to push for it to be less completely awful (and, generally, the citizens fail completely), but here is a comprehensive list of regional and up hegemons that don't engage in that behavior much: - The colonial Netherlands on a good week? - Modern Germany, I suppose. - China isn't doing a lot of invading and bombing (outside the borders of Greater China, but this is a tread about how they are better than America, so let's give them a pass on Xinjiang and Tibet), but sure is partial to arming the wealthy African assholes it works closely with. Does abetting dictators count as dirty and underhanded or is it just a reasonable demand of geopolitics? The US learned a lot of lessons from the British Empire in how to be relatively hands off, and China is learning from us why it is a good idea to be cost effective, which incidentally means fewer bombs unless youare really quite sure your regional proxies have this thing handleable.
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Jul 23, 2015 18:21
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fspades posted:So you are tolerating the US murdering thousands on a regular basis to keep its hegemonic position because you just have a feeling that the alternative world where the US isn't the world hegemon would just be the same. Ok, then. This, at last, is an interesting question. We kinda don't and the humane use of current US hegemony would probably be to nudge things towards the sanest possible multipolar world, since the US probably can't remain sole superpower forever. The big question in a power vacuum is always going to be what happens when someone tries for a bigger piece of the pie or otherwise steps out of line. Right now, the answer is dependent on whether you are sufficiently obnoxious to US interests and/or have another major power sponsor who is able to disincentivize US intervention in, for example, a country on the north coast of the Black Sea. In Hypothetical Future Multipolar World, the answer probably ranges from "depends how the other regional powers feel about it" (not great) to "there is a working cohesive international order that functions a lot like the modern US-led interventions but with more input from the world or the region in question" (probably good). The Obama administration's policies, including helping build a system for Asian governments to plot together, are a step in the right direction insofar as they take a look at the inconvenient and excessive costs of direct US hegemony and evaluate whether there is a cheaper way to keep global geopolitics reasonably civil and amenable to American companies making tons of money.
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Jul 23, 2015 20:01
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crabcakes66 posted:I think the only way to decide which system is better is bodycount since WW2. A typical statistics error. You should be asking which resulted in more deaths per capita.  (It's probably communism, but there are confounding factors like, for example, the tendency of the transition to a workers' paradise being accompanied by a vicious revolution that puts an autocrat in power who then does the things that an autocrat tends to do.) Relatedly, Fojar: pre-agriculture war resulted in an ABSOLUTE poo poo TON of deaths per capita. Mostly because the total capita was very modest.
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Jul 24, 2015 03:36
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