Don't have anything against USA, but a world with a single superpower is prone to bullying and abuse by the said superpower. Many of us just want a peaceful world, and if that needs to be multipolar, so be it
>Right. The one who participates in and wins the most wars or murders the most people becomes the superpower.
If merely winning the most wars and murdering the most people automatically made one a superpower, then the United States would not have become a superpower, because they did not win the most wars, nor did they murder the most people, at the end of World War 2, when they gained superpower status.
You're trying so hard to be cynical here that you're abandoning rationality. I'm no fan of American military hegemony, or superpowers in general, but you make the US sound like a Mongol Khanate which is just absurd. The world is more complex than "whomever stands on the biggest pile of heads wins."
>States would not have become a superpower, because they did not win the most wars, nor did they murder the most people, at the end of World War 2, when they gained superpower status.
The US suffered less casualties than all the other major powers (USSR, China, Germany, Poland, Japan, France, Italy, UK) in WW2 and their infrastructure was not destroyed. So kill/death ratio and net destruction are quite indicative of the outcome.
Which country would you guess has committed the most large scale invasions and longest lasting wars since world war 2?
>you make the US sound like a Mongol Khanate which is just absurd
That is indeed an absurd strawman. Did the Mongols not achieve their super power status because of how successful they were at mass murder?
Your analysis entirely leaves out the most important factor which is: who are the “poles”?
China is an authoritarian, control-freak one-party-superstate that jails and kills political opposition. Will the world be more “peaceful” if there’s a multipolar collection of those?
I suspect some people are guessing that a multipolar world will be less interventionist (since the great powers might block each other from interfering too much) and therefore adventures like the Iraq war are less likely to happen again. This might arguably make the world more peaceful, though it might allow civil wars to continue for longer.
No idea if it's true or will work out that way, but it's one hypothesis I think is out there.
Sure, the downside of China's rise is that authoritarian states have more legitimacy, but it's not like the western powers did much about those states back when they were the hegemons, so I'm not sure if the argument carries much weight either.
But that's not what happened during the cold war. The US and Soviet Union both fought over allies, influenced affairs in other countries, engaged in proxy wars, etc
You say "block intervention"... how does that work? That sounds like a proxy war to me... like the korean war, or vietnam, or afghanistan in the 80s. It's not peace, it's just bloodier.
The world is more peaceful today without the Soviet Unions fight for influence.
China is less imperialistic and appears to mess less with other country affairs. China never gave support for a dictatorship in my country. USA also jailed and persecuted the Black Panthers and had the macarthism. Their 2 political parties which are able to win elections sometimes appears to be very similar, at least about their foreign policy which impacts the world.
The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.
Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.
Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.
> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
How so? I don't think so. AFAICS - and I lived in the US for a decade and would do so again, I have no beef with the country, just saying what I think I see/know - the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.
It's hard to prove or disprove your 2nd paragraph claim since we cannot have the experiment. I think that while you can certainly (as always) find plenty of examples in support the opposing side won't have any difficulties either. Overall the statement is way too fuzzy and broad to be either attackable or supportable.
> Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen
Sounds like a vote for a global dictatorship to me.
> the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.
That’s not true at all, at least not in historical context. The US is the most powerful country in the world never to build an actual empire. It’s conquests are limited to part of Mexico, and some pacific islands. It’s predecessor, Great Britain, colonized India, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and turned China into a vassal state. The would-be challenger Germany occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, etc.
The US is interventionist—it intervenes in the political affairs of other countries to perpetuate the status quo. That’s very different from being expansionist or Empire-seeking. Take Iraq for example. The US toppled the government. But did it colonize the country? Annex the oil fields? Turn the oil over to domestic oil companies like Exxon? No. (Most of the development rights went to BP, a British company!) The US spent far more on Iraq then it got out of the country. That’s not how an Empire operates.
It's a fallacy to think of global affairs as a competition for some funny vague rank or doing good or bad, and of figures that represent power as tragedies characters that aim certain things and act in accordance with their stereotypes. It's a game of economics. Rest is rhetoric.
> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
If I cure a 1000 people and kill 1, in still an evil killer. It's not like some kind of game system where karma is a single number. You can help some people and be abusive to others, and those will never balance out unless there's a strict cause-effect relation between them.
(This is a quirky and rough post written late at night during a break from coding, so be forewarned...)
For example Europe used to be what we'd call multipolar, but today with the EU (sadly minus Britain for now at least) it's non-polar. OK, Germany is the biggest and most powerful, France after, but they aren't hegemonic and they must abide by the rules of the wider EU.
The US-led post WWII international order has probably been the closest thing yet to a global non-polar situation, so it's sad to see the US turning way from its own creation. To me, there should be more international harmonization and rule-making, which of course can only happen at the expense of some loss of national solidarity (the cost of any treaty) but which also can confer global rights and privileges.
I'd hope to see the world develop to become more like one huge EU. Just as countries wish to join the EU, they would hopefully wish to join the World Union. To do that they'd have to meet standards, and those standards would provide beacons, giving direction and purpose to countries that still had a long distance to travel.
So it couldn't be just like the EU all of a sudden of course. For example you can't just have a global Schengen Area for total free movement, you'd crash the system and get too much backlash, but you could start with, say, freedom of movement within some areas. So, imagine all OECD countries as one free movement area. I'd be so psyched! Wouldn't you? You could live in many places, your freedom would be massively expanded. And because OECD countries have similar levels of wealth, disruption would seem unlikely. Then you could expand from there however it were possible to other countries, but a larger total area would be better at absorbing immigrants because there would be more places for individuals or groups to discover niches they could fill.
(As an aside, I find it hard to understand how people who call themselves libertarians can be against freedom of movement. Likewise, people believing in "universal human rights of man" but only if you happen to be a citizen of their country. It seems almost like, say, a Christian telling you they'd only extend forgiveness and agape love to people from their own family, circle, or region, but sadly this is also common. I'm writing this from Seoul, by which I mean to argue that today we are all neighbors. Hello, neighbors^^)
Anyway, if we want a non-polar world, things like the WTO and UN, instead of being disparaged for their flaws, should be improved and expanded. To gain greater access to the global market, or areas within it, the World Union could stipulate that human dignity be maintained (even continuously improved), that rights of individuals be protected, and even that democracy, perhaps with local characteristics, be the system of government for those who wished to join. Perhaps China could keep its bureaucratic meritocracy ideas and still join, but not without approval from the country's citizens.
Advantages of joining could include things like open markets, common issuance of bonds, common protection against catastrophes, some kind of common currency mechanism with room for monetary policy to be either joined or governed by shared rules and principles, so that things like devaluations or interest rate settings could reflect local conditions but also jive / be in harmony with global economic trends. There could be levels of membership. Partial members. Pathways toward membership.
We already have a global culture and plenty of important, even existential global problems. It seems like the time is nigh for a global harmonization, maybe a World Union, or "World Commons".
That word "nigh" is interesting because it's chunked together so often with the apocalyptic phrase, "The end is nigh," the "end" being the Christian Day of Judgement from the Book of Revelations.
The Book of Revelations, which just barely made it into the Bible at the Council of Nicea, has sadly become an enemy of global cooperation in many religious Christian people's eyes. This may have in part to do with the kinds of views in the runaway best-seller Left Behind series of Apocalypse and Damnation-porn fiction (the books are an evangelical Christian orgy of shadenfreude -- just watch the damned sinners get theirs hahaha), with a metaphysical conspiracy theory about the United Nations being a source for Satan's control of the world.
I'm not religious, but it saddens me that the Christian faith, which began as something hoping to be universal and seeing us all as God's creations and each with the Holy Ghost within us, so each of us as holy and sacred, how that beautiful faith can (yet again) be twisted toward parochial and even nationalistic ends, even without many of the people responsible realizing what they are doing. Why have we come here to metaphysical conspiracy theories? Because the United States, from where so much progress has come in so many ways, but also where the Left Behind books were such hits, remains the indispensable country when it comes to global union and harmonization. China, not so much.
Peaceful, not necessarily fair or free.