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Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

I agree. It's not just that though, part of what gives the powerful country it's power is the belief from other countries that they won't back down when an aggressor comes knocking. The US can't really not get involved because even not getting involved is a sign of weakness/defeat. Dalio mentions this a bit in the video in the original comment.

The question it comes down to is how many fronts can they effectively fight on? If the US is fighting in the Ukraine trenches, the Taiwan strait and the Korean border, how much do they have left over for the other places? Even stuff we take for granted such as shipping goods around the world easily because of the general lack of piracy goes out of the window because you need the warships that were policing the shipping routes for the war effort.

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The USA is resourced and practices to fight around two wars at the same time. With Russia being almost spent just fighting the Ukrainians and North Korea being basically bankrupt (while both South Korea and Japan are not slouches militarily), the USA will be fine.

But how much debt would it be in at the end of it all and is it still going to be able to maintain it's status as the dominant power? If all this happened, my money would be on India leapfrogging to first place because it would be able to stay out of the main conflicts whilst simultaneously being able to leverage it's massive population and engineering skills to become the biggest manufacturing force.

As soon as India see China is loosing they will likely use that to settle all the open territorial disputes quickly.

The US winning just cements the dollar dominance in the world.

> As soon as India see China is loosing they will likely use that to settle all the open territorial disputes quickly.

This has fairly similar parallels to what happened in WW2 though. US entered the war mid way through after Pearl Harbour and helped win the war, theoretically India could do the same.

> The US winning just cements the dollar dominance in the world.

Again, in WW2 the UK was the dominant currency, was on the winning team, but lost dominant currency status because the debts amassed were too large that it no longer had enough money to maintain the infrastructure necessary and service the debt so other countries sold off their holdings of GBP debt in favour of the safer haven of the US.

The UK was in pretty bad shape after WW2, and accelerated dismantling its empire (so it was mostly gone by 1949). The US never had an empire to begin with, and was relatively untouched by WW2. They lent a lot of money to help Europe and Japan rebuild, the rest is history.

The US doesn't have a traditional empire but it does spend a lot of money on international military bases as well as protecting strategic infrastructure and resources across the globe.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that kind of global influence and service stratospherically high debts simultaneously. In that scenario, spending money to resolve internal problems always ends up taking precedent over global influence and other countries with rising bank balances step in to fill the void.

> But how much debt would it be in at the end of it all and is it still going to be able to maintain it's status as the dominant power?

Whatever it takes? As long as American interests are threatened. I don't mean jumping into every single quagmire of questionable value to the USA (Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam), but if Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine were threatened with being taken over by..actually anyone at all...I don't see how the USA couldn't get involved, and why it wouldn't be in their interests not to.

The alternative is a rapid decline in world stability, which would cost way more than whatever America spent fighting instead.

> If all this happened, my money would be on India leapfrogging to first place because it would be able to stay out of the main conflicts whilst simultaneously being able to leverage it's massive population and engineering skills to become the biggest manufacturing force.

If India were able to function and produce at America's level, they would already be leapfrogging everyone, but they are still pretty dysfunctional in terms of governance and allocating capital and labor productively. The only part of India doing well is a small private sector in technology that benefits from the government not caring about it enough to meddle.

China, on the other hand, has a much better chance of capitalizing on American instability one way or the other IF they are somehow not involved in the conflict.

> Whatever it takes?

Yes but this is what the UK did in WW2 and ended up with so much debt that it could no longer service them and other countries lost faith in buying the debt and so they invested in the US instead.

> If India were able to function and produce at America's level, they would already be leapfrogging everyone, but they are still pretty dysfunctional in terms of governance and allocating capital and labor productively. The only part of India doing well is a small private sector in technology that benefits from the government not caring about it enough to meddle.

They're growing rapidly and they're one of only four countries to put a vehicle on the Moon. If the world was at war there would be a lot of money to be made and they're one of the only countries that would be well positioned to take advantage of it.

> China, on the other hand, has a much better chance of capitalizing on American instability one way or the other IF they are somehow not involved in the conflict.

Well yeah, but we're specifically discussing a theoretical conflict in which they're one of the main players in the conflict.

> They're growing rapidly and they're one of only four countries to put a vehicle on the Moon. If the world was at war there would be a lot of money to be made and they're one of the only countries that would be well positioned to take advantage of it.

India is probably about where China was I would say 25 years ago (having visited China in 1999 and comparing it against what I saw in India in 2013 or so). There is a lot of documentation about visiting the moon, and while an accomplishment, and probably something that should be done along the way to development (especially if you want to launch like ICBMs, which was the main product of America's moon program), its a bonus. But it isn't as great as figuring out how to do it from zero. Keep in mind that even China lags on jet turbine and semiconductor production (they can get either good perf or good costs, but not both at the same time), that just means India has another 30-40 years before it catches up with the US (assuming the US stagnates, which is probably a good bet).

> The USA is resourced and practices to fight around two wars at the same time.

No, its not, and arguably it never was. The two major regional contingency concept was adopted shortly after the first Gulf War and was an organizing principal in theory for a couple decades, did not actually provide the capacity to succeed in two major regional contingencies simultaneously [0] the only time tested, and has been effectively abandoned.

[0] there's no particular resourcing need for any number of contingencies of a particular scale if you don’t demand capacity to win.

The DoD plans for fighting 2 major conflicts at the same time and always has.

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