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longwayhome -> RE: The world without the US (10/25/2016 8:19:06 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tamaka
An interesting read whether or not you agree with the religious aspect.
https://realtruth.org/articles/120416-001.html
Leaving aside the whole motherhood and apple pie bit about how America civilised the world and spread its beneficence, the essential analysis of power politics in an international system in this article is not wholly wrong.
Yes (before you say it thompsonx) cold war rhetoric when you link it to good and evil is overblown and unhelpful, but the essential premise that a strong US and the alliances it formed has been the basis of world peace (as in the absence of a world war, not actual absence of war) for some time is accurate.
The move to a multi-polar world (long promised but not yet realised, despite the potential strength of countries such as China) does in historical terms make general war more likely. This is true in any power system, including Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s where the UK despite being the strongest power with control of the seas had nothing like the practical dominance that the US developed over the 20th century. We can debate when this definitively happened and who contributed most to victories in the world wars, but US dominance has been the most important factor in avoiding general war since 1945. The same lessons about power systems can be learned again and again in places like China, post Roman Europe and so on.
Local wars have taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries but regional and global conflict has largely been avoided, despite the involvement of the US, Russians and Chinese in proxy conflicts at a local level. The fact of the world becoming a riskier place where medium and large powers are more likely to clash has nothing however to do with moral questions (like "just how nasty is Putin?" or "how democratic is the Middle East?") but everything to do with competing needs which lead to clashes, however you frame the morality. The lack of trust between Europe and Russia for example is as old as the Russian Empire, whatever temporary alliances there had been in the intervening period. The end of the Cold War marks the end of seeing Russia in stereotypical terms as an "evil empire" but does nothing to relieve the underlying tensions.
I am dubious about claims that America has spread its political system across the world. Although I like living in a functioning democracy, it is merely the least worst form of government. The flavour of political systems has tended to have more to do with local circumstances than US influence. In terms of stability, the danger of dictatorship lies in the fact that the dictator can have ambitions which destabilise international peace, rather than the western liberal dream that democracy is the most stable system. It certainly is not. Dictators such as Tito in Yugoslavia maintained peace in a way that the democracies of the former Yugoslavia did not. So much for democracy being superior in all aspects.
Finally for the influence of US cultural imperialism, I don't think that it would particularly be missed - there are perfectly good alternatives to all of the US cultural and technological exports. It is would however be churlish not to acknowledge the significant contribution of American art, literature, drama, film, music, academic learning, semi-conductor technology and space exploration.
The main aspect of the analysis in the article I do agree with is that, for all of America's faults and all the places its interventions have worsened and not improved the lives of local people, a world where we do not have the US as the pre-eminent power, fully engaged with the world, will be a less safe place for those of us lucky enough to be living in countries who have not seen large scale war since 1945. Destabilising the international order is not unambiguously good or bad, but the risks of regional and global conflict are greater.
In that sense, leaving aside all the religious and political piety, a world without the US would be worse place.
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