[0xDEAFBEAD]

Well sure, I might as well link you to info on the 2008 crash to demonstrate that the modern US economy is just as broken.

Here are some interesting facts from the Wikipedia page you linked:

* "The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world" -- i.e. we were doing really well, as I said: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Gr...

* "with the devastating Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929" -- sounds like it didn't have much to do with a failure to defend Europe

* If you're going to try to argue that tariffs worsened the Great Depression -- I'm not advocating tariffs. I didn't vote for Trump btw. I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them. (I don't advocate a gold standard either.)

* "Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs." If you think the New Deal ended the depression, which some economists appear to believe, that's basically an argument for the "welfare state" course I'm advocating.

* As far as I can tell, literally no one argues for the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance:

>The precise causes for the Great Depression are disputed. One set of historians, for example, focuses on non-monetary economic causes. Among these, some regard the Wall Street crash itself as the main cause; others consider that the crash was a mere symptom of more general economic trends of the time, which had already been underway in the late 1920s.[3][8] A contrasting set of views, which rose to prominence in the later part of the 20th century,[9] ascribes a more prominent role to failures of monetary policy. According to those authors, while general economic trends can explain the emergence of the downturn, they fail to account for its severity and longevity; they argue that these were caused by the lack of an adequate response to the crises of liquidity that followed the initial economic shock of 1929 and the subsequent bank failures accompanied by a general collapse of the financial markets.[1]

Fun fact: Chaos in Europe might have even been good for the US economy:

>According to Christina Romer, the money supply growth caused by huge international gold inflows was a crucial source of the recovery of the United States economy, and that the economy showed little sign of self-correction. The gold inflows were partly due to devaluation of the U.S. dollar and partly due to deterioration of the political situation in Europe.[56]

I advocate a Swiss foreign policy for the US. We should have a much stronger default towards neutrality, and stop being so eager to sanction so-called "bad actors" like Russia. That will strengthen the USD as a reserve currency, since central banks won't feel as much need to diversify away from it in order to beat sanctions.

[silver_silver]

> the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance

Not caused by, but the economy didn’t fully recover until all the wartime production started, and the measures that had been put in place to curb unemployment had been short term solutions with only a limited effect

> I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them.

You see the problem with you people is that you’ve strong armed your way into everyone’s business for the past century, trying to change cultures and ways of life, far beyond simple alliances - only to now turn around and abandon your so-called allies as soon as they become inconvenient for you. I say this as an African living in Europe who experienced firsthand one of your regime changes and subsequent cutting of ties when the new regime didn’t align

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>Not caused by, but the economy didn’t fully recover until all the wartime production started, and the measures that had been put in place to curb unemployment had been short term solutions with only a limited effect

Are you seriously arguing that we need military commitments so we can hope that war breaks out right around the time of an economic depression?

It seems to me that you've basically conceded the point that the US doesn't benefit from its involvement in Europe, and its involvement is simply out of misplaced idealism. I'm just saying, we should stop doing the idealism.

We both agree that the idealism is misplaced and America is a nation of fools. All I'm saying is you should accept the logical consequence of your position, and agree with me that us fools should stop wrecking everything in the name of "freedom and democracy" nonsense.

>You see the problem with you people is that you’ve strong armed your way into everyone’s business for the past century, trying to change cultures and ways of life, far beyond simple alliances - only to now turn around and abandon your so-called allies as soon as they become inconvenient for you. I say this as an African living in Europe who experienced firsthand one of your regime changes and subsequent cutting of ties when the new regime didn’t align

Europeans mostly complain about our influence on the continent, despite 80 years of peace and prosperity post-WW2. If that's not enough to please them, nothing ever will be.

But in any case: We are very bad at foreign policy and we should do less of it. That's my position. We aren't going to get any better.

The post-WW2 experiment, initiated by Dwight Eisenhower, to have a more interventionist foreign policy, has been a failure, and at this point everyone agrees on this. Most of all, it has been a failure for the USA -- our relative GDP has fallen, meaning the rest of the world got rich quicker than we did. (This demonstrates how we have been manipulating the global economic system for our own benefit, naturally.)

As a voter, I don't have the capability or wisdom necessary to reform the US foreign policy establishment. Best I can do is to hope for less foreign policy.

Everything is always America's fault, as you yourself say. No other countries have agency or responsibility. For example, America is the only country that ever seeks to influence others.

America is the only country which seeks to ally with leaders that are aligned with it. Other countries don't care whether their partners are on the same page or not. This is a uniquely American trait. Other countries just choose who to ally with based on whether they like the design of another nation's flag.

Regardless of how things go with e.g. Ukraine, America will always to blame. We will be to blame no matter what we do. So we might as well focus on helping ourselves, and mind our own business.