jones wrote:
The point is China or any other country wouldn't be replacing the American role as the global pervasive hegemon ie in economic, military, political legal and cultural terms but in parts of it (mostly economic tbf), that much is clear by looking at the countries' respective histories alone at least for the West.
Even in subservient Germany there are commercial interests that won't ride America's horse forever with their eyes open watching American unilateral action damaging their accounts. The US are still making sure the tipping point won't be reached in the short term with their think tanks and lobby associations dominating all critical nexus in media and educational programmes but at some point something will have to give, especially given the more brazen nature of their moves in general and especially towards their allies in the post-Obama years. Stuff like this always seems like an impossibility until it actually happens, the situation in Ukraine is a perfect example for that.
For sure, American uni polarity that we’ve seen since the 90s is an aberration. We’re slowly going back to a more familiar setting within international relations but there’s no way for the American state to accept that as anything other than as proof of decline and they’ll be compelled to fight it.
However, other states have agency too in accelerating that trend and they’ll need to make tough decisions to put themselves in that position. None of this will be done with a shred of morality so I take it as read that most of the major world powers and quite a few smaller powers are not very nice. Ultimately the records will show that it’ll be decided by pure self interest so then the question is whether that inflection point has been reached yet and personally I don’t think it has.
Predicting the end of the US Empire is easy - it’s happened almost every other decade. And it’ll definitely end because the seeds have been planted. For instance, countering the dollar has been on the agenda for decades. Never mind Russia, even the EU had lofty goals of surpassing USD as the global reserve currency but ultimately they lacked the ability or the willingness to make tough decisions to make that happen despite at one point being a larger and wealthier economy than the US.
