China is using mainly economic tools (very aggressive ones) instead to take over the world. They want to get to EU through Hungary as the weakest point (estabilishing a university through a $1.5BN loan), and it seems like they are getting what they want.
While the comment may seem off-topic, geopolitics dont happen in a vacuum. You move chess pieces over to one side and you create spaces for your opponents.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Your comment is bad enough (and already against the site guidelines) as a generic tangent and as flamebait. Tossing Molotov cocktails ("imperialist bully") into the thread is downright destructive.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously in other places recently too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914977). No more of this please. Regardless of how wrong or badly-behaved other people (be they HN users, celebrity CEOs, or imperialist bullies) are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Other people doing bad things is a poor non-excuse for setting this place on fire.
As far as empires go, America is nothing compared to the larger players.
But also consider that global geopolitics is inherently an anarchy. The guy with the biggest stick makes the rules. Between America and the next 3 largest contenders for biggest stick... I'll take America, the alternatives are far worse. And I'm a Russian by birth. Want to talk about actual bullying? Check out CCP blackmailing people overseas for political speech, by threatening their families in the mainland.
We're in the middle of the most globally peaceful period in recorded history since 'imperialist pig' USA came to power. The alternatives don't include 'no world leader', they are only choices of a different world leader. If you really want the US to fall from the world stage, I suggest you start learning Chinese or Russian; you're going to need it.
I'm not sure it's all good news. There was no perfect route out of this where everyone won. Hopefully it ends up being the least bad decision but I'm really worried about individuals that were working against the taliban and with the united states and I'm even more worried about girls not being able to go to school.
I don't see how there could possibly be peace when the last US soldier leaves. The country still has a long hard road of war in front of them. It will be a massive power vacuum that the taliban and most likely others will try to fill.
That's a very one sided take on it. The US has also been playing global peacekeeper for the last century. While also intervening all over and playing imperialist games against the USSR, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, among others.
It's not been all good or all bad, and I flat out reject any one sided critiques of it.
This is just blatantly false. Most countries were not at war for most of their existence. Even Europe pre-WW1 wasn't at war during most of its time. There was a war going on most of the time yes but they were much more limited in scope until the Seven Day's War.
Most of these conflicts implicate only one or two countries. Europe is big, especially in historic times, there were dozens of states. It's simply not true that most countries were at war most of the times.
And even then there is a lot more to the world than Europe, which admittedly was quite warlike at times.
Can you provide some examples? Are Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos better off because of US interventionism in the 70's?
You can't walk around Cambodia without seeing a bunch of legless people who stepped on landmines. Huge swathes of land is unusable because the country has the most unexploded ordinance on Earth from a war that never existed on the books and certainly not in the minds of the public.
The sheer arrogance of enforcing your morals and telling people what is best for themselves with the barrel of a gun. None of this stuff is about democracy or western values, it's all about money and power.
It was never about democracy really, it was all about containing Soviet influence and the spread of communism. Which had little to do with democracy directly and a lot to do with drawing battle lines and trying to keep the other side from gaining too much power.
In hindsight it is easy to say it was pointless, because the USSR imploded. However, at the time with the USSR looking strong and expanding influence rapidly internationally, that was not at all clear.
And I imagine you don't think it would have been best to allow the USSR to gain a strategic advantage over the West.
I would urge you to read Legacy of Ashes, if you haven't, to get a sense of just how poor US intelligence on the USSR was at the time, and how that impacted policy. One gets the sense that the vast majority of these secret or undeclared wars were driven by a few die hard anti communists who manipulated or manufactured evidence to support their crusade - and to a large extent the USSR "looked strong" largely because it suited them for it to look strong, not because it really was.
Whether that's true or not, the way they were spreading communism throughout Asia and Africa was alarming. The US policy of containment was definitely not the right one in hindsight, but it's very difficult to make the case that it was clearly the wrong thing to do at the time - and decisions are not not made with the benefit of hindsight, nor is it fair to judge them that way.
It's very common to say later, that decision I made was a mistake, but if I was in that same situation with the knowledge I had at the time, I'd still make the mistake.
And yet Wahhabism is being blatantly pushed across the globe by the Saudis with not a word from the US or it's allies?
I like to hope they are actually doing something in the shadows to stop the spread of such extreme ideologies but there's a part of me that thinks the Western world has no problem with it occurring. Just another war and another enemy to fight down the track.
Most of the comments are off topic from the point of the article, but this is an interesting question. Trump initiated the process, yet the media presents this as a Biden achievement. I dont care about politics at all, but the bias is hard to miss.
The media/intel community also pushed the likely bogus Russian/Taliban US troop bounty story really hard last year. But now all of the sudden they have had a moment of clarity:
I honestly don't know, but I am wondering how much credit for this (and many other things, like various machinations the Economy) can really be given to any president, or if it isn't the product of long-term, behind-the-curtain developments.
The sitting president tends to get recognition for things happening now, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with it. Likewise, if the economy crashed tomorrow, Biden would get the blame.
I think the major supporters of Trump are the working class white people with "Type B" personalities. The audience of this site is the opposite of that mostly, white or non-white. Hence the bias i guess.
It is not my impression that Biden has taken credit for _anything_ Trump has done. My recollection is that Biden, outside of news clipped down soundbites, HAS recognized things the former president has done:
* from getting a pandemic vaccine developed (though not properly produced, which Biden does deserve credit for pushing as hard as they have on),
* to the agreement that the prior administration reached, but lacked a clear timetable to implement (hence the end of the year soft deadline for pulling out, rather than an unplanned fulfillment mandate).
* to the deplorable crisis that was happening UNDOCUMENTED by the American media where refugees were shoved into the hands of criminals and thugs and inhumane conditions on the Mexican side of the border. Refugees that are fleeing crisis severely exacerbated by years of relief neglect in impoverished nations that they are fleeing as a result of US nationalism and a withdrawal from the world stage.
The border crisis isn't an issue that can be fixed overnight. It is a serious SYMPTOM that is so difficult even that symptom can't be treated in a short time-frame. Let alone fixing the root cause which is hundreds and even thousands of miles from the border.
Sure, and Trump tried to take credit for a bunch of stuff that Obama set into motion (and, uniquely Trumpian, for things that didn't even happen at all). Every president does this, unfortunately. It's dishonest, but is just a lame part of American politics, regardless of party. And it works both ways, too. If a mess that a prior president set into motion blows up during the next president's term, that next president tends to get the blame.
(Just FYI: you're being downvoted because you're bringing partisan political mudslinging into a conversation. Not only is that generally not going to fly on HN, as those sorts of subthreads get flame-y quickly and don't contribute to discussion, but it's just not particularly necessary to do here anyway.)
