Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'

>Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute.

I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.

>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.

This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.

There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273326

There is an unspoken alternative for dealing with being out-populated by rival states. That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war. These methods have been used by the Soviet Union in Ukraine, Germany/USSR in Poland, Imperial Japan in China, Belgium in the Congo. It continues to happen today, most openly in Palestine.

An important caveat to #2. Rising populations can only be leveraged into more power if they can be channeled into import substition. Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.

China has grown old before it grew rich. The past decade has been one of a collapsed houehold sector (and birth rate below the already gloomy concensus back in 2010), general deflation, and bright lights and conspicious technology achieved only through throwing government spending at ritzy projects - centrally planned growth and waste. Being unable to escape the domestic security agenda will forever neuter global aspiration, from currency to technology.

India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.

Relative gaps are smaller, but the persistance of gap is never more entrenched than ever.

That is not a decline. It is however a Great Game, not played with nations but with ideology and where the US and China are quite aligned. That game is less visible until it is seen.

Demographic stagnation? compared to who? everything is relative and I don’t think US demographics has it at a disadvantage over EU, China, Japan, South Korea, does it? So then who is left to take seriously as a competitor?

> Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.

If only there was a conflict somewhere with a perieved superpower, maybe a nuclear country or something that would be relatively easy to win without even entering into a direct altercation. Oh, wait!

America could’ve easily won the war in Ukraine by just ging away a bit more weapons, specifically long range missiles. It could even just tell European countries to give their long rhange missiles in exchange for a resupply for some plausible deniability.It could’ve been a bit more generous with intelligence.

Unfortunately, America elected Trump. A person who doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t directly concern him. If it doesn’t benefit (or hurt) him personally it might as well not exist. Which make it easy to sway his foreign policy. Russia is actively trying to buy him and he thinks it’s great. It’s going to be a very fast decline of American influence as more and more countries around the world will see that it takes very little to buy an american president, allegedly the most powerful person in the world. And if any petty dictator can buy him, what worth is his power?

The America First agenda is predicated by isolationism. You have a demagogue with whom nobody is willing to say "no" and an army of self serving sycophants lined up to try and win favors. The political messaging is all built around zero sum language and arguments, and toughness is demonstrated by punitive measures taken against any allies deemed "weaker" than the U.S. (basically everyone). Those who know where this will lead are unwilling to speak up and the rest follow. Everyone involved seems to be in it for short-term transactional benefits, and nobody seems to acknowledge or care about what the long term outcomes will be for the country.

I'd posit that it is trying to wrestle it back actually. It lost it when their industries went abroad. From a global perspective this is good because it makes peace more sustainable if the world is interlinked and interconnected. National interests being distributed all over. Alignment of incentives. The issue is that it is not without friction. People's interests don't align so flawlessly.

The knee-jerk reaction is protectionism but it is too late. The other parts of the world have caught up. And that is normal and sound. It rebalances the world. It is a new equilibrium. This is just the natural way for most closed systems where there is a gradient.

What is weird is that it is almost like watching a movie. Meaning that the current technological push into AI, energy and robotics is likely to spearhead us into a whole new kind of economics (post-money/post-work kind of). And probably requires to open the system (find new territory beyond the existing). The point is that it will probably offset the current protectionist trend.

Wondering how AI will affect governance...

I think the US is giving up control willingly and turning more isolationist. It has been building for some time but I do not thing it is forced. It is a deliberate policy shift turning away from trying to control and police the world. America is pushed in and on to other countries and societies that a retraction might be the best thing

I came to the comments to say exactly this. I think the reason is a combination of incompetence, ignorance, and greed.

It's because it's not worth the expense. Vanity is a hell of a drug, but it has its limits.

Hasn't this been the Russian agenda for decades? I don't think it's a secret, or a fringe theory. They have worked on it long term, and seemingly finding success now.

I don't think China is against this change, but their agenda seems to be more focused on international trade and internal growth, rather than specific strategy against the US.

The EU is definitely not benefiting from it in the short term. While some argue it needs this change in the long term, it is difficult to imagine that the EU wants it to happen so arbitrarily and quickly.

Those holding any meaningful power in the US are either benefiting from this change, at least in the short term or personally, or oblivious to it, possibly also due to influence from the agents of change.

It's an opportunity for other states to gain influence. And in particular for Russia to advance their geopolitical ambitions, since this is from their playbook.

It would be in the interests of the United States to alter the course, and regain the influence already lost. The leaders seem to have chosen to ignore her interests, though.

The "world", implicit in your comment, is the liberal world order. This world order worked for America (ie Americans) until it became apparent that it did not, at least in a political and cultural sense (in a material sense it is of course still working perhaps even too well). The greatest champion of this world order, the EU bureaucratic class, views Americans' play for their sovereignty with bewilderment and casts it as renouncing its leadership in the world, yet leadership is not just blindly following a path to ruin but instead forging ahead down new and promising paths. In this sense the US is indeed still "leading" and it is the EU that stands firm in its intransigence and refuses to follow the leader. Yet it need not be this way and the EU very well could follow the US away from the excesses of hegemonic liberalism. There are signs of change in the air. This is politically interesting and the eventual outcome is not at all clear.

On the other hand, the emergence of China, India, and to a lesser extent Russia (as a puppet of the Chinese) upon the world stage as independent actors, out of the shadows of Western domination, is another way in which the US is "losing control" but this is much less politically interesting in the sense that it was an inevitable and expected outcome. There is nothing the US has done, is doing or could do that would diminish non-Western ambition and agitation for power.

America is, and always has been, an isolationist nation - behaving like an island nation even though it's not an island (although it might as well be, given it has only two neighbors of little consequence).

It was dragged into the first world war (despite strong public aversion) because J.P. Morgan Jr started lending money to Britain and France to buy American steel, thus setting in motion a cycle of investment and production protection that eventually required boots on the ground.

It was dragged into the second world war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (and Germany's subsequent declaration of war, as it was obligated to do under its treaty with Japan).

It protected Europe and SE Asia in the post-war years in order to contain communism, which it feared more than anything else. Once that threat subsided, there wasn't much reason for it to continue with its overseas footprint other than inertia and protecting important trade routes.

Gulf Wars I was to protect oil prices (and because they already had the equipment for war), and Gulf Wars II was to be seen to be doing something about 9/11.

Now that Trump is in power, America is performing its "great reset" (which was going to come eventually), where it becomes isolationist again, sticking to the Americas (reinvigorating the Monroe Doctrine), and leaving everyone else to their own devices.

those things are usually hard to discriminate

You cannot separate monstrously expensive calamities like Vietnam or Iraq from the military-industry complex that is the foundation for the U.S.’s role as the defender of the west. So many thousands of lives lost or ruined, trillions spent. To say nothing of the millions of foreign civilians killed and maimed. The American people are sick to death of it. Some politicians smartly harnessed that sentiment.

Israel is rising to fill the void, and there are many indications that this is by design, all along...

I mean its hand has been forced. That's good imo, maybe my country will be able to regain its sovereignty after all.

Trump's project is to turn the US into a playground for oligarchs such as himself, like in Putin's Russia. It doesn't matter if the US becomes way poorer and weaker in the process. "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven".

Why should we control the world? It’s very expensive running an empire, and all it has accomplished is getting people around the world to hate us. Do you know how much people in my home country hate Reagan and Nixon (who opposed our independence because of some stupid alliance with Pakistan against Russia)? Much more than they hate Trump.

The Europeans want it both ways: they want the US to pay for and be responsible for policing the world, but to do it the way the Europeans want with them free to criticize the US and act morally superior the whole time. This act has become utterly tiresome.

Thank you. This is what I was looking for.

The Lancet had numbers around 600k, but that included the wider context of deaths due to the temporary collapse of society, medical services, electricity supplies, ongoing violence and insurgency, and so on.

The long consequence of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions was providing Russia with a pretext for its own interventions, from the various caucasus states to Syria to Ukraine.

Yes, it's on the low end of estimates and corresponds most closely to the US military's Iraq war logs that were leaked by Wikileaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab...

Still, "over 100,000" is technically correct if it's more than 100,000. Since this subject isn't the main point of the article and the Iraq war is generally acknowledged to have been disastrous, I suppose he chose a safe figure so as not to derail the article with disputed estimates at the outset.

Indeed it is. Madeline Albright admitted in an interview that at least 500,000 children died but "it was worth it."

The total toll must have been much higher.

[0]https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/27/im-iraqi-and-i...

There's a pretty famous website that tracks Iraqi civilian deaths:

   Documented civilian deaths from violence

   187,499 – 211,046

   Further analysis of the WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs
   may add 10,000 civilian deaths.

as of today

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

Yes, it is a very low-ball estimate. The more accurate estimate is that Iraq lost 5% of its population, and in many areas, Iraq continues to lose babies born with birth defects due to the use of depleted uranium.

https://psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf

Note that this report was filed in 2010, and the fatalities have continued since then.

Not really, it’s the lower end of what we can be confident about from direct evidence per things like the Iraq body count project. There are statistical estimates that are higher but they have very large error bars. Over 100k is completely defendable and plenty high that any reasonable person should be horrified by it!

They should but they're not. They are also controlled by the interests that control the US.

Europe could be relevant again if it only embraced China and gave NATO the finger.

Any specific examples you can speak to? Which countries? Who are they allying with?

I'll bite. What are those new alliances of significance? I mean real significance in military means, or trade, or industry?

In 1944 huge numbers of people, from a large number of countries, asked for a hegemonic world police stemming from a sole hegemon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference

We don't know much of it anymore with the decline of Europe, but for several centuries the dominant geopolitical goal of most countries on Earth was to defend themselves from European invasion. Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?

Diplomacy before the "world police" era involved a lot more war than you might be willing to stomach.

Allow? It just happens, and when you're the weaker part in the equation, there's not much you can do against it. Where Russia and the USA give up power, China will grab it.

A "world police" are useful to almost everyone (nations involved in international trade) for situations such as piracy or border enforcement on the high seas. OTOH being such police is a costly endeavor so most nations will do their best to avoid investment and get a free ride.

If it’s not the US, it will be China (or the EU if they’re up for it). The main question is how much chaos will there be during the interim.

It sort of happens because in the absence of a proper world police, when one county tries to steal another countries stuff/land it falls to the most powerful decent country available to stop it. See Hitler sending tanks into Ukraine and Putin sending tanks into Ukraine.

100%. They should just step aside and let all those theocratic shit holes arm them selves with more nuclear weapons and wipe each other out. Problem sorted.

Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.

Nah, AI is a massive money pit, and Starship has proven to be a dead end. The real tech revolutions of the moment are in energy production and storage and health care advances like mRNA and GLP-1. The US is actively self-sabotaging on both energy and health care at the moment.

  Wegovy and Zepbound have not been covered by Medicare for weight loss, “and they’ve only rarely been covered by Medicaid,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “They’ve often cost consumers more than $1,000 per month, some a lot more than that. ... That ends starting today."

  "“This is the biggest drug in our country, and that’s why this is the most important of all the [most favored nation] announcements we’ve made,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during the briefing. “This is going to have the biggest impact on the American people. All Americans, even those who are not on Medicaid, Medicare, are going to be able to get the same price for their drugs, for their GLP-1s.""

Unlikely.

Silicon Valley is great for innovating new "intellectual property," but they don't manufacture any real products any more.

China has entire cities which not only can develop IP, but they have the entire ecosystem collocated.

Catching up with them will be expensive and will need focus. Focus is not something the current president seems to excel in.

Well you can’t power fighter jets or tanks on renewables yet so there’s still that.

But I think this past year really changed the direction of the US and to a lesser extent the EU with respect to oil and gas versus renewables.

As the US has realized at the institutional level that China has secured a very strong position on refining rare earth materials into batteries and other green technology it is doubling down on oil and gas as the energy choice for the foreseeable future, climate change be damned. Not that China ever really cared about the climate, they just, for good reasons, wanted an alternative energy production source because even if they seized Taiwan the US Navy can bring oil and gas imports to near 0. Pipelines from Russia are sitting ducks too, so not much reprieve there.

US is putting $40 billion into Al Udeid and signing AI deals with the Middle East powers, and is close enough on a deal to legitimize Israel. Add Venezuela. You can see where this is going.

The EU politically wants to switch to green tech but it’s facing a problem which is doing so will result in effective deindustrialization since they would wind up buying most equipment from China including cars. The EU either did or is about to shelve the requirement that cars are EVs by 2035. I expect this to be fully repealed. While the EU likes to not mince words about US tariffs, they’re ultimately heading in the same direction. China had a $1 trillion export surplus. If the US isn’t buying their subsidized products who is? Brazil? Right now it’s Europe, but do you think Germany will let its manufacturing sector go away? If so I have a ticket to sell you to the next AfD rally. The product dumping from China is going to be too much and in a judo move the west will be able to use China’s manufacturing capacity against it. Nice factories you have there, too bad nobody buys anything you make (relatively speaking).

So the EU is sitting between two oil and gas energy superpowers oh and the Middle East is just around the bend. Politically they’ll still work on climate change initiatives but as push comes to shove, and with China overplaying its hand with export controls on rare earth materials and creating more panic in Brussels (never mind China's support for Russia invading Ukraine), the EU will generally maintain an oil and gas industrial direction, if I were to guess.

I’m not pro gas/oil or anything like that. Drive an EV and love it. But that’s my fun armchair take on what’s going on here.

Because your national deficit is 70% of your gdp you kinda have to

> Why do we want the blame for the world’s problems

Because the US was complicit in creating many of them

It is difficult to see how in an environmental crisis the problem is under consumption of finite resources.

So, America is great at consuming, but if ratio of debt to GDP continues to grow, it's unsustainable for the U.S. Sure, China needs the U.S. to be a major customer, but it doesn't seem like things can continue as they're going now, especially as the willingness to ignore the extremity of the debt is largely based on good faith and credibility.

It's a trade imbalance. They send stuff out, they get nothing in. They could just continue to produce the stuff, then just set it on fire. No mass unemployment. Problem solved, no? It seems easier to do than to build an industrial base again.

Why assume rebalancing is mainly a demand problem but not a (slow) supply-constrained adjustment driven by demographics, capital stickiness, and institutional limits (in deficit countries)?

I read somewhere that the sentiment in Europe after WW2 was that Soviet had a bigger impact than the US. But narrative has shifted over time. I'd guess Churchill saw the US as a last resort, not the goto fixer. Happy to be corrected by someone who knows history, thouogh.

It seems the US wasn't in the war until two years after it started, and was drawn in due to Pearl Harbor. Even the protection of Atlantic trade was handled by the UK and Canada until 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...

I agree with your first point. The alternatives are a lot worse. its not going to be Russia (its not got the economy to do it) but China.

> The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.

And in most of Asia too where China is a very immediate threat.

> Even worse, if the right wing and right extreme talking points and policies in the US don't stop, we might face the (still) strongest military on the planet becoming the arm of a fascist state

That seems alarmist to me. Nationalist policies and rhetoric (and I have lived with worse than the US) do not lead to fascism that easily, especially when you have strong institutions.

Both political far sides are rocking the boat, not just rights even tho they are in power. It's both of them together and the dysfunction of their inability to compromise or reason on anything. Moderates or centrist voters in the USA have no representation and haven't for some time.

>The US are by no means innocent of terrorism and invasion of other countries, but at least with countries commonly counted as "the west", the US was a friendly nation.

>If we have the likes of terrorist states like Russia taking over, then we got some very dark times ahead of us.

Did you seriously write these two sentences one right next to the other and not see the hypocrisy in what you're saying?