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Those wars don't count. The US at war with small and poor countries. Nobody in the world will ever think the US are a reliable ally unless the enemy is Iraq and Afghanistan, and even in the later case the US did not win...
Ok.
Given how our alliances have worked out over the last few decades, this seems to be an acceptable outcome. I am tired of being a "reliable ally" to "allies" who offer nothing in return but ever-increasing demands, recrimination, and interference in our internal politics to my tribe's detriment.
Those allies have offered you a mostly free global market. The network effect means that the value of a network is proportional to the square of its number of users, and allied countries users have contributed in no small part to US big tech consummer basis, even though the US use its tech as a mean of spying on them.
That is why I think that the fall of Trumpism will not come from #Resist, or from democracy, or from the juges, but from capitalism itself.
When Scott Alexander explained this concept, it was meant as something to fight against, not as a political compass.
Whether this was a good deal or not is the debate, and the status quo has been losing that debate, worse and worse, for quite some time now in my estimation. Americans do not generally seem to believe that our economic system is working, and the mounting frustration is spilling over into extremism on both the right and the left. You seem aware of this as well with your reference to the fall of Trumpism coming from capitalism.
On that point, my disagreement would be that Trumpism is itself a response to the model of "Capitalism" that we've all been living under for the last several decades. Maybe it will succeed, and maybe it won't; if it fails, further escalation seems inevitable.
Indeed. And in my estimation, Scott Alexander and his supporters, of which I used to be one, lost that fight decisively. Zunger and Ozy were correct, Scott was wrong, as he himself seems to have recognized over time. Tribalism won because humans require values-coherence for cooperation to function, because the range of possible values allows for values-incoherence, and because liberal norms foster unlimited values drift until the norms themselves become unsustainable. Tolerance is not a moral precept, and will never be a moral precept. It is only ever a peace treaty, and under conditions of sufficient values-diversity the treaty stops making sense.
I don't think capitalism will fail and Trump will die with it. I think capitalism will survive but Trump will be destroyed in the process. Americans may be unsatisfied with the way the world works, but they just have unrealistic expectations.
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This means the network is mutually beneficial, so the US is paying with it's own membership, so the allies are still not offering anything.
Effectively this means Scott Alexander wanted to have the values of his tribe be the only ones that can even be considered.
The money? The companies are american, didn't you notice?
I think they're paying for that with goods and services.
You just told me the network was mutually beneficial, but now it pays for the money? The US gets the money and the network, the allies only get the network, but somehow the allies get more?
Do you think the dollar as the reserve currency for the world, or english as the international language, would have been unchallenged without the late international order?
Yes? Such are the glories of trade, both sides of it are better off for having the opportunity to engage in it.
The allies also get the goods and services. And the opportunity to sell their goods as well, which you keep ignoring for some mysterious reason, but I'll let that slide.
Yes, because they're not contributing to the protection of the network, and the Americans are.
The dollar probably would, but I have my doubts about the language. Once you establish a standard it's a pain in the ass to switch. Continental Europe mostly communicates in English with itself, even after the UK left, for example.
Yes, but no. The relationship is not even, the US got more value out of it, and on top of that they get intelligence because the tech is used to spy on everyone. It would not be tolerated from any other country.
They are spending less, but they are still spending, and they are not responsible for the fact that the US started dubious war they could not win, which costed a lot. When the US called NATO article 5 against Afghanistan, no one betrayed the alliance even though the threat for the global security was very minor.
Anyway it can't be reverted, the trust is lost now.
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