Hacker News Reader

Comment by __d | Hacker News Reader

Tariff European products. Cut off access to payment networks. Stop sharing satellite imagery.

There’s a lot of things the rest of the world has no or bad backups for.

The only thing that would achieve is that the rest of the world would decouple even faster from the USA. Incidentally, there are also a lot of things that the USA does not have backups for and this whole isolationism mindset always ends up with the rude awakening that no single party is larger than the rest of the world.

Yes.

The US is choosing to leverage its position without much concern for those consequences right now. The rest of the world is busy routing around that, and the leverage is slowly reducing.

It will take time: the US was a key member of the world economy. But there’s frequent new reminders of why it’s necessary.

Yup. I cannot stress how much the conversation has changed from a decade ago: the mere prospect of a European army was feared enough to be one of the reasons why we left the EU, but now it's something being seriously considered thanks to Russia's deranged land grab and the US's worsening instability. There's even been some panic over how reliant we are on the US for our nuclear deterrent and what that could mean should relations break down. This became a particular concern when the US started openly threatening to annex Greenland.

The prospect of the US going rogue has forced us to wake up and realise that every dependence we have on the US is potential leverage. For example, the US has levied sanctions against ICC judges, meaning that they can no longer use their VISA/MASTERCARD cards. This means that the French Judge Guillou for example cannot go to a shop in France, pay for French goods in Euros with a card from his French bank, because a US company is intervening to prevent it. As such they can only pay for things in cash... and Europe is becoming increasingly cashless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com