Trusting US to keep to its agreements and promises is so lol. The US has a bigger military, why the fuck would we do that?
https://twitter.com/twittarmatthaus/status/1636247148663644160
If Europe places itself entirely on the ground of mercantile disputes, without advancing any project of its own, it will have been defeated in advance. People in Washington are well aware of that.
In my view, however, the United States has no decisive economic advantages within the system of collective imperialism; on the contrary, scarcely any of its sectors could be certain of seeing off competitors in the kind of truly open market imagined by liberal economists… Indeed, without extra-economic means that violate the ‘liberal’ principles imposed on its rivals, the United States would probably not be able to compete… Washington uses various means to make up for its deficiencies: for example, repeated violations of the principles of liberalism.
- Samir Amin, beyond US hegemony? Assessing the prospects for a multipolar world, 2006
Hmm…I would disagree. The US is the Saudi Arabia of food. Well over self-sufficient and a major exporter. We were also (briefly, under Trump) self-sufficient in energy. No need for energy = no more Middle East wars.
But of course nobody wants the wars to end, so a flimsy excuse like “we don’t need the oil any more” won’t fly at all.
It’s more about how if the US had to follow the rules and principles of liberalism, it would be outcompeted. A good example of this was with Japan and technology in the 70s and 80s, in which the US had to break the rules of liberalism to maintain an advantage. The US would seethe at how the Japanese handed out subsidies to their own companies and rather use their own suppliers, claiming it was unfair, even though that’s how pretty much all US industry operated post WW2. (This is before all industry was moved to China). Only the US is allowed to “cheat” the economic principles of liberalism. No one else can. So Reagan got export constraints passed on Japanese cars, the US government co operated with business to get a trade agreement passed to allow IBM and TI to sell semiconductors in Japan and share technology with them. This allowed the US to “steal” trade secrets from the Japanese companies that allowed for their advantage.
