American Power
NOTE: the text was not written by me and is from Twitter user Yishan. The only changes were formatting for readability. I would merely link to Twitter, but I don’t want to give that asshole who owns it any clicks. I would link to nitter, but I don’t know if that will be a long-lasting place to preserve this text.
The original post.
I don’t know if the following is true. I found it interesting enough to preserve. The order of posts is confusing because of the way twitter works, so some of these aren’t just replies to the previous comment.
1st post:
The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power.
Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a “rules-based international order” and the organizations needed to run it.
These include the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO, and numerous philanthropic NGOs like (as has been in the news recently) USAID.
The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance. The British learned this and used prototypical methods of institutionalization in the declining years of their empire, but their American successors perfected it.
(If you don’t understand how this works, I will link a post in the replies explaining how one example works - NATO)
The more sophisticated rivals of the US obviously know what’s up, so they try to oppose or circumvent these institutions, but obviously the institutions are backed by hard power in the end. It sounds fair enough to say “if you don’t abide by the ‘rules,’ we will invade you.” It works well enough because it it sounds more fair to say that than “if you don’t do what we tell you, we will invade you.” Rival governments aren’t fooled, but a lot of their ordinary citizens are, and combined with media dominance and control of the reserve currency (economic dominance), it’s enough to keep everyone in line.
An unanticipated problem seems to have arisen:
It turns out that if you hide the levers of power, your own successors may have trouble understanding them. Especially if you failed to educate them, or let various cultural forces undermine the indoctrination of your elites.
With that happening, once the new generation of elites gains power, they don’t recognize that the complicated weird control panel you built that doesn’t seem to do anything but costs $10 billion a year to maintain is actually how you’re controlling everything around the world and they take it down to save money. All because you did too good a job hiding the levers of power.
Soft power isn’t “soft.” It’s real power. It’s just soft because it’s hidden.
I don’t know how to solve this problem because I think hidden levers of power are definitely better, but you have to train a priesthood generation after generation to understand them, and that kind of thing corrupts itself too. Open power is much more honest, but no one likes it and it’s hard to hold on to.
2nd post:
Here is a reply I wrote in response to the question “What does the United States get out of being in NATO? How does MY COUNTRY benefit from protecting these anti-freedom European freeloaders?”
You want the real answer? Here it is:
You institutionalize your power so that it becomes more efficient to wield.
All entities who develop or acquire hard power tend to institutionalize it.
If you don’t, you have to continuously exercise your power nakedly while wielding it, i.e. “do X or I will use my power to hurt you.” This also engenders resentment and breeds resistance.
Institutionalization takes advantage of the human mind to conform to rules out of habit. An institution is just a set of rules. You make them up. So you make up a bunch of rules that say things like “if you do any of these things, the institution says you must be punished [and it will be enforced via my power]” or “if you do this, you will be rewarded by the institution [where I will be the one to dole out the reward]” and most importantly “if you want to do X, you must do it according to process Y [which happens to benefit me and not threaten my other interests].”
This obscures the threat of naked power behind a set of “fair” rules. All institutions and rules have existed like this since the dawn of civilization. They are a way of telling the people who are being dominated when and how they can expect their rulers to act, what tribute they must pay, and what protection from competing rulers they will receive. And, many people conflate consistency with fairness, or at least familiarity, so it reduces resentment at being dominated.
At the end of WW2, the US ruled by way of military supremacy over Western Europe. NATO was an institution that used the threat of a competing ruler (Russia) to say “if you conform to our rules and do things our way, we’ll protect you.” By and large Europe conforms to US-led cultural and economic wishes, and the US even lets them shirk their military contributions because by doing so, it keeps the other countries weak (vs competing rulers) and dependent on the US for protection.
Yes, they are freeloaders. This is by design. The best way to dominate someone is to provide them free protection and material comfort (turn them into a freeloader), and then they become dependent on you and you can control them. If you think Europe isn’t controlled by the US, it’s because you’ve probably grown up in a world where that was assumed. As a contrast, a developed country that isn’t controlled by the US is China, and that’s so bizarre to the typical US experience that many Americans consider China an enemy when it’s merely just not under US control. That’s what it looks like.
Western Europe, on the other hand, allows the US to put military bases on its sovereign territory which, if you think about it objectively, is pretty much the greatest act of submission a sovereign country can commit. And it does so because it’s done under the guise of NATO (“we’re all in this together… uhh even though the US runs 90% of the show”).
So the benefit to MY COUNTRY is that NATO lets the US be completely in charge of Western Europe without looking overtly like it’s in charge, and do what is in effect what used to be called colonization by maintaining military bases in foreign territory (imagine how this would look to any country prior to 1900) and all sorts of cultural and economic dominance besides. It has been able to maintain this dominance system for DECADES now without any of the countries getting mad (getting mad for real constitutes kicking out the US military bases, not whining about freedom or other crap).
Incidentally, the World Bank and IMF and other institutions like this all serve the same purpose. They are largely run by the US, and used to control everyone else who participates by obscuring US hard power behind - and here it is - “an international rules-based order” because getting to make up the rules (because you have the hard power) sets up a system where everyone else plays by YOUR rules, the ones that benefit you.
3rd post:
This is precisely why it’s called the “international rules-based order” (and why it sets off your bullshit detector - because it IS bullshit).
But the whole point is that it’s bullshit the US foisted on the other members: it’s an ORDER created according to RULES that the US got to create, and it applies INTERNATIONALLY (not domestically - other countries don’t get to have bases in the US, hahaha).
The problem today is that the generation who set it up is dying out, and the heirs are too stupid to realize:
1) it was intended to benefit the US. Of course it’s not obvious, because if it was obvious, you couldn’t fool the other countries 2) you have to actually lean into running these things in order to keep exercising the power and deriving the benefits from them
If you just kind of passively sit around having meetings where you keep LARPing along and pretending the other nations are equal members then yeah, it’ll just seem like they are freeloading and complaining and the US isn’t getting anything out of it.
But no, the whole point is that NATO is an instrument of US power and control, but the trick with power is that IT GROWS WHEN YOU USE IT, and the US has forgotten how to do that.
4th (and final) post:
So yeah, if the Trump admin wants to Make America Great Again, it needs to realize that these gigantic structures (international institutions) that were set up by the very clever and shrewd people who ran things while American was at the height of its power are the very things that maintain and perpetuate its greatness and LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE REINS and actually use them.
Withdrawing from NATO and these other “international” organizations wouldn’t hurt the US, it would just be basically walking away from the kind of intentionally-created power structure that kings and emperors of old could only have dreamed about having.
Russia, in particular, would like nothing better than to see this happen.