this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Brief summary: according to Americans, everyone else is doomed if Americans walk away.
Er, no. If America walks away, that's when America discovers everyone can manage perfectly well without them, just like we did the last time y'all had that orange muppet in the Shite House.
I'm the first to agree usually, USA Defaultism and such is a huge annoyance.
But, while the following is just one theory, it was plausible enough to give me pause, and consider that there may be avenues for things to go badly that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
This scenario doesn't include the USA leaving NATO but instead not responding to Article 5 if it's triggered in an unimportant backwater corner of NATO, so functionally it's the same kinda idea.
https://youtu.be/ZY7GPBSyONU
If nothing else, certainly food for thought!
Absolutely I’d love to see Europe pay for its own defense and patrol the trade lanes that feed it.
Bring our guys home and stop wasting us tax dollars.
So, according to your comment Europe is getting free (military) resources and/or money from the US with no agenda or gain for the US? It's like "The US (alone, for your clarification) against the World, we do things just to empower every other nation and everyone else".
Please, bring your guys home, then. Maybe the World would be better off.
The US has been subsidizing Europe (and Japan) as a counterweight to the Soviet Union since the end of WW2. Bretton Woods established the modern world where the US opened its markets and guaranteed freedom of the seas to anyone that would join us against the USSR.
Globalism as we know it today did not exist prior to WW2. Nations traded and sourced resources from their colonial empire. The U.S. opened the world to trade by championing globalism guaranteeing safe trade lanes. In return we tied those countries to our security and stood them up to take on the USSR.
Fast forward 80 years and the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is weak and will probably disintegrate at the end of the war in the Ukraine. Most of Europe is aging faster than anytime in history and is dependent upon globalization to import energy and is far from independent, Germany relies on exports to power its economy, the U.S. does not.
The demographics in the U.S. are strong, we have a sizable millennial and Gen Z population to replace the boomers (something which Europe does not have). The U.S. is in the middle of the largest industrial build out in history and we produce all of our energy needs within North America. Why do we need Europe? They have no expanding market, Russia will pose no threat.
I prefer to give Ukraine everything they need to win their war and kneecap Russia and then pull out over the next 15 years and let the world do its thing without us.
So... you want the USA to fall into decline.
I’d love to see the thought process behind your statement. Please go on.
When a nation relinquishes its influence outside its borders, that's not saving its strength. That's giving it up. Forever. That causes a power vacuum abroad which other powerful nations will instantly swoop in to grab for themselves.
Domestically, it's actually the same tactic capitalists used to loot corporations like JC Penny, Sears, etc. It's the same tactic that resulted in BREXIT. It's short-selling a nation in order to grab everything that isn't nailed down and run. It's those same people selling the idea of American isolationism.
Look I’m a numbers guy, ever since the end of the Cold War and especially since the end of the GWOT the US electorate has become more and more isolationist. Even Biden has been reluctant to involve the US military in directly in foreign wars.
I also dont mind intervention when it is in our interests. But much of our foreign policy is an echo of the Cold War which is no longer relevant.
The US lost a little over 7,000 lives and spent between 6.2 to 8 trillion on the GWOT… what benefits did we see besides scarring an entire generation and burning 8 trillion in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine how much sooner we could have achieved energy independence if we had invested that money in oil, gas and clean energy sources.
We now one of the largest exporter of oil in the world… why would we go back to the Mid East, why do we need to ensure anyone’s safety in that region. China is now the largest importer of oil from this region. In ten years when the US is done with building out our own industrial plant in NA and moving production to other countries, why would we continue to secure China’s access to that oil?
The US has 296 ships in active service, this is less than half of what we had during the Cold War. Yet we still patrol the world water ways while promising to aid Taiwan if they are invaded. We simply do not have the fleet size to maintain the mission tempo for all of these obligations. If you google ship readiness rates and deployment lengths you will see the damage this is causing our navy. I don’t see the political will to increase the size of the Navy to a level that would allow us to support those commitments. The current intervention off the coast of Yemen keeps trade lanes in the Red Sea open. This benefits Europe and China, but does very little for the US.
Let the world go to war, we can sell arms to countries at war and tip the scales in our favor. The best thing to happen to US foreign policy in the last 20 years was not the GWOT, it was Russia invading Ukraine.
We can sell or provide arms when it is in our interests. We can use our fleet and military to intervene when our interests are directly threatened. But we don’t need to guarantee other nations safety or economic security with our own blood and treasure.
Can't say I'm a numbers guy myself. I believe them, for sure. But I don't keep them around because I personally can't verify them properly.
I see where you're coming from. I'm not particularly pleased or impressed with my country either. But I know I don't want the isolationists in charge, getting their way, getting away with whatever they want. I want an America beholden to it's obligations abroad. I want us to do our best to be ethical leaders, not forfeit the ability to become so.
I don't know the solutions. Just wanted to make sure isolationists are aware that influence diminishes under such policies, and does not easily recover, if ever.