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Rightly or wrongly I think a sizeable portion of the world is tired of the flavour of stability the U.S. provides.

I agree. However, I also think that a lot of the world, especially Europe, has a strange and unrealistic vision of what a multi-polar world would look like. A multi-polar world looks like 18th and 19th century Europe writ large, with nation states jockeying for power, and war being considered as a logical extension of economic and political policy. It isn't nations coming together and negotiating peacefully at the EU or UN or wherever.

It feels a bit like the U.S. thinks the rest of the world isn't capable of looking after itself.

Arguably because the rest of the world isn't. If you look at the "free world", who actually spends even 1% of their GDP on defense? Heck, half of Germany's air force can't even fly because they've pared their maintenance budgets back too far to buy spare parts for their planes. When France and Italy bombed Libya, they had to rely on the US to provide necessary logistical support, like tankers and reconnaissance, and even the smartbombs themselves. Taiwan explicitly relies on US carriers to guarantee its territorial sovereignty against Chinese aggression. Japan likewise.

A world in which the US is in full retreat is not a more liberal, peaceful world. It's a world in which even more autocratic powers, like China and Russia advance.

EDIT: By the way, I totally agree that the US is overstretched. But unilateral retreat, leaving our allies in the lurch to face hostile powers on their own is not the correct way of addressing that problem.

>who actually spends even 1% of their GDP on defense?

Here are the numbers. All but five of the countries do.

You're point still stands, though.

http://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2016_0...

It means they are not your allies anymore. They'll have to make deals with somebody else instead. How could this benefit the USA puzzles me.

China was the number one country in the world at the beginning of 1600, per population and economy, as usual. They also had an oceanic fleet travelling to India and possibly to Africa. Then they decided to concentrate on internal matters because they were the only ones important to preserve the government. They even burned the fleet.

That move played out very bad for them in a couple of centuries. The world is much faster now. My bet is that turning inwards, if it really happens, will play bad for the USA in two decades or less. They are laughing in Moscow and Beijing now. Any immediate commercial trouble will be repaid with interests by a more prominent international status. Even wars will pay off in the long run, especially if not fought at home. Check WW1 and WW2 for the USA, or any regional conflict after then.

If you look just at the shield of deterrence that the U.S. has held over western Europe, it has allowed the growth of both social democracy and of the common market there. European nations all spend a much lower percentage of their budgets on defense than the U.S. does. While their citizens take that as a sign of cultural superiority, their leaders know that it is made possible by NATO and the outsized role that the U.S. has played in it for decades. Every one of those nations is looking at Russia right now and wondering "what happens next."

Same thing on the other side of the planet: both Japan and South Korea have very little military might; they depend on the deterrence the U.S. provides. They are looking at China and wondering what happens next.

If the U.S. reduces or removes these relationships, it will dramatically change these nations. Japan and China hate each other. If the U.S. draws back, Japan will complete its transition away from pacifism and will have nuclear weapons of its own in less than a decade. Same with South Korea.

Even if you think that the U.S. is not a leading light of democracy, these are real relationships and altering them has real consequences: more weapons and more tension among more nations in the world.

Completely inaccurate in terms of South Korean military power. S. Korea has a large, well trained and well equipped military with almost 7000 armored vehicles, thousands of artillery systems, a robust air force, and a navy perfectly suited for their requirements. It's even arguable that they could adequately defend themselves against North Korea without US help, as long as China doesn't intervene.

Yeah, S Korea is the Israel of SEA.

I believe the point made above was in regards to China. SK's ~1500ish MBT's and ~200ish Gen4 aircraft isn't so "well equipped" or "robust" when put up against the PLA and PLAAF.

China roughly outmatches SK by 4:1 across the board, but China has to worry about more than just SK. They have to be concerned about India, Vietnam, Russia, Japan, SK, and of course the US. China has been on an incredible spending spree and upgraded a lot of their equipment, but there not as well trained as other modern militaries. This is changing, but not something that can be done overnight.

If the U.S. withdraws into itself, that will dramatically accelerate all of this. China knows it can't beat the U.S. in a shooting war, but it also knows the U.S.'s #1 interest in the region is "no shooting wars." The U.S. wants peaceful stability. China knows that we don't have territorial ambitions in Asia. Lots of other countries do though.

North Korea could destroy Seoul without even crossing the border. And they are better prepared for defense.

And who will stop China from intervening if US is out of the picture?

NK is starving, equipped with ancient hardware, and without adequate fuel for training. The one thing they have is artillery, which can do an incredible amount of damage to SK.

So you think the current token US force in SK can stop China if it decides to intervene? That force just acts as a nuclear tripwire; it doesn't need to be larger to act in that fashion.

Just to be clear, I don't disagree with anything you've said here, and as such I prefaced my comment with "Rightly or wrongly".

And it seems likely to me that as Trump continues to receive intelligence briefings, economic and military advice, we will see a whole lot not change. That's my prediction. Probably.

There are two kinds of stability:

1) A big strong guy, stronger than anyone else, fucks with anyone who tries to change anything

2) lots of strong people stop anyone who gets too destructive

I don't think 1 is remotely sustainable. 2 might be doable.

> In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.[1]

> How can you take yourselves seriously?

Totally agreed.

If the US had low crime rates, great quality of life, and was seen as universally fair and just - well then 1 might work. But when it's so unjust, unfair, and unbalanced at home, while we spend billions abroad... it stops making sense.

> 2) lots of strong people stop anyone who gets too destructive

That's a very idealistic view. You can't have lots of more or less equally strong parties -- only a very few. From those few all secretly want to switch to 1).

> From those few all secretly want to switch to 1).

Unless each of those has learned that 1) always ends poorly and has decided they're better off with strong allies comitted to the ideals of justice.

Yeah, we quibble over the details. But there is a direction we all want to go - safety and personal freedom are universal ideals.

Even dictatorships fake elections.

We want safety, personal freedom and justice enforced by some agreement because we're weak and we need the agreement to protect us. Powerful ones are looking for more power because it's the power that protects them. The idea of safety is universal. The means to achieve it are not.

So either everyone gets along and agrees the western worldview is the best one, and the strong protect the weak as opposed to getting bought of or silenced, or the whole thing collapses ?

I believe the economic analysis would be: it's not a Nash equilibrium, and therefore it cannot exist for any length of time, because the cost of it rises exponentially over time.

So can I just say: Good luck with that, and I, personally, would like to opt out if possible.

Scenario 2 describes Europe shortly before World War I.

In some ways the world is quite different now, with nuclear deterrent...but it's still worth considering history.

> It feels a bit like the U.S. thinks the rest of the world isn't capable of looking after itself. And perhaps it isn't, and some boarders will be redrawn, but I get the feeling a lot of people are ready to give it a shot.

Well, this was the sentiment of most Americans after World War 1. It took the attack on Perl Harbor for Roosevelt to have enough support from congress to join WWII.

I think that after WWII the US government made part of its foreign policy to use economic integration and military might to prevent any country from ever dragging them into WWIII.

I am personally not worried about China, Russia, the middle east or even North Korea. But I would be seriously worried to see Japan rebuild their military because we pulled our bases out of there.

> Especially considering the U.S. as de facto self-appointed global police, is doing a terrible job of looking after it's own citizens with regard to education, healthcare, the war on drugs, shooting black men, mass shootings, etc etc etc.

Those things aren't really related, except as far as american attitudes go.

For example, a massive amount of money is spent on health care.

In what way aren't those things related? Can you give this a more thorough treatment to expand why you think this.

A massive amount of money in the U.S. is spent on administering healthcare.

Not much actually goes towards actual health care.

Healthcare could be relatively inexpensive to provide, if we chose to eliminate the profit motive.

It's absurd to me that anyone should profit from my being unwell. That's the sort of thing mosquitoes, leeches, ticks, pathogenic viruses and bacteria, thrive on.

I don't have a fully-formed whole-system replacement for for-profit-healthcare, but it definitely seems like something we ought to work on.

How does it make sense that people's unwellness should be paying for my neighbours Toyota Prado (that's never been taken off the road).

Being the global police and having good healthcare are orthogonal to each other. One doesn't really effect the other all that much. I don't really get why are saying they do?

I do think US attitudes lead to both things (world police/broken health care system).

It shouldn't take much of an effort as a thought experiment to glimpse how having a global authority calling the shots and not keeping it's own affairs in order comes across as hypocritical and undermines that authority.

Rather, I think what you've done here is mimic the common HN pattern of saying "X is orthogonal to Y, so I don't get what you're saying", which, as I've try to point out above, lacks imagination.

I even went to some length to try to explain why I feel like that.

How can you take yourselves seriously?

A large daily dose of craven "speaks comfortable untruths for power" mainstream media, who have been owned by the military-industrial complex for decades. The morons at CIA didn't see it coming, that Americans would question the lies of network news, or else they would have attempted to strangle this internet thing in its cradle. They've adapted somewhat, e.g. the "good work" done at Facebook this cycle or the constant fear-mongering about Russia, China, North Korea, ISIS, etc. They just couldn't get their bloodthirsty old gal over the line, though.

The conspiracy theorist in me would like to be a fly on the wall in Pence's personal security briefings. If they hear what they like from him, he'll be our President in short order. Wasn't he a big incarceration fan?