Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by refurb 1216 days ago
US soliders’ corpses were dragged through the streets of Somalia.

The US bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.

At the time these were not viewed as minor interventions.

But regardless, compare to today - the US doesn't have troops in active war zones anywhere?

1 comments

> But regardless, compare to today - the US doesn't have troops in active war zones anywhere?

OK, let me state my argument a bit differently.

Imagine the state of the world follows a sine pattern with a 20 year period. On average over the long term, the mean is zero - but there are some 10 year windows of constant ascent, and some of constant descent.

But I think for an American who started paying attention to the state of the world just as the cold war ended, the period from then through to 9/11 was the sine wave rising. There weren't no wars, America couldn't possibly go a whole decade without at least one or two

The pandemic was, of course, a downslope on the sine wave. The people young enough not to remember the pandemic won't be writing NYT Op-eds until 2070 or so. Maybe we're about to see 10 years of relative prosperity - you never know!