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Comment by siavosh | Hacker News Reader

Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical author, has had a long running thesis that after the end of the cold war, the US no longer has a motivation to maintain the post WWII order of multilateralism and ensuring the safety of global free trade with its navy. The current administration has only accelerated that timeline. The end result, he claims, will be nations acting more like nations have always acted which unfortunately means more conflict. The US will simply watch from afar and swoop in when its interests are directly threatened. So in his opinion, it very much is NOT the US falling, but simply withdrawing because the economic order it used to bribe most of the world to be allied against the USSR no longer makes sense.

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An alliance without a definite enemy is a sad state of affairs.

Russia was an existential threat to the United States in a way that the PRC simply isn’t. They’re more of a threat to their immediate neighbors than anything, and near as I can tell they just want US to back off and let them be, let them have Taiwan, do what they want with Hong Kong and Macau, and let them assert a local hegemony. I don’t want to see Korea, Japan, Vietnam, or others to fall under a PRC hegemony, and Americans don’t necessarily want that either, but it’s a tough ask of my countrymen to continue to allocate resources to maintaining the world order in a sort of stasis when that proposition is increasingly expensive, bad for business and we we have strong isolationist tendencies. The post-WWII order was the exception, not the norm for American sentiments.

Charles Krauthammer wrote in the wake of the collapse of the Cold War when we weren’t sure what the hell we were going to do as a country that it was actually pretty obvious: we would move from a bipolar world to a global order of American dominance, and if we were lucky, it would last about 30 years or so. Krauthammer[1] hasn’t lived to see how that turned out, but we’re creeping up on the end of that third decade.

[1] Krauthammer 1) has about the coolest name for a Jewish man to have and 2) was a guest on Bill Kristol’s podcast “Conversations with Bill Kristol” where he gave an excellent interview in 2015. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

The years since WW2 are a third of all of America's history. Considering America still maintains military bases across the world, surely one cannot call it an exception when it's for that period of time. Either there is a coherent American sentiment over centuries and the one expressed over these last 75 years isn't exceptional or there is no coherent sentiment.

America’s history goes back to before the founding of the country and is filled with people fleeing the dysfunction of European politics around the time of the Enlightenment, literally seeking to at least insulate themselves with the Atlantic Ocean. How well they succeeded is a different question, but the will to do so has always been a strong force in domestic politics and is expressing itself again through the present Presidential Administration.

You conveniently forget the immense benefits the American Empire has obtained from maintaining allies in Asia. Japan, Korea and then the other Asian tigers have been incredibly beneficial to American businesses and American consumers. Cheap manufacturing allowed Americans to keep a somewhat decent standard of life in the face of stagnating wages, and has allowed the US to focus on high end manufacturing, services and the like, all of which provide much better jobs than can be provided by the manufacturing sector.

I want to point out the fundamental flaw in your analysis: Asian allies have been an incredible investment for American taxpayers, and not supporting them would not only mean the loss of those benefits, but also goodwill, prestige and respect.

I never said there weren’t any benefits in it for us, let me be clear: I am a proponent for American hegemony. I want to see the American Empire continue.

I’m pessimistic however that even in the face of what are to me some incredibly obvious benefits that have been borne out and proven in the last several decades, that the sentiment I share with a decreasing amount of people outside of Washington and our predecessors that we will probably not even continue to try to assert American global hegemony. After World War II, we were and possibly still are despite our President, the greatest proponents of free trade, but when I look at both the left and the right of the political spectrum today, I see that same historic isolationist tendency creeping up on both sides of the political spectrum from where I stand.

Trump might be the first of several Presidents we see with such strong isolationist tendencies, but I sure hope not.

When you say isolationist, do you mean in terms of projecting force through military means, or by promoting and upholding trade liberalization?

Military. Americans generally had a distaste for foreign wars until about the 20th Century. Arguably still do.

Arguably there has also been a rather bloodthirsty contingent among us that once we ran out of Indians to kill, started wanting to get involved in foreign wars. We got our first real taste of being a Maritime Empire after the Spanish-American War, but that same contingent brought us into two World Wars and just kept on going until we had invaded Asia no less than 6 times, and I’m probably missing a few.

We’ve always favored free trade, but that was as much a consequence of being cut out of the British mercantile system post Independence as it was just a nice idea. Generally when opportunities came up to assert more sway on the global stage, by which of course what I really mean is get involved in European affairs, we balked all the way till 1917, and mostly kept trying to balk even after until 1942.

The isolationist segment of society has been out of power for a long time now, but it has never truly gone away, and arguably they are gaining power. Clinton was a Hawk, Biden might be Hawkish relative to his contemporaries, but Trump is definitely an isolationist and there’s a decent chance the Democratic Party is going to nominate one as well.

> and let them assert a local hegemony

Why would they stop at local hegemony? The Chinese don't dream small scale. Without opposition; anyone would be happy seizing global hegemony. I'm not saying anyone should do anything in particular about it but the only reason China only talks about local hegemony is because anything else would get the US involved.

If the PRC maneuvers into a position where they are bigger and stronger than the United States they could become an existential threat in a way that the Soviets never really were, and they'll probably look for global hegemony if it is a possible option.

Chinese society is less likely to expand and conquer nearby ground in the way that the mainstream culture of those territory isn't Chinese dominantly. There's also a strong isolationism deeply rooted in Chinese culture that "it's the central kingdom with the best land and smartest people and why bother go after those barbaric clans and poor lands." kinda thinking.

Han Chinese immigration means that the native populations of Tibet and Xinjiang are becoming minorities in their own lands. So I don't think you are correct.

China already invaded Tibet, after all.

They might not stop there, my statement was more a comment on the prevailing attitude in the PRC today, or at least its leadership. I’m not convinced they have any kind of grand plan to secretly assert a global Chinese hegemony just as soon as these pesky Americans get out of the way, to be honest I’m not sure that even with the means, they would have the political fortitude to do anything other than clamp down on criticism of themselves.

What we are learning from the last 30 years is that no one, really, has the ability and/or the will yet to assert any kind of global hegemony and sustain it for much longer than a decade or two. Certainly not the Chinese yet, but maybe in another couple of decades?

If America withdraws substantially, at least in spirit if not in forces deployed anytime in the near future, then we enter a multipolar world again, filled with Great Powers rather than one or two dominant powers. It is possible we are already undergoing this shift and haven’t fully realized it yet. What happens after is anyone’s guess, but I don’t think anyone should want to live in a world where there are multiple competing powers for dominance and where nukes also exist. Seeing the Chinese step into a space that America vacates would almost be a relief in a way if it were to happen, even if I would prefer to see the US continue to fill that space.

How does China’s heavy investment in Africa and Eastern Europe fit into the thesis that they only want to be local hegemons? I believe they’ve even setup naval bases in some of these nations.

And the New Silk Road project is aiming to connect this interests, while pulling those west Asian countries into their political sphere.

Jobs program.

It’s either that or keep building cities for no one.

Let me clarify one thing though, I don’t believe they want to assert a global hegemony, but under US pressure they might feel they have no choice but to try to counterbalance us. That would theoretically lead us back to a bipolar world where the PRC takes the place of the USSR.

Here’s the problem with that theory though. No one is taking Russia’s place, and Russia has more nukes and more domestic issues which is saying something. The PRC nuclear arsenal isn’t comparable to the USA’s nuclear arsenal, and the Japanese while not a declared nuclear power, have the capability to be a nuclear power in very short order. So no one is taking the USA’s place either, least of all China under any government when they’re flanked by: Russia, Japan, India, Pakistan, and for an extra dose of fun, an Afghanistan which will soon be back under the Taliban, officially.

At the end of the Cold War, the difference between the #1 and #2 economy was so great that it wasn’t even close. Right now our closest competitors have even more problems than we do, and we went ahead and exhausted a lot of strength and political will to act on the foreign stage fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now the President of the United States is making peace with the bloody Taliban! After 17 years of trying to replace them with a different government.

It doesn’t make sense for the PRC to build the New Silk Road of their primary policy objectives had anything to do with foreign policy. Any benefits at all to their foreign policy is the gravy to their meat and potatoes of what is the largest domestic jobs program in the world and the infrastructure to strip mine Africa and Central Asia of their natural resources.

Hegemony is what you get when you are the dominant power at the table by a country mile, several country miles really. What they’re doing with the Silk Road is some new form of colonialism we haven’t exactly seen before, but it still reeks of colonialism. It puts them in a nicer position than they might otherwise be, but those contracts with Kenya or Sri Lanka are only as good as the PRC’s ability to enforce them. Given they don’t have the airlift power or a Navy remotely close to the US, that’s a pretty remote possibility. They might as well invade Afghanistan for all the good that has even done anybody, but at least it’s a next door neighbor and not past Taiwan, Singapore and across the Indian Ocean.

No wonder they want US out of “their” neighborhood. In the mean time, it is a very nice jobs program, and it keeps the peoples happy, happy enough to not revolt, even provides a decent source of pride so they can say “we’re out their physically connecting the world while ya’ll are out there talking a good game on free trade and you know, enforcing clear shipping routes and whatnot.”

Maybe the market really is decent at figuring out where and what kinds of railroads should be built, because a railroad to nowhere still goes nowhere.

>They’re more of a threat to their immediate neighbors than anything, and near as I can tell they just want US to back off and let them be, let them have Taiwan, do what they want with Hong Kong and Macau, and let them assert a local hegemony.

the same strategic interests guide regional and global hegemony, the only difference is in the capability and resources to exert power.

>So in his opinion, it very much is NOT the US falling, but simply withdrawing because the economic order it used to bribe most of the world to be allied against the USSR no longer makes sense.

Correct.

Among its many "Trump is such a threat to America that I think America ought to be destroyed as a country to save it" flaws, I love how Fallows's article glosses over most NATO countries not meeting the 2% target commitment, as if that isn't the fundamental basis of Trump's complaint about the alliance. As you say, the United States basically bribed most of its allies during the Cold War to fight the Soviets, and among those bribes was the willingness to spend to make up what they couldn't/wouldn't spend on defense. Russia today is an economic pygmy that faces within a decade demographic collapse (another theme of Zeihan's). Its conventional forces only pose a threat to Western Europe because, again, most NATO countries—notably Germany—aren't anywhere close to the 2% target and won't be by the 2024 deadline. (And yes, the four states most exposed to Russia—the Baltics and Poland—do meet the standard.)

Over time I've come to wonder more and more if Jeane Kirkpatrick's initial reaction to the end of the Cold War—to get the heck out of NATO and return to traditional American isolationism—wasn't the way to go. The great challenge to America going forward looks to be China, and that's an area 1) explicitly omitted from NATO's purview and 2) the US has worked bilaterally, not multilaterally.

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