Adverse Event said:
Not in disagreement, we are the tallest midget.
A. The navy cannot perform much if we so not have the fuel to feed the navy which this admin is intensively reducing our strategic petroleum reserves, ie. our wealth (both for kinetic violence projection and trade (mis)management, and dollar hegemony).
B. If global supply chains grind to a halt because the US doesn't perform performative duties around international trade, this country collapses overnight.
C. We do not have the cultural or societal ideals to perform work necessary to continue our current lifestyles, instead we are focusing all of our energies towards sex and gender and anti-isms.
Hell we have military folks making tiktoks about how they can't support this country because of RvW...
D. And secondly, at what point do Space Forces supercede the navy in international trade administration?
D. What can't we do from space we can perform burning through fuel on the ocean?
D. What can we do with drones and global data that would absolve the navy of the demand of maintaining dollar hegemony?
Is it about to be far less costly or more costly?
E. If the US navy ceased to exist tomorrow (or became a shell of its former capabilities), why would the dollar still remain king?
F. Imo, the only thing holding this duct-taped country together is the Dollar hegemony adhesive. Once the adhesive stops performing, strong men will be forced to create good times once again.
Lot's to unpack here. I'm going to number them and reply accordingly:
A. Agreed but let's not overplay that. The military doesn't operate from the SPR. The Pentagon buys fuel and burns it. The SPR is there to keep us from running out in a crisis and this isn't a crisis. The current SPR usage is a political football. We are the #1 producer of crude and I don't THINK this admin is capable of ending that in the remaining time they have left. That we're importing it as well is where they can do damage but they'll leave office and we'll still be the #1 producer.
B. This isn't true. We'll have some real problems if supply chains halt but we're the least engaged economy in the world with less than 20% of our GDP based on trade. We're the world's #1 exporter of food, for example. If supply chains halt how many people starve and how many will be in the US? The first answer is a lot and the second is none. Things get really messy but we aren't going to fail because we can't import cheap Chinese crap. One of the reasons we're seeing the inflation we are is because so much manufacturing is returning to North America and we're seeing that because of concerns over the ability of China and the rest of Asia to keep up with US demand. It's going to get and stay messy until those products find new homes and that's going to cause problems but that's not going to last forever and we aren't going to starve because of it.
C. Agree here. America is in real trouble from a cultural perspective.
D. Good question I hadn't considered. Can we effectively fight off pirates and rival nations from space? IDK. India doesn't attack oil freighters headed to China because we don't let them. Can we enforce that from space?
E. This isn't going to happen so why worry about it? You have to understand that a big part of what Americans don't like is this push for globalization but we aren't seeing it right. We aren't being pushed to implement a globalized system but rather we're being pushed to keep the 80 year old global system that already exists. Globalization is ending and the powers that be don't want that because they've made a ton of money on this system. As long as they're in power the US Navy is going to keep protecting trade routes. I would like to think that when we recall the Navy it will be because we aren't importing at even the rate we are today but I think that's naive. We don't have anyone in power that understands the world well enough to look up one day and realize that our trade isn't sufficient to warrant what we spend to protect global trade. I fully expect us to see a day where trade is less than 8% of our GDP and we'll be still fully engaged in protecting global trade. In other words the Navy isn't going to be recalled anytime soon.
F. Not sure here. If/when we pull the plug on propping up global trade the dollar may no longer be the global reserve overnight but so what? At that point there is no global trade, it'll be impossible for anyone to provide adequate security to their own vessels never mind everyone else's. if we get to that point we will likely have seen so much manufacturing reshore to North America that we'll see a slowdown in the rate of inflation because the costs of that reshoring will have been spent and things will have slowed down some. That's 7-10 years out, IMO.
I agree we're headed to some hard times and it's going to get painful. But you have to remember that globalism was never an economic system for us. We created this to control the Soviets. Extracting ourselves is going to be annoying and painful and your comment about strong men is accurate but we aren't going to fail. The rest of the world rides our coattails, not the other way around. The real question is how does our politics evolve during the rest of this decade and do we put ourselves in a position to take advantage of a much more North American system than what we've all know all our lives? THAT I'm far less confident in.
The federal government was never meant to be this powerful.
