The Status Quo Coalition

"Status Quo Coalition" (of rich and free countries)

I think Mr. Devereaux is mostly right from a german point of view.

(West) Germany became rich and free because of the USA.

But there were and are considerable differences of interest, for example with regard to Russia policy.

The U.S. was not happy about Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. (1)

Many Germans were not happy about nuclear armament in Europe (limited nuclear war in Europe) (2).

The Nord Stream pipelines are a story of their own.

Mr. Devereaux is right, however, about the current German stance in the Ukraine war.

(1) https://www.jstor.org/stable/23032805 (The Nixon Administration and Willy Brandt's "Ostpolitik")

(2) https://www.britannica.com/topic/limited-nuclear-options

Interesting stuff, and I hope that it's true. Would be really great if humanity can outgrow war.

Not mentioned in the article, but very similar to the "McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention"

>And remember for the United States, like every status quo country, our interest is not having a war in the first place.

I agree with Mr. Devereaux but many influential people do not agree:

"List of wars and rebellions involving the United States of America"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

TL; DR Classic international relations “theory was based on agrarian states or early industrial states. And one of the features of agrarian interstate relations was that returns to war outpaced returns to capital, which is a fancy way of saying you could get richer, faster by conquest than by development. Under those sorts of conditions, most powers were going to be, in some form, ‘revisionist’ powers because most powers would have something to gain by attacking a weaker neighbor and seizing their resources (mostly arable land and peasant farmers to be taxed)…

But, as we’ve discussed, industrialization changes all of this: the net returns to war are decreased (because industrial war is so destructive and lethal) while the returns to capital investment get much higher due to rising productivity. In the pre-industrial past, fighting a war to get productive land was many times more effective than investing in irrigation and capital improvements to your own land, assuming you won the war. But in the industrial world, fighting a war to get a factory is many, many less times more effective than just building a new factory at home, especially since the war is very likely to destroy the factory in the first place. This was not always the case! The great wealth of many countries and indeed industrialization itself was built on resources acquired through imperial expansion; now the cost of that acquisition is higher than simply buying the stuff. War is no longer a means to profit, but an emergency response to avoid otherwise certain extreme losses.

So whereas in the old system, almost every power except potentially the hegemon, had something to potentially gain by upending the stability of the system, the economics of modern production means that quite a lot of countries will have absolutely nothing to gain from a war, even a successful one. Now that dispassionate calculation has arguably been true for more than a century; the First World War was an massive exercise in proving that nothing that could be gained from a major power war would be worth the misery, slaughter and destruction of a major power war. Subsequent conflicts have reinforced this lesson again and again, yet conflicts continue to occur. Azar Gat argues in part that this is because humans are both evolved in our biology (and thus patterns of thinking and emotion) as well as our social institutions, for warfare and aggression. We have to unlearn those instincts and redesign those institutions and this process is slow and uneven.”

Analysis seems to miss out considering most of Middle East and Africa.

really missed on not using "The Status Quoalition"

> the coalition isn’t bound together by American power but by common interests

We can test this theory by looking at instances where coalition members' sovereign interests conflict with Washington's interests. Who ultimately gets their way?

There was an analogous study done IIRC in the late 90s where policy interests of poor vs. rich Americans were compared. In virtually every case, the rich/powerful people got their way, despite the poor constituents having vastly more democratic power on paper. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone living in America.

I believe it's the same story for this Western nominal "coalition". The cases where Washington compromises on its interests are rare and not conceded without a fight. Did Germany really consent to its pipelines getting blown up by another coalition member? Is it really in European interests to suffer massive economic blowback from sanctions? And then Washington's interest gets rebranded "common interest" without much investigation.

The bottom line is that elite-aligned liberals (in the classical sense) like the author are blind to the machinations of power. They presume a priori that the status quo is natural, structural and broadly consented to, rather than imposed through the vast and tireless efforts of an enormous, mostly-unelected power complex (media, financial, military, intelligence) based in Washington DC.

...and that power complex is gradually collapsing, partly because of these ideological blinders which hamstring action.

When I think about this kind of thing I always think about how for the first couple generations, the overwhelming majority of people who lived in the Roman Empire weren’t even aware there was an empire. They still believed that they lived in a republic.

Europe is de facto a military protectorate of the USA. They are imperial clients in all but name. And they know it. We see this overt control (not influence!) from time to time, for example how for some reason US policy makers control ASML’s exports.