How is china's economy superior to ours? Sure they build shit, but they are in the midst of industrialising. Have you ever been to China? I am of chinese descent and just spent a month there last summer. Half the country are still peasants with no running food or water or electricity. They plant shit in mountain top farms. Thats half the fucking country.
GDP is a great measure of economic "power" in neorealist IR theory. Perhaps it is not important in assessing the current financial health of a country, but I believe assessing the current financial health of a country, the way finance majors do, is too short-term and illplaced for politics. After all, were talking politics here, not finance.
I didn't say the DOW was important, I use the simplest of terms so most can understand what im saying.
Again, you really have no idea what you are talking about. How are we imperial??? We have bases, that doesn't make us imperial. We don't colonize and we don't go mass murdering civilians when they revolt against our colonization. You can draw out whatever convoluted relationship you'd like to call imperialism but then again, you could do that with any relationship between any two countries, given a power differential.
There is a reason we have 900 military bases in 175 countries. Its called history. Go read up on WWII and the Cold War. How very real the threat was. Our current military holdings are all residual effects of WWII and the Cold War.
How is Obama's foreign policy not strong? Do you know anything about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan??? Both are counterinsurgency operations, not wars. Wars happen between states.
Iraq and Afghanistan are both text book insurgency efforts. By text book, i mean they are literally abiding by Mao ZeDong's Guerilla Warfare. And per GW, and very accurately stated, an insurgent wins simply by outlasting an occupying force. Insurgency takes decades to overcome, yet at minimal resources.
If you think our 3 wars combined are really costing us anything, you need to look at some real wars bud. We have lost roughly 5-6 thousand soldiers over roughly 10 years in both Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We lost 60thousand in Vietnam alone, 580,000 in WWII, etc. The cause is worth the effort, despite whatever you think in terms of money or resources. We are involved in strictly counter insurgency and it takes a while.
I don't even consider Iraq, libya, or Afghanistan foreign policy. I'm talking about state-to-state interaction which is something clearly out of your field. As far as recovering from a decline in soft-power and maintaining American Hegemony, the kind we witnessed in the 90s, he's doing a pretty good job considering the forces working against us.
We're in the current financial system were in because we EXPECT our standard living to increase regardless of input, and we EXPECTED our housing prices to rise regardless of input. We over-consume because we EXPECT and think everyone DESERVES high speed internet, cell phones for 12 year olds, cable TV, and diamond wedding rings regardless of input. EXPECTATION and entitlement are exactly the attitudes I'm talking about.
