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Remember, the rise of the US 1854-1944 was accompanied by the rise of Standard Oil and the dominance of the oil economy by the US. I think we don't appreciate the extent to which unipolar and bilpolar world orders were an artifact of oil competition.
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There is still resource contention over plenty of other things, but the structure of competition is unlikely to be that drastically convergent. More than a change in the competitive order of large political entities (countries, block, Stephensonian clades...) it is a "loosening"
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The US and USSR were in closely entangled competition 1950-74, matching each other's every move. So were the US and Japan 1974-90. But the US-China axis feels different. First, it's more cooperative than competitive. Second it is marked by divergence, not a circling-in.
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The previous ideological conflicts felt like wrestlers circling in a ring looking to grapple. This one feels like a live-and-let-live mutual retreat. You don't have to agree on most things. You share an economy, you share science and technology, you go your own way elsewhere.
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I started with a future-like-the-past analogy between the US and UK rise-and-fall, but the future is mostly not like the past now. The biggest difference is that we now live in a rapidly greying world. A retired world of aging populations.
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A good mental model of world of the next 40 years is: 1. Global divergence of civilizations 2. Energy transition (whether or not you believe in climate change) 3. Aging population 4. Technological progress decoupling from nation-states, and turning into a political commodity
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After 1939 the World's Fair stopped being some sort of national tech olympics and became a kind of boring bureaucrat show (something similar is going to happen to the sports olympics soon...). Tech became a political commodity after 1939, not a way to build national identity.
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