[Pigalowda]

The US made poor judgement in the invasion of Afghanistan and then leaving. Then with the invasion of Iraq and leaving. Now we make the same mistake with wartime support of Ukraine and abruptly cutting it off. US foreign policy is schizophrenic and we are wholly unreliable.

Now we are moving toward a multipolar world where regional powers with nuclear weapons can engage in conventional war. Perhaps moving back in time to great power struggles of the 19th and 20th century.

Nuclear non-proliferation is dead. As Pakistan’s leader so pragmatically said decades ago - “we will eat grass but we will have our bomb”. It is insane to not be armed at this point.

With Pax Americana now ended a more brutal world is going to emerge.

And MAGA supporters aren’t going to be some unshakable disciples. Once the economic reality sets in and there is enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt - they will tear themselves apart. Blame will be thrown and they will deny even knowing their messiah. The only way to stop an absolute electoral obliteration will be to suspend elections or completely suppress them.

Putin played his big Diplomacy game very well - but he might think Americans are a bit like Russians. They are not. Greed and prosperity hold this country together, not bonds of shared suffering. MAGA is doomed, the world is a more unsafe place, and we are all poorer for it.

[somenameforme]

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]

“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]

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

[Pigalowda]

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.

[somenameforme]

I don't expect the US will default on our debt. Rather I expect we will continue to print money endlessly. But what I am arguing is that the world becoming multipolar will mean that the result of that will be more in line with other countries who might try such things - which means you mostly just end up pumping up inflation.

What this means is that the US will need to gradually cut down on spending, and eventually work on also bringing down our debt, or at least our debt:gdp. As will other countries who have gone a bit too far down the funny money hole. Well that, or just enter into stagflation. And should this prediction hold true, then war is going to become much more difficult to wage in the future.

[Pigalowda]

It’s easy to talk about stagflation and have this little academic discussion. However when this political motivated recession drops your party’s popularity drastically - which will happen - what will you do? How will you keep the ball moving? Do you think it be done before mid term elections? Or are elections irrelevant now?

[_t9ow]

> I don't expect the US will default on our debt

This is tangential to your discussion, but it seems like Trump might be setting the stage for defaulting on US debt:

Forget Trump’s tariffs, the president’s bond market threat is worse (2025): https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/feb/16/forget-trum...

Excerpt:

“We’re even looking at Treasuries,” the president told reporters. “There could be a problem … It could be that a lot of those things don’t count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we’re finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.”

The fact that Trump is now talking about "very fradulent" activity in the treasuries increases the probability I assign to the event that his administration will default on US debt. He will justify it by claiming that many/most of these debts are not real, and the government therefore does not need to repay them.

When Trump says something like that, take him seriously.