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by impossiblefork 427 days ago
I really don't think we do.

France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense. It really is good for essentially everyone aside from the US itself, once the disruption is over. Obviously we'll have some kind of crash though, but I think that was inevitable with or without this.
3 comments
enraged_camel 427 days ago
>> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense.

That was a different world. France and Britain today have nowhere the kind of force projection the USA does, via its military bases and aircraft carriers.

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impossiblefork 426 days ago
Yes, but the US basically had to intervene and tell them to stop using it. If that hadn't happened they wouldn't have.

The US probably wasn't in preventing an invasion of Egypt, but if not restrained I'm sure that Britain and France could have realised their objectives, and if they had had a continuous need to realise different changing objectives they would have retained more capability.

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dragonwriter 426 days ago
> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense

France and Britain used to be two of the world's largest imperial powers, and at any time you could plausibly claim France and Britain alone could defend global trade routes, Britain, at least, still was.

You really aren't making a case for it being an easy, cheap job.

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impossiblefork 426 days ago
Yes, but I think they can basically still do it. If they hadn't been buying F-35s they'd presumably have pushed their stealth fighter projects to be finished by now, and what more is really required?

I think these trade routes etc. will stop mattering rather soon. Batteries are coming and once that's here the oil trade's gone, and then you have no need to export things to get something to trade for it, so in a decade or so none of this will matter.

International trade will go from being mandatory to optional, and thus become much less important.

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dboreham 427 days ago
I don't think that's completely true. Wasn't the US Navy founded (by a Scotsman of course) because the US at the time lacked the funds to pay off the pirates? European countries did pay them off, hence didn't need as large navies.
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mistrial9 427 days ago
isn't this ancient history now? the formations in the last 50 years are large
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