Pax Americana and Team America World Police only works so long as the cop is willing to play by their own rules.
In some ways the critical event was the BLM protests. Faced with the question of "are police subject to the rule of law", the country comprehensively chose "no". Combined with the decades-long process of stacking the Supreme Court with partisan judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, this eroded rule of law really badly to the point that all this was able to happen. And now they're trying to export gunpoint extortion as an international norm.
Globalisation in itself wouldn't be as bad, if the profits were equally distributed. But most often globalisation just means taking away worker and consumers protections so mega corporations can outsource manufacturing/labour/services to cheaper countries with low or no environmental / social protections.
Before Globalisation of markets there must be a globalization of citizen rights to the highest standards.
The flawed premise here is that globalization has not already been a win-win endeavour, both for people in wealthy countries and people in poorer countries.
The evidence is overwhelming that it has been win-win, albeit with some negative side effects that need to be managed better.
We can always do better but that should not involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater based on a faulty understanding of where we currently are.
It is a win-win even when one side wins more than the other.
Also you are operating in dollars space instead of utility space, which is a mistake. Even if a poor person "only" gains an extra $2000/year in annual earnings due to globalization, that can be a life changing amount of additional wealth given that their utility function is highly sensitive to small changes.
It didn't. Yes, the gap certainly has widened with countries that didn't partake in globalisation. Here I'm thinking countries in Africa, North Korea and Afghanistan.
But if you look at poorer countries that did invite the richer ones so that could provide labour at a lower cost, countries like Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and yes China - the gap has gone from peasant farmers who starved in lean years to industrial nations that are starting to rival the incumbents. Places like Singapore and Japan are in fact now wealthier than most of the incumbents.
Yes ... that's how every empire has worked since the dawn of time. You make countries join an empire, first voluntarily, mostly because at that point, the tiny militaries just aren't strong enough to force the issue, then through military force and this provides economic benefits through scale and sharing of know-how. This is then used to make the empire grow in a feedback loop. Economics and technology, and in turn the military, all greatly benefit from scale.
Then the disadvantage of scale slowly becomes clear: this concentrates wealth and power in less and less, and eventually one, ___location. This is how Rome, Paris, London and, outside of the US, Teheran and Beijing are not just a bit bigger than the cities around them but completely outclass them on every metric. Even within those cities it's not exactly equally divided. The amount of wealth in the City of London is more than all the rest of London combined.
Of course, as Ireland and Scotland can explain, by then the exit is closed.
"Wealth" is nothing but debt, mostly from people living in the further away parts of the empire. That's why a poor person from middle America is tending the golf course in Florida. One problem with that, is that debt is a fiction. Someone strikes a few lines in a law book, and debt is gone. For people living far away from the power centers that sounds better and better.
The US hasn't had enough time yet, and on top of that, it is the hub of the world in many ways. Mostly because in WW2 the rest of the world decided to destroy itself, leaving the US as the only intact industrial power, and thus lots of debt is being created in the world and brought to the US to build stuff. Technology, internet, military, financial, ... plus the power centers in the US haven't (fully) merged yet. It will come.
The bigger the empire, the less equal it is for the people living inside it.
Empires collapse because large parts of the empire are plundered of all economic value they can generate, in trade for wealth in the power centers, after which most of the empire becomes a resource sink ... and that is not something the military can fix. But by then the power centers have depended on wealth being brought in to them for decades, sometimes centuries ... and more and more they have to care for themselves. A lot more work, done by the locals, must be done for less in return. For one thing, the power centers must militarily defend the heartland ... and at this point, must do so while getting nothing in return.
Here's a funny (but meant very seriously) illustration of the end and if you think about it, terrible, article about China's southern border asking the questions: WHY would China defend this border? HOW would China defend this border? WITH WHAT would China defend this border? Illustrating the problem. Read it now because this will become crisis #1223, at which point this subject will become yet another target of CCP censorship. And it's not like the US or Russia, or India, or Europe don't have the same problem.
> Of course, as Ireland and Scotland can explain, by then the exit is closed.
I mean, the exit was always closed to Ireland, from the initial invasion onwards. That wasn't a case of choosing to be in until you're trapped, Ireland was conquered (and subject to periodic ethnic cleansing in the plantations, reprisals etc.)
globalization is going to continue, even among unlikely partners, see for example[1]. The US putting itself behind an Iron Curtain, is of course not going to change the reality that the rest of the world needs, and benefits from trade just as much as it has until now. It was true in the time of Adam Smith, it will be true in a hundred years. All it does is effectively end America's influence in the world out of a bizarre ideological isolationism, genuinely like a sort of funhouse mirror USSR.
My understanding is that most of the government in the states has realized how they’ve lost the game they’ve created themselves. Unless some black swan event happens, I don’t think anything can stop the new juggernaut in the field (China). Surely they have a lot of problems, but with 1.4B population and proven track record, it’ll be hard to compete with them in scale.
This is basically an attempt to create a new game, with the hopes that they can govern the rules again. Nobody wants to give up the power, obviously. But yeah, good luck to all of my American friends, I really hope (genuinely!) it turns out well in the end for you all!
