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?
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.
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.
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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.