I would much rather continued US world domination than cede that power to China. Yes, that's easy for me to say as an American, but I can't help but think that other Western nations would suffer as well under China's dominance.

Yes, the US's liberal democracy isn't in the best of shape (to put it mildly), but China is an isolationist, authoritarian nation where state censorship and human-rights abuses are the norm, not the exception.

The US had the power to conquer much of the world at the end of WW2, but instead promoted self-determination and a global security framework based on rules that are applied to all countries, weak and strong, equally.

They did conquer much of the world and Europe as a result of WW2, and then the rest of the world post cold-war. It doesn't have to imply a draconian or complete absence of benevolence in their conquest.

They have military bases all over Europe, and rest of world, they control the global financial system especially amongst their "allies" and have dominant world reserve currency. They sanction and invade countries and leaders that go against their interests.

NATO: "To keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down". Always they are suppressing and sowing conflict amongst rival powers especially on "world island" / Eurasia. And this makes perfect sense, but to not call it a conquest is silly.

>self-determination

Just to take a recent example, they absolutely did not allow Germany and Russia to make an alliance over energy trade through Nord Stream pipelines, sanctioning all involved players and companies for many years, and making dozens of promises to destroy the project.

They also banned Huawei and demanded Western allies comply, not permit self-determination to do business of their own regard.

You'll say something to the effect of "well when the rules are broken..". Yes being able to write your own rules and have your vassals comply is called conquest.

Wading a tiny bit into this discussion, which country or clique would you prefer to occupy the slot that the US currently does?

There's almost always been some hegemon. When the world wasn't as connected, they were regional, then continental, and now world-wide. The US is the current one for a large portion of the world, but in the past you had Britain, France, Spain, HRE, Mongols, Rome..etc. Asia has seen its fair share of regional hegemonies, so has Africa and the pre-contact Americas. So it seems like that's a power void that needs to be filled by _some_ entity, and if left empty it doesn't remain so for long.

I like clarity and honesty about what's going on, not the layers of nonsense that obscure power politics. Notice, the thread here goes "the US is not a world dominating conqueror, and if they are that's a good thing". I know you weren't the one denying it, but my original point was to disagree with the characterization that they are not. If you think they are and that it is good, certainly you must think it is weird how much it is denied that they are, or that western liberal morality requires that it is denied? Cognitive dissonance, no?

Personally, what bothers me more than the US being in charge, given that I'm American, is the way the US regime runs things in the homeland. The values, ideology and culture which is cultivated at home is not consistent with the type of foreign conquest/hegemony/will to power externally. One can see this with the way military recruiting for example is suffering. I would prefer, like empires of the past, that a warrior culture and values promoting power and vitality were encouraged at home. That they are not, and woke culture is ascendant makes some like me not very motivated to "fight" for the nation's interest overseas or support a more aggressive heavy handed "hegemony". There are big contradictions, in other words. (I'm a military vet who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, so these issues are meaningful to me... I see the country I fought for not representing my interests, so I have less will to fight for it or support it's fight. Make sense?).

If one is not American, and say, European. They should want Europe to be powerful, not the US. I can't tell you how many Europeans I get in conversation with online that for some reason don't even support their own continent or countries to be powerful on the world state. To assert their own interests. To have a military that can enforce their will, or do whatever is necessary to oppose US meddling in their affairs. As if it is some unquestionable fact that the US should dictate to them or that it is better the US have power over them than Europe rivaling US for global power.

I do largely agree with you, especially on the topic of the US being a world hegemon. I am not sure how much I track with your beliefs in the warrior culture, because I think that the US arose to their current position by downplaying their hard power. In a way, it is the most advanced experiment in world hegemony using the carrot more than the stick, but much as that simile says, the stick is always an option. Just think of how many more countries would be going 'blech, USA' if instead of coming in with Micky Mouse and Coca Cola, they came with guns and bombs. So far it's worked well enough seeing as how the US is at about a century of world dominance.

> To assert their own interests.

Who's to say their current interests aren't "Let's let the US play world police and take care of the military stuff." Perhaps it's just that I've played too many 4x games, but it seems to me that sometimes the best strategy is to be buddy buddy with the big bad dude on the block, rather than try to be the big bad dude himself.

I think they US rose to their power almost completely because of isolation between 2 oceans away from the rival powers, who themselves were next to each other, along with an abundance of space and natural resources unprecidented in comparison with their rivals, and this also protects this dominance (probably along with nuclear weapons) unlike any other empire/power in history. We could probably get away with bad internal culture and politics for far longer than others before external pressures assert a more vitalist reality. To me this is a pessimistic and depressing outlook.

And these advantages allowed them to get away with this fake soft power narrative. In other words their advantages in materials and geography enabled what I see as a disadvantage in ideological frame that will eventually lead to weakness in my opinion. Most Americans, and American society at large are shielded from the harsh realities of power politics, empire, and conflict that their nation cultivates far away from them to weaken rest of world. European civilization benefited from rotating powers and repeated conflict among themselves which was a selection pressure to further power, technological development, civilizational advancement etc. "Hard times make strong men".

>who's to say

Yes for a while. But now I see that power directed at them to suppress their own interests which I view were a closer alignment with Russia, purchase of their cheap resources to fuel European industrial power, and a rise of Euro as additional reserve currency which they could print for cheap Russian commodities. Now they've sanctioned Russian reserves at the behest of US interests (crushing the idea of Euro as something energy exporters will want to stockpile in reserve, eliminating the Euro as a "petro"-currency), and they've self-sanctioned out of cheap Russian energy, Nord Stream etc and potential alliance and close relations with their neighbor (relative peace in western hemisphere benefits US, chaos on "world island"/Eurasia benefits US, hurts Europe). Relatively speaking European industry will get crushed compared to US who has cheaper input costs and can print money for energy (for now).

Europe arguably would have been better building long ago their independence from US, and some sort of alliance with Russia since they are neighbors, and built their own military strength so they could oppose these developments and assert their power on the European continent, instead of fade into irrelevance if the energy issues lead to industrial decline, companies/citizens leaving to US etc.

I think one big thing has changed. In the past hegemony was enforceable. If two nations both wanted to declare themselves rulers of the world, that was solved through war. But nukes changed the game. Now outright war between "developed" (nuclear) nations has become impossible.

I'd argue that this is only coming to the front (some 80 years the development of nukes) due to historical nuance. The US and USSR kept each other, more or less, in check. When the USSR collapsed the US not only had immense soft power, but also lacked any any remotely viable competitor. But that's all changed rapidly. Russia largely rebuilt, China is becoming the dominant world power, India is coming into their own, the Mideast is no longer content just being a lapdog, and even much of Europe is increasingly being coerced into agreement rather than genuinely seeing eye to eye with the US.

So the US wants to stay the dominant world power, but has no viable claims to such, let alone means to enforce that. We're headed to a multipolar world, or nuclear war and then a multipolar world. Once choice is clearly optimal.

..and all on top of decades of ideological propaganda that liberal democracies don't enforce will-to-power against each other, follow some supposed mutually agreed upon rules based order etc. Just when they have to project power even against supposed allies, they are at peak "glorious liberal democracy" against illiberalism rhetoric. And seeing rising economic pain in West..which is one of the pillars that they stand on. "say what you want about liberal democracy at least it provides material comfort"

If that starts to wane, much of the other aspects of liberal culture might not be able to fill the gap in "hard times" like atomisation, declining social cohesion, increasing polarization, declining military recruiting numbers and disillusion within much of veteran community of past few years. Much of the legitimacy of our institutions and leaders is predicated upon certain narratives. If they fail..

That seems a little idealistic and even naive. The US acted in its own interests, it just happened that said interests took the shape that they did. Its rules absolutely do not apply equally to all countries; Its rules rarely even apply equally to their own citizens.

It's fallen far short of this ideal many times, and perhaps it promoted a rules based global security architecture for its own long term interest, but the fact remains, its behavior has been very different from other global hegemons, in not extracting maximum advantage from other states nearly as much past hegemons did.

The US's foreign policy - in all its aspects including trade - has generally been extraordinarily mutually-beneficial / positive-sum. The biggest exceptions to this have been US policy in the Middle East and with respect to state-level adversaries.

> The US's foreign policy - in all its aspects including trade - has generally been extraordinarily mutually-beneficial / positive-sum. The biggest exceptions to this have been US policy in the Middle East and with respect to state-level adversaries.

Yes, but that does not at all preclude that said actions would be largely ones of self-interest. Is it not possible that the US realized that by not maximizing their benefit all the time, they could ensure a much more stable environment for their own growth and power gain? Grease the squeaky wheel and it'll work for you longer than if you just force it to keep going until it completely breaks.

>>Yes, but that does not at all preclude that said actions would be largely ones of self-interest.

Yes, it's entirely possible. Regardless, this strategy that the US has-pursued/pursues makes it preferrable to most other comparable historical states as a global hegemonic power.

Well it makes it preferable to some, and really distasteful to others. It's rarely a good idea to make moral judgements on history or international politics. They don't really operate in the realm of morality. To those of us in the USA or west Europe, we have benefited a lot from the US' global power over the last near-century. On the other hand, I am sure China could argue that if the US wasn't as dominant, they could have benefited more. Considering that those two cliques have similar populations, we can't even go with what the majority thinks -- there isn't one.

Agreed, but I think we also have to consider where we come from and where we're going.

As a citizen of a Western nation, living in a liberal democracy, wouldn't it be logical to wish for a nation of similar values to maintain high global influence? Wouldn't it be reasonable to be against the rise in influence of an authoritarian nation that wants the rest of the world to allow it to dictate their cultural norms?

I frankly do not give a damn whether or not China could have benefited more over the past several decades if it would have meant the spread of the Chinese government's values to other nations.

You don't give a damn, probably most of your countrymen (assuming you're from the US) also don't give a damn. And there's probably over a billion Chinese that don't give a damn that you don't give a damn.

I don't wish for the US to lose their global influence either, I rather like what I get out of that. But I am under no delusion that this is a lucky happenstance and that the interests of the US could change to ones that I am not happy with, and that China, and any other nation will have their own interests that they pursue; Within their moral codes, within their systems of values, interests that we here may judge as wrong or counter to our beliefs, may well be the opposite and acceptable in their origin nations.

So if you want to interact with those nations in any fashion, you need to throw away some of these notions of morality, or at least reify them to things that are relatively universal, of which there aren't as many as one would think on a geopolitical scale. You say that we need to consider where we come from and where we're going. I say that we cannot do that in a vacuum, so if you want to really understand, you have to understand the other side too.

> It's rarely a good idea to make moral judgements on history or international politics

Ultimately, you are forced to make rational decisions based on history and international politics. What hegemony is more aligned with your interests?

It is blatantly obvious that the chinese governance is immoral, and that it is not even controlled by the chinese people. Say what you will about the US, the bigger picture is that one nation is a free-democracy-with-exceptions and the other is a dictatorship that murders political dissidents and harvests their organs. There is no reasonable moral judgement that can be made that considers US dominance to be comparable to Chinese dominance.

In the same sense that there is an asymmetry in the freedom of US/Chinese markets, there is an asymmetry in the freedom of US/Chinese marketplaces of ideas. Just consider the preconditions of this argument: There is simply no equivalent chinese forum where they openly discuss the misdeeds of their own nation, so the anti-American argument is globally over-represented.

Does it really matter why? I would much rather be under the soft control of a nation whose self interest largely consists of things that benefit me and increase my independence, rather than one that favors subjugation and domination.

To a degree, yes, it does matter, because you might need to also understand the context and motivations the other side operates on. If for nothing else, than just so you understand the risks and dangers to your position. And from a more individual standpoint, you might also want to understand the motivations that your government has because they are very unlikely to factor you at all.

You're saying that the US has taken a "a rising tide lifts all boats" approach and apparently that's a bad thing for people not in the US?

Nope, not at all. A rising tide lifts all boats, but the tide spends more energy lifting the bigger boats.

South and Central America would like a word about that.

Ah yes, self-determination is what they say to all those countries they illegally invaded.

Indonesia and China are hardly comparable here.

The US lost grip on China once the civil war ended, and it could be argued that one of the reasons why the KMT lost was, in fact, the lack of military support by the US.

Indonesia was just an example of how FDR admn. allocated 'responsibilities' to the new 'colonies'. China is a different case.

why are you getting down-voted lol

Thinly veiled nationalism still dominates Angloamerica. The proposition of any evildoing except the most blatant and undeniable one (like the Iraqi WMD case), triggers their self-defense instincts that make them defend their group cohesion and the social group they identify with.

The (post ww2) world is dived up for the US to take over and Africa is bread crumbs for the then lesser imperial Europeans is well documented.