We spent so much time worrying about foreign adversaries. But if a collapse were to come, it won’t be because we are invaded by a foreign power, it would be because half of the people can’t stand the other half.
> We spent so much time worrying about foreign adversaries.
The US government has a report on how the current US government was put in power by a foreign adversary, who is also heavily invested in polarizing US society as part of their strategy.
> We spent so much time worrying about foreign adversaries
You can't ignore the decade long psyop by Russia to destabilize democracies in the West, which the result is exactly that you can't stand each other anymore.
I think foreign information operations had a fair amount to do with why half the people can't stand the other half. I mean, the schisms were there. But Russia (and others, but primarily Russia) amplified the divide, a lot.
Not even half. Only about 1/3 of eligible voters voted for Trump. And many of them are feeling a little dismayed or betrayed at current behaviors (presumably because they are rubes and got scammed).
A little over 1/3 didn't vote at all.
A motived pushed back from virtually any part of the electorate -- they have the 2nd Amendment for a reason guys -- or a small push from established military officers could easily topple Trump.
Arguably the real risk is social media, since they're all in bed together now, and have a stated aim of owning the system. If you're gonna topple trump, you'd better have a go at the zuck, theil, and larry ellison, etc
I want to stress this is a bipartisan position in the US - there seems to be consensus that the overall system is in a state of crisis. And from a financial perspective they can't afford the Not-An-Empire spread through Europe and Asia.
It is interesting to take a step back and ask how it can end without a USSR style dissolution. If the left wing are genuine in their meme that the right wing supports the 2nd coming of Hitler it is hard to see how the country will hold together. Some sort of painful schism seems likely.
Someone is going to have to admit to being wrong, and there isn't a clear path to that. Although democracies do have a tendency to be much more socially robust than they have any right to be; even when the situation comes to literal blows.
> If the left wing are genuine in their meme that the right wing supports the 2nd coming of Hitler it is hard to see how the country will hold together.
It's not "the left wing" making that claim, but the whole world.
You have the current Trump administration repeatedly threatening to invade and annex multiple neighboring countries. There is no way around it.
Right, you’ve compiled a list of pre-WWI annexations and a random smattering of other military actions. In those cases, America was recapitulating European colonialism and great powers, in turn. If we broaden our scope to that list, we’re still left with lots of stuff that’s unpleasant but far from unprecedented.
Fast forward to WWII, when the modern prohibitions on annexation emerged, and you find two countries doing most of the military annexing. (And America doing virtually none of it, the exceptions being around ISIS in the Middle East, where we de facto annexed strongholds as military outposts.)
> If they are going after someone, tautologically, that someone is not an ally.
No one in their right mind would describe Canada or Denmark as anything other than staunch allies of the US. Trump's stunts forced the whole collective West to do a full 180 in their relations with the US.
If US allies are doing a full 180 because a democratic country elected someone a bit different then their US relations were founded on delusion and it was never going to end well for anyone. It is easy to fall into the trap of negotiating with a faceless bureaucracy but that isn't how democracies actually work. They rethink the basics from time to time. Particularly when they're under stress and the status quo isn't working. We all know that, democracy has been a thing for more than 2,00 years. This isn't a new thing.
I suppose ultimately it is a question for the US to debate internally how much to string people along; but my advice would be that it is better to root long term relations on a basis of common interests and basic power dynamics. Trump's approach looks pretty typical for someone with a lot of experience negotiating. You can hoodwink someone in good times or for tactical gain, but for a long term working relationship it in necessary to be straightforward about what the interests and goals are.
> If US allies are doing a full 180 because a democratic country elected someone a bit different (...)
The Trump administration is threatening countries with annexation and retaliation.
Elections isn't a magic powder that you sprinkle onto anything to make it good. Even Hitler was elected. And so was Trump.
If you elect a fascist dictator who threatens multiple neighbors with annexation and war, specially staunch allies, of course that the whole world automatically grows cold on you. You are a threat and you are threatening everyone.
You'll notice the election of Hitler didn't have much of an effect on German relations either; they re-fought the same war that they'd been fighting 20 years earlier. The big change was just that the Nazi edition German army was wildly effective compared to the version sent out in WWI.
The US launching random and unprovoked invasion or destabilising their neighbours is normal behaviour. Look at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars for example; or their strategy of provocation leading to the ongoing eventual proxy war against Russia.
If Canada or whoever think they're immune to that because ... who knows what reason makes sense to them then they are being aggressively stupid. They aren't magically immune to US military pressure. The way to achieve safety from the US is trying to convince their military to be less expeditionary, not to adopt appeasement strategies like the US's inner circle of allies tend to do. Although realistically I don't think the US is going to be invading anyone they are close to. The reason these countries are held closely is because when things get serious they tend to fold under US pressure without too much resistance.
> The US launching random and unprovoked invasion or destabilising their neighbours is normal behaviour.
It is not. In which parallel reality do you live where this is normal behavior?
> Look at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars for example;
Are you referring the multi-nation coalitions that built a consensus on military intervention?
Heck, the first gulf war was a coalition of 42 countries which follow a UN resolution after the Iraqui regime invaded a neighboring country. Is this your term of comparison?
And what are you talking about proxy war? Russia, much like Iraq, is trying to annex a neighboring country. If anything, the response is timid.
> If Canada or whoever think they're immune to that because ...
What the hell are you even talking about? Are you comparing Canada with Saddam Usein's Iraq? Are there UN resolutions targeting the Canadian government? What can possibly go through anyone's mind to even suggest there are parallels?
> Are you comparing Canada with Saddam Usein's Iraq? Are there UN resolutions targeting the Canadian government?
Yes & http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm - I don't know why UN resolutions would be a factor here. The UN was pretty up front that the invasion was illegal. The US doesn't have time for paperwork. There aren't major differences here. Both Canada and Iraq are sovereign countries, neither done anything to morally justify an invasion. The US has just as much right to go into either of them and if they care about outcomes they should avoid using the military.
> Are you referring the multi-nation coalitions that built a consensus on military intervention?
Yes. And having a gang assist doesn't justify a crime.
> And what are you talking about proxy war? Russia, much like Iraq, is trying to annex a neighboring country. If anything, the response is timid.
After 30 years of provocation as the US geared up for war with a country that is, we might note, a neighbour.
And we see in the aftermath why the Russian military had real concerns. The Ukraine invasion should have been a close parallel to Iraq. A vicious assault; local government folds and then everybody moves on and lets civilians start trying to pick up the pieces.
Instead it turns out that this was indeed something that the US was aiming for and they started ramping up the slaughter because they want to destabilise the Russians. If the US had a history of trying to promote peace and stability among their neighbours then a lot of that bloodshed would never have happened. We're lucky to have Trump back in the big seat pointing that out too. A lot of nervous warmongers in a shambles over that.
> Are you trolling?
Far worse; I'm empathetic with the poor people who were on the receiving end of US policy and and interested in moral consistency. I don't like casual hypocrisy that gets people killed.
> Instead it turns out that this was indeed something that the US was aiming for and they started ramping up the slaughter because they want to destabilise the Russians.
The US has been the main stabilizing force for Russia in this war, ensuring that Ukraine does not lose while also preventing Russia from disintegrating - driven by the same misguided and exaggerated fears that the US government had when the USSR was collapsing.[1]
Had the US wanted to destabilize Russia, it would have had a long list of steps to take to make the city-state of Moscow lose control over its colonized regions, primarily through economic sanctions to prevent Moscow from flooding the rest of the country with oil money to buy loyalties. When the USSR became unable to provide essentials like food and fuel to its population in the early 1990s, every major city and region took matters into its own hands, established local councils to manage essential needs, and outright ignored orders from Moscow until the central government became entirely impotent and ceased to exist in any meaningful way. From this grassroots level, they built a new Russian central government to replace the Soviet one. In the end, the USSR had shrunk to a few office blocks in central Moscow, while the populace had established a new country - the Russian Federation - everywhere around it.
The US tried to prevent the USSR's disintegration into self-governed regions then and is repeating the same mistake now by doing everything it can to keep the Russian federal government in control of the entire country. The narratives about the US "destabilizing Russia" are completely disingenuous fiction, hollow accusations with no substance.
It is amazing to look back at policy from before the USSR collapsed and see how much more sensible it was. That speech is a good example of how, when the US political class were taking the situation a bit more seriously, they understood that Ukraine was important to Russia's interests and they shouldn't be trying to align it with NATO. Had they maintained that attitude in the intervening period instead of the big push to expand NATO that actually happened then this bloody and tragic land war in Europe would have been avoided.
And saying this is stabilising Russia is ridiculous. I may as well go back to motorest and tell him to relax because at worst a US invasion is only going to stabilise Canada. So far the US is the most responsible party [0] for around a million Russian casualties and there are concerning factoids [1] coming out that we had a nuclear near miss.
[0] We're being treated to the dark comedy where Russia doesn't even need to negotiate with Ukraine to get the war ended, they went straight to the US.
Amazing? Far from it. The Chicken Kiev speech was widely seen as a major failure and embarrassment. Not only by his political opponents in the US, but also by the people of Eastern Europe, who were struggling to break free from Russian-controlled dictatorships that had been forced upon them at the end of the WWII. Instead of continuing to live in the prison camp that Gorbachev was offering to reform (with US support), a hundred million people in Eastern Europe regained freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and other basic human rights within months from Bush instructing them "not to rock the boat". The Chicken Kiev speech was quite a downgrade from Reagan's speech a few years prior, in which he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall and let people live as free human beings.
The US and its allies in Western Europe were not carving off parts of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR like some try to depict nowadays, nor did they have any interest in extending mutual defense guarantees to the nations that had just restored their independence.
The desire to live again as free people came first and foremost from within. After independence, membership in the European Council, the European Union, and NATO became the holy grails of foreign policy in most newly independent countries to secure permanent freedom and prosperity. The goal was to integrate with the free world as tightly as possible to make it as difficult as possible for Russia to tear them away again.
The "big push to expand NATO" that you keep repeating is a disgusting lie. Pick up the memoirs of Vaclav Havel, Aleksander Kwasniewski, Lennart Meri, Vytautas Landsbergis, or any other statesman of the era, and you'll usually find entire chapters dedicated to the immense struggle of entering European cooperation frameworks like the EU and NATO: how nobody wanted to see them there and the incredible lengths they had to go to just to be considered potential candidates.
Your entire frame of reference is just wrong. You don't get the basic push-pull factors that have shaped the relations in Europe - what happened, why it happened, and how it happened -, which leads you to blame victims and make excuses for aggressors.
In 1938-1940, Hitler and Stalin cooperated and destroyed every single independent country along a line that ran from the Atlantic coast of France to the Ural mountains so far in the east that they mark the border between Europe and Asia. A key to their success was the foolish belief by smaller nations in Wilsonian concepts of international law and neutrality. Not looking out for each other and failing to support nations under attack enabled Hitler and Stalin to pick countries off one-by-one at their convenience. Neutrality was a fundamental mistake that the generation of national leaders active in the 1990s sought to avoid repeating at all cost. Many of them were old enough to have personal recollections of pre-war Europe and its destruction, and as they write in their memoirs, that greatly influenced their attitudes toward European cooperation. The idea that they were somehow forced or coerced into this by the Americans is, first, not true, and, secondly, has no connection to the actual history and motivations that guided people. They were the most passionate group from the start.
Indeed it is not controversial. Even the USSR's last foreign minister Shevardnadze (1985-1991) and Russian Federation's first foreign minister Kozyrev (1990-1996) have said that they find nothing wrong with the way Eastern Europe joined NATO. According to Kozyrev, the fatal mistake in international relations was not applying enough pressure on Russia to transform it into a modern European country, as other nations did on their own while seeking protection from Russia.
I ask Kozyrev about a debate that has roiled the American foreign policy establishment in the leadup to this war. Did NATO go too far? On the contrary, he thinks it didn’t go far enough.
“Unfortunately, there are many wishful thinkers especially in academia here and intellectuals who have ties to Russia. They go to Valdai [a Russian think tank forum]. They consume caviar and vodka and are treated like kings by those who exist solely to manipulate them. This argument about NATO is just propaganda fed to Americans who then regurgitate it in their opinion and journal essays. The only real analysts who come here from Russia are dissidents. The rest are front people, just like in the Soviet Union, and they manufacture Western champions of the Putin regime, chumps and useful idiots.”
Eastern European countries that joined NATO were not, contra a lot of heated rhetoric on the subject, simply gobbled up by it. “They wanted to be in NATO, and at first America and its partners didn’t want to take them in. But they had no choice, because they couldn’t deny membership for qualified liberal democracies. The same way they can’t deny it for Ukraine.”[1]
Kozyrev is still alive and even has social media presence:
Maria Popova: The "Ru is afraid of NATO attack/encirclement" argument has been conclusively falsified for a while now.
Kozyrev: That is precisely what I was saying from the late 1980s. NATO presents no threat to Russia but provides free-of-charge security along its western borders. Putin's tyranny hates NATO as a tool for protecting democracies.[2]
I don't see any kind of schism/balkanization in our future. The federal government has its tentacles in all states and the states in turn rely heavily on it for big parts of their budgets. Any one that gets to the point of secession (highly unlikely), the federal government will just invade it on grounds of securing their many assets in the state and then proceed to depose of the seditious element.
Pissing off allies was part of the first failure mode:
"Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal."
That isn't the failure mode at all, that was given as the result of the failure (once it was already too late to reverse course). The next line which you forgot to quote was: "The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence."
Which is definitely not how the world is currently treating Trump.
Do you not think swelling deficits and an inability to pay the bills (the things actual spelled out as causes in that section of the article) are not something Trump is (ostensibly) trying to reverse more than any other president in recent memory?
No, it was part of the failure mode. The next line you quoted is the result.
> Which is definitely not how the world is currently treating Trump.
I don't know what world you're referring to, but the one I'm living on has a bunch of countries disregarding what the US president says and making plans that don't involve America.
> Do you not think swelling deficits and an inability to pay the bills (the things actual spelled out as causes in that section of the article) are not something Trump is (ostensibly) trying to reverse more than any other president in recent memory?
No, I do not believe Trump is trying to reverse the swelling deficits more than any other president in recent memory. In fact I believe he is doing quite the opposite, just as during his previous term when he swelled the deficit more than any other president in recent memory. Setting up a fake government agency with a joke name then claiming your actions are in the name of deficit reduction when they are obviously not, all the while torpedoing the economy and planning massive tax cuts to boost the deficit is not what I consider "trying to reverse the deficit". Previous presidents, who were actually serious about improving government efficiency, used the real government agency that already exists to do exactly that: the office of management and budget.
That’s the thing about war—if it goes on long enough, it eventually ends, because one side is unable to continue it. And if it’s the aggressor, then that stops them from continuing their aggression.
> And yes, ending the Russian-Ukrainian war is in fact de-escalation, even if giving Russia what they want is the outcome.
It's siding with the aggressor, and makes the soil more fertile for more such aggression.
So if I try to steal your baby, and you catch me and we fight, and it gets really loud and people are inconvenienced and all that, so someone steps in and says "stop fighting, both go on your way", and I leave with your baby, that's de-escalation? Not even in your dreams. You can only stoop to this from the ivory tower of not being affected either way, or thinking you won't be. You can only call this de-escalation when you are not the victim. You wouldn't do it otherwise, ever.
> Oil Shock: Scenario 2025 [...] At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12 percent of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry
Collapse or no collapse I just hope that somebody sets up a HN equivalent in Europe. Discussing technology in a meaningful and fun way becomes impossible when moral values diverge beyond recognition and this is now becoming our reality.
It can't be the UK or France because of their laws around platforms and while Wikimedia has picked Germany the EU as a whole is pretty vulnerable to anticompetitive lobbying for more regulations from the giants that can afford any regulatory barriers.
> Relative number of technology unicorns headquartered in Europe would be a good start.
You seem a bit confused. "Unicorns" are characterized not by technology but by coming up with novel business plans that can disrupt incumbents. The likes of Google and Apple are tech companies, but Uber, NetFlix, AirBnB, etc have tech as a secondary support role to what actually drives the unicorn status.
More nuanced, what characterizes a unicorn isn't even a successful business plan. Being able to fool a fat wallets investor to dump cash on your idea is the key aspect that makes and breaks a unicorn, and tech is an afterthought.
> Or number of bleeding edge tech industries you'd say "Europe" is leading (e.g. space, military, nuclear, AI, etc)
France is the world's second largest arms exporter in the world, ahead of Russia.
In the top 10 list of world's arms exporters, 5 countries are EU members.
Not bad, for a region that has offloaded it's arms industry to the US.
Also, does the US have anything that comes close to ASML? Perhaps a TikTok clone or an app to rent apartments counts more as tech than it, perhaps?
"Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal."
Maybe you think America is collapsing politically, but the four specific scenarios described here (economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, world war III) are not even remotely applicable today in February 2025. If Slate was trying to predict the future, they failed miserably.
It is not at all obvious to me that those scenarios are irrelevant today.
* The US is poised to strongly take Israel's side in a conflict with Iran, which could easily evolve into either a misadventure, oil shock, or WW3
* The US is poised to withdraw from NATO, ceding a significant amount of geopolitical clout to Russia in particular. This would undermine a bunch of our military efforts abroad, relegating them to the bin of "misadventure." To say nothing of the proposed acquisition of Greenland.
But none of the things have happened yet, nor are there any signs they're immediately about to.
They might happen any year.
And fortunately, Iran isn't doing anything belligerent at the moment -- they got their butts kicked last year and are missing a lot of their previous protection. And no, the US isn't "poised to withdraw from NATO". Nobody's even talking about that. I mean, a lot of bad stuff is going on, but withdrawal from NATO has not been in any news cycles.
I don't know how close to withdrawing from NATO the US actually is, but people are talking about it. The aggressive stance the US President has towards two NATO members makes it seem like it could happen soon.
Congress found the scenario credible enough to pass a law specifically making it more difficult for him to do unilaterally.
> But none of the things have happened yet, nor are there any signs they're immediately about to.
Proving the nonexistence of signs is not a position I would be willing to take as it is far too philosophically difficult to defend.
The reality is that both the Ukrainian and Iranian situations are far from an equilibrium; there don't need to be signs to know that dramatic changes are coming, we just can't tell what those changes will actually look like.
This is interesting with some quite prescient predictions especially on the date they could happen. But it is also wrong on some call outs. Still, it is sobering to see how there had been signs all along.
When giants like the US are falling, often there will be signs. These initial signs are never taken seriously and by the time the issue become obvious, the momentum has already built up. At this scale, once events are set to motion, no single entity can change its course. The time and specifics may differ slightly, but the outcome is, imo, inevitable.
People will struggle and attempt drastic measures. Yet I doubt it will help. If anything, the combination of pride and desperation is more likely to hasten a violent end.
The other side is that an empire can remain irrational longer than you can remain alive. There can be clear signs of impending collapse, but the actual collapse can be a year or a century away.
"... while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean."
Australians caving in to Chinese pressure. Yeah, right.
