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BRICS represents an aspiration to have an alternative to the dollar.
Even that will get America fucking with you.
After the 20th Century it became clear that war could spread anywhere at any moment and destroy vast swaths of people and nature indiscriminately.
The world had no choice but to ally with really big baskets. The USA was the most obvious choice given their lack of hostile landgrabs unlike China and Russia.
Lack of hostile land grabs? West of the Mississippi, Texas, Hawaii and the Philippines would beg to differ.
Oh wow, 1848, great example of post-20th-century hostility. /sarcasm
The Philippines are literally independent.
They were part of a land grab that took it from the Spanish along with Guam and some other places. Gained independence in 1946.
puerto rico was in that and still hasn’t gotten statehood OR independence. incidentally puerto rico is more populous than 7 countries in the EU
They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.
After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
Aligning with them was often a more safe move.Which were the Chinese and Russian 20th century post world war land grabs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_occupations_by_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_territorial_acquisitions_table
Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.
My comment was a reply to this argument:
After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory. Aligning with them was often a more safe move.
Seems like Russia also didn’t grab new land after the wars.
Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?
Yes, because that was the original framing. I guess the West did their own annexing, or OP would have kept the focus on those annexations.
What are the failed Russian annexations?
China did Tibet and tried Vietnam, as far as I know, as well as some Indian disputes. I was wondering if there are more because depending on the country, there were reasons enough for the annexations that an alignment with China was not unreasonable. BRICS shows that those annexations are not show stoppers.
The US literally said “you don’t need weapons, we’ll protect you.” They weren’t asked to protect us, they strong armed us. And now we’re lacking arms because of them. Most Americans, including Hesgeth and Vance have never opened a history book.
They actually enforce that members of NATO spend percentage of GDP on weapons. As for individual other nations, hard to say, but it was still no competition with the fucking dictatorships.
America made damn sure the world put its eggs here. We’ve always been the villain.
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If it wasn’t for even more autocratic nations filling the power void (China…Russia) the degradation of America’s importance would be a great thing. But unfortunately I think the rest of the world is unprepared to defend themselves with America’s sudden retreat into itself.
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Brazil, India, and South Africa might instead, creating a world where democracies and autocracies can get along fine with a tacit mutual non-intervention agreement
Not going to happen. Europe is barely holding together as it is, and Russia/China are using just as much energy and resources in undermining it as they do in the US.
At best Europe can stick somewhat together enough to form a working defence and foreign policy for its own territory and near neighbours, but it is never going to be a global force.
They have enough on their plate protecting themselves. Effective militaries are not made in a few years. (Not without shifting your whole ass economy at least.)
Africa and South America and Asia better keep their eyes peeled.
I just want to compliment you for spelling and using “kowtow” correctly
stop, wait, what, that’s why tankies believe in comrade trump? because any steps towards subverting American hegemony is mistaken as being inherently pro worker? even if it’s a genocidal fascist who makes workers’ lives worse
Are tankies pro trump? I see the grim irony of trump dismantling America’s empire, (grim for us, and the rest of the world doesn’t seem to be celebrating.)
I suppose I should not be impressed by mental gymnastics.
in 2020 when bernie lost, reddit tankies were banning anyone in support of Biden, saying that a Trump victory would be preferable in the name of Accelerationism. I mean they weren’t rooting for him exactly but the rationale was “voting status quo would be worse than trump winning because we’ll be closer to revolution if trump wins so it’s best to not vote at all”
i wonder if anyone posting that has spent a night in a depoconcentration camp yet
America spent a century burning all the other baskets and demanded that everyone store their eggs in the American Basket™. All resistance was met with violence openly or covertly.
Well, South American countries made multiple attempts to put their eggs somewhere else and then found their eggs suspiciously smashed and their chicken appeared to have been replaced by a fascist dictator in the morning and when they asked what happened to the eggs they were put in a plane and quietly dropped over the ocean.
So there was that reason.
For more info, read Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Great book
The US bombed the shit out of much of the world’s manufacturing in WW2, and after the war they filled the void and dominated the global markets.
When there was competition that threatened US profits after the war, they assassinated heads of State who didn’t enact US policy.
America demanded the role. America took the role and hoarded it.
Once I got temporarily banned from reddit for saying something like this 😭
Yes, but also no. America has put a lot of work into breaking every other basket.
America spent about a hundred years burning baskets everywhere until theirs was the only one left
Eggs in a basket??? Jesus!!! How much is THAT going to cost???
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Yes, at least for the Europeans that is very much the case. The Germans, for instance, were always morally appalled by the more overtly violent aspects of US Imperialism, but were perfectly happy to hide under their coattails and let them do the dirty work. The deal was that Europe world accept US hegemony in exchange for military protection. Nobody could ever imagine that the US would just rip up that deal because it will definitely hurt them more than everybody else.
For further reading on this agreement it’s called the Bretton Woods agreement if anyone is interested.
Bretton Woods wasn’t about military protection. It was about stabilizing the global economy and monetary system. It absolutely gave the US a ton of economic influence, but it didn’t have anything to do with military protection. The Soviet Union even took part in the negotiations that turned into the Bretton Woods Agreement, although they chose not to sign the treaty.
The US’ military hegemony came out of NATO, the Cold War, and the Marshall Plan.
America never suppressed it, it is considered the most right wing western country out there, and there is no left that people seem to believe, center right at most. It was only a matter of time, with the help of Russian propaganda that USA became just like RU, since alt right Christians had significant stranglehold on politics for decades. Half of the time USA has been under their control, with the help of DINOs. They just have a veneer of progressivism, as a way to hide behind
America is the cause in the rise in fascism, this is who this country has always been.
Yeah, it all built out of WW2. After WW2 pretty much all of Europe was in shambles. Most major cities had been bombed at least once, many far more than that. Infrastructure all across the continent was destroyed. The industrial capacity was destroyed. Armies had marched, pillaged, and destroyed first out of Germany across Europe, then back across Europe into Germany. The US was uniquely positioned as the only world power that didn’t suffer massive economic devastation from the war. In fact, due to stuff like the lend-lease act and massive industrial mobilization for the war effort, the US was experiencing a massive economic boom while Europe and east Asia were in a depression.
But in the aftermath of the war the Cold War set in. The USSR and Allied powers (led by the US) drew lines in the sand and established their areas of influence. The US instituted the Marshall Plan in Europe which essentially just shotgunned money at western Europe to rebuild as much as possible as quickly as possible. This had a massive positive economic impact on western Europe, but it also ensured that so much of Europe would be dependent on American products and companies. If your rebuilt power grid was made with American parts, then anything new would have to be compatible with that, ensuring your country is a long-term customer of American products. At the same time, the US and western Europe created NATO as a military pact against the Soviet Union, which further strengthened the western alliance. Again, with the US as the only major western power with a larger and more powerful army after the war than before, the US took the leading role in NATO.
Another major factor that most people tend to overlook was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This was an effort to stabilize the global economy and monetary system after WW2. It said that the US would readopt the gold standard (we had abandoned it during the war, and would later permanently abandon it in the early 70s), then every other western-aligned country would use the US dollar as the basis for their currency. Think of it like a gold-standard, but instead of gold, they used US dollars. This gave the US enormous economic influence because everybody needed US dollars to maintain their economies, and the only way to get them was to do business with the US.
This created the conditions that the US expanded and exploited over the second half of the 20th century to cement ourselves as the dominant western world power. Through colonialism and Cold War dynamics, the US and USSR forced most of the global south to pick a side, and often forced regime change when they didn’t like the choice countries made.
Then the Soviet Union fell and the US was the only global superpower left remaining. Over the 90s and early 00s a lot of formerly Soviet-aligned countries hitched their wagons to the US since it was the only game left in town.
So, yes, much of the rest of the world put their eggs in the America basket, but it wasn’t recently, it didn’t happen all at once, and, at the time at least, there were other factors that went into those decisions.
Yeah. It was the easy thing to do so everyone did.
