America seems to be teetering on collapse, but still I keep hearing about them spreading their influence in eastern Europe and South America. What would have to happen to get them to stop? I know the British Empire collapsed under mountains of debt after WW2, can US imperialism slow down just a little?
Money is fake and the US prints all of it. The US can literally not go bankrupt and the people actually running it know this.
So any hope of the government "running out of money" to do a good old fashioned imperialism just isn't realistic.
The US can't go bankrupt BUT the world could move off the USD as the primary reserve currency as well as what oil and other commodities are priced with. That would fuck up the US economy plenty.
The US can absolutely go bankrupt if trust in the US dollar were to decline enough. You can't just print money forever without an extremely tight focus around issues of inflation.
Argentina was one of the worlds richest countries in 1940 and is where it is today because they ran the money printer a little to hard buying things that didn't actually increase their economic capacity.
How come the british couldnt just keep printing money in the 50s? At some point, I assume we have to run out of material resources to maintain this whole thing
It's entirely about capacity to maintain hegemony through violence and the threat of violence: the US can not run out of material resources until its client states decide to stop providing them, and whenever one of them tries the US makes an extremely bloody example of them either directly or through arming fascist death squads to do a coup and mass murders. The US is increasingly losing the stand-offs that lead up to that, but it still has a long way to go before it materially cannot control its empire anymore.
Ive been pretty happy with Iran and Venezuela's ability to stand up against America, hopefully more countries can follow in their footsteps
KobaCum is right, just wanted to add onto this that by the 50's the pound wasn't the reserve currency of the world anymore, that was the dollar. So it wasn't really possible for the UK to just keep printing pounds, because they'd have to use those pounds to buy dollars to pay back their debts. Because most debts are denominated in dollars, the US is in the unique position as the reserve currency holder to just keep printing to be able to pay off debts that are denominated in the currency that they happen to control. How the world's reserve currency is decided is through hegemonic violence, and right now it's the dollar. If and when the US loses reserve currency status (probably in favour of renminbi) the game will change tremendously, but losing reserve currency status will be a symptom rather than a cause of the declining power of US hegemony.
probably in favour of renminbi
Eh it'll probably be a mix of the euro, renminbi and the yen. No way anyone's gonna be as dominating the US is. Who knows, maybe gold makes a comeback.
Yeah you're probably right, I'm just dreaming. The world post-US hegemony is going to be a much less stable place with a mixed bag of reserve currencies. We're already headed in that direction.
It really depends. If BRI takes off and becomes a massive economic engine, the RMB might earn hegemony. If the dollar loses its place by piecemeal efforts from various countries around the world, that's a different story.
Everyone seems to forget that the US's main currency is nukes. That's where hegemonic power comes from. Nukes allow the US to create hostage situations, which is why everyone needs nukes. It levels the playing field.
America is a world bank and a world military, with a nation attached. It can get a lot worse internally without showing significant cracks abroad, at least in the short term.
US influence might be spreading in some areas, but it's massively dropping away in others. The EU is moving further away from US hegemony, the UN Security Council used to be dominated by the US but that's stopped, and the Middle East is further away from US dominance than at any other time in the last decade.
When people say America is in decline, they mean relative to other powers on the world stage, they in no way mean major declines in things like GDP in ways that impact the ability of the US to keep federal staffing up in these particular agencies.
Our gdp is collapsing and were being hit hard by extreme weather events and covid. So... maybe?
I freaking hope so. I'm tired of hearing about the bullshit this country pulls and I just want it to stop some day
You don't have to be globally hegemonic to still pick on countries way smaller than you. There's not really an end, just a slide down the scale of who you're able to fuck with and how easily you can fuck with them.
The dollar as the world reserve currency would have to fall before the US global influence falls. If that happens, US influence in world affairs would decrease dramatically
I don't know but I hope they fucking get there soon. Hyped for the day people can stand up to them and they have to get their nose the fuck out of our countries/governments.
It's the equivalent of the emperor in 40k. He's dead, has been for 10,000 years. But the rest of society is keeping his body alive because they need him to be alive. The rest of the world wont let America die.
The US abandoning its imperial position would accelerate its collapse because American hegemony and prosperity is dependent on its imperial reach. In the event of the empire entering a death spiral it would launch a renewed offensive of military adventurism to maintain its position and rally around the flag at home.
This isn't like the end of the British Empire where it was able to pass the torch of world hegemony to an extremely agreeable and friendly regime. The only alternatives to American imperial hegemony in this moment are China, which is completely unacceptable to the white, Western world, or a renewed European bloc imperialism that has yet to truly emerge.
Right now the strategy to head off an acceleration of intra-capitalist competition and internal instability is to ignite a new Cold War with China. But China is in a much stronger economic position than the USSR ever was at any time in its history. And moreover, the suicide of the USSR was a ludicrously unlikely event in the first place. Three decades of rampant and misplaced Cold War triumphalism have potentially fatally infected the American imperial mindset. The American political and economic elite legitimately believe American capitalist triumph is foreordained and they can win a second Cold War against a stronger rival. But a more likely outcome is the extermination of humanity through nuclear war that preempts a climate apocalypse.
This. The most dangerous animal is a wounded and cornered animal.
