I think we're about to find out just what globalization did for us. Globalization is what held down consumer prices as unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the global financial system over the last 13 years. Globalization solved our garbage problem - many municipalities are no longer offering recycling now that we can't ship it to China to dump in their fields. Globalization made the Internet much more useful - how many of you are fans of Factorio, Telegram, or World of Warships (all developed in former eastern bloc countries), or Alibaba or TikTok (both Chinese)? Globalization has led to unprecedented global peace over the last 30 years.
I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war. Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.
> Globalization has led to unprecedented global peace over the last 30 years
Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers, activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers, soldiers, etc. Many have laid down their lives.
It's offensive. and disrespectfull for purely commercial interests to claim all the credit. There is not even a rational argument provided beyong a correlation.
Maybe it's the other way round global peace has allowed globalisation. And it hasn't stopped Russia.
> unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the global financial system over the last 13 years
Every time I see a person that complains about government printing money, they can never answer how is money supply supposed to grow along with economy to enable economic expansion? The only mechanism is government printing money or banks creating loans
Also do you know that many governments owe like 30% of their debt to themselves?
'HM Treasury owes £2.1trn to holders of British government securities, of which approximately £745bn is owed to the Bank of England'
> how is money supply supposed to grow along with economy to enable economic expansion?
Money supply doesn't have to grow to enable economic expansion. Things can just get cheaper.
When governments print money, what happens is not that economic expansion occurs that otherwise wouldn't. What happens is that things don't get cheaper--instead, a portion of the economic gains from increased productivity go to governments and their cronies, instead of to all of us. In other words, printing money is hidden taxation. It's much easier politically than overt taxation precisely because it's hidden; people don't directly see economic value being taken away from them, even though it is.
> Every time I see a person that complains about government printing money, they can never answer how is money supply suppose to grow along with economy to enable economic expansion? The only mechanism is gpvernment printint money or banks creating loans
Only really fringe people complain that the government prints money at all. The more normal complaint is that the government is printing way more money than it should, for the amount of economic expansion that's actually happening.
Why can't we increase individual people's holdings of USD proportionally like a stock split? Instead for legacy reasons the government creates money in a way the dilutes the currency holder's position. People perceive this as unfair because they don't like their shares (of purchasing power) being diluted.
People don't object to the money supply increasing. They object to their holdings being diluted in unaccountable ways.
> Why can't we increase individual people's holdings of USD proportionally like a stock split?
Because that would not serve the real purpose of printing money, which is hidden (and therefore politically much easier) taxation, to enrich the government and its cronies at the expense of everybody else.
> Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers, activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers, soldiers, etc. Many have laid down their lives.
This is idealism. It just so happens that resources are much more efficiently acquired through more peaceful means in this age.
If the incentives were in the opposite direction, those lives would have all been wasted. People don’t seem to realize how unprecedented this era of global peace is.
Most of the population is fed news from the extremely wealthy who benefit from these peace oriented policies. It really doesn’t take that much to take a population from benevolence to militarist nationalism.
> This is idealism. It just so happens that resources are much more efficiently acquired through more peaceful means in this age.
Ah right, this is why slave owners have voluntarily freed all the slaves in the US? The french revolution was about aristocracy voluntarily giving up their privilidges? In Britain Parliament asserted it's dominance over the monarch through peacefull means?
In each case, idealistic people rose up against tyrany and cut some heads off
Slavery was a heavily economically motivated endeavor, obviously, otherwise it would never have occurred in the first place or wouldn't have taken so long to abolish.
The other two examples are just a changing of the hands holding power from one aristocracy to another. Peasants still lost out in both of those instances and life was worse after.
> Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers, activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers, soldiers, etc. Many have laid down their lives.
millions sounds too much.
I protested against USA war in Iraq 1 & 2, against USA bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, against USA bombing Kosovo, against USA invading Afghanistan and against the too many times that the USA have bombed some place in the World, killing millions of innocent civilians.
But I don't feel like I worked for peace, I simply voiced my opinion, which was simply correctly pointing out that the USA have become a problem for global peace.
Just one question: in USA okay with Iran repression or Putin invasion? they are not bombing there.
Do they like Talibans given they gave them back Afghanistan leaving behind vehicles and weapons, including fighter jets?
Do they agree with Saudi Princes killing journalists? because Bin Salman is still on the throne and USA still sell him billions in weapons every year.
> Basically, you're in favor of Russian-style or Nazi-style "peace"
Classic American , see a problem, take out the gun.
Now tell me again the story of Bush administration fabricated evidence to bomb Iraq.
I love it.
p.s. I live nearby former Yugoslavia, I have many friends there, nobody supported Milosevic here in Europe, many of us have witnessed the horrors of the war and the consequences of the American bombs, but he was such a threat that when they arrested him (because it wasn't so hard to find him) they couldn't charge him with anything substantial and he "died" of "natural causes" in prison.
That's justice according to US: first thing bomb civilians, then we'll think of something.
"The Trial Chamber of the Karadzic case found, at paragraph 3460, page 1303, of the Trial Judgement, that 'there was no sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan' [to create territories ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs]. The Trial Chamber found earlier in the same paragraph that 'Milosevic provided assistance in the form of personnel, provisions and arms to Bosnian Serbs during the conflict'."
Milosevic did it, but USA was unable to prove it, they already had what they wanted, a fruitful war, the trial, the real justice, don't sparkle their attention.
The America of Robert H. Jackson has long gone.
So, please, keep you bed stories for people who don't know better, spare me the propaganda. I'm too old for that sht.
Who's the real Nazi?
Because I think I saw actual Nazis walking around with swastika flags on American soil and nobody stopped or arrested them. They said it's freedom of expression. Then they assaulted Capital Hill, fomented by the POTUS, but it's OK, it's democracy at work I guess.
I also remember very well that only one country after world war 2 gave a medal to a Nazi, that place is the United States of A, the Nazi was called Wehrner von Braun.
I also remember very well operation Condor, Allende forced to commit suicide and Pinochet (a Franchist who loved Mussolini and praised Hitler) getting to power thanks to the US support.
Who armed the talibans in the 80s, to "use" them against USSR?
A spin off of that operation took the name Bin Laden, armed and trained in CIA camps in Pakistan.
Who armed Saddam in the 80s, to "use" him against Iran?
Because wars by proxy are much better, right?
If you create a new enemy every now and then, you can keep selling weapons and keep financing your military industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, the highest expenditure in the World, more than the rest of the World combined.
Because they don't want to risk their soldiers lives, it isn't important enough for them, soldiers lives that they lost anyway, there is no American veteran that went back home and had a good life after deployment. Not a single one.
During the Afghan campaign sadly more than 22 veterans a day die from suicide and two serving military service members per day die by their own hands. [...] combat fatalities are less than 8,000, while more than 30,000 veterans and service members have taken their own lives.*
Cannon fodder. I'll ask again, who's the real nazi?
So now they use drones, that already killed thousands of civilians and hundreds of children (conservative estimates), because you know, if you are in the US you don't see them coming to your country mutilated. And if they do, they call them terrorists or keep them for decades in Guantanamo, with no charge whatsoever, deprived of every human right.
>in USA okay with Iran repression or Putin invasion? they are not bombing there.
They aren't bombing Russia because that could start a nuclear war. Are you seriously that stupid to not understand this? This one really beggars belief.
They aren't bombing Iran because it's just too difficult a target; trying to subdue and set up better governments in Afghanistan and Iraq was bad enough, and in Afghanistan it was a failure. Iran is a much more powerful country; the losses aren't worth it.
>Do they like Talibans given they gave them back Afghanistan leaving there all their weapons, including fighter jets?
Wow, more utter stupidity. No working fighter jets were left behind. Even if they did, the Taliban wouldn't know how to fly them. They don't like the Taliban; they simply gave up because resisting them was costing too much and the Afghan people and government weren't taking care of the problem themselves.
>p.s. I live nearby former Yugoslavia, I have many friends there, nobody supported Milosevic here in Europe
More stupidity. Who do you think committed all those atrocities? Obviously, a lot of Serbians supported Milosevic.
>USA is a problem, not the solution.
So what exactly is your solution, genius? Let warlords do what they want?
> They aren't bombing Russia because that could start a nuclear war
Remind me which Country is the only one to have dropped two atomic bombs on innocent civilians...
> No working fighter jets were left behind
> Even if they did, the Taliban wouldn't know how to fly them
Aircraft worth $923.3 million remained in Afghanistan. The US left 78 aircraft procured for the government of Afghanistan at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul before the end of the withdrawal. These aircraft were demilitarized and rendered inoperable before the US military left, the report states
I wonder what a terrorist organization can do with billions worth of weapons, even if half working...
Thanks God the US fought "the war on terror"... (it would be hilarious, if it wasn't tragic)
Give 'em a few years and they will find a way to use them, like they did last time when you armed them against USSR and then they used those same weapons to take control of the country and even kick the American asses out of Afghanistan.
Americans literally ran away leaving afghan people to die
Afghans are paying for the idiocy of Americans that went to look for Bin Laden where he was not, knowing he wasn't there, only because Dick Cheney is a dick.
The Afghan opposition to talibans is now left alone and against a powerful enemy, with lots of weapons and money, left behind by the invaders.
Thanks 'mmmmurica
> So what exactly is your solution, genius?
The solution is unfolding on its own.
America is retreating, their culture has become toxic, their companies are considered dangerous for the economy and for the rights of workers, they cannot even give free healthcare to all their citizens, despite being the richest country in the World.
Culturally they have become irrelevant, they can only produce shitty superhero movies, socially the nation is on the brink of a civil war.
The golden age is long gone.
USA are already dead, they just don't know it yet.
Nobody even fears them anymore, not Putin that nowadays controls a poor Country that isn't even probably able to launch a real war against anybody, they don't have the money, the means and the skills. USA have been beaten even by talibans, a tribe of shepherds of sheep with no training in combat. In Iran they are laughing at USA announced sanctions, they can't harm them more than they already did.
Recently Turkey Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu rejected the condolences the U.S. offered following a deadly attack in Istanbul and accused Washington of complicity saying that "it like the murderer arriving as one of the first at the scene of the crime."
Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, ordered the execution of the journalist Jamal Kashoggi who "was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi assassins. His body was dismembered and disposed of."
USA have declared not more than a few days ago that Bin Salman cannot be prosecuted, because he's the king.
Do you think that the fact that he buys every year billions in weapons from USA influenced the decision?
It's not hard to convince a peace activist to support peace. They're already inclined to it, and weren't seriously considering waging war to achieve their aims anyway.
It is incredibly difficult to convince a greedy bastard to support peace. The natural order, for millennia, has been that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist, the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then kills them. That is why we continue to have greedy bastards after millennia, and many of the original peaceful hunter-gatherer tribes have been killed off.
Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel. Historically, people who desire world domination achieve it by killing everybody else. Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else. This is a huge change in incentives.
> Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.
i used to think this as well, but as time has gone on, i wonder more deeply about this... like what are the conditions that create sociopaths in the first place? what causes these people to act in such ways?
> Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else.
but in the end, don't we still end up with sociopaths in charge?
You always will since they're strongly favored in short term outcomes. Think of it as a harm reduction strategy, of the viable options it's generally the least disfavorable.
It's probably genetic - the heritability of psychopathy is about as big as intelligence or height [1]. And it's propagated because somebody who kills all the menfolk, takes all the spoils, and rapes all the women manages to pass on their genes to an awful lot of offspring.
Whether you end up with sociopaths in charge depends on whether you view profits as controlling the CEO or CEOs as controlling the profits. IMHO the former view is more accurate: you can reliably predict a psychopathic CEOs actions as that which will increase profits, while if they were actually in charge, their actions should be unpredictable.
Capitalism certainly deserves credit for those rose-colored glasses so many people like to wear.
Rather than point at a bunch of historical counterpoints, let me ask you this: are arms manufacturers and dealers engaged in capitalism? Weapons and munitions are certainly 'stuff' that is manufactured and sold in highly competitive markets.
> The natural order, for millennia, has been that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist, the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then kills them
> Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.
So the capitalist plantation owners were convinced to give up slaves peacefully and the civil war was for nothing?
> I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war. Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.
Why the leap from the end of unipolarity to the end of nation-states in general? (I assume you mean "countries" here, ex: the U.S. is not a nation-state) To me a Cold War II scenario and a bipolar world order seems more likely. I don't think there will be widespread civil uprising; I think you're underestimating how much control that governments (including democracies) have over their people.
It will take some radical technological change to overturn this power dynamic and displace national governments with anarchy and unrest as you mentioned. One example of tech in this vein is DAOs, which seem like an attempt in this direction but the problem is they lack enforcement via force and coercive violence. Until you can disrupt that (killer AGI drones?), central governments will remain the efficient and viable solution to consolidating power and enforcing order, and therefore they will be the dominant form of organization in the world. The disruption of U.S. influence and the end of globalization will not be the end of countries, at least until a radical technological change happens.
Because the military conditions that led to the rise of countries don't exist anymore.
The modern nation-state grew out of a confluence of technology trends that accelerated throughout the 1800s. Mass-production made for cheap, accurate, long-ranged rifles. These made large armies of relatively untrained soldiers effective, right in time for conscription to fill the manpower void. Steelmaking made mechanized armor impervious to bullets, which also required internal combustion engines to power them, which required oil to fuel them. All of this required supply chains, which meant that political organizations large enough to build complex industrial supply chains and man them could steamroll earlier feudal empires that were still relying on cavalry charges, swords, and muskets. This happened in WW1.
Since roughly 2000 consumer electronics and inexpensive shaped-charge explosives have dramatically driven down the cost of fielding an effective fighting force. A ~6" diameter HEAT round can penetrate any reasonable level of armor, particularly if you can deliver it accurately enough to hit the same spot (defeating composite & reactive armor). Guide it with a microchip and you will hit that spot, and without a whole lot of training. MANPADS can take out far more expensive helicopters & close-support aircraft. Add drones and your $100M fighter jet is no longer assured air superiority, plus you can strike infantry formations from the air.
We've seen this already in those countries that have erupted into war. Afghanistan (repulsed first the Soviet Union then the U.S. using U.S-made weapons), Iraq (insurgency using IEDs), Syria (collapsed into anarchy, multi-sided urban war), Azerbaijan (very effective use of drones against Armenia), and now Ukraine (kicking Russia's ass with Javelins and Bayraktar). IMHO the reason we haven't seen it in developed nations is that it is far more profitable to take people's money than take people's lives. The folks with the capability to field smart weapons & drones are busy getting people to click on ads and fleecing them out of their retirement savings rather than waging war.
Sure, insurgencies don't need fancy jets or million-strong armies when they're fighting against countries that aren't investing much in this specific war. This concept of asymmetric war is literally as old as America itself; it's how it won the revolution: Britain just gave up when it got too expensive.
But it's absurd to think that, under modern military conditions, the strength of an insurgency rivals the military strength of the U.S.. For example, in all these conflicts you mentioned (-Azerbaijan), the U.S. isn't even sending troops (-Iraq, Afghanistan) and our side is still winning with its superior technology and supply chains.
The military conditions today absolutely still favor organized countries. In a future war against such enemy, if the U.S. has much to gain and doesn't care too much about the body count, you'll see Desert Storm levels of dominance. The reason we have all those real big "obsolete" planes is to drop real big fucking bombs like we did in WWII and Vietnam.
(Edit: maybe your insurgency has impenetrable air defenses consisting of thousands of drones with said "microchips". But at some point your insurgency will run out of supply and the U.S., with its "outdated" mass production capabilities and supply lines, will eventually outcompete you and then the bombers will be sent in.)
My point is that the military successes of insurgencies that you're describing are not enabled by a change in the balance of military strength. They're enabled by the fact that there was a significant decrease in the amount of effort that major military powers spent on war, e.g., when the U.S. decided not to irradiate the Korean Peninsula with cobalt. But just because countries don't go all-out anymore doesn't mean they can't or won't. These capabilities still exist and they implicitly influence every international interaction and transaction made with the U.S..
So no, anarchy will not erupt domestically when the U.S. loses some of its global hegemony to China. And the country with its centralized government and military is not yet an obsolete form of organization. Any domestic revolution would be put down easily, assuming there were people stupid enough to try. People will just adapt to whatever change happens and submit to their governments like always.
Everyone printed money like crazy, not just the Western governments, nations at all levels of development are paying the inflation price. I don't think that alone will change the balance of power meaningfully.
It's fair to say that less trade with a totalitarian rival power means less deterrent to war. Yes that's bad but the alternative of financing their military buildup and their oppression of their own people is not really a good one.
I'm not sure "financing" their military buildup is the right way to analyze what's happening in China. Do they really have a dependence on U.S./western goods? It seems like almost all their production is domestic besides imports of chips and software (Microsoft, Apple, etc.). I doubt they'll have much trouble replacing those U.S. imports either. And, at least from western reporting, it seems that China has significant coercive control over their people even in their daily lives. If all this is true, then it makes no sense to quantify China's efforts in dollars and to think that somehow the West is financing it. It makes more sense to look at China as a self sufficient economy with a potential labor force of 1.4B and compare it to the U.S., EU, India, etc. which have a similar position and are for now buddies in competition against it.
> Globalization solved our garbage problem - many municipalities are no longer offering recycling now that we can't ship it to China to dump in their fields.
Garbage was never a problem to begin with. US is a huge place. We'd be fine landfilling garbage for the next few centuries at the very least.
I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war. Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.