Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed and renewed repeatedly.
America permanently traded away basic freedoms for the bogus promise of safety in the shadow of fear. And the Supreme Court was too scared to stop it despite its obvious constitutional problems. Crying eagle photos in chain-emails were sufficient propaganda to keep it in place.
It wasn’t just the GOTW. It was much of the 20th century from World War I onward. Each step led to further centralization of government, a larger and larger security apparatus, and more and more foreign entanglements. We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.
> We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.
The current military "excursion" seems to be transitioning the US out of being an empire.
>Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed
I've been seeing plenty of Americans cheering on temporary safety over essential liberty since then, and I can't even provide examples without getting [flagged].
This seemed obvious to me at the time. It was hard to understand why people in the cultural mainstream let themselves get swept up in it. I felt like I lost my country, back then, as they pretty much all went off into crazyland together.
How old are you? I think a lot of younger folks don't fully adjust for two important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common, and 9/11 was committed by the second group of Islamic terrorists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center. There were real excesses, and I ultimately agree with you that many of them were predictable in advance, but there was also no feasible version of a response that did not go at least a little into crazyland. It was a crazy time, we genuinely didn't know what was necessary to keep the country safe.
Yes. History will record that bin Laden won.
There's a pre-9/11 book about bin Laden, "The Man Who Declared War on America".
Bin Laden was interviewed.
Consider the situation at the end of the Clinton administration. The US was at peace. The Soviet Union was gone. The US got along with China and Russia. No major enemies remained. The federal budget was balanced. Bin Laden looked at that, and realized that America had to be weakened before it could be defeated. That was his plan.
we're at the stage of the cycle where we know things are wrong but we don't care enough to do anything about them. unfortunately, it might not be until we live through the consequences that we can muster the energy to care enough again.
>in 1776 the American colonists rebelled against what they saw as the arbitrary and tyrannical British monarchy.
although they didn't just do that, the American founders also articulated the point that the article seems to present as some new insight. That permanent foreign military involvements and the state it requires will eventually diminish freedom at home, that was why many of them wanted to avoid emulating the British empire.
Given that papers like the Economist used to regularly be staunch defenders of these interventions until they went wrong, and only ever seemed to disavow them for their practical outcomes rather than in principle they might want to do some reflecting on that.
> the Economist used to regularly be staunch defenders of these interventions until they went wrong, and only ever seemed to disavow them for their practical outcomes rather than in principle they might want to do some reflecting on that
Can you link a couple of examples? Presumably those articles should be easy to find on economist.com
Yes, they ran a leading editorial titled "Why war would be justified", arguing that confronting Saddam Hussein was "the least bad of the limited range of available options".
However, they reversed position in 2007, calling the invasion a debacle.
I just don't buy this narrative. What primed the USA for decline was it's new allergy to manufacturing, addiction to social media, and Trump taking his spot as POTUS twice. If anything, these wars were something for everyone to worry about, which involved actual critical thinking. They were nowhere near the root cause.
What do people really think about Mearsheimer's book? (John Mearsheimer, co-author of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy") His analysis and interpretation of the Jewish lobby provide excellent answers to a lot of questions. Perhaps this is a topic that isn't easy to discuss openly?
I don't want to make a sweeping statement that the U.S. is Israel's lapdog, but it is true that regarding many policies—especially those concerning the Middle East—the U.S. is essentially swayed by Israel.
Of course, right now J.D. Vance might represent a kind of domestic counter-force in the U.S. that leans more toward 'America First' rather than prioritizing Israel. Rubio is also a more pragmatic individual, and Trump is not your traditional politician who just blindly follows Israel's orders. Unfortunately, Trump might lose the next election, and the Democratic Party will absolutely revert the country back to its past status as a vassal state to Israel."
It's actually incredible that you can share that bottom paragraph with a straight face after we just went to war with Iran.
Let's discuss it openly, as you prime: how do you contrast what you just shared with the war, and Israel's actions after the agreed to ceasefire and declaration of war's end?
It arguably polarized the public, paving the way to today's sharp ideological divisions, because political differences suddenly were treated as matters of life and death compared to the laid-back '90s.
Seriously? Are we really trying to debate politics & get in flame wars in comments here on HN? That not what we come here for. That’s not what we’re expecting to see in the #1 position when we log in.
Before conservatives hurled TDS at democrats they called them unpatriotic when they said the war on terror would undermine civil liberties. Its rather annoying to see a title like this.
There's always some kind of monocausal influence claimed, but really that was like the Boer War in the early 1900s. America was certainly at top power in the last twenty years, but its alliance was already fracturing. The Western NATO members were pushing more of their productive capacity into social services and forming strong dependencies on Russian fossil fuels. China's ascendance also meant that the encirclement that US's presence in Europe + Taiwan + Japan (and those governments themselves) kept was going to need to be extra tight.
But Europe couldn't keep herself together, Taiwan was constrained by circumstances to not defence-spend-up and Japan is just moribund despite attempts to rebuild. Realistically, the US kept everyone together for some 40 years after the Berlin Wall fell and that's a pretty good run. Two generations in "Whitey's on the Moon" is a resurgent and wide culture, and China outproduces any other nation while domestically and internationally repudiating that culture.
Perhaps we were doomed to this path by the inexorable nature of success. Two generations have been born and enough time has passed that people have forgotten what it is like to fear the "awesome Soviet threat". The modern empire was a loose confederation of US-Europe and the East-Asian satrapies with a capital in DC perhaps but other capitals in London and Paris as well. And just like that Boer War showed the old British Empire could bleed so will Iran have done the same this time.
Doubtless when the need arises we will sweep away environmental law and historical protection law in order to build our factories but already the appetite for war is gone from America. Why Europe couldn't keep herself together and why America couldn't retain the alliance and why the modern Not-Empire fell will probably be written about, but I think it's worth remembering Kipling at the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria who was then queen over an indomitable empire:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Or in the more elementary school warning manner: "This too shall pass". For my part, I certainly hope that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" and that means our mighty opponents should not prevail because that is not their way of life. And certainly I do not think that lashing out at our allies or attempting to take for ourselves land which is nonetheless in this larger Not Empire is the way to ensure that.
At best, I hope that the Iran War teaches us where we are weak and we are wise enough to learn this, and I hope that the Not-Empire heals and order is restored in this world.
In democracy, there is a distinction between peacetime power and wartime power, and in a wartime power state, there is an inherent affinity with authoritarianism. After 9/11, the political language in the United States saw a revival of terms like 'state of emergency' and 'enemy within.' The moment the government is granted the authority to define who the 'enemy' is, the gun inevitably turns toward the citizens. The reason is simple: those in power come to see the state as an extension of themselves, and anyone who speaks against them becomes labeled as the 'enemy.'
On top of this, the limitations of the petrodollar system are becoming increasingly apparent. When it worked well in the past, economic distribution could be used to suppress dissatisfaction — the American middle class generation is a case in point. But as dollar hegemony weakens and resource allocation becomes more difficult, the ruling class typically begins to replace economic rewards with emotional rewards like fear and hostility. They point fingers and say, 'Your enemy is these people.' When the system cannot grow the pie, the most efficient resource allocation for authoritarianism is to forcefully suppress internal divisions through coercion. Perhaps the dollar system itself might be a fundamentally flawed system.
I subscribed to the economist from ~2008 for 10+ years before I cancelled. I'm mostly a centrist but admit to leaning libertarian these days, I think both sides do not represent "democracy" anymore, I do not trust the Democrats any more than Republicans in this regard. One only has to look at how the Democrats have turned California into a single party state to stop taking serious their tropes about anyone endangering "Democracy" more than they have when they've got a chance. Reading this article reinforces that I've only saved money and had time for other things than reading these thought pieces from biased echo chamber academics.
It's interesting that decades into this we are still calling the massmurder and pillaging of dozens of countries, turning entire geographic regions into war ridden wastelands with slave markets, a "war on terror". Meanwhile the leaders of those so-called terror groups are praised and invited to ALL the western capitals.
That isn’t what happened. You are inter alia combining the loony but causally inevitable ‘war on terror’ with … the Arab Spring (which Assadist - Putinist propaganda has linked in your mind to imaginary Libyan slave markets) Ask you preferred AI how many Kurdish language universities there are in the world and where they are and what their students think of your imaginary Putinist antiyankee brain slurry.
I mean JD Vance is in Pakistan saying he's as close to the military junta there as his own wife, stirring up unnecessary pain at a full on mass unplanned genocide (I'm referring to the partition of India).
People claim Israel has America by the balls and that's probably true.
The other country that has us by the other ball is Pakistan.
The partition of India feels close to when you burn food and instead of washing the pan properly you just throw it in the dishwasher hoping it will sort it out somehow.
It isn't exactly the inability of the dishwasher to dissolve crimes against cuisine where the problem is rooted.
Calling it the “partition of India” makes it seem like it was imposed on India rather than being a product of the 1940 Lahore Resolution where Jinnah led calls for a separate Pakistan.
And in retrospect, it was a huge boon to India and Bangladesh to separate themselves from Pakistan.
It was a boon economically but people died. Millions of people died due to the actions of a few aristocrats and religious zealots. Probably the greatest humanitarian crisis in the last millennium.
And the partition of India is the well accepted term for the event. I'm not going to be drawn into some post colonial syntactic argument in a discussion about the very real deaths if very real people as well as the human tragedy of the subsequent forced displacement from land people had lived in for thousands of years.
Jinnahs argument with the Indian Congress was because someone sang a song once referencing a Hindu goddess from a novel. It's honestly bananas and difficult to understand especially when his own daughter lived in India after partition
That my every movement is known to Google, Meta, Apple, et al, is much more disturbing than any autocratic effect of the dismal Patriot Act. The idea that ‘the state’ is the thing to fear, or even worth a moments’ thought, is basically childish and premodern. Witness eg the apotheosis of Snowden for revealing nugatory CIA corner cutting … in the same historical period when the above mentioned are completely hoovering up and relentlessly analyzing every datum about every American.
Those corporations are certainly to be feared, but they don't have the power to impose violence or prison on you. The state does. It was the state that forced Snowden into exile. It is the state that is detaining people for the crime of walking out of Home Depot while speaking with an accent. Both must be kept in check.