Americans—including this author—believe that the international security order the United States constructed in the aftermath of World War II and has been the guardian of in the decades since then has been a remarkable era in human history. This unprecedented “long peace” has provided stability that has enabled not only Americans but most of the other eight billion souls with whom we share this small planet to enjoy greater increases in income, health, and well-being than in any other era of recorded history.
Yuck. This doesn’t even work if you’re just a propagandized USian. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Taiwan, Former Soviet bloc countries like Yugoslavia, Latin America, South Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, close nuclear calls, Israel, Reagan deindustrialization and financialization and the fact that the US was engaged in a literal “Cold War” and this is taught in American schools as a necessity to defend against a nation an entire ocean away from us.
There was no long peace, nazism was internationalized and wielded against the Soviets and now it has brought the world into the decadent stage of imperialism
Overall an interesting observation on China’s growth and differing viewpoint on diplomacy but still reeks of neoliberalism which in a way makes it even more credible.
Articles like these are very useful as a window into the psyche of the kind of person that is responsible for maintaining US imperialism. They often have a good material analysis combined with some of the most idealist nonsense you’ve ever heard to justify being on the wrong side of the class struggle
welp, time to change the measure
they cheated!
The article is referring to GDP (PPP), so this has been true for a while now.
The Tricontinental has an in-depth discussion on the fall of US hegemony, if anyone’s interested in something to expand on this article. The bit about the Pentagon losing its own war games wrt Taiwan isn’t discussed there, though.
