[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?

[somenameforme]

This isn't about any given party or their actions. It's about a changing world order as well as the emergence of larger economies. In the future money printing will increasingly be met with little more than inflation. To some degree we're already seeing this. The COVID inflation is still nowhere near gone, let alone the dramatic increase it had on CPI.

[_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.

[somenameforme]

The legacy media is not a reliable source for his comments as they tend to take tidbits and intentionally take them out of context to mean something other than clearly intended, often to the point of absurdity. I couldn't find a transcript for that presser and would really like to know what the context was, and also what was said in those ellipses.

The timeline there corresponds 100% to probable fraud DOGE discovered at the Treasury and I'm fairly certain that's what's being referenced. They found something like $100 billion/year in entitlements being paid to accounts lacking a social security number or even temporary ID numbers.

EDIT: Ok yeah LLMs are actually good for some things. I found the 'transcript' (actually a video) here. [1] And yeah it's exactly what I thought. The media is lying as usual:

-----------

Reporter: On spending you found some maybe questionable expenditures or Elon Musk?

Trump: Not some questionable, the whole country looks like it's a fraud. It's fraud waste abuse but it's a tremendous fraud. And what Elon and his group of geniuses have found is unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And that's just in USAID. Soon we're going into education. You'll find the same thing but bigger. Soon we're going into the military and you're going to find a lot of bad things happening there.

Trump: You'll find it because our government has not functioned properly for many many years and we're going to make it function properly. We're even looking at treasuries there could be a problem. You've been reading about that with treasuries. And that could be an interesting problem because 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 of.

-----------

The thing the media ellipsed out is specifically him mentioning "you've been reading about", completely removed that the comment was in reference to DOGE, as well as that it was in the context of a laundry list of fraud discoveries. The context makes it clear that he was referencing the already publicized fraud DOGE found at the Treasury, which he then mistakenly called treasuries rather than treasury payments.

Note the reporter could have asked for clarification because his comment wouldn't make any sense when taken at face value (there was nothing written about fraudulent treasuries that people had been reading about, nor had DOGE investigated such), and this would have been a HUGE revelation if true. But she didn't want clarification, because she obviously knew what he was talking about, but wanted to lie with some plausible deniability.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pShlwrxzXtQ (around the 20min mark)