Conversation

What if there are no more superpowers, just a bureaucratic and tedious detente of middling powers? Mediocre multipolarity, desultory bickering, and no player with the energy or ambition to want to dominate the world? Feels likely. Neither the US nor China seems very ambitious.
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I can’t think of an era in history with so little global geopolitical ambition. There’s usually been a bunch of hungry wannabe imperialists messing ariund.
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China’s ambitions are a joke compared even to third rate colonial powers like Italy or Denmark a century or two ago. They want one island, some borderlands, and minerals from Africa. The BRI doesn’t even rise to East India Company level ambition. Mostly a bunch of bad loans.
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There’s good things about lowered aggression levels, but also a dark side — sign of general exhaustion of all ambition. What if we’re a geopolitically retired planet?
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Replying to
You don’t have to be a collapsnik or general pessimist to note that history features long, global, decline periods that last between decades and centuries even if the overall pattern is progress in some reasonable sense.
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I think the 22nd and 23rd centuries will be fine and fun. There will be quantum computing, positronic robots, Mars bases, 150-year lifespans, and a terraformed climate-controlled earth. It’s the rest of this century that seem likely gloomy.
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In a way the presence of world-conquering assholery on the stage of world history is a sign that the world is worth conquering. A sign of a healthy global psyche. Like the presence of apex predators signals a healthy ecosystem with the abundance to sustain them.
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For all its horrors now coming home to roost, I miss neoliberalism. History had a definite gripping plot to it. Now it’s mostly sitting around twiddling its thumbs waiting for someone to come up with an idea for where to go next.
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Replying to
Well was eg the Dutch–Portuguese War and other wars fought over spices conflicts over suddenly-abundant commodities or was it for fear of scarcity of them if the other guy took control? How about oil as an implicit motive for some ME wars post-WW2?
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The age of exploration was sparked by the new abundance of advanced sailing and navigation tech and early Renaissance ideology. The mercantile contests were more consequence than cause IMO.
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