I mean, at some level, he's not wrong. You do want a single uniform system of trade and travel, one which promotes a peaceful coexistence between nations, particularly if you're a middling-sized heavily agricultural community living in between these two manufacturing titans.
No sane person living in the modern era wants to endure a third World War. Particularly if they think their country is going to play the role of Armageddon. But when your position within the global hierarchy is predicated on an old hegemony that's hollowed itself out with corruption, you're in an even more precarious spot. You need the new hegemony to effectively bail out the old one and guarantee a transition that keeps you in your current position. Even though the material conditions of the old and new hegemonys would foment conflict.
Then pile on climate change and mass migration and a real failure to maintain and upgrade existing international infrastructure, and you realize you're living in a giant fucking tinderbox. Begging people not to light a match is not unreasonable.
But all of this concern is predicated on you maintaining your own prosperity at the expense of your globally southern neighbors. What happens when you're forced into a conflict and the bottom finally does fall out of your economy? Where do you go from there?
I know where this guy is going, what with his talk of jungles and tigers and monkeys.
You do want a single uniform system of trade and travel, one which promotes a peaceful coexistence between nations
Right, and as you go on to say further down in your post, this is what american unipolar hegemony only pretends to be.
Begging people not to light a match is not unreasonable. But all of this concern is predicated on you maintaining your own prosperity at the expense of your globally southern neighbors.
Yes. When people get couped/sanctioned/embargoed/invaded/occupied if they try to nationalize their natural resources, or if their labor rights are too strong, or if they don't take out a high interest IMF loan with prerequisite demands of privatization, etc. you don't really have a "uniform" system of trade, you have a hierarchical system of trade where certain regions are made into vassals, kept deliberately underdeveloped and overexploited, yada yada. Those at the helm of the imperialist unipolar global system of trade are so afraid of "near peer" power that it is willing to do any amount of violence or false/exaggerated accusations of violence to maintain that system.
I mean, at some level, he's not wrong. You do want a single uniform system of trade and travel, one which promotes a peaceful coexistence between nations, particularly if you're a middling-sized heavily agricultural community living in between these two manufacturing titans.
No sane person living in the modern era wants to endure a third World War. Particularly if they think their country is going to play the role of Armageddon. But when your position within the global hierarchy is predicated on an old hegemony that's hollowed itself out with corruption, you're in an even more precarious spot. You need the new hegemony to effectively bail out the old one and guarantee a transition that keeps you in your current position. Even though the material conditions of the old and new hegemonys would foment conflict.
Then pile on climate change and mass migration and a real failure to maintain and upgrade existing international infrastructure, and you realize you're living in a giant fucking tinderbox. Begging people not to light a match is not unreasonable.
But all of this concern is predicated on you maintaining your own prosperity at the expense of your globally southern neighbors. What happens when you're forced into a conflict and the bottom finally does fall out of your economy? Where do you go from there?
I know where this guy is going, what with his talk of jungles and tigers and monkeys.
Right, and as you go on to say further down in your post, this is what american unipolar hegemony only pretends to be.
Yes. When people get couped/sanctioned/embargoed/invaded/occupied if they try to nationalize their natural resources, or if their labor rights are too strong, or if they don't take out a high interest IMF loan with prerequisite demands of privatization, etc. you don't really have a "uniform" system of trade, you have a hierarchical system of trade where certain regions are made into vassals, kept deliberately underdeveloped and overexploited, yada yada. Those at the helm of the imperialist unipolar global system of trade are so afraid of "near peer" power that it is willing to do any amount of violence or false/exaggerated accusations of violence to maintain that system.