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Comment by geraneum | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that a “US Bad” view which paints everything America as evil is misguided. But also the other extreme which portraits US as a savior and protector is also not true.

From the book:

> American disinterest in the world means that American security guarantees are unlikely to be honored. Competitions held in check for the better part of a century will return. Wars of opportunism will come back into fashion.

It sounds like a narrative where a powerful monopolistic entity backed by military power bullies everyone else and claims to provide “protection” for them.

When was the last time consolidated power in one place ended up to be good for people?

I believe a world with US as a powerful country along with other equally powerful nations (an equilibrium) is a much better place for everyone to live in (also for people of US). Maybe it’s naive, at least for now, but one can only dream.

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Didn't we have that equilibrium (sorta) with USSR? I don't think it was a good kind of equilibrium - mutually assured destruction and all.

Nope. Pick any point in history and there was a huge imbalance between the sides. Often such "gaps" were unrecognized at the time, but each side would later learn that their perception of the other was incorrect. The "missile gap" and "bomber gap" were illusory. The public picture, the one on which budgets were based, was disconnected from the intelligence picture which was in turn often disconnected from the on-the-ground reality. Those involved at each stage of abstraction turned the information to suit their own needs. People who sold airplanes in the US counted extra bombers in the USSR. The people who drafted budgets counted more troops in the opposing army. In the end they all got what they wanted: massive spending on material.

An interesting example is the number of ICBMs programs on both sides. The engineering culture within the USSR meant that it had many different missile designs, some only ever resulting in a handful of missiles. Missiles would have short service lives and then be replaced by a new model. The Americans were different. They stuck to a smaller number of designs but mass produced and maintained them for decades. Both sides perceived that the other "had more missiles" because they were effectively counting them differently. The USSR saw American missile factories churning out missiles. The US saw a flood of new designs on parade and assumed they were being mass produced. Such cultural splits continue to inflate budgets today.

I also agree an equilibrium would be the ideal state.

But I just don’t think humans do equilibrium well. We seem to have a constant need to seek control or to be controlled.

I would say the US is a hegemony like any other...with the benefit of structural hedges of the Madisonian system to avoid the most egregious abuses of power. Not perfect but better than tyrants of the past...

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