Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

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America's dominance in science and technology (and art, and other fields) was due to an atmosphere where the smartest and best people from around the world wanted to come here. We have actively worked to drive them away and broken the processes in ways that can't be fixed with the stroke of a pen.

Our economic influence was based around being a stabilizing force and soft power - both of which we have destroyed. The world was willing to forgive us for 2016-2020, but now they know we are not to be trusted - that we will abandon and publicly abuse our allies no matter how close, that our policy changes based on whichever dictator last talked to Trump, and they know that the other two wings of our government are spineless and powerless sycophants who will never put a stop to any of it. They are forming trade relationships and infrastructure without us, and we will never get back our preferred status.

We have given up generational advantages and are not set up to be a dominant power in anything. We are an empire in accelerating decline.

As we literally just invented cheap space travel and AI?

Massive energy stores, massive military, massive datacenters.

I would not want to bet against that

Outdated energy sources, no manufacturing base, and expensive AI that's barely ahead of cheap open source Chinese models.

A massive military that's burning billions and depleting its reserves proving that it can't even protect ships from Iran.

So. Much. Winning.

Outdated... Let me know when planes fly on solar, shipping containers on wind and your chair isn't made of plastic.

Drones have made terrorism hard to stop in iran. But it's not over let's see where it goes. The positives are that Iran has effectivelt made lifelong allies of our arab neighbors. They used to lean toward china but now china is supplying weapons to the country bombing their people. Additionally israel and arabs may actually normalize diplomacy between each other as a result which would also be a massive win.

If US can collapse Iran we're looking at it being the strongest it has ever been and likely the strongest power to have ever existed. If not then it's roughly british empire at its peakish as of now.

You mix that with Russia getting it's asses kicked and every single country around china massively aligning with US and that's a recipe for success.

EU honestly is the downside here they are upset but also the sad truth is europe is no longer a world power. A regional one at best.

You could argue that america will BEGIN to decline as the recent policies take effect but as of now really the only negative is we don't do enough social spending and our supply chains aren't secure enough. Let's see how EU does over time if they are forced to build their own military again and population collapse hits their tax base that social spending is gonna get argentina like real fast.

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