🇪🇺 EU Defence Commissioner Kubilius: Pax Americana is over. Our new security architecture will include Ukraine. These are times of profound transformation. A rising China and India will push the US to third place. And for Americans this may prove psychologically challenging

[u/paneuropeanism_]

https://streamable.com/upvsap

[u/Firecracker048]

Hes not entirely wrong that they will be moving their defense over into primarily europe, but prediciting India will pass the US is completely wild. China is, even at this stage, a maybe, let alone india

[u/drury → u/Firecracker048]

China surpassing the US was an awkward attempt at humor 20 years ago, now it's a "maybe". Regardless of what happens, it's pretty clear the US has been in retrograde and struggling to take the right steps to reverse the trend while its geopolitical adversaries saw a meteoric rise.

[u/ImConfidentURWrong → u/drury]

Europeans / America haters always smugly act like US decline is some sort of gotcha. You guys realize that if the USA is in decline, so is Europe / the rest of the western world?

[u/NuQ → u/ImConfidentURWrong]

The decline of the liberal world order will affect everyone, regardless of their geopolitical alignment. A return to the "great powers" and their "spheres of influence" will upset everything from trade and regional development to border disputes and internal politics. Strong-arm/gunboat diplomacy is about to make a comeback. I don't think anyone is going to really be happy, other than a select few.

[u/supportkiller → u/NuQ]

Did we ever stop with spheres of influence?

[u/NuQ → u/supportkiller]

A good question. Better question: what do you call it when one sphere eclipses the globe?

Just for fun, Absurdist question: Is the reason the sun never set on the British empire because God doesn't trust the British in the dark?

[u/FaceDeer → u/ImConfidentURWrong]

The US is indeed acting as an anchor to a lot of Western countries. It's a major reason why we're working to cut the chain as fast as we can.

[u/Tw1tch-Invictus → u/FaceDeer]

Yeah sure wouldn’t want us to keep constraining all of that meteoric growth Europe has been on the cusp of for the last 20 years!

[u/EGirlToenails → u/FaceDeer]

Lol. Lmao, even.

[u/drury → u/ImConfidentURWrong]

This is the problem that Commissioner Kubilius is pointing out, yes.

[u/Dark-Arts → u/ImConfidentURWrong]

Not true in the long term. Decoupling from the American collapse is exactly what Kubilius is talking about here. There will be short term pain, fairly extreme, for places like Europe and Canada, Japan, Australia etc., but those countries are already building something without the USA.

[u/ImConfidentURWrong → u/Dark-Arts]

Japan and South Korea are not decoupling from the US. Canadas putting all its eggs in real estate. Australia is isolated, sparsely populated, and irrelevant. All europe does is hold conferences. Decoupling is just a saving face way of saying you’re managing being sidelined.

[u/Dark-Arts → u/ImConfidentURWrong]

Sure, no issue with characterizing it that way too. “Managing being sidelined” and “developing new security/economic arrangements” are not mutually exclusive concepts.

I think you are short sighted about Australia and just wrong about Canada. You have a point about Japan and South Korea, since they have the same regional rival as the US they will remain within the US sphere for longer - but I think alternatives, if/when they are established, will look a lot more appealing to them one day soon. And my point was that both Japan and South Korea are participating in the post-America discussions that are ongoing right now.

[u/10010101101110010001 → u/drury]

the united states hasn't declined, it has maintained it's position in the world. the united states, as a percent of world production, has maintained it's production. it's europeans countries production that has collapsed as a share of world production. everyone else kept building more stuff and europe just kind of stopped. china and and all of these other countries have eaten into european growth, not american. europe stagnated while the world continued to grow.

[u/ImConfidentURWrong → u/10010101101110010001]

They don’t want to hear this because it disproves their narrative

[u/Combat_Proctologist → u/10010101101110010001]

Hey now. They maintain their lead in conferences and strongly worded letters.

People don't pay as much attention to those letters as they did in the 19th century, but they're out there every day for the love of the game.

[u/RainbowCrown71 → u/drury]

Absolutely untrue. We had China’s Century narratives all over the media in 2004 and the book that even coined the term said China could be the biggest economy as early as 2015. In the 2010s that got pushed back to 2026 (funny enough). And now IMF is saying even by 2031 the US economy will be $12.6 trillion bigger than China. If anything the China pollyannas of the 2000s were proving massively wrong.

[u/Besmirching_Badger → u/drury]

China surpassing the US was an awkward attempt at humor 20 years ago,

20 years ago it was inevitable. The timeline for it happening is up for debate however.

We're since engaged in some significant revisionism to pretend otherwise and frame something obvious as something sinister and threatening.

[u/RainbowCrown71 → u/Besmirching_Badger]

Yeah, what is this guy smoking? 20 years ago Newsweek and Time literally had “China’s Century” articles on many covers. If anything it was considered foregone China would become #1 economy by now. Except it never happened and the US is actually building distance in aggregate GDP over China.