The gift of FDR that keeps on giving........

The demise of the US is hardly guaranteed.

@@Chrmngblly Once the reserve currency monopoly is broken, it will be.......

The US never intended to use industrial supremacy to continue their hegemony, they’ve always intended to use anti-competitor propaganda, financial manipulation and ‘might makes right’ with its competitors across the globe to maintain it.

akeleven I think there are many in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine et al that are very conscious of the current struggles physicality.

akeleven Before losing consciousness one is certain George Floyd felt the physicality of this worlds injustice.

akeleven I share your frustration with those who declare Trump the disease when he is merely a pustulous symptom!

James D Robertson Yes the promise of hope and change championed by candidate Obama seemed quite distant when President Obama declared himself a "moderate republican" Obama's broken promise paves the way to the Molotov cocktail that is Trump.

By war do you mean capitalism?

its all by design .

Multiple view point. Knowing neurological atypical individuals like Trump he is antidote to race for the serfdom. It appears that way! There was Dorasii book i read in my teens SF by R Heinlein.... Called tactics of mistakes. I really like the title as it implies winning despite mistakes. I think according to Peter Ziehan USA is going to be top despite who ever is the president geopolitically. USA as cultural civilization has still not grown up yet! I think usa will be alright if india hooks up with it otherwise its accepting or fighting thucidides trap. I rather usa than china as head bully!

There's a reason they say that the lies must be repeated over and over and over and over. The People will likely begin to believe them. I'm not as susceptible to brainwashing/propaganda as some.

Your logic only hold, if you ignore the fact that the chinese sphere of influence has at least quadruple the number of humans in it. lol You show typical US "exceptionalism".

My son was shocked some years back when I told him that there were more phones in New York than all of Africa. Africa needs China. No one else cares.

@@pcuimac And they all speak a very hard language for a non-native to learn. Where's their cultural capital? What language is your comment in?

Agree, though the view from the top of the cliff is wonderful til the sudden slip. The current economic, social and biological crises are straining the U.S. global fiscal system and pushing further American military options as an eventual out while the American people awaken to domestic dystopia. The US $ is still king and I had thought to see it dethroned within my lifespan, at age 52, and now see as likely a lot sooner: IMO Chris Hedges discusses the topic of this podcast much more accurately and presciently than both of these guests (though I'm always in to hear Mark Blyth fascinatingly dissect the new world disorder as well)

@@adyear3168 yes. The military paradigma has changed radically though, and the way the USA make war is so expensive (for the people at large who haven't got any more to give to the military industrial complex) that the military options are getting limited too.

@@cyrneco All those trillions and a lot fewer targets than before occurs to me as well. Pulling out of many treaties especially nuclear is counterproductive. Moving to tactical nuclear weaponry is a real and present and future danger - and we don't have a JFK&RFK to manage such a crisis if skirmishes blow up no pun intended. I've heard it said well that the United States is now a country that cannot afford to stay at peace for a long period of time. Hopefully saner heads will prevail behind the militant rhetoric of both Parties and the mass media. Other nation powers can also provide balance with no need to engage militarily while the U.S. implodes domestically. Wait and watch wins the battle by default. Interesting times.

You need to expand your argument !

@Geir Characteristic of the "liberal order" is anonymous and spread out economic dictatorship. They all know who butters their bread and even when criticizing, they sound like kids who do not dare to say "no" to their mother. There's just too much to be lost: good life, career, money, social acceptance etc. Final result is legions of spineless, beating around the bush "academics" and "journalists". If they grow a spine and formulate concise and clear criticism they are simply marginalized. Not by decree as in "dictatorships" but by "invisible hand of the market" (hydra of country's owners).

write a blog about it

We might make mistakes but we mean well. LMAO

Marks score card is in the black

The Prisoner series and topics is more relevant than ever. Too bad we don't get to have 'The girl who was death' episode.

Haven't you escaped yet?

Yeah while broadly this analysis is correct it does leave a lot of important aspects out that would reframe the discussion and better reflect reality. They’re talking exclusively about the neoliberal order and it’s benefits while sweeping aside the negatives, other than to say, effectively, that Francis Fukuyama was wrong and neoliberalism doesn’t necessitate progressive cultural change.

@@invanorm negatives like everyone viscerally hates it!

I think "democracy promotion" is neo-liberal code for, you know, destroying Iraq, etc.

While I can sort off agree, China is pretty explicit about their agenda and their human rights record is abysmal. That won’t magically change if they increase their reach. In fact it’s likely to get worse as they can get away with more. That doesn’t have any bearing on US atrocities though, which are undeniable and inexcusable and currently a greater threat globally.

"Exporting revolution" - ask all of the African regimes how much "support" they got from the USSR. Not much. Now ask yourself a second question: if those African regimes asked for help, how is it that they were exported from Moscow? The FAPLA/MPLA in Angola requested help from the USSR and didn't get much - in fact the Cubans rejected Moscow's position not to interfere and forced Moscow's hand. In any case, the South Africans were the ones who advanced into Angola under the auspices of UNITA, and planned to hit Namibia next - that is, Angola was meant to be a puppet regime for South Africa. The revolution in Angola, as elsewhere in Africa, was real - and they received limited support from the USSR, hence why the United States did in fact manage to establish some dictators of their own which persist to this day. This is old, flawed, xenophobic, Cold War thinking.

@@laserprawn ussr was funding revolution across the world fact. facts have no feelings

Secondly, the USSR invaded Afghanistan precisely because there was a revolution - one in which the Taliban assassinated the elected Communist leader of Afghanistan because they opposed urbanization, secularization, and education for women. The Taliban saw the USSR as a modernizing power that wanted to colonize it. The USSR went into Afghanistan to defend the elected government. The United States on the other hand made it an explicit policy to create a "bear trap" and turn Afghanistan into Vietnam. Far from being about supporting the freedom of the Taliban, they participated in making Afghanistan a warzone for their foreign policy. Zbigniew Brzezinski was explicit about using Afghanistan to destroy the Soviet Union, and funneled arms through the Pakistani ISI, chiefly stinger missiles which allowed the rebels to attack Soviet helicopters. The result was that the helicopters flew higher and began to "fight back" by destroying entire villages from afar, ala the French "rat hunts" in Algeria.

@@laserprawn The U.S. after they assassinated Sadat, also funnelled arms from Egypt.

@@laserprawn The US also used the Saudis as a proxy to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. After the war ended the US tried to use the same strategy in the Caucasus Region to further disintegrate Russia. It did not work.

I'd like to hear where Mark disagrees with someone like Michael Hudson.

@@Bisquick Basically: Mark has hope that people can do anything other than revolt. All his comments on how to fix it assume: they will let you.

@@antediluvianatheist5262 Yeah this is what I figured too. God I wish he was right but I think history and virtually everything that elites do and permit says otherwise.

Or Vijay Prashad. He would make Mark eat that The Russians are Klingons comment.

Have you looked up his lectures and interviews on KZfaq? His interview on the Michael Brook Show explains the Neoliberal Revolution and its first crisis - the crash of 2009 - very well. He hasn't really tackled the early 20th century in any detail however. That's unsurprising as Mark came to prominence because of his work on Neoliberalism, and Austerity in particular in the 20th century and early 21st century. Whether he will dip his toe into that arena as his discipline is Political Economy I don't know. I think it would be an interesting departure for him.

I assure you the US Workers are great!

Can't stop with the scrolling though. Scrollers anonymous should be a thing at this point.

Sadly, I hope for some learned, and erudite commentary but unfortunately you get the ones who didn't read the title properly, have some pet theory to push, or just want to troll. That's KZfaq for you.

@@BigHenFor I'm here to listen to people who've done their homework. I've no idea how I end up down here! Good luck. ps, out of interest, any drivel in particular?

@@sprobablycancr4457 Drivel like boo Trump doesnt have a doctrine, so boom everything is BS what these guys say... 🤦‍♂️

Keep scrollin' scrollin' scrollin' scrollin' WHAT ...sorry

Maybe when you specify what those true categories "are", oh enlightened one.

@@matthewwilliam1180 You haven't read Aristotle's Politics? This is basic information.

And why use his terms? And not modern terms like rep-democracies?

@@chrishekman6179 Aristotle's theory is the foundation of Western Political science. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

@@matthewwilliam1180 Rule of one person is either Kingship or Tyranny. Rule of a few people is either Aristocracy or Oligarchy. Rule of the people is either Polity or Democracy.

They are referring to Graham Allison's book "Destined For War - Can America And China Escape The Thucydides Trap" which is one empire having another coming up behind, mostly leading to war.

Daniel Schmidt have you watched any Peter Zeihen? He has very compelling analysis of what is going on.

As the title is "How US Hegemony Ends" instead of Why, you might have misread the title, and are now stomping your little feet in frustration. Doh!

BigHenFor unfortunately, the talk neither explored how or why. Rather it was just little lefty academic foot stomping about how orange man bad and brainless lamenting about the way things were back in ‘the good old days’, before orange Superman destroyed everthing.

Most people already know why it's happening I think. It's because US politics is such a mess. And you assumed people are interested in fixing it, as long as US politics (influence of rich/powerful through campaign funding, etc.) doesn't get fixed nothing will get fixed. So their is nothing much to do.

Possibly there is no mechanical formula, it works differently every time hegemonic powers decline, depending on the times.

China makes all the stuff you buy in Walmart. how is China dependent on US not the other way around?

roc China by no means owns the monopoly on low-cost manufacturing. Vietnam, Thailand etc. could all pick up the slack if China was excluded from global trade. Conversely, China is fully-dependent on foreign naval powers to provide security on the high seas so that it can import raw materials and export its goods to international markets; the US Navy is the only one powerful enough to do that for all the world's oceans.

@@matthewwilliam1180 You can't exclude only China, and keep the rest. We slap tariffs on China, head over to Vietnam with our shopping cart and SURPRISE THEY'RE RIGHT NEXT DOOR MORON YOU EVER LOOKED AT A MAP??? You'll just be buying the same Chinese crap with a Vietnamese markup, and Vietnam is pleased as piss because that's the joy of arbitrage, ZERO capital investment required.

Daniel Schmidt I'm sorry, who said anything about tariffs? If America wants to sink China it can just take its Navy and go home. Without the freedom of navigation guaranteed by the US, the world's shipments of raw resources are open to anyone who wants to take them. And since I can, in fact, read a map, I can tell you that Vietnam, Thailand etc. are closer to the supply of these resources than China is. Why settle for a markup when they can just have the whole thing?

Apologies for my BIG, FAT TYPO: America 'OWNS' the Oceans (our Navy).

LOL as if. They can barely keep from starving. The EU rules the world.

@ i don't know about that. Maybe 20 years ago you would be right.

@ I wish but countries in EU can't get their shit together and are still playing stupid games between them.

@ The EU has a major problem with its common currency, the Euro. Many EU countries must borrow in that "foreign" currency and thus come under the thumb of bond vigilantes, who invariably impose damaging austerity. It's inefficient to have one central bank serving multiple national governments. I'm not sure what they were thinking when they set the whole thing up.

@ The EU is getting squeezed from both sides. It is a weakling compared to the US and China.

Different Rhodes, The William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University was established in 2007 with the generous support of William R. Rhodes. That is where Mark works.

@@varsityathlete9927 Ah! An important distinction. Thanks for the clarification, j. Perhaps its unfair, but upon review of William's Board Appointments, I don't know if it's significant enough of an improvement. Glad to know the Center has the wisdom to promote Mark's message, but with friends like the CFR it's hard not to ascribe some likelihood to the conjecture that message control animates their selection and endorsement of opposition voices. Of course, if anyone, no matter what their loyalties, is willing to institute a replacement for the yolk of Fiat Debt without invoking total surveillance under a single currency and centralized global management, I'll remain open. On that note, (hey Mark!) wouldn't a multiplicity of non-transferable currencies matched to geographic watersheds and associated representative governments be a nice idea? After all, economic regions are incapable of measuring their relative value to other economic regions without currency markets to determine the differences. Under single currency regimes, they can't distinguish equitable trading partners from rapacious ones. Without heterogeneous measures of value that are fixedly specific to place, any and all value can be siphoned from any one locale into any single entity's coffers, clearly an unethical and destructive system. Jane Jacobs was clearly on the money with her ideas about this role of currencies. It'd be a hell of an improvement for Global Trumpism if nationalist sentiment were transformed constructively from xenophobic social differences into mere pride of place with a focus on regional economic improvement and representative efficacy. Competition needn't be a winner-take-all zero-sum game, but having one currency necessarily makes it so.