Who here is unhappy about the currents trends of powers working to end U.S dominance?

[Bankotsu]

Several states are working together, joining forces to create a multipolar world and to reduce the power and influence of the U.S and to end its hegemonic role in world affairs.

Who here is unhappy about the currents trends of powers working to end U.S dominance?



Sarkozy wants end to dollar dominance

http://www.rte.ie/business/2010/0107/dollar.html


U.S. dollar under attack by Arabs, Russians, Chinese and French with oil scheme

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/international/us-dollar-under-attack-by-arabs-russians-chinese-and-french-with-oil-scheme


Brazil, Russia, India and China form bloc to challenge US dominance

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6514737.ece


Chavez and Gaddafi call for 'balanced world'

http://www.france24.com/en/20090927-chavez-gaddafi-call-balanced-world-libya-venezuela-asa-summit


NORTH-SOUTH: China, India, Brazil, South Africa Tilt Global Power Balance

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39247

[Bankotsu]

George Kerevan: US dominance likely to endure despite China's startling growth

http://business.scotsman.com/business/George-Kerevan-US-dominance-likely.5958113.jp

[AK]

Great, because that's what we need in capitalism. MORE competition.

[RGacky3]

better than dominence.

Capitalism =/= Competition.

[Bud Struggle]

Capitalism =/= Competition.

As a practing Capitalist I have to tell you Brother Gacky I COMPETE. Sometimes I think it's all I do, my business is just a sideline to continual competition.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I am unhappy that imperialist powers compete with each-other to dominate the world and destroy our lives in the process, use us to kill for their empires, use us as fodder and so on.

Yes other countries want to end the US's dominance just as in the past countries including the US worked to erode the dominance of England. But the flip side of the coin is that the US or Uk or Soviet Union work to maintain their dominance and destroy and kill and cheat to do this. This is what the wars in the middle east and central Asia are all about for the US.

So the problem isn't that the US is just sitting around minding its business and these bad "other" powers are trying to take over... it's a struggle between all powers, each claiming to be the most civilized, holding the moral high ground, and the rightful leaders of the world.

[Bankotsu]

USA and USSR: Accidental parallels?


Just as the US sent the USSR into oblivion, Al-Qaeda has accelerated the economic decline of the US to the benefit of its nearest global rival, China, writes M Shahid Alam* (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/987/special.htm#1)

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/987/_iraqwar.jpg (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/987/_sc1.htm)

'US wars in the Islamicate impose other painful costs, perhaps more debilitating than budgetary expenses' During the Cold War, the US and USSR were archrivals, each the antipodes of the other. For some four decades they battled each other for survival and global hegemony, staring down at each other with nuclear tipped missiles, ready at the push of a button to embrace mutually assured destruction. What parallels could there possibly exist between such irreconcilable antagonists?

Dismissively, the sceptic might retort that their similarities start and end with the first two letters in their acronyms. The USA won and the USSR lost the Cold War. The USSR is dead and gone. Its successor, Russia, now ranks a distant second behind the US in military power, a position it retains only by virtue of its nuclear arsenal. Measured in dollars, the Russian economy ranked eighth in the world in 2009, trailing behind its former client, India.

On the other hand, the US still believes it can ride roughshod over much of the world like a Colossus. It came close to doing this for a few years after the collapse of communism. In the years since its occupation of Iraq, that image has been deflated quite a bit. Haven't the events of the last decade -- the growing challenge to its hegemony in Latin America, the economic rise of India and China, and the recovery of Russia from its collapse of the previous decade -- downsized the Colossus of the 1990s? Indeed, the near collapse of its economy in 2008 appears to have brought that Colossus to its knees.

SHARED GRAVEYARD? Coming back to the question of parallels, we can begin by pointing out that the US is in exactly the same place -- literally -- as the USSR once was: Afghanistan. The USSR was in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989: the US has been there since November 2001. Isn't this the oddest of coincidences? And a bit ominous too, since only a year after it withdrew its 100,000 troops from Afghanistan, the USSR collapsed.

Of course, no one expects the US to collapse, whether it leaves Afghanistan or stays on. Unlike the Soviets, who left Afghanistan after 10 years of a bruising occupation, the US is not in a mood to leave anytime soon. If necessary, claim some American politicians and generals, their troops could stay there for decades.
What is it that has drawn great powers -- three over the past two centuries -- into Afghanistan, but makes it so hard for them to leave in dignity?

Britain, the USSR and US have gone to Afghanistan for different reasons. Britain went into Afghanistan repeatedly to create a buffer state, to distance its Indian colony from Russia. Soviet troops entered to shore up a fraternal communist regime, but if things had gone well they would have walked through Afghanistan into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It is hard to say exactly why the US landed its troops in Afghanistan. Was it to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden? Or was Bin Laden only an excuse for stationing its troops in Iran's backyard, close to the Caspian Sea oil fields, just south of Russia and China, and looking to Pakistan with an eye to rolling back its nuclear programme?

ON THE ROAD TO RUIN: Vital questions, but answering them will take us away from the subject of this essay -- the question of parallels between the US and the USSR.

Afghanistan points us towards a more troubling parallel. Some people have argued that by ramping up the arms race, President Ronald Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Irresistibly, Soviet leaders took the bait since their prestige depended on their ability to match the US militarily. With a smaller economy and a slowdown in growth that had started in the 1970s, the arms race made matters worse. As growth continued to decline, the ensuing stagnation in living standards bred popular discontent. When economic reforms failed to spur growth, disillusionment infected the leadership of the communist party. Collapse came quick: the system had lost its defenders.

Is it outlandish to suggest that the US has been travelling down a similar road since 2001? For sure, no one thinks that the United States is on the road to collapse. Nevertheless, increasingly one gets the impression that its recent military adventurism is hastening its descent to second spot -- behind China -- in the global hierarchy of economic and military power. The dramatic collapse of the USSR in 1990 gave a new impetus to American ambitions. It encouraged feelings -- and not only on the right -- that this unipolar moment in American history should be made irreversible. In particular, neoconservatives argued vigorously for a military build-up and a more muscular display of US military power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East.

Since the neoconservatives were embedded in the Republican Party, they had to cool their heels for eight years, from 1992 to 2000, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. When the Republicans returned to power in 2000, the neoconservatives quickly seized key positions in the administration of George W Bush, especially in the office of the vice- president and Department of Defense. In September 2000, the neocons had written that they would have to wait for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" to launch their unilateralist policies to deepen their global hegemony. They did not have to wait long. On 11 September 2001, Al-Qaeda, a small group of non-state actors (or terrorists, in common parlance), obliged by attacking New York's World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 Americans.

OSTS OF TERROR: At the press of a button, well-laid neocon plans for endless war were put into motion. They called it the "global war on terror".
The global war on terror was insanely ambitious. It was launched with an ultimatum to all weaker non-Western nations: You are with us or against us. To execute this war, the US would mobilise, expand and use its global military forces to threaten, attack and invade "unfriendly" countries. Neither international nor domestic laws would stand in its way. Various US agencies would kidnap, imprison without trial, torture and assassinate anyone resisting or suspected of resisting its policies. The goal was to immobile resistance to American hegemony with state terror.

A comprehensive accounting of the costs to the USA of this reckless policy of unilateralism will not be available for a while, but we do have some partial and tentative estimates. At the end of 2008, the direct budgetary costs of the global war on terror were expected to reach $758 billion. In March 2008, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the indirect budgetary costs of global war on terror -- of restoring depleted military hardware and materiel and support for veterans of the wars -- would add up to $1.5 trillion. "All told," they wrote, "the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that is a conservative estimate." Add to that the rapidly escalating costs of the Afghan- Pakistan War that is being ramped up even now, nine years after the Afghan War was declared to be a success.

THE HUMAN TOLL: US wars in the Islamicate impose other painful costs, perhaps more debilitating than budgetary expenses. We refer to the human toll of these wars, the erosion of liberties inside the United States, and the manner in which the global war on terror is undermining the US's economic leadership. The US military has kept its casualties low, at 5,340 in January 2010, with greatly improved body armour, armour plated troop carriers, and a war fought remotely from the air, which saves American lives by sacrificing those of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan Pakistan and Yemen. In terms of the near-sighted calculus of US politicians, low US military deaths make these wars attractive. They forget, however, that high civilian deaths in the countries they attack or invade make their wars unwinnable by fuelling resistance.

The figures for Americans wounded and traumatised by US wars are much higher. As of July 2009, according to official statistics, 34,592 American soldiers were wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A much greater number of veterans of these wars are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In November 2007, according to one official source, there were a "minimum of 300,000 psychological casualties" from the war in Iraq alone. The lifetime cost of treating them is estimated at $660 billion.

The economic damage of the wars can be gauged by the speed with which China has been narrowing its gap behind -- or even moving ahead of -- the United States since 2001. During much of the last decade, the US has concentrated a huge portion of its resources, policy focus and media attention on fighting multiple wars; it has borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia to finance these wars; its economy suffered a near collapse in 2008; and it has done little to repair its infrastructure, reduce its dependence on oil, or fix its expensive healthcare system. During the same years, China, free from the burden of wars, has directed its policy focus and resources to developing its infrastructure, green energy, manufactures, exports, higher education, and securing access to raw materials globally.

The damage to America's moral standing is not less worrisome. The United States stands before the world accused of engaging in a war of aggression against Iraq, waging an undeclared war against Pakistan, and sanctioning torture, kidnappings, assassinations and imprisonment without trial. "Fifteen years ago," writes Kishore Mahbubani, a former diplomat from Singapore, "if anyone had suggested that Western countries would endorse or allow the use of torture, they would have been dismissed out of hand." After 2001, torture became routine. In 2005, Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, stated: "Guantanamo is the gulag of our times." One year after he took office, Obama has not ended these human rights violations. Indeed, he has chosen assassinations as a major instrument of his war against the Taliban in Pakistan.

AL-QAEDA'S GREAT WINDFALL: What did it cost Al-Qaeda to produce this avalanche of misdirected and self-damaging actions by the United States? The sum total of investments the leadership of Al-Qaeda made in its attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon is trifling, as these things go: the lives of 19 men and an investment of between $400,000 and $500,000 in flight training, airline tickets, lodging in Western capitals, and box cutters. That is roughly equal to the cost of deploying one US soldier in Iraq for one year. Had the leaders of Al-Qaeda anticipated this dramatic payoff from their paltry investment? Was 9/11 part of a strategy to lure the world's most powerful military machine to place their boots on Muslim lands, where jihadists would successively engage and defeat them, and eventually drive the United States out of the Islamicate? Indeed, this was the strategy Al-Qaeda adopted towards the end of the 1990s. Challenged by their failure to defeat the "near enemy", the Egyptian and Algerian governments allied to the United States, Al-Qaeda decided to carry its war to the United States, the "far enemy", which they saw as the "head of the serpent".

Recently, Eric Margolis offered a succinct account of Al-Qaeda's strategy. Bin Laden, he writes, "would oust the modern 'Crusaders' by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America's Achilles' heel." If this had not been their strategy, Al-Qaeda would quickly appropriate it as its own after watching America's frenetic response to the attacks of 9/11. The neoconservatives had been waiting for the men with box cutters, ready to launch their well-laid plans to redraw the map of the Middle East. If the United States could so easily be provoked into invading Muslim countries, Bin Laden -- not the US president -- would decide when and where the US would be fighting wars in the Islamicate. Indeed, Al-Qaeda has provoked the United States into attacking an ever- lengthening list of Muslim countries.

Nine years after it had been "won", the United States is escalating its war in Afghanistan. Some eight years after its "cakewalk" through Iraq, it is just beginning to draw down its forces there. In addition, according to Margolis, different factions of the US military are "involved in combat operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, North Africa and the Philippines. A new US base at Djibouti is launching raids into Yemen, Somalia and northern Kenya. US forces aided the failed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006." If indeed, it was Al-Qaeda's strategy to lure American troops into the Islamicate, who can deny that they have done quite well? Repeatedly, the US has walked into one Al-Qaeda trap after another.

RIVALS TAKE THE LEAD: While the US is engaged in the "sequential destruction of Muslim nations" -- to borrow a troubling phrase from Liaquat Ali Khan -- China is making economic gains in the very countries that the US occupies, attacks or threatens to attack. Over the past decade, China has continued to make economic gains in Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan, while the US occupies, sanctions or launches military attacks against these countries.

Two years back, China acquired rights to one of the world's largest deposits of copper in Afghanistan. In a report in The New York Times in December 2009, Michael Wines writes perceptively about the symbolism of this investment: "While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world's superpower is focussed on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce."
A similar picture emerges from Iraq. US oil companies are not getting the oil deals they wanted -- production-sharing agreements instead of service contracts. In this area too, a partnership between a British and Chinese oil company walked away with a contract to develop Rumaila, one of the world's largest oil fields. Two US companies signed a contract for the much smaller oil field of West Qurna.

Surely, the Chinese must be saying, Al-Qaeda is its best ally -- though accidental and unacknowledged -- in the contest to displace the US from its leadership of the global economy. It is difficult at this stage to assess the long-term significance of Al-Qaeda for the Islamicate; its strategy has brought great suffering to Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the gains it has brought to China are clear. The siren song of terrorism has lured the United States to ramp up its military expenditure, to finance its escalating wars by borrowing from its chief economic rival, to deplete its moral capital in the international community, and to shred its own safeguards against state tyranny. China cannot acknowledge the gifts it has received from Al-Qaeda, but privately, perhaps, the Chinese leadership must be toasting these windfall gains.

Instead of rising up to deal with the economic challenges stemming from the rapid rise of India, China and Brazil, instead of investing in programmes to develop alternative energy, instead of developing a network of high-speed trains, instead of reversing the decline in its K-12 schooling, the Christian right and the neoconservative cabal pushed the United States into a vast quagmire, stretching from one end of the Islamicate to another. All this while China has continued to challenge US dominance in a growing array of economic activities. And here is the parallel. In the 1980s, the United States out-spent the USSR into economic ruin. Since 2001, Al-Qaeda with its paltry investments in men and money has been drawing the United States into wars that are accelerating its economic decline. At least for now, China is the chief beneficiary of the perverse mechanism that forces the United States into embracing wars against the Islamicate as the panacea to its problems, when in fact they have been having the opposite effect.

EXPLAINING THE MADNESS: It was Euripides who first wrote, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Is that what happens to the leaders of a country who doggedly follow a course -- as the Soviets did during the 1980s and 1990s -- that points in the direction of decline, or worse, ruin? In principle, democracies have the capacity to replace such ruinous leadership. Yet it would appear that the disastrous military policies inaugurated under President Bush are not going to be discarded under President Obama, his Democratic successor. Is it that both parties in the United States are captives of a political system that at least on the question of Islam and the Islamicate are dominated by a powerful conglomerate of pro-Israeli forces, led by Jewish Americans but with a strong following of Christian Zionists?

If Americans wish to see a reversal in their ruinous policy towards the Islamicate they will have to make some honest and courageous efforts to countervail the influence of pro-Israeli forces in their body politic, the time for which is running out. This will not happen by electing a candidate who dazzles the masses with rhetoric of change. Americans will have to elect a president and Congress with spine enough to stand up for American, not Israeli, interests.
* The writer is professor of economics at Northeastern University and author of Israeli Exceptionalism: The destabilising logic of Zionism .

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/987/special.htm

[danyboy27]

what difference does it make?

there was a multipolar world before, and quite frankly, before the rise of the US governement, there was plenty of bloodshed, exploitation and imperialism all over the place.

having a multipolar world dosnt end injustice, it just add variety.

Khadafi is a nut btw.

[rednordman]

what difference does it make?

there was a multipolar world before, and quite frankly, before the rise of the US governement, there was plenty of bloodshed, exploitation and imperialism all over the place.

having a multipolar world dosnt end injustice, it just add variety.

Khadafi is a nut btw.Word. I have heard from someone who works in Libya that he is actually a good leader. It is his son who is not a nice person..AT ALL. Problem is that for some strange reasons, Khadfi wants to turn Libya into a monarchy, just so his some can inherit his power and become king. Sounds bonkers, but thats what this guy was saying.

[CallMeSteve]

Blaaaah.... the usefulness of polarity as a concept is limited now, given the changing nature of intl. politics since the Cold War. So talking about US unipolarity doesn't really include concentrations of power elsewhere, and its global influence has been under stress since the mid-1990s when Maastricht actually created some level of European unity that allowed them the option of being a single actor on the world stage.

Although I adhere to the Marxist view as argued by Antonio Negri (basically decline of the nation state and resource necessity brings about war and effective US 'empire'), the neorealist school makes a valid argument when it points out that polarity is limited by failure to include the rise of influentual NGOs, terrorists/guerilla groups, fluctuating concentration of power and multilateral fronts from smaller powers (like EU etc.).

The only scholar as far as I know that is actually trying to create a system to measure state power with these factors is Beres, and he's sort of sidelined in this field.

If you're annoyed that US hegemony is being contested then you're kidding yourself that US Foreign Policy directives actually have any effect on your life, unless you're in a business like credit financing, foreign security firm or an oil baron. I'm guessing you're not, and that you're just a standard nationalist who blindly associates himself with the actions of statesmen. The sort of **** who reckons he "saved the French" despite being under 86 years of age? :)

[Dean]

Nothing "good" will come of western recession from a position of power. I'm a bit scared for the American public, because it really looks like we are going to become an impoverished police state like Russia.

On the other hand, nations like Iran, India and China have been oppressed by imperial capitalism for a long time, and it is time that their populations gain some semblance of autonomy. their current regimes don't really reflect that, though, so I wouldn't be "pleased" at this shift from bourgeois ownership to bourgeois ownership.

[CallMeSteve]

Nothing "good" will come of western recession from a position of power. I'm a bit scared for the American public, because it really looks like we are going to become an impoverished police state like Russia.

Doubt it. The concentration of capital and importance attached to consumerism (and thereby credit loans) are hugely different in the US than they are in Russia.

I think all that will happen is the US will be pushed further into debt; the level of widespread poverty in the US won't be as bad as Russia (though of course I am not saying it doesn't/won't exist at all), nor does the US have the infrastructure to create anything like a police state at the moment.

Maybe you could explain a little more what you mean, might have misunderstood.

[Comrade Anarchist]

No countries should exist. When you speak of U.S. dominance you must be referring to the economic dominance. This dominance is only created because of the government subverting the free market and eliminating competition which always creates monopolies that then have the ability to go across the world and enforce a corporate fascism.

[IcarusAngel]

what difference does it make?

there was a multipolar world before, and quite frankly, before the rise of the US governement, there was plenty of bloodshed, exploitation and imperialism all over the place.

Such "multipolar worlds" didn't have the existence of large IGOs and NGOs either. Also, WWI etc. broke out because of bipolar structures.

I've forgotten so much of International Relations (took it 3 years ago) I can't really make a good case for it though.

To OP:

http://www.truthtree.com/gov.shtml

[CallMeSteve]

Such "multipolar worlds" didn't have the existence of large IGOs and NGOs either. Also, WWI etc. broke out because of bipolar structures.

I've forgotten so much of International Relations (took it 3 years ago) I can't really make a good case for it though.

WWI was caused because of a tumultuous multipolar Europe, when the 'balance of power' meant something. Most scholars of Intl Pol claim that bipolarity is the 'safest' system, as long as the superpowers only come into conflict through economic clashes and proxy wars, like in the Cold War. Though the fact that power is concentrated in two states with respective spheres of influences means war is less likely to occur.

Where did you study Intl Rel? I study Intl. Politics at uni at the moment, not particularly useful but certainly interesting.

[Bud Struggle]

The USA creates "play to win" people. There's a part of American society that does just that--and does it very well. Others try to emulate it--the Japanese, the Germans, now the Chinese--and they may have similar or even better financial ability--but they lack the charm.

And charm is what business is really all about.

[Drace]

@Bud,
I never have a clue about what your talking about.


No countries should exist. When you speak of U.S. dominance you must be referring to the economic dominance. This dominance is only created because of the government subverting the free market and eliminating competition which always creates monopolies that then have the ability to go across the world and enforce a corporate fascism.
No you dumbass, were talking about political dominance...puppet states, imperialism, globalization, military domination, hegemony, interest in other countries, acquiring natural resources, etc.

Capitalism is a hierarchical system that will create a state if needed to.

[danyboy27]

Word. I have heard from someone who works in Libya that he is actually a good leader. It is his son who is not a nice person..AT ALL. Problem is that for some strange reasons, Khadfi wants to turn Libya into a monarchy, just so his some can inherit his power and become king. Sounds bonkers, but thats what this guy was saying.

he may be a benevolent dictator, but he still a dictator.

plus, his recent decision to declare a jihad against suiss is rather disturbing.

[IcarusAngel]

WWI was caused because of a tumultuous multipolar Europe, when the 'balance of power' meant something. Most scholars of Intl Pol claim that bipolarity is the 'safest' system, as long as the superpowers only come into conflict through economic clashes and proxy wars, like in the Cold War. Though the fact that power is concentrated in two states with respective spheres of influences means war is less likely to occur.

I have not heard this analysis. There was a multipolar world that was relatively peaceful throughout most of the 19th century. The unprecedented rise in German power and the solidification of the triple alliance (Germany, Austria, Turkey) and the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain). Britain moved from a semiisolated position as a balancer towards an alliance with France while Germany, which felt isolated, tightened its relationship with Austria-Hyngary.

These alliances represent a structural shift from multipolarity to bipolarity:

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/strforum/SF161/forum161.html

I believe even many realists have advocated bipolarity as well.


Where did you study Intl Rel? I study Intl. Politics at uni at the moment, not particularly useful but certainly interesting.

I studied it at University here in Utah. I'm not a social science major, I took it as part of my generals even though it was considered somewhat of an advanced class.

[CallMeSteve]

The USA creates "play to win" people. There's a part of American society that does just that--and does it very well. Others try to emulate it--the Japanese, the Germans, now the Chinese--and they may have similar or even better financial ability--but they lack the charm.

And charm is what business is really all about.

And what the fuck does any of this vague theory of yours have to do with US hegemony as a unitary actor in a multipolar international climate?

Actually, I don't think anyone has mentioned this ITT so far, but the US has been far less a unitary actor since Obama came to power, which in realpolitik terms suggests to me that unlike the neocons, the current government account for the decline of their power in certain regions and economic fields, and are thus more willing to enter diplomatic talks and give thought to multilateral institutions etc.

So to uneducated folks such as the OP of this thread, it might seem that US hegemony is being scratched away at all of a sudden, when in reality it's been the case for a while and only now is the government is responding to it?

[Bud Struggle]

@Bud,
I never have a clue about what your talking about.


There's a reason that America always wins. Each time. Everytime. I'm trying to explain how it works. I'm probably now doing a great job--but America tends to win, that's for sure.

[IcarusAngel]

1815-1870 Loose multipolarity
1870 - 1907 - Rise of Germany
1907 - 1914 Bipolarity of aliances (bandwagoning and balance of power)

(Nye, page 67.)

The textbook we used was Nye, who's a liberal/neo-liberal. However, he has very much real world experience, and a lot of what he says makes sense.

[IcarusAngel]

There's a reason that America always wins. Each time. Everytime. I'm trying to explain how it works. I'm probably now doing a great job--but America tends to win, that's for sure.


Period Leading state
Sixteenth century Spain

Seventeenth century Netherlands

Eighteenth century France

Nineteenty Century Britain

Twentieth Century United States

Twenty-first century United states

See a trend here Bud? All good things come to an end

[Bud Struggle]

Period Leading state
Sixteenth century Spain

Seventeenth century Netherlands

Eighteenth century France

Nineteenty Century Britain

Twentieth Century United States

Twenty-first century United states

See a trend here Bud? All good things come to an end

I think we're at a bit of an endgame. All good things come to an end as you say--and maybe it ends here. Comrade, I don't see any sort of a "Revolution" in our furture--do you?

[Drace]

There's a reason that America always wins. Each time. Everytime. I'm trying to explain how it works. I'm probably now doing a great job--but America tends to win, that's for sure.

Probably because its the dominant power with superior technology, military, economy, political domination...


I think we're at a bit of an endgame. All good things come to an end as you say--and maybe it ends here. Comrade, I don't see any sort of a "Revolution" in our furture--do you?

Look at my sig! :lol:

[Comrade Anarchist]

No you dumbass, were talking about political dominance...puppet states, imperialism, globalization, military domination, hegemony, interest in other countries, acquiring natural resources, etc.


Oh okay so economic dominance has nothing to do with political dominance. Hmm that makes no sense. The U.S. use puppet states and such to further economic interests. The list you give is of things that are wrong but it is all to further an economic advantage over the world without which there would be no point in the political dominance unless we are reverting to a fucking mercantilist system.

[gorillafuck]

I'd rather have no powers trying to dominate the world than a bunch of them.