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30/ It feels especially selfish coming from a country that could wage 2 world wars and a Cold War at a safe remove and then reshape entire continents to its liking in the aftermath, without even gaining the label of “colonial power”
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31/ For almost 100 years, America has been free to take the best of the rest of the world, be mostly insulated from troubles caused both by itself and other powers. Arrange a planet’s worth of raw materials, carbon-sink forests, markets etc for its benefit.
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32/ And now it has the gall to act like the injured exploited party, take its resources and retreat behind its isolationist borders, loudly claiming it is the rest of the world that is “ungrateful”? Takes a very special, heavily edited sense of world history to do that.
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Good question. It’s not as narrow as a Trumpist shouting MAGA cliches, but it is also not a confused cacophony of internal debate. There’s definitely a well-defined egregore for “American”. The cartoon Uncle Sam actually comes close.
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I haven't thought of Uncle Sam as relevant to anything in at least one generation, if not two or three. Can you attach this idea to anything concrete? I think of it as the "confused cacophony". Sure, some people are isolationist, but others are interventionist.
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Never in American history has the opposite of isolation truly been ‘interdependence’, the default for most other countries. Political science profs talk of isolation vs interdependence, but laypeople talk of isolation vs intervention. The latter is more accurate view of US.
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Yeah, America is geopolitically unique. It's a massive contiguous batch of diverse resources, geographically isolated from competing powers, organized on the latest principles, with almost zero historical baggage. We can afford to treat interdependence as optional.
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Could afford to. No longer true. I mean there’s now a crisis on the west coast due to China refusing to take in our recycling anymore. Doesn’t get more interdependent than that.
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It's still optional. We could dump the trash in Nevada and not be bothered by it for another 100 years. We engage with the world because we usually win, not because we have to.
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Well now we’re into the specifics of cost-benefit tradeoffs of isolationism vs interdependence. In that sense it’s always been optional for all sufficiently large countries. Only the cost of isolationism varies. It’s going up for everybody now.
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To circle back to the original, most people don't come close to understanding cause-effect on a local let alone global scale. Even the Americans that do come close are spoiled. We get to collectively do pretty much what we want and like all spoiled people be believe we deserve it