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The thing is people keep making this assumption that we could just win if we tried harder or stayed longer or whatever else. We occupied Afghanistan for more th

The thing is people keep making this assumption that we could just win if we tried harder or stayed longer or whatever else. We occupied Afghanistan for more than two decades. And it's not like we were there just occasionally droning people. We were actively engaging the Taliban with local proxies on a very large scale - total deaths were in the hundreds of thousands. And we spent in excess of $2 trillion on that war! For some scale we spent $4-$5 trillion (inflation adjusted) in WW2. These are absolutely massive efforts. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was bungled, but the problem was being there in the first place. If Bin Laden was ever there, obviously a wide scale occupation is going to cause him to leave. So the entire idea was just nonsensical to begin with. If you're ever going to enjoin a war, you need a realistic plan. For these wars that plan did not exist, and we ended up trapped in inescapable quagmires. Getting out of Ukraine after just a few years is perhaps the smartest military decision we've made in decades. And I disagree with you in regards to overall safety in the coming era, but from an economic point of view. As the world becomes more multipolar, the US's ability to export our inflation will fade, and along with it the endless printing of funny money. War is much more difficult to carry out when you have to really pay for it. Keep in mind that in spite of being on the winning side in WW2, that war practically bankrupted Great Britain and led directly to the end of the British Empire. Money being "real" completely changes the nature of war.

Pigalowda 2y ago
“Printing of funny money”? Are you referring to the Fed purchasing mortgaged backed securities after the financial crisis of 2008? What do you mean when you refer to “real” money? A gold backed currency? Currency is an abstraction of value. “Real” money doesn’t make that much sense. Who is going to decide what is real? Great Britain after WW2 is not analogous to the US now. The US has 300+ million people, a vast military, a huge land mass with enormous natural resources, the world reserve currency, and a leader who has followers who don’t understand the US rules based world order. GB didn’t collapse all on its own. The US with its strength after WW2 coerced them and the French into following its lead. Eisenhower sided with the Soviets regarding the Suez for example. The Breton Woods agreement strengthened the US currency at the expense of everyone other signatory. Reinventing the world into a multipolar mercantilist patchwork of competing powers is not going to be some brilliant strategic maneuver. It’s creating a power vacuum. I really want to be wrong but this is more like the Asimov Foundation series. The empire didn’t forget how their technology worked, it forgot how their system worked. Otho is not going to save the US or make it great. He’s destroying the current system and replacing it with an older inferior one. Strength through contraction requires intelligence and sophistication. Not blundering oafish incompetence.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I wasn't exaggerating when I said we spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan alone. But that number should send off your bullshit detector. That's $15,000+ from every single household in the US. Even spread out over time that's an obscene amount of money. So where did the money come from? Well the US gets money/debt by selling treasuries. And the largest 'private' buyer of those treasuries is the Federal Reserve who has infinite money. The war was funded by money printed out of thin air, funny money. But of course there is a cost - inflation. But the US has historically been in a unique place owing to a number of factors to export our inflation [1], particularly after our bait and switch with Bretton Woods. But many of those factors (largest consumer economy, global reserve currency, petrodollar) are on the way out or already, more or less, done with. And as those factors decline we get economically closer to Bahrain, Maldives, Laos, and Cape Verde - our distinguished economic peers in terms of debt:GDP ratios. So long as we don't just replace the USD with the Yuan, this will be the case for all countries in a multipolar world. Money having value dramatically changes the cost:reward ratio of war. For instance I think this is the main reason China is implicitly accepting of a worsening situation in Taiwan. It's not because they don't think they could win, but because they don't want to pay for it. And so a deteriorating situation is seen as more desirable than a costly war. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation
  - Pigalowda 2y ago
    You really want me to acknowledge that $2T so I will. The Republican Party started 2 wars and spent trillions of dollars. The democrats spent billions in dollars in military aid. Neither party achieved their objectives, both parties had their positions reversed after they were electorally defeated. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of these mistakes. And now you think the US should default on the debt so money is worth money again? Is that not tautological? And the argument is that war should be expensive? If the US can default on this old debt and create dollar 3.0 what would stop it from defaulting on this new “real” money in the future? New money, new wars, new debts, new defaults.
    - 2y ago

Pigalowda 2y ago

“Printing of funny money”? Are you referring to the Fed purchasing mortgaged backed securities after the financial crisis of 2008? What do you mean when you refer to “real” money? A gold backed currency? Currency is an abstraction of value. “Real” money doesn’t make that much sense. Who is going to decide what is real? Great Britain after WW2 is not analogous to the US now. The US has 300+ million people, a vast military, a huge land mass with enormous natural resources, the world reserve currency, and a leader who has followers who don’t understand the US rules based world order. GB didn’t collapse all on its own. The US with its strength after WW2 coerced them and the French into following its lead. Eisenhower sided with the Soviets regarding the Suez for example. The Breton Woods agreement strengthened the US currency at the expense of everyone other signatory. Reinventing the world into a multipolar mercantilist patchwork of competing powers is not going to be some brilliant strategic maneuver. It’s creating a power vacuum. I really want to be wrong but this is more like the Asimov Foundation series. The empire didn’t forget how their technology worked, it forgot how their system worked. Otho is not going to save the US or make it great. He’s destroying the current system and replacing it with an older inferior one. Strength through contraction requires intelligence and sophistication. Not blundering oafish incompetence.

somenameforme 2y ago
I wasn't exaggerating when I said we spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan alone. But that number should send off your bullshit detector. That's $15,000+ from every single household in the US. Even spread out over time that's an obscene amount of money. So where did the money come from? Well the US gets money/debt by selling treasuries. And the largest 'private' buyer of those treasuries is the Federal Reserve who has infinite money. The war was funded by money printed out of thin air, funny money. But of course there is a cost - inflation. But the US has historically been in a unique place owing to a number of factors to export our inflation [1], particularly after our bait and switch with Bretton Woods. But many of those factors (largest consumer economy, global reserve currency, petrodollar) are on the way out or already, more or less, done with. And as those factors decline we get economically closer to Bahrain, Maldives, Laos, and Cape Verde - our distinguished economic peers in terms of debt:GDP ratios. So long as we don't just replace the USD with the Yuan, this will be the case for all countries in a multipolar world. Money having value dramatically changes the cost:reward ratio of war. For instance I think this is the main reason China is implicitly accepting of a worsening situation in Taiwan. It's not because they don't think they could win, but because they don't want to pay for it. And so a deteriorating situation is seen as more desirable than a costly war. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation
- Pigalowda 2y ago
  You really want me to acknowledge that $2T so I will. The Republican Party started 2 wars and spent trillions of dollars. The democrats spent billions in dollars in military aid. Neither party achieved their objectives, both parties had their positions reversed after they were electorally defeated. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of these mistakes. And now you think the US should default on the debt so money is worth money again? Is that not tautological? And the argument is that war should be expensive? If the US can default on this old debt and create dollar 3.0 what would stop it from defaulting on this new “real” money in the future? New money, new wars, new debts, new defaults.
  - 2y ago