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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31699 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.

So what? Plenty of people benefit from public goods or are not harmed by them directly and yet they often never get built or decay as parties see it in their interests to exploit the commons.

A sword is a sword. The same ability to protect sea lanes opens the risk of a party trying to control it. The more parties you have with serious navies with no absolute superior the more the temptations rise. The more a party might wonder why it must accept losing a valuable natural resource to a rival or opponent and then be forced to protect that opponent's trade.

Nations that have amicable relations today like Western Europeans cannot agree on a European army or how it is to be used. Why would we assume this would change in a world without America?

The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade. Then the next temptation for other parties is to prey on those who either can't or they have rivalries with. And then there's the temptation to lock weaker nations into trading only with you, which may strictly be worse than a totally free trading system, but balances the costs of your navy with more control because you assume someone else is planning the same thing.

Indeed, but that's hardly insurmountable with a bit of will and training.

Demographic decline is not a matter of a bit of will. The European nations that once protected their own spheres are in terminal demographic decline. They don't have the bodies, they don't have the money (because of welfare, not the military) and the world has changed.

But it also just is insurmountable for many nations.

America can blow up everyone that'd interdict its trade. How about Poland? Lesotho? Indonesia? Ghana? What about when the trade is being stopped by a legitimately powerful nation like Iran?

Agree. But I don't agree that reduced trade or living standards means the "end of globalism".

I mean, if you take the broadest definition of globalism, sure.

The trade system we know and take for granted (that some call globalism pejoratively) would in fact end and it would be a noticeable change and drop in the living standards of a lot of people.

The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade.

The interesting thing is, based on that leaked chat, the Trump administration doesn't want to do that. They want the Europeans to pay more, but they don't want to stop protecting trade.

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